William Beinart
Cecil Rhodes: Statue Controversies in the Light of History

William Beinart - Cecil Rhodes: Statue Controversies in the Light of History

- Well, good evening, everyone, and welcome to Lockdown. I know that it’s a terribly, terribly difficult time, and we are all trying to pull together as a group. And obviously we send our love and support to our friends and family in Israel. And we will over the next few days be talking more about this. But within the framework of the South African series, I’m absolutely delighted to introduce William Beinart. He is emeritus at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford. He’s worked in Bristol. He’s worked at Oxford University. He’s written very widely, both on South African and environmental history. Some of his more noted publications: “Twentieth-Century South Africa,” “The Rise of Conservation in South Africa,” Environment and Empire.“ Also, and I think this is particularly interesting for what he’s going to do tonight, he’s on Oriel’s commission to advise on the Rhodes legacy and the statue. And of course, his title, very provocative, and I’m delighted that he’s prepared to do it, "Statue Controversies in the Light of History.” William, a warm welcome to Lockdown.

• Thank you very much for the invitation. I think this is a great idea to have an online university with talks of all kinds. I’m not going to do a biography of Rhodes. I start in March 2015, when a Black student at the University of Cape Town, Chumani Maxwele, triggered a multifaceted protest movement by throwing a bucket of faeces, excrement, at the statue of Cecil Rhodes on campus. He and other politicised students explained that their aims were far wider than the statue. And with remarkable skills in media and online politics, as well as mobilisation through meetings, Rhodes Must Fall found support at other institutions, and became globally known. Whatever you may think about their ideas and methods, it was a significant intervention, and they succeeded in persuading UCT to remove the statue. A solidarity group then started in Oxford, and students focused on a public statue of Rhodes at Oriel College. Momentum was given by the Colonial Comeback cocktail incident at an Oxford Union debate. The debate was on the reparations for slavery, in May 2015, and the Union bar offered a cocktail of that name, advertised by a leaflet depicting Black hands in shackles. It caused widespread outrage. Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford was initiated partly by South African students, of whom there were about 100, but there was a far wider support base. And in November 2015, the students presented a petition. “We, the undersigned, call upon Oriel College to take down the statue of Cecil Rhodes overlooking High Street.

The statue is an open glorification of the racist and bloody project of British colonialism.” Oriel decided to keep the statue, but protests were renewed in 2020, with two major demonstrations in Oxford High Street that metaphorically banged on Oriel’s back door, and there were many smaller events. These were part of the widespread Black Lives Matter movement, and they followed, of course, the casual police murder of George Floyd in the US. But they took up the issues of Rhodes Must Fall again in Oxford. On this occasion, Oriel decided to remove the statue, but appointed a commission of nine people to look at the arguments and the processes that might be needed. The commissioners made a very wide range of recommendations on the questions of educational diversity and inclusion, and a majority supported the college’s decision to move the statue from its celebratory position to a place such as a museum, where it could be fully contextualised. As an alumnus of UCT, and a professor of race relations, teaching African Studies and History at Oxford, I tried to keep abreast of these developments, met students, participated in the Oxford Union debate in January 2016, and participated for nine months in the Oriel commission in 2021. I supported the moving of the statue. As I was the only historian on the commission, I wrote, with help, a historical appendix, a piece for the college website, and a published article. And I think it is important to discuss the issues, even though, to some extent, the apex of protest has blown over. And that’s why I was keen to accept this invitation from Lockdown University. The issue of why Black students and the broader support group thought that racism and inequality was important or central to their experience at the Universities of Cape Town and Oxford is in a sense not surprising. These have been part of politics and rhetoric in both countries for many years.

What is more surprising is that some of the political strategy focused on statues, and especially that of Cecil Rhodes, who had lived a long time ago, 1853 to 1902. And it’s surprising that history became so central in the debates about the conditions or the experience of Black students and a broader range of students in Cape Town and Oxford. But I think that the protest did help to trigger challenging questions about the relationship between the past and the present, and what, if any, action should be supported in the present. So the students accused Rhodes of racism and excessive violence. I’ll focus briefly on his historical role with these issues in mind, and then return to the statue controversies at the end. Rhodes was British born. He arrived in the Cape in South Africa in 1870, and he soon moved to the Kimberley diamond fields At that time, the Cape Colony, in red here, was the largest and politically dominant of the four white-controlled states in South Africa, its economy largely fueled by wool. Livestock, in fact, always remained more important in the colony’s economy than diamonds, but diamond wealth was more concentrated and more dazzling. By 1881, at 28, Rhodes had bought up sufficient claims to be one of the largest producers of diamonds. He won election to the Cape Parliament, and completed a degree at Oxford, at Oriel, after irregular visits. He was hugely ambitious and energetic, and he was adept at forming political as well as business alliances.

He won support from the Afrikanerbond, the Afrikaners, and from some liberals, to emerge as prime minister of the Cape from 1890 to 1896. He was simultaneously chairman of De Beers, which monopolised production of diamonds after 1888, joint managing director of Gold Fields of South Africa, where he wasn’t quite so successful, one of the richest men in South Africa, but not, as sometimes claimed, in the world, and managing director of the British South Africa Company, which colonised Zimbabwe from 1890. It is extraordinary that he could hold all of these positions while prime minister, and that he could function across this range of activities. Rhodes was clearly a gifted businessman. He understood both finance and technology. And one of his earliest strategies was to monopolise water pumping from the mines. And you can see, this is 1873, roughly, the necessity, if mining was to continue, for a degree of amalgamation, which he achieved. As a politician, he was a curious mix of pragmatist and imperial ideologue, and someone who understood the value of money and shares in forming alliances. He was restless, constantly on the move. He enjoyed being on the road. And at the same time, interestingly, he enjoyed some art, and building a mansion was important to him, which he used to entertain and to impress. Rhodes is an important character, but I’d just like to emphasise before he continue that it’s a mistake to see the whole of Southern African history through the lens of Rhodes’s biography. There are over 30 biographies, by the way, and you can read about his life in great detail. And in some ways, it’s a pity, then, that the students focused on an individual, but often that works as a political strategy.

Our focus on the issues that were central in the debates about the statue, racial discrimination, and violence. Robert Rotberg, who wrote the best biography, said, “It’s not wholly unfair to suggest that Rhodes’s legislative victories proved essential precursors to apartheid.” Rhodes contributed to restricting the vote for Black people in the Cape, a central element of the shift towards racial segregation. I should briefly explain that the Cape Colony was granted representative self government in 1854, with a non-racial qualified franchise, unusual at the time, and this was taken forward into responsible government, after which the Cape parliamentarians, then all white, could form their own executive and have a prime minister. Rhodes supported two limitations to the franchise. The first, in 1887, excluded land held in customary tenure from property qualifications. Most Africans held their land in this way. The second, in 1892, which he oversaw as prime minister, raised the property qualifications, and introduced an educational qualification. Rhodes didn’t oppose an element of Black representation, but clearly wished to restrict it. He was not against education for Africans, but on the whole saw them as, quote, “a subject race.” The precise effects of these measures is quite difficult to quantify, because race wasn’t recorded in voter registration till 1903. But the first reduced the Black vote by 40% in key districts, and despite campaigns to register voters, the second by 20%. And in the 10 years from 1886 to 1895, before and after this legislation, Black voter numbers were down by 30%. And had they not been passed, these acts had not been passed, there would, of course, have been considerable increase in voting numbers. This was fundamental to South African history.

Rhodes supported a punitive Master and Servants Amendment Bill that would allow flogging of Black servants. He was one of the few English speakers who voted for it. The Glen Grey Act is often quoted in discussions of the origins of segregation and apartheid. I won’t go into it in detail, but this complex piece of legislation, partly aimed at mobilising African workers for the colonial farms and the Transvaal mines, and included a labour or poll tax on every African man, adult African man. Segregated councils were also going to be introduced with another new tax. And there are important examples where Rhodes intervened informally to support racial segregation. For example, in 1894, when some white cricketers enthusiastically proposed the Coloured fast bowler Hendriks for the South African team to tour England that year, and there was some multiracial cricket in South Africa, in the Cape, at least, at this time, the chairman of selectors, William Milton, Rhodes’s private secretary, and the future administrator of Rhodesia, refused to include him. Rhodes claimed responsibility. Such decisions, although not them alone, helped to confirm racial segregation in sport. Symbolically, it would’ve been very significant had a Black player been allowed to go to England in a South African team at that moment. Together with other mine owners, Rhodes’s Company, De Beers, introduced compounds for African migrant workers. Now, initially… This was in the mid 1880s. Initially, they were in part to suppress illicit diamond buying.

African, and white workers, too, were thought to be stealing diamonds and then selling them. But increasingly, they became a means of reducing costs, mobility, wages, and African bargaining power. Black workers were rigorously searched before and after work, and their movements restricted. Compounds were then transposed to the Witwatersrand goldmines, and they became a central feature of the exploitative migrant labour system in South Africa, which successive governments imposed increasingly rigorous controls on African freedom of movement. Students in the Rhodes Must Fall movement called this a form of slavery. Rhodes, of course, wasn’t solely responsible. It was not slavery, and this distinction is important, that African freedoms as workers, as well as in the political sphere, were increasingly curtailed. So I think, and other examples I could offer, Rotberg is justified in pointing out Rhodes’s contribution towards racial segregation in South Africa at a critical moment when policies, in the Cape, at least, could’ve taken a different route. With respect to land and violence, i think South Africa should be distinguished from Zimbabwe. Rhodes was certainly an expansionist, but the great majority of what became South Africa was already conquered and annexed by the time that he had significant power. The arguments characterising Rhodes as violent criminal, and even responsible for genocide, focus particularly on the colonisation of Matabeleland, and Zimbabwe more generally, by his British South Africa Company in 1890 to ‘97.

As power and wealth concentrated in Rhodes’s hands, and maybe because of his ill health, too, his sense of urgency about establishing his and British control over additional parts of Southern Africa, and his hubris increased. Lobengula, the Ndebele king, signed the Rudd Concession voluntarily in 1888, although he soon tried to retract. And he sent a delegation to England, which did get an audience with Queen Victoria, but the British government decided to enforce the concession, which covered minerals, and not land rights. And that was an important step for Rhodes to win support for the British South Africa Company charter in 1889, which Rhodes construed to mean much more than minerals. And the Pioneer Column that went into Zimbabwe in 1890 was an armed invasion, although at that stage it didn’t require much violence. Jameson, administrator from 1891, an old associate of Rhodes, was particularly generous in handing out farms to white settlers. And in 1893, the Ndebele, who had taken control of the southwestern part of what became Zimbabwe, in the 1830s, which was about 1/3 of the land which became Zimbabwe, rebelled against Company rule, and the rebellion was brutally suppressed. Maxim guns were used with no constraint, one of the first times they were used on this scale in warfare. In 1896 to '7, both the remnants of the Ndebele/Matabele Kingdom and many of the Shona-speaking people, the majority living in more dispersed chieftancies in Zimbabwe… So I’ll use Shona-speaking. I mean, there were very varied groups with, on the whole, smallish chieftaincies, kingdoms.

Together, although in a staggered timeline, staged a sustained resistance, which was later called the First Chimurenga. There was violence against white settlers. Over 200 were killed in Matabeleland at the start of the rising, and 120 in Mashonaland. I think it’s essential to try to understand the scale and character of violence used by Rhodes in his colonial project, both to understand him, but it is important to emphasise that, particularly in 1896 to '7, he had the direct support of British armies. Students talking about this period and these issues sometimes use the figure of 60,000 African deaths in the conquest of Zimbabwe, that’s the two rebellions, and used that in support of their argument about a genocide. They didn’t invent the figure. I didn’t note at the time, but if you add up the numbers in Wikipedia in various entries, you’ll get to something like that. Selous, the hunter and explorer, who led the Pioneer Column, which went not Bulawayo, but up to Salisbury, what became Fort Salisbury, estimated that 3,000 Ndebele died in the 1893 rebellion, when they alone rebelled. My estimate, based on figures reported from a number of British sources, are 45,000. I’m not an expert in this field. I spent some time trying to look at published sources. I haven’t really gone into detail in archives. But we need to look at these figures again. Having seen the core of his regiments destroyed by massively superior weaponry in two major battles, Lobengula fled northwards with some of his people, and ordered his capital, Bulawayo, to be burnt as the Company militias advanced. For a society entirely dependent on locally-produced crops and livestock holdings, famine and diseases were soon reported as they had to leave their land. And the Ndebele were particularly dependent on their cattle, which were looted on a large scale.

This term, “loot”, was used by the settlers themselves frequently. That’s what they described themselves doing. The estimates at the time suggest that the Ndebele retained perhaps 75,000 out of the 200,000 to 250,000 cattle they were estimated to have before. And in 1896, large numbers were lost to a disease called rinderpest, which swept down East and Southern Africa over those few years. It’s difficult to overestimate the impact of such losses, as well as much land, on an essentially agrarian people, for whom milk was a major food source. Soured milk, largely. The wars of 1896 to '7 lasted longer. There were more dispersed. It’s more difficult to quantify what happened, because both Ndebele and Shona avoided direct confrontations. Both British and Company forces were involved on this occasion, and they systematically used scorched-earth strategies, destroying many settlements, burning or looting grain stores. They looted grain stores to feed their horses. They were dependent on horses, and there was very little grain that was available to be brought up from South Africa. In other words, on the market. And again, confiscating livestock. Rhodes was present for some of this period, and he helped to develop these strategies, and occasionally went on raids himself. Some of the people in the Shona chiefdoms retreated to rock shelters, which they had used when raided by the Ndebele in earlier years, and also people from Portuguese East Africa. And there were a number of recorded occasions when these were shelled with dynamite, these were shelled by artillery, or dynamite was thrown in. Baden Powell, who gleefully shelved villages, a key British officer at the time, noted also that capturing women and children undermined the food supply and transport capacity of what he called the enemy. And there are stories of the terrible stench of dead bodies when troops went into shelters, caves in some cases, after they’d been blown up, the people in them had been blown up with dynamite.

19th century wars often resulted in a higher number of deaths from disease and famine than from direct military casualties. This was the case on both sides in the South African or Boer War from 1899 to 1902, even in a context where there was much better medical presence and support than in Zimbabwe. The Boers, for example, lost about 34,000 people, but something like 27,000 to 28,000 were from disease, largely in the concentration camps in which women and children were put. So famine stalked the land in 1896/7, the land that Rhodes so badly wanted. Native Commissioner Gielgud wrote from Inyathi in January 1897 that whole families were dying of starvation, and nearly ¼ of the population of the district had died since the beginning of the rebellion from wounds, hunger, and disease. If this is generalised, then more than 60,000 died. But not all districts suffered so badly. There’s a great deal more research to do, and really, Oriel and Oxford should fund this directly rather than rely on retired historians like me. I’ve suggested 25,000 deaths in conflict and famine.

That is famine directly caused by war. These were brutal suppressions of people on their own lands following an invasion. Now, let’s briefly get back to genocide, because you can’t have a statue to a perpetrator of genocide. These terms have become perhaps a little bit more fluid. They’re used in a number of contexts in the colonisation of Africa, in relation to, say, the Khoisan in the Cape, by Mohamed Adhikari, by Nama and Herero, sorry, the experience of the Nama and Herero in Namibia, for example, by Olusoga and Erichsen, a book called “The Kaiser’s Holocaust,” and in the DRC, the Congo, by Adam Hochschild in his book “King Leopold’s Ghost.” Proof of this requires a high bar in terms of numbers and motives. So let me briefly talk about motives. We can certainly find evidence for the latter. Selous himself spoke of a “war of retaliation, waged with merciless ferocity” against people who, quote, “rightly or wrongly they consider belong to a lower type of the human family than themselves.” A military intelligence report from February 1897, when rock shelters were being blown up and villages destroyed in Mashonaland, justified these strategies. “The only way of doing anything at all with these natives is to starve them, destroy their lands, and kill all that can be killed.” Two conservative historians noted Rhodes saying that, “You should kill all you can. It serves as a lesson to them when they talk things over at night, and then they begin to fear you.” There are other quotes from Rhodes, such as, in 1896, and this was by another sympathiser of his, Vindex: “Now we shall have to hunt them in the bush, and in the stones, and in the kopjes. Their food supplies will fail, and their courage will disappear.

This country will be the abode of a white race.” I need that sort of evidence out there. And the numbers, so, 60,000, I can’t find the evidence for 60,000. It might be that it’s there, 25,000. But I’m less concerned about exact numbers and definitions. This seems to me an episode of extreme violence, unusual even by the standards of colonialism in Africa, against communities or civilians, as well as fighting men, and when there were a number of possibilities for negotiation, and when, in some ways, the basis of this was a mineral concession, and not an appropriation of so much land. But if these figures are about right, the Ndebele suffered sequential losses in people of about 4% in 1893 and 8% in 1896/7 For Zimbabwean population as a whole, it’s significantly lower because there were… You know, it wasn’t a country. It was the zones immediately around the settler areas that the fighting, most of the fighting, took place, or intense fighting took place, and also the removals and starvation, destruction of grain. Perhaps if one looks at the whole for over those years, 1890 to '97, perhaps 4% of the population was lost. It’s difficult to say what this means. In the First World War, the UK, including Ireland, lost 800,000 people, which is under 2% of the population, and it was a searing experience for the society. The Transvaal and Free State Boers lost perhaps 10% of their population over the three years of the South African War, and that shaped history until 1994, maybe beyond. Rhodes’s peacemaking with the Ndebele chiefs in 1896… Oh, sorry, I was going to show this slide as other evidence of violence. It was published in Olive Schreiner’s book, “Trooper Peter Halket,” in 1897, critical of the invasion of Matabeleland.

Rhodes’s peacemaking with the Ndebele chiefs in 1896, and the Company’s distribution of food to those who surrendered, are often cited as acts of generosity. But the negotiations were only commenced when the Ndebele were beaten and were starving, and many of the deaths were already in train, and Rhodes did not negotiate with the Shona. I’ve roughly calculated that the amount of grain that was confiscated just by one of the Imperial contingents that had 1,000 horses was about the same or more than distributed in famine relief. The main areas of famine relief were the Matopos in Matabeleland, Matopos and Bulawayo, and there were deaths in the fields, deaths of people from famine in the fields and veld around Bulawayo. These rebellions and suppressions in Zimbabwe left a deep legacy. The hanging of about 25 of the leaders, including Nehanda, one of the spirit mediums who was involved, also are constantly referred back to, fed into the anti-colonial struggle. One could say that, even after 1980, there’s been a persistent and powerful, in some ways counterproductive, anti-colonial strand in Zimbabwean politics and popular consciousness. Rhodes must be accorded responsibility for this violence. He and his Company chose to colonise Zimbabwe by force. Other routes were possible, even through the Rudd Concession, leaving most of the land in the hands of African people, and there were contemporaneous models for this. Proponents of the statues tend to gloss over the history of violence, which is for me the central issue. My strongest analogy at present is Putin. Hubris, urgency, aggrandisement, the conjuring of threats, the carelessness for lives of others, self-justification and propaganda. And in Rhodes’s case, or at least those who are fighting for him, some of them, a sense of racial superiority.

At the end of 1895, Rhodes, who had worked largely within constitutional constraints in South Africa, abandoned them there, too, encouraging Jameson, one of his closest allies, and formally administrator, or sorry, even then administrator of Rhodesia, to orchestrate a simultaneous invasion, an internal rebellion, coup, by uitlanders, foreign workers, largely British, in the Transvaal. It failed, but it was illegal, and it could’ve triggered a civil conflict. Most of the deaths, in fact, probably less than 100, were amongst the small invading force, which was based on the British South Africa Company Police. Rhodes didn’t have authoritarian powers, and he had to resign as prime minister, not least because he lost the support of the Afrikanerbond after the Jameson Raid. He didn’t stay out of politics, and supported the British move to war against the Boer republics in 1899. But he was not by then a key figure, and he was not, as occasionally claimed in 2015/16, he was not associated with the concentration camps of the South African War. They were the responsibility of the British Army. Jameson was convicted for his role in the Jameson Raid, but political influence saved Rhodes from being brought to trial. So Rhodes achieved a great deal in his short life, and in many senses, there are things to explore. The creation of wealth around the diamond fields, though I’d qualify even that in some senses, partly because much of that wealth and the resources came back to Britain and to Oxford.

But we do need to think about the question: should someone responsible for violence of this kind be subject of the celebratory memorialization that took place in the early decades of the 20th century? Should this persist right into the 21st century? Rhodes didn’t require a statue in return for his donations, and he has been thanked profusely by Oxford for 120 years. The politics of statues is, of course, the politics of symbolism. So in my view, there is an argument to make a symbolic statement about that legacy, as well as introduce real changes, which the university has done. The statue remains. It’s also important to emphasise that Rhodes retains a very significant symbolic presence. The removal of one statue won’t blot out his legacy. And I’ll come back to statues and debates and debating history in a second. For example, he had a huge funeral procession through Cape Town. He was, except to a limited number of liberals, and of course, to many of the Boers, a heroic figure amongst English-speaking white South Africans. He has memorials all over the place. His grave, although on occasion threatened with removal, I think is still there in the Matopos in Zimbabwe.

The Rhodes Memorial still stands in Cape Town, with the sculpture called “Energy” by Watts. There’s a museum to Watts in Surrey. And his name is linked with Mandela, through the Mandela Rhodes Scholarship. At least that small donation, which came out of the Rhodes Trust in Oxford, has been returned to the country where he made his money. Because I think it’s worth noting, aside from statue issues, that Rhodes was, in a sense, a true imperialist. He did make donations in South Africa, Southern Africa, but his real money went into scholarships in Britain, in Oxford, an endowment of three million, I think, at the time. And had that money been put into South African institutions, it really would’ve made a difference. I think the trust put in 10,000 pounds to Rhodes University at a later stage. And even then, the majority of the Rhodes Scholarships, the great majority of the Rhodes Scholarships, have gone to Americans, the wealthiest country in the world. Few critics believe that the statue should be destroyed. Certainly those on the commission that I was involved in didn’t.

The proposal, and Oriel College itself, when it briefly thought it would move the statue, the proposal is to move the statue to a place such as the Ashmolean Museum, our premier museum in Oxford, where Rhodes and his legacy can be properly inserted into the critical displays and debates about history that we should have. Nobody debated history when Rhodes’s statue was up on High Street. It was only when the threat of removal came along that it became the subject of debate, and his career subject, the subject of debate. The Belgians have managed this with Leopold, a king, and not just a capitalist, at the Museum of Africa in Brussels. The proposal is to develop and expand historical coverage to have an exhibition which really tries to deal with the legacy of the British Empire in all its multifaceted conjunctures. And the commission argued strongly that Oriel and Oxford should respond by developing multidisciplinary coverage of fields in relation to Africa and Black lives as a route to greater diversity in the college’s intellectual life amongst its staff and students, and in its academic coverage. I’ll stop there, as I undertook to talk for 45 minutes, and I’d welcome comments or questions. I hope I can answer. Thank you.

Q&A and Comments:

• [Trudy] Thank you so much, William. I will have a read for you of the comments and questions. Okay, so the first one is from Oscar. “Hi, William. So glad to hear your talk. I am Cousin Oscar, now living in the USA. I hope you remember me. Whenever your parents needed a babysitter, I used to help them. I trust you and her and your families are doing well.” Sorry, that was not a question. That was just a lovely comment.

Monty… I think they’re mainly… Hold on. Monty says, “They should stop fixating on Cecil Rhodes. You want to expunge some vestiges of colonisation, go to wine farms in the Western Cape, South Africa and get rid of slave bells that might be standing on these farms. Rhodes University is now the University of Grahamstown.”

The next one is Michael. “Surely the affairs of the Rhodes Foundation and the Rhodes Scholarship are of greater moment than the issue of Rhodes’s status.” Statue, sorry.

• Okay. Should I try to answer?

• [Trudy] Yep.

• So I think both questions are… Oh, sorry. Hello, Oscar. Both questions, I think, are saying there are more important things than statues of Cecil Rhodes, and I would agree. When I spoke in the debate at the Oxford Union in January 2016, that, in a way, was my argument. However, over emotion in this discussion for now some years, I’ve come to change my view slightly. Firstly, we have to ask, what was it that really energised this debate? What was the trigger? And it seems that our politics, sadly, in a way, often works around individuals as much as issues. And also, that this symbolic politics, the politics of memorialization, attracted more and stronger opinions on either side than complex debates about who benefited from the diamond mines, or exactly who was responsible for the compounds, and so on. Or what the syllabus in English or history should be in Cape Town or Oxford, although these issues came up as well. So, I’ve sort of learnt, I think, or at least I think I’ve learnt, that the symbolic politics are important. And one can say, “Okay, this got us there. Let’s find ways of shifting focuses, syllabuses. I must say, one thing I disagreed with about Oxford, having taught here for some years, the students greatly underestimated the diversity of the university, the extent to which a large amount of teaching and research is going on in Africa. And of course, I’m sure the same is true and was true of UCT. It may not have been all to their liking, the teaching, but that’s another issue.

So the point I’m trying to get at is that I think that these symbolic debates are significant, because they have shown to be significant. When we write the history of this, we’re going to have to write the history of statues. And it’s that, in part, which was taking place elsewhere, particularly in the United States, about Confederate heroes or slave heroes, and here in Britain as well, and elsewhere, in former communist countries, about what to do with statues of Lenin and Stalin, and so on. I visited Estonia for a conference, and was struck, in a very good museum on Estonian history, to find a statue park with these old statues, not destroyed, but standing in some disarray, and there, in a sense, for viewing and discussion. Critical point being, as we’re arguing, I’m arguing, for Rhodes to be abstracted from positions, you could say, of power, of symbolic power, and of celebration. I think that’s the thing. If statues can be debated where they are, which they’re usually not, then that’s all to be encouraged as well. If you’re saying this leads us into multiple debates about what we teach, what we learn, how we should think about the future of the world, should we have slave bells or not, then I agree. I don’t think there’s going to be a single rolling destruction of every statue if one statue goes. Statues are going all the time. Central Oxford is changing at a pace which those of us who are slightly traditionalist about architecture just weep about. So the notion that one statue on a building with 11 statues will fundamentally change, in a sense, the urban, or compared to what is going on, doesn’t seem to me to be very significant. But as a route into the debates around important, substantive issues, about diversity in higher education institutions, about inequality in our institutions, and in the world in general, I think it’s been quite effective.

Q - [Trudy] Okay, lovely. So the next question is from Peter. And he says, "So the present situation is that nothing is happening to the Oxford statue. Is that true?” That’s the first part of the question.

A - That’s true.

Q - [Trudy] That’s true. And then, “What is your prediction? What will happen in the near future, if anything, about the statue? Presumably there is no talk of changing the name of the scholarships.”

A - Okay, two separate things. I’ll try and be briefer. I’m sorry. The first is that the scholarships are controlled by a separate trust. Oriel College, where the public statue is situated, doesn’t have a say about that. So Oriel College made a decision to move the statue. When they went into it, two key things, I think, became apparent. The first is, it’s a Grade II listed building, and they would have to go through complex planning consent, and they weren’t confident about getting that consent. They thought it would be a long, difficult process. But I think, even more important, is that, two, culture wars have been important in Britain. And in a college which has quite a traditionalist alumni, and it has a Conservative provost, that’s the head of the college… By that I mean he is in the House of Lords as a Conservative peer. The idea that they would… Well, they were very reluctant to confront a government, at the time led by Boris Johnson, and others for whom culture wars were meat and drink. In other words, they felt it would be very, very difficult to win a debate, and could damage the college. I think the university saw it, the senior people in the university saw it the same way. And Oxford as an institution, maybe many institutions, tend to try to deal with these things, as it were, I think genuinely, by dealing with issues of diversity, and trying to work around what they see are going to be conflictual and damaging actions. I think that’s why nothing happened, even though the college initially decided to move the statue. And I think they will try to ride it out for another 100 years.

• [Trudy] Okay, lovely, so you’ve had a few lovely comments, just saying how fabulous the presentation was. And then, I think we had another question, which was asking if you had heard of a book.

Q: Have you heard of a book called “Majuta,” M-A-J-U-T-A? It’s a history of the Jews in Rhodesia.

A - I have heard of it. By Barry Kosmin, is that correct?

• [Trudy] I’m not sure. Barry, is that correct? If you are still on? So that was Barry’s question. And then, the other one I think might have been answered.

Q: But it says, “Was Alfred Beit, the partner of Rhodes, Jewish? I was born in Rhodesia, but now live in Canada. I approached my member of parliament, who was a Rhodes Scholarship recipient, and spoke to his secretary, and suggested to her that the MP return the funds of Zimbabwe. She suggested that the MP would not do that. A very interesting presentation. Thank you.”

A - Thanks, it is correct that Alfred Beit was Jewish, or of Jewish background. And one thing, I think, it’s worth affirming is that Rhodes had close relationships with many people of Jewish background, or who were practising , because they were involved at different levels and in different contexts in the world of banking. And like the Rothschild, just can’t remember which one it was now, were very important in backing his amalgamation plans and providing the capital. And of course, he had a, could you say, a major financial conflict with Barney Barnato, but in a way both came away with their interests settled. So Rhodes interacted with many different Jewish people. And I think one thing that could be said is that that was not an element, antisemitism was not an element of his makeup. I can’t say for certain. As I’ve said, I’ve read biographies, but I haven’t gone into detail about this sort of thing. And yes. Is that an adequate answer?

• Lovely. Thank you. I think that wraps it up, doesn’t it? William, thank you so much for such an interesting programme. It’s something we’ve all been thinking about. And I hope you come back again. And I wish you all good night. So thank you very much.