LONDON: The chancellor of Oxford University has warned against rewriting history in his first public comments on a student campaign to remove a statue of 19th century colonialist Cecil Rhodes from one of the university’s colleges.
Inspired by protests at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, which led to its statue of Rhodes being removed last April, the “Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford” campaign says the statue at Oriel College celebrates a brutal racist.
The dispute is one of a growing number of university controversies over issues of history and identity, often pitting freedom of speech arguments against demands for symbols deemed offensive by some students to be removed.
In the United States, southern campuses have been rocked by arguments over the confederate flag, while at Yale a row erupted when an academic pushed back against suggestions that students should self-censor Halloween costumes to avoid causing offense.
Chris Patten, Oxford’s chancellor, spoke against removing the Rhodes statue in a speech widely reported on Wednesday.
“Our history is not a blank page on which we can write our own version of what it should have been, according to our contemporary views and prejudices,” he said.
A fervent imperialist and mining magnate, Rhodes was a central figure in Britain’s colonial project in southern Africa, giving his name to Rhodesia, present-day Zimbabwe, and founding the De Beers diamond empire.
A student at Oriel in his youth, Rhodes left the college money when he died, which helped fund the construction of the building where his statue stands in a niche on the facade.
The student campaigners see it as a “veneration” of a man who made his fortune from the exploitation of African miners, secured power through bloody imperial wars, and paved the way to apartheid with his beliefs and measures on racial segregation.
“(Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford) is NOT an attempt to ‘rewrite history’, but its opposite, a campaign to bring its uncomfortable truths to salience,” said Jack Kellam, a political theory student at Oxford, on Twitter after Patten’s speech.