Rhodes Must Fall was a protest movement that began on 9 March 2015, originally directed against a statue at the University of Cape Town (UCT) that commemorates Cecil Rhodes. The campaign for the statue's removal received global attention and led to a wider movement to decolonise education across South Africa. On 9 April 2015, following a UCT Council vote the previous night, the statue was removed.
Rhodes Must Fall captured national headlines throughout 2015 and sharply divided public opinion in South Africa. It also inspired the emergence of allied student movements at other universities, both within South Africa and elsewhere in the world.
Background
A bronze statue of a seated Cecil Rhodes, a 19th-century British industrialist, was sculpted by Marion Walgate (), the wife of architect Charles Walgate. Charles had worked with fellow architect Joseph Michael Solomon in designing and constructing several buildings of the University of Cape Town (UCT) during this period. Marion's statue of Rhodes was unveiled in 1934 and installed on the UCT campus, as the university was built on land donated by Rhodes.Jeremy Harding, Rhodes Must Fall, London Review of Books Blog, 1 April 2015WALGATE, Charles Percival, Artefacts.co.za Calls for the statue's removal had been slowly increasing for several decades, with Afrikaner students first demanding the removal of the statue in the 1950s.
Ideology and goals
Rhodes Must Fall describes itself as "a collective movement of students and staff members mobilising for direct action against the reality of institutional racism at the University of Cape Town." Whilst initially being focused on the removal of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes, Rhodes Must Fall states that "the fall of 'Rhodes' is symbolic for the inevitable fall of white supremacy and privilege at our campus."
The movement was initially about the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes, a symbol which the protesters felt was oppressive, and grew to encompass institutional racism, the lack of racial transformation at the university, and access to tertiary education and student accommodation.
Students made use of occupation, civil disobedience, and violence during the protests. Actions included throwing human feces at the Rhodes statue, occupying UCT offices, and burning art, vehicles, and buildings. Students also made use of the internet; protesting students created a Facebook page entitled 'Rhodes Must Fall' and promoted and made use of the hashtag '#RhodesMustFall' on Twitter.
Leaders
The first action of the movement took place on 9 March 2015, when Chumani Maxwele "picked up one of the buckets of faeces that sat reeking on the kerbside" and "hurled its contents" to a bronze statue of Rhodes, as reported by The Guardian. The Times later named Chumani as "The faeces-throwing activist who orchestrated the #RhodesMustFall campaign at UCT." Ntokozo Qwabe was named as "one of the leaders of the Rhodes Must Fall movement at Oxford University in the UK" by BusinessTech and by the Daily Mirror. Parisian magazine Jeune Afrique named Youssef Robinson "one of the leaders of the movement in Britain." Athabile Nonxuba was also named a leader of the movement at UCT by City Press. National Public Radio interviewed Kgotsi Chikane and named him "one of the leaders of the Rhodes Must Fall movement."
Protests 2015 Protests: The statue, decolonisation
The first protest, and the action that started the Rhodes Must Fall campaign occurred on 9 March 2015, when Chumani Maxwele threw human faeces onto the statue and toyi-toyied with approximately a dozen protesters at the statue. Maxwele was charged with assault after he was involved in a physical altercation with a security officer during the protest. It was reported that a UCT security officer had prevented a photographer from taking photos of the protest. UCT announced that it was investigating the incident.
Escalation of Protests at UCT On 12 March 2015, people held an open discussion on the stairs of Jammie Plaza, an important area on UCT's Upper Campus, to talk about the statue and hear different opinions.The following week, people marched to the UCT administration building called Bremner to demand a date for when the statue would be removed.On 20 March 2015, students stormed the Bremner building, which houses the UCT offices during a speech addressing the removal of the statue by UCT vice-chancellor Max Price. On 22 March, it was reported that the students were still occupying the building and that members of the public were supplying them with food. The protesters "renamed" the building Azania House, an indication that the movement takes an Africanist position on national identity, thus rejecting the civic and non-racial tradition of the ANC.
UCT's senate voted in favour of the removal of the statue on 27 March 2015, and following the vote, the statue was boarded up pending the final decision from the university's council. On 9 April 2015 the Rhodes statue was removed, and later moved into storage.
Protest quickly spread around South Africa's universities, defacing statues and calling for the "decolonisation of education" in South Africa.
Racist statements
"One Settler, One Bullet" On 8 April 2015 protesters disrupted the UCT Council meeting which had been called to discuss the removal of the statue and prevented members of the council from leaving. According to a statement issued by Max Price, Vice-Chancellor of UCT, protestors chanted "One Settler, One Bullet", a rallying cry during apartheid, both at the meeting and the following day during the removal of the statue. On Tuesday 14 April 2015, Rhodes Must Fall issued a statement from its official Facebook page calling on its members to join a protest in the parking lot of the Bremner Building which ended with the slogan "One Settler, One Bullet!" This post was subsequently deleted.
Support for Mcebo Dlamini On 25 April 2015, Mcebo Dlamini, then president of the Students' Representative Council (SRC) of Wits University, stated in a Facebook post that he "loves Adolf Hitler" and admired Hitler for his "charisma" and "organisational skills." In the same post Dlamini also stated that he "loves Robert Mugabe." Dlamini later declared during a radio interview on PowerFM, "Jews are devils," a remark which led the South African Jewish Board of Deputies to lay criminal charges of hate speech against him. Dlamini was ultimately dismissed as SRC President on unrelated charges of misconduct. Wits University Vice Chancellor Adam Habib stated, "I believe that Mr Dlamini has single-handedly wrought more damage on Wits University's reputation than any other person who I can think of in at least the last two decades."
On 7 May 2015 Rhodes Must Fall tweeted "Why Mcebo Dlamini's views on Hitler are not outrageous", including a link to an anonymous letter in the student newspaper Wits Vuvuzela bearing this title. On the same day Eyewitness News reported that the Rhodes Must Fall movement stated that it "rejects the removal of Wits SRC President Mcebo Dlamini."
2016 protests: accommodation, decolonisation, and institutional culture Protests resumed at the University of Cape Town at the start of the academic year on 15 February 2016, when members of the Rhodes Must Fall movement constructed a shack at a heavily used pedestrian crossing and road at the base of the Jameson Steps on the university's main campus. The shack was set up to protest what some students perceived as a lack of housing for black students and unfairness in the allocation of student housing. The university responded, stating that the shack needed to be relocated by 5 p.m. the following day, as its placement was causing traffic congestion. The following day, the shack was removed after 6 p.m. by the university. In response, Rhodes Must Fall supporters vandalised two statues, one of Jan Smuts and another of Maria Emmeline Barnard Fuller; burned paintings, predominantly portraits of white people, collected from university buildings (including two collages in remembrance of the revered anti-apartheid activist Molly Blackburn, five anti-apartheid-themed paintings by black artist Keresemose Richard Baholo, who was the first black student to receive a master's degree in Fine Art from UCT and who later supported the activists' actions); torched three vehicles, including a Jammie Shuttle transport bus; and petrol-bombed the office of the university's vice-chancellor.
The University of Cape Town stated that the shortage, 6,680 beds for 27,000 students, was due to three reasons: greatly increased student numbers caused by lower fees, students rewriting deferred exams caused by the protests the previous year, and the clearance of historical student debt increasing the number of returning students. The university also stated that their ability to respond to the housing problem was hampered by the occupation of three buildings hosting the Student Housing department by Rhodes Must Fall protesters. The university also refuted protesters' claims of prioritising the housing of white students, stating that 75% of students in university residences were black. The university claimed that a number of the protesters were not university students and that due to the "intimidation of others, demeaning utterances, and distortion of facts" it was taking criminal action against the protesters. Eight protesters were arrested on charges of public violence and malicious damage.
In the same week, non-black students were also barred from the UCT residences' dining hall by Rhodes Must Fall protesters and denied food from the cafeteria.
Similar protests erupted across South Africa during February 2016 with protests at North-West University, University of the Free State, University of the Witwatersrand, University of Pretoria, and the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
Reactions On 22 March 2015, UCT lecturer Xolela Mangcu told the Cape Times newspaper that the university was not hiring enough black professors. He said that only 5 out of the 200 senior professors at the university were black. A week later, Julius Malema of the Economic Freedom Fighters agreed that the statue should be removed and that the student protests were against not only the statue, but white supremacy itself. Albie Sachs suggested to "keep him [Rhodes] alive on the campus and force him, even if posthumously, to witness surroundings that tell him and the world that he is now living in a constitutional democracy."
During March 2015, the Faculty of Engineering & the Built Environment at the University of Cape Town ran a poll on whether or not the statue should be moved. Out of 2700 students, 1100 students voted. Sixty percent of them were against the removal of the statue, 38% were in favour of its removal and the remaining 2% abstained. However, the poll did not measure strength of opinion. A consensus in the Senate found that many who were against removal did not feel strongly about the issue.
Apartheid-era president, F. W. de Klerk has criticised the movement, calling the movement a "folly" and the students "full of sound and fury". He argued that Rhodes was "the architect of the Anglo-Boer War that had a disastrous impact on our people, yet the National Party government never thought of removing his name from our history". De Klerk continued on by saying in a letter to The Times that for better or for worse, "Rhodes had made an impact on history, which included the positive contribution of his scholarship scheme."
Members of the governing party ANC criticized the movement. For example, education minister Blade Nzimande accused them of being "ultra-left formations" controlled by the EFF and accused them of having "an anti-ANC government agenda by those who cannot win power through the ballot".