Palo del Colle Had lunch with a pair of Classicists, teachers at one of the universities here in South Africa. They were lovely people, doing their best to inspire their students, and conversation was genteel and thoughtful, as it usually is among people who truly feel themselves to be teachers first and foremost. But wanting a bit more, I pushed a bit: what did they think of the recent controversy at the University of Cape Town, where a large campaign was mounted to get rid of the statue of Cecil Rhodes, which as an image of one of the founders – the person who gave the land “for the establishment of national university,” no less – had a prominent place on the campus. A group of students had repeatedly protested at the statue, proclaiming “Rhodes Must Go.” The university acceded and removed the statue.
Les Cayes One of our interlocutors was clearly upset about it – and like all things in South Africa, this was ultimately about race – “Look. I don’t have any problems with saying that values have changed, and we don’t completely approve of everything Rhodes did and we would today make statues of different people. But you don’t go around destroying history. I say, go ahead, put up new statues. But don’t go around tearing things down. It makes it seem like you have nothing of your own to put up beside what is already there.” He spoke with the heat of someone who felt the incident as symbolic of a larger issue with contemporary South Africa.
In America we are having a similar controversy, about the Confederate Flag being flown in state buildings in the South. A flag is more clearly a symbol of a cause, while a statue of a man often has the greater moral ambiguity which lies always in our humanity. But I have thought, in my dislike of the Slave Power known as the Confederacy (I side with Grant’s dictum, that theirs was “the worst cause for which men ever fought”), that it would be good to clear away all the monuments as well, which honor nothing so much as men’s desire to live by the sweat of other men’s brows, even to the point of buying and shackling and whipping and raping and selling men and women and children.
Everyone recognizes that there is a spectrum of honorability, and at some point along the spectrum the statue should come down. Few people argue for statues of Hitler in Berlin, despite the fact that he is without doubt the most important figure in twentieth-century German history. On the other end of the spectrum, Napoleon spilled much blood, but his monuments all stand and his image would cause no controversy in polite circles. Where does Rhodes fit in this spectrum?
One of the comments I have heard more than once is that “the ANC was a revolutionary organization. Revolutionaries don’t make very good governors and policymakers” – indicating that it is time for South Africa’s one-party system to be voted out. It does intrigue me that in the newspapers and on the radio I hear about “the spirit of ’76,” which here refers to the student protests in 1976 which resulted in the death of Steven Biko and others, and greatly increased the international isolation of the apartheid state. This was almost forty years ago, and the ANC has held monopolistic power for more than twenty years since. It is like the Communist Party continually propagandizing for revolutions long past while the shelves slowly empty. Campaigning to remove statues strikes me as similar: creating a show of revolution while the real tasks, which could make people’s lives better, are left undone.
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