Adekeye Adebajo, Business Day
THIS year marks the 110th
anniversary of the founding of Rhodes University, which was created with Cecil
Rhodes’s wealth and named after him.
It is also the 86th
anniversary of the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) relocation to Rhodes’
estate, which he bequeathed to it. Both universities continue to grapple with
transformation, even as they largely ignore these lingering historical
connections. While many symbols of Afrikaner supremacy have been removed, the
legacy of the greatest symbol of British imperialism — Rhodes — remains
surprisingly uncontested.
Rhodes dispossessed black
people of their ancestral lands in modern-day Zimbabwe and Zambia through
aggressive and duplicitous means, stealing 9-million square kilometres of black
land in one of the most ignominious "land grabs" in history. He was
an unscrupulous businessman and a crude racist. Zambia and Zimbabwe removed
statues of him from their streets after independence, but he still lies buried
in Zimbabwe’s Matopos Hills.
Rhodes University in
Grahamstown is named after this ruthless imperialist. It opened in 1904, with
the Rhodes Trust financing its establishment. Rhodes’s racist and destructive
lieutenant, Leander Jameson, helped secure the funding.
The psychopathic Jameson
had led the "scorched earth" policies in the genocidal conquest of
Zimbabwe in the 1890s. Inspired by Rhodes’s legacy, the university was
established to "extend and strengthen the imperial idea in South
Africa" and to counter Afrikaner influence in the Western Cape. As
historian Paul Maylam has shown, for much of its existence, Rhodes University
willingly maintained segregation, with its lily-white council unanimously
refusing to admit "non-European" students in 1933. The body agreed to
accept "non-Europeans" only in "exceptional circumstances"
14 years later. In 1954, Rhodes University awarded an honorary doctorate to
apartheid’s education minister, JH Viljoen; and eight years later, to its
repressive justice minister, CR Swart.
Nelson Mandela received
an honorary doctorate from Rhodes University in 2002 — like
apartheid-supporting white businesses, universities acted pragmatically to
embrace the new order. Rhodes University’s imperial connections were reinforced
by its commemoration of Rhodesia’s "Founder’s Day". An effort to
change the university’s name in 1994 was soundly defeated in its senate.
UCT moved to Rhodes’s
Groote Schuur estate in 1928. The imperialist had wanted to build a university
on the foothills of Table Mountain. UCT was the posthumous fulfilment of this
dream.
A bust of Rhodes still
stands proudly on the university’s upper campus 80 years after it was first
erected. Should UCT perhaps follow Rhodes University’s example and remove this
monstrosity?
UCT’s main hall, in which
graduation ceremonies take place, was financed by the Rhodes Trust, and is
remarkably still named after Jameson. This was the same man whose notorious
"Jameson Raid" of 1895 sought to overthrow Paul Kruger’s Transvaal
republic to gain control of its gold mines, resulting in the disgraceful end of
Rhodes’s premiership of the Cape colony. Like Rhodes University, UCT was also
slow to admit black students, accepting only 40 by 1937, and figures remained
low into the 1980s.
Connecting Rhodes
University and UCT is not only Jameson but Harry Oppenheimer, chairman of the
Rhodes-affiliated Anglo American for 25 years until 1982. He delivered the
Cecil Rhodes commemoration lecture at Rhodes University in 1970, disingenuously
condoning the excesses of the racist imperialist in his dealings with
"tribal, barbarous people". Oppenheimer was chancellor of UCT from
1967 to 1999, and regarded Africa as being "backward" until the
Europeans arrived to "civilise" it.
Some UCT students
demonstrated against his "racist capitalism" and exploitation of mine
workers.
UCT’s Institute of
African Studies is still named after Oppenheimer. In an infamous incident in
1968 — for which UCT later apologised — its council caved in to pressure from
the apartheid regime, and withdrew its prior offer of a senior lecturing
position to Archie Mafeje. Given this history, UCT’s slogan of promoting
"Afropolitanism" seems somewhat vacuous, with two-thirds of its
faculty still consisting of white professors.
