The Sunday News
Cetshwayp Mabhena
Right under the nose of the unsuspecting world, the Rhodes Must Fall as a militant movement against the world system of imperialism and predatory capitalism has died. The funeral was not called from the roof tops and no obituaries were read, stealthily the struggle that exploded into a spectacle on 9 March 2015 was buried and beautiful flowers grown on the grave. Now in South Africa we are stuck with Fees Must Fall, which bears a noble cause but is in actuality not a struggle against the world system but a slender battle against an order within the world system.
Built by Maron Walgate in 1934, the statue of Cecil John Rhodes that sat by the gates of the University of Cape Town was what Sigmund Freud described as a “mnemic symbol.” As a “mnemic symbol” the stature of Cecil John Rhodes daily conjured the traumas of the colonial encounters in the minds of poor black students in South Africa. While for privileged white students the statue invoked commemoration of past and present glory, for the poor black learners it invited bleeding memories of conquest, defeat and dispossession hence the hysteric call for its dethronement as an offensive artefact. The statue was no longer a bronze figurine but it became pregnant with messages, hypnotic suggestions, which celebrated the continuity of institutional racism, lack of transformation and the difficulty that poor blacks encounter in accessing university education in Africa.
When, on 9 April 2015 the statue was removed from sight, many thought Empire was getting defeated, but it was only in retreat, and yet to return in a much more deadlier form. It is the nature of the modern colonial and imperial world system that when attacked, it changes its orders and can publicly crucify some of its symbols and representations while it stealthily reloads and prepares to appear in much more lethal terms to punish its challengers. If the modern colonial and imperial world system is many things, one of them is that stubborn corpse that insists on waking up every time it is buried, and continues to torment its victims after what was thought to be its final death.
Exactly how Rhodes Must Fall quickly turned into Fees Must Fall provides an interesting case study into the behaviour of colonial and oppressive systems when they encounter resistance. The ability to narrow the struggle from the call to decolonise the university in Africa to simply asking for fees to be abolished is classic abilities of the system to invent smaller struggles for its enemies so as to protect its loot. No wonder, Fees Must Fall protests are so well funded, sympathetic old white professors, from their pockets supply bottled water, food parcels and ice cream to the protesters. Philanthropic NGOs also appear with goodies to lubricate the struggle, a privilege that Rhodes Must Fall struggles did not enjoy. The brave among the white intelligentsia and a few black beneficiaries of this order have written open letters to vice chancellors and to the media to express muscular solidarity with Fees Must Fall and its noble cause.
What Rhodes Must Fall was
As good as the statue of Cecil John Rhodes was not an innocent piece of bronze art but an idol of Empire, the Rhodes Must Fall movement was not a simple student protest current but an anti-Empire struggle. The imperial World System that began on 3 August in 1492 with the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World, and was consolidated in South Africa on 7 November 1497 when the Cape of Good Hope was rounded up, is a monstrous system that lives today after the abolition of slavery and political decolonisation. In his own words, Cecil John Rhodes defined the mission at hand as the need to “find new lands from which we can easily find cheap raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labour that is available from the natives of the colonies.” Besides his imperial philosophy that imperialism and “expansion is everything” Cecil John Rhodes engineered the formation of a “secret society for the furtherance of Empire.”
Funded by Lord Rothschild and Alfred Beit, Cecil John Rhodes became what the prophet of German Nazism Oswald Spengler called a “modern Caesar” and one who was a symbol of the future of Europe in the world. Unmasking the statue of Cecil John Rhodes as an idol of Empire, and not just a work of art, and felling it, was a blow against the modern imperial and colonial world system that presently enjoys hegemony. It was not an accident that, as an heir of Empire, F. W, de Klerk raised his hands up in the air and asked Rhodes Must Fall to think about the scholarships that the Rhodes Foundation gives. The University of Edinburgh caught the flue as student went into the streets in solidarity with Rhodes Must Fall. The Berkeley College of the University of California also caught fire. The craze increased until the Oriel College of Oxford University demanded the removal of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes on their campus while also asking the University to publicly acknowledge its own complicity in colonialism and imperialism in Africa. Rhodes Must Fall was setting the world alight and shaking the world system from its roots.
Besides the loud protestations of heirs of Empire such as F.W. de Klerk, an inexplicable explosion of xenophobic attacks on 19 April 2015 appeared designed to take the attention away from Cecil John Rhodes and the system he represented to foreign nationals as the problem. If xenophobia gave Empire a few days of relief from the assault by Rhodes Must Fall, the rise of Fees Must Fall on 19 October 2015 was to finish off the onslaught, and kill Rhodes Must Fall forever. A decoy had been found, a smaller and smoky struggle to keep the attention away from Empire was promoted.
What Fees Must Fall is
As I write, Fees Must Fall is in full rage. Lecture rooms have been burnt and cars stoned and set on fire by angry students. There is no refusal that the removal of fees would be a victory for poor black students not only in South Africa but throughout Africa. Making education accessible for free is a fruit of independence in Africa that is long overdue. For Empire, however, Fees Must Fall is a safe struggle. Away from Rhodes Must Fall, the struggle is now opposing poor black students to a black government. For that reason, the same old white professors whose presence in the universities is proof of lack of transformation and decolonisation can sponsor Fees Must Fall. The NGOs that feed from the Ford Foundation and from the estate of Cecil John Rhodes are willing to offer generous donations and field support to Fees Must Fall. Expensive law firms are willing to donate legal representation to those Fees Must Fall students who find themselves in court for burning lecture rooms and setting vehicles alight.
Fees Must Fall has narrowed from fighting the World System to fighting an order that the system can do away with after all and still remain alive. Fees Must Fall has lost the liberatory potential and the world systemic potency that Rhodes Must Fall carried. That fees must be abolished was part of the list of demands that the Rhodes Must Fall movement advanced, and that one demand was elevated to the cause itself by Fees Must Fall, in the process taking Cecil John Rhodes and Empire off the picture. Today every South African university, on 24 hour basis, is guarded by poor black police officers who wait to arrest poor black students who are determined to burn the university before they decolonise it.
White owned private security companies with their poorly paid black security guards remain posted on all the universities, earning millions for the capitalists each day. Examinations are getting post-poned, libraries are in disorder as teaching and learning is effectively distabilised. Education itself is falling, and from the window of the cold museum, the idol of Empire, the statue of Cecil John Rhodes must be watching and smiling as Empire fights back, as it gets it enemies to fight each other.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a Zimbabwean academic who is based in South Africa. [email protected]
