Last week, in Oxford, a demonstration of around 200 students were also demanding that Britain ‘move on’ from its colonial past – not by forgetting about it, but precisely the opposite – by acknowledging the damage done and atoning for it. The Rhodes Must Fall movement began in South Africa last year, demanding an end to the veneration of colonial murderers like Cecil Rhodes, but has since spread to Oxford.
Rhodes’ statue at Cape Town University was eventually removed this year after protests, and the Oxford campaign hopes to repeat the success in Britain. Cecil Rhodes was the archetypal British imperialist – a tyrannical stealer of land, ruthless exploiter of labour and rabid butcher of men, women and children. By the 1890s, he had conquered around one million square miles of territory in Africa and laid waste to its inhabitants, massacred all those who stood in his way and forcing many of the rest into the living graves that were his company’s diamond mines.
