Cecil Rhodes: Colonising African minds

THE attacks against African migrants in South Africa drowned a salutary step taken by that country against a major symbol of racism in the continent.

After occupying a pride of place on the campus of the Cape Coast University, South Africa, the statue of British imperialist, Cecil John Rhodes unveiled 81 years ago, was removed on April 8, 2015. It was the culmination of protests by students, lecturers and other South African patriots.

The decision to move the statue to the dustbin of history, was democratically taken by the 30-member Council of the university. The sculpture was provocative; it was like having the statue of Adolf Hitler in West Jerusalem because his infamous acts propelled the creation of Israel.
Cecil Rhodes

Cecil Rhodes

The act of the university was one more step taken by Africa to cleanse itself of the infamous role Rhodes played in the brutal subjugation, exploitation and colonisation of the continent. The colonialists had renamed parts of Africa, Rhodesia, in honour of Rhodes whose British South Africa Company (BSAC) had been given a Royal Charter to run them as private estates. Back in 1964 at independence, Northern Rhodesia changed its name to Zambia, and fifteen years later, Southern Rhodesia where Rhodes is buried, was renamed Zimbabwe.

This decision on the statue, reminded me of a past that never seem to go away. As a primary school pupil in the Lagos of the early 1970s, we were taught some history as part of social studies. Our standard text book on history featured great figures we were taught to emulate. One of them was Cecil Rhodes. We learnt about some of these figures by rote. I recall very clearly that Rhodes was born in 1853.

It was in my undergraduate years when I joined some discerning and anti-apartheid organisations like the Alliance of Progressive Students (ALPS) of the then University of Ife (now OAU) and the Pan Nigerian Patriotic Youth Movement of Nigeria (PYMN) that I came to realise that part of my education was colonial.

I found out that Rhodes was the grand father of apartheid in South Africa that condemned non-whites to decades of servitude, slavery, racism, violent and bloody repression. How can a supposedly independent country like Nigeria which was also in the fore front of the anti-apartheid struggle, teach its impressionable young minds to emulate a person like Rhodes?

Rhodes was an unapologetic imperialist and racist who argued that the Englishman “…has won first prize in the lottery of life” and that England’s divine duty is to colonise the world. He said that was the will of God. Hitler was to make similar arguments for Germany in the 1930s,leading the world into a global war and unimaginable massacres.

His idea of how to guarantee world peace was for Britain to colonise all of Africa, Asia, Palestine and South America, incorporate the United States and give representatives of these people seats in the British Parliament. For him, Africa was good only for three things; land to exploit raw materials, “cheap slave labour” and market for surplus English goods.

Rhodes was a philanthropist, provided it brings in some profit; the Rhodes scholarship he initiated was for people from countries who can be molded by Oxford University in English culture, ideas and interests.

Rhodes who in 1888, co-founded De Beers Consolidated Mines and created a monopoly that manipulated the world diamond market, was Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 -96. It was in this position, he made three fundamental contributions to the racist policies and laws that metamorphosed into Apartheid South Africa. First was his 1892 Franchise and Ballot Act which sought to disenfranchise blacks by placing financial and Western education qualifications to be eligible to vote. In later years, the vote was given to whites only.

Two years later, his government passed the Glen Gray Act which abolished the indigenous African communal lands and limited land ownership by non-whites. In 1913, the racists expanded this into the Land Act under which blacks were restricted to seven percent of the lands.

The Rhodes Government also legislated the Labour Tax which forced the black people to work in the white-owned commercial farms or industry in order to be able to pay the tax and survive. In post-apartheid and independent South Africa, it is untenable to have the statue of such a man occupy a pride of place.

I recall that in Nigeria, the statue of Queen Elizabeth was for many years at the entrance of the Parliament Building, Race Course, Lagos until student protests forced its removal. Such statue belongs to the museum or some art gallery.

The Rhodes story in Nigeria educational system is just one example of how colonial our education system can be. Due to lack of critical scholarship and political clarity, we adopt the colonial narration and history for our education system. What our education system end up producing are what Franz Fanon called Black skin, White masks; black people with colonial orientation or the mentality of the colonised.

I also recall that in primary school in Lagos, we were taught that the infamous British pirate, Sir Francis Drake was an exemplary patriot, noble man and a role model, as was Bolden Powel who founded the Boys Scout Movement. Conveniently left out is the fact that the Boys Scout was set up to spy on Africans in South Africa and smoke them out of their hideouts to be killed, or burnt while sleeping in their caves.

There is no reason why the Nigerian child should be taught that Frederick Lugard amalgamated the country in 1914 without teaching him that Lugard, a retired British major, was a mercenary contracted by the East African/Royal British Company to militarily defeat and colonise the Ugandans, the Sokoto Empire in Nigeria and the Asanti Region in Ghana.

Social studies is necessary and history should be made compulsory to high school level. But we need to re-write history from the perspective of the African, not of the colonialists.