Abstract
On March 9th 2015, Chumane Maxwele, a student at the University of Cape Town, threw a bucket of shit at a statue of Cecil Rhodes, prominently sited at the main pedestrian entrance to the university. A month later, following concerted protest action by the student-led social movement, #RhodesMustFall, the statue was removed. In this paper I situate the Rhodes statue and the events of #RMF into historical relation with the broader memorial and symbolic landscape of the Groote Schuur estate, the landscape of which the University of Cape Town forms a part. I argue that an imperial legacy is deeply inscribed in this landscape in architectural form, the organization of space, forms of the gaze, and embodied habitus. The University of Cape Town upper campus was conceived in terms of two architectural tropes, the idea of the Temple-on-the-hill, and the idea of the site of prospect. These, in turn, derive from Rhodes Memorial, slightly further up the slope. In this context, the Rhodes statue was the most obvious materialization of a more generalized coloniality, which remains a part of the ambiguous legacy of the Groote Schuur estate and the University of Cape Town.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | City |
| Volume | 24 |
| Issue | 3-4 |
| Pages (from-to) | 565-579 |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| ISSN | 1360-4813 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Sept 2020 |
Keywords
- #RhodesMustFall
- Cape Town
- coloniality
- deep inscription
- fallism