UCT's Taliban censorship of art

This is an edited reprint of a blog I published on 11 April 2015. It remains pertinent in light of UCT's Taliban censorship of art and threats to academic freedom.  The original was sent as a letter to UCT's council before their proforma decision in April 2015 to remove the Rhodes statue.

I grew up during apartheid.  My family experienced racism.  In the early 1960s when I was a year old we moved from Claremont to the Cape Flats because of the Group Areas Act.  Some years before my father sold his family's small holding in Alice, Eastern Cape for next to nothing. My mother said he was robbed of his land.

We were working class but I was fortunate to attend the University of Cape Town (UCT) in the mid-1980s to study mechanical engineering.  During this period opposition to apartheid had reached its peak.  The regime’s response was brutal, including states of emergencies.

 

Student opposition on campuses around the country formed a significant part of the local anti-apartheid movement.  Although I was not active in student politics, as a black student I was aware of the importance of sustained peaceful opposition to the state.  I attended political meetings on campus and was affected when riot police dispersed gatherings with tear gas and helicopters.

Our focus, and that of the country, was the ending of the state of emergency, release of detainees, unbanning of political parties and exiles and talks leading to genuine political reforms.

We – students and staff of all races – passed Cecil John Rhodes’ statue on upper campus every day with hardly a thought of his deeds.  Of course we were aware of his bequest of the Rhodes Estate that led to the creation of the university and nearby institutions.  The average UCT student did not think deeply or at all about Rhodes’ life or the kind of person he was – he lived a hundred years ago, another era. The residue of Rhodes still extant was his legacy of the Rhodes scholarships to Oxford University. I wished I was bright enough to qualify.

I returned to UCT in 2006 to read a master’s degree in urban infrastructure management.  We were in the post-apartheid democratic era, filled with some, but declining, optimism for the country.  Rhodes’ statue was where it always was.  There was no sign on campus of dissatisfaction or polemic about his legacy or, for that matter, any other issue, until today. 

What makes 2015 different from the decades since the statue was erected? 

Protests over poor service delivery started soon after the honeymoon of the first democratic election in 1994.  The causes of poor service delivery are unrealistic expectations created by the ruling party that South Africa is a welfare state nirvana, the lack of a strategic developmental vision, poor management of services and infrastructure and corruption of resources, especially at local government level. 

Protests are characterised by unrealistic, childish demands for immediate relief, refusal to discuss, intimidation, violence, destruction of property and death.  A new feature is throwing excrement, coyly referred to as “poo”.  Some may be amused by this but it's uncivilised and disgusting.

 

However, after UCT student Chumani Maxwele threw faeces on the Rhodes statue, people took up his cause and hailed him a hero.  Predominantly black students and students’ representative council (SRC) members came out of the student union and rallied and demanded the “Rhodes statue must fall”, which gave rise to the RMF movement.  

The public were taken by surprise.  When and how did such visceral antipathy to the statue and what they initially claimed it represents – Rhodes, his life and legacy – arise?  Supporters and apologists, including vice-chancellor Max Price, SRC and others then said the furore over the statue is not about Rhodes and what he did.  Rather it is criticism over the lack of (racial) transformation at the university, and the debate has been going for some time.

There appears to be two alternating strands of argument offered about what the protests represent:

(1) Rhodes the man and what he did as a colonialist and empire builder.
(2)   The lack of transformation at UCT today.  

Protestors, Price, UCT academics and others present both arguments.  Perhaps there are others.  If the protests were “not about Cecil” why have they demanded and decided the statue must be removed?  

By their own words, this is not an argument about physical heritage – statuary, monuments, buildings and the like – but about social transformation today, a hundred years after Rhodes’ death, a society that has no resemblance to the one that existed when he was alive and one he cannot now influence because he is dead.  Except that his only legacy that is relevant today are the exclusive Rhodes scholarships, which are synonymous with academic excellence.

Over recent years controversial debates within and about UCT that became public concerned race-based admissions criteria, the low numbers of black (as broadly defined) academics and recently, alleged racial attacks against a law lecturer.  The statue was not mentioned, although I am not excluding it might have been discussed internally. 

However, if it was such a serious and pressing matter as is now claimed, why was it not aired with the wider UCT community, alumni and public?  Available evidence and reportage prove the statue only became an issue from the moment Maxwele defaced it in a manner designed to create controversy.  Note the university did not charge him for defacing a heritage artefact.

The students who protested about the statue are predominantly black, part of the 50 percent black student number.  Like all UCT students, they are privileged to be there.  Many would be former model C students and middle class.  Many were born around or after 1994 and have no first-hand experience of apartheid.  Their life experience is one of material privilege and full democratic rights and freedoms.  

So what informs their direct experience of discrimination and injustice - let alone under an inequitable society of Rhodes’ time of which no living person can testify - that is driving them thus?  In what place, time and context – at the start of the academic year after the long holidays when everyone relaxes – has their outrage been festering so that it suddenly exploded?  

Their outrage at what Rhodes did – if this is what the protest is about – is not even second or third hand but smacks of being manufactured, artificial and hypocritical.

 

UCT management were taken by surprise and scrambled for a response.  Price, writing a widely distributed letter in his official capacity, opted for a populist role and stated his personal view the statue must be removed from its present location.  As chief executive of the university he should not have expressed this opinion publically at this time because it could be argued it was meant to influence the simultaneous eliciting of opinions about the statue.

 

Compare Rhodes University vice-chancellor Dr Sizwe Mabizela, who during a CapeTalk/702 interview the same week, declined to be drawn on his opinion of whether or not his university’s name should change.  (However, he clearly felt it should remain the same because the “Rhodes brand” today was associated with “academic excellence”.)

The stunned reaction of UCT, and country, proves the crisis was unexpected and there was little or no debate about the statue in the period that led to it.  The students demanded the statue be removed and refused to talk to Price and management and were hostile to them.  The protestors physically confronted him, as a picture in the Cape Argus shows, and threatened management by occupying the administration building. 

UCT’s “have your say” consultation, to which I also contributed, was quickly over.  In the last week of March, under continuing storm clouds, Price wrote there was “unanimous” agreement the statue must be removed.  At the same time he threatened unidentified members of the university community with disciplinary action for leaving allegedly racist comments on the “have your say” notice boards.  Their opinions on the statue were probably excluded while serious transgressions by protesting RMF students were taking place in front of him.

The university acted hastily and under duress in arriving at the purportedly unanimous decision to remove the statue. (The senate vote included three abstentions and one opposed.)  The manner it was done – unrelenting threats by students and their refusal to debate – prove consultations were not constructive, democratic or that it took place under an environment meant to foster rational argument and consideration of an important matter that affects not only the university but wider community. 

In the meantime, protesting students refused to leave their sit-in at UCT's administration building saying the protests are not over, they have demands they insist UCT meet and that no action must be taken against them.  

The students’ uncivilised and dangerous methods and the university’s apparent flight from them are the antithesis of a university and democratic society.  Removing Barney Pityana from chairing a meeting and disrupting and threatening UCT council members when they met on April 8, forcing the meeting to halt, are cases in point.  Yet some liberals and supporters are happy to excuse this conduct while harping on about the influence an inanimate object, the statue, has on the university.

Price, showing poor leadeship and giving in to protestors' demands, muddied the water by pre-emptively stating his personal view about the statue before the consultation process was done.  The protesters represent a minority of all affected parties.  But Price only referred to university groups who support the removal and not what the public, including alumni, think.

 

Comments in the media are mixed, with roughly equal numbers opposing and supporting.  During a meeting of the convocation on April 7 Price admitted the numbers on either side were equal.  But the public are being swept along by the manufactured outrage and social media tidal wave and led to believe removing the statue is the majority view.  Objectors are insultingly and incorrectly referred to as “bigots” and a “few die-hards (racists)”. 

Protestors asserted “only blacks” have a right to speak on the statue’s future.  When in democratic South Africa did one group assume the right to lord it over the rest?  Hypocritically, protestors and their supporters have shown the same bigotry and intolerance they accuse Rhodes of.  Fortunately, personalities across the racial and social spectrum – UCT students and others – objected to the removal for various reasons and are dismayed by the conduct of the protestors’ threatening campaign.

  

Are black African opinions and experiences the only ones that count in South Africa?  Price acknowledged during a CapeTalk interview on April 9 that far too often RMFs’ views and demands are irrational and “woolly thinking”.  Unfortunately, as illustrated today, whites, especially liberals and those in leadership positions, are afraid of being perceived as racist so they submit to these woolly demands.  Like UCT management has done.

People are asking what right these privileged young people - who are at university at the taxpayers’ largesse and have not yet earned their dues - have to hijack public institutions for their own agenda. Protestors claim Rhodes, as represented by the statue – bronze and stone that cannot harm them – is an offense to their sight and sensibilities.  But throwing faeces and draping it with tampons is not?  

I am disheartened by the dishonesty displayed by the UCT community, including vice-chancellor and academics.  They claim the protests are not about Rhodes.  If so, why are they not addressing the real issues, apparently the lack of transformation?  

To my mind they cannot satisfactorily explain the contradictions inherent in rejecting an artistic, inanimate representation of the man but simultaneously embracing the living embodiment of his legacy, that is, the university’s existence and the Rhodes scholarships.  It’s like a scientist rejecting Newton’s laws but using Newton’s calculus to derive his (the scientist's) own theories.  They gloss over this paradox with ease.

During a radio interview on CapeTalk on April 9, an hour before the statue’s removal from its place, Price was unable to answer the question “where to now” regarding transformation at the university.  The interviewer, John Maytham, known for his no-nonsense style, allowed him to get away with speaking almost uninterrupted for fifteen minutes without answering the question, except for him to say no change can be expected in the near future.  

His response defines their confusion and dishonesty about the real issues.  This was the moment they had campaigned for, when the cause of their immediate problems would be overthrown, at the risk of dividing the country, and it's revealed to be a dead end, mere rhetoric.

Rhodes was a man of his time.  He may have been a misogynist, racist and imperialist.  But was he any worse than others of his type, then and now?  

De Beers and Anglo American, which UCT through the Oppenheimer family have had a long association, originated from his immediate legacy.  Shall we expediently bury this fact? Protestors demanded the statue be removed as if it would change history, as if we could reinvent an epoch without his existence.  

The university, without a policy on names or symbols, indecently rushed to a decision to remove the statue.  But they have not explained how by this act the problems that beset the university will be remedied.  Since the university is a public asset, they have not explained how its removal will resolve the problems that face the broader community. 

The university focuses on a petty issue when social, political and economic problems of far-reaching import plague our country.  The dead Cecil Rhodes cannot help, but UCT could if it stopped concentrating on sophomoric pranks and used its considerable publically-funded human capital for good.  Is it not part of the wider world?

Heritage Western Cape was asked to rule on a matter of heritage – a physical monument – when the arguments motivating its removal will be sociological: “the protest is not about Cecil”. They were asked to apply social work principles to balm fragile yet immature student psyches to a matter that concerns social transformation and racial inequality at the university, really a micro-issue UCT is not addressing.  Is this Heritage’s remit?

If it's not about Rhodes per se then it's about objecting to the memorialisation of our history and historical figures and anything we, on a whim, take a disliking to.  Does society and society’s guardians allow moronic, egotistical juveniles who have little life experience, have not paid their dues and are unable to think beyond their next moment of self-gratification dictate the course of history and the norms and standards we ought to adhere to?  UCT apparently does.

South Africa has relatively little in the way of significant monuments to our past but we are prepared to remove from memory those we do have because of a misguided and overwrought sense of political correctness and opportunism.  

London mayor Boris Johnson, a historian in his own right and author of a biography of Winston Churchill (a friend and contemporary of Rhodes), wrote in The Daily Telegraph:  “There is something about their assault on history – their moronic demolition of the past – that has filled me with a special despair.”  He is referring to the Islamic State’s “ruthless assault on ancient sites that is destroying humanity’s shared history”, but it could apply to any similar instance.

Statues and memorials were erected by ancient rulers to honour themselves, their gods and victories.  Most were despots and very unpleasant people.  But after the elapse of time, mankind placed these monuments in the context of the era and history’s arc.  Thank God the peoples of the ancient world had the wisdom to leave the monuments honouring their fallen and departed rulers, for all their crimes, intact for the generations to come. Rhodes and UCT’s little statue of him is insignificant compared to these ancients whose memorials around the world tourists flock to.

 

In Italy they have an expression: “the past and present run together”.  This refers to their abundant artefacts of more than two millennia – the age of Italy – co-existing with a modern society.  

But the fuss over the Rhodes statue has shown that in this country, including among so-called liberals, there is bigotry, intolerance, insularity and parochialism: board it up; hide it where we may never speak of it again.  These are not the qualities of a society that wants to and will be remembered hundreds of years from now.  The protestors and UCT are not held captive by Rhodes, but by their own attitudes for they have ensured that with the dangerous precedent they have set, they have no present and shall have no future.

I am saddened UCT, run by white males, has exploited and stage-managed the furore as a smokescreen to deflect criticism from the same quarters it is not transforming fast enough, which has nothing to do with heritage.  I am disheartened by the UCT community’s immaturity, lack of vision and leadership and their determination to efface our shared history for short-term political gains. 

I am ashamed to be a graduate of the university.  Were it possible I would erase my association with it.

I have no sympathy for the university or Max Price who described the situation as a "challenge" (like Eskom is a challenge, not a crisis).  They, and he, helped create this situation when they abandoned reason for madness by quickly giving in to student pranks and threats.  They have unleashed the destruction and defacement of national monuments that is happening around the country by moronic elements.

Footnote:  Within twenty four hours of UCT council’s decision on 8 April 2015, Heritage Western Cape granted them a permit to remove the statue to temporary storage. This was done without the required public consultation and review process required by law.  

UCT and Heritage may argue it was done to “protect” the statue, as I confirmed in emails with UCT's (former) registrar Hugh Amoore and Heritage's reluctant acting chief executive, whom I had to threaten with access to information to provide the sparse details I received.  

However, during radio and television interviews the afternoon of April 9, including at the site, vice-chancellor Max Price spoke of the removal as a done deal.  The informal ceremony and celebration at 17.00 that day attended by Price, students and the media reaction, including congratulations by the minister of arts and culture, attests to it.  

Heritage confirmed a "public consultation" would follow.  However, an "independent facilitator" had not been appointed by April 10.  The consultation and official review process that followed was a farce and a sham because it was fait accompli.   As the whole country knew, the statue was not relocated anywhere on campus.