RESURFACING RHODES

A small stone man called Cecil Rhodes, who hubristically claimed Zimbabwe in his own name back in 1895, has stood frozen in time outside Oriel College, Oxford, since 1911. In recent years, he has become a focus for student protests. One wonders what he might make of Rhodes Scholarship students who are perfectly happy to accept a free education paid for in his name demanding that #RhodesMustFall. Perhaps we should dig him up and ask him. In Zimbabwe itself, where Rhodes’s corpse has lain buried atop the granite outcrop of the Malindadzimu Hills, within the hallowed precincts of Matobo National Park, since his death in 1902, there are repeated calls to do just that. Matobo is a sacred site, where pre-Christian deities and revered ancestral souls also dwell, together with the physical remains of the founding Ndebele king, Mzilikazi. Pilgrims attend the holy cave of Matobo’s Njelele Shrine soliciting help from gods and ghosts, with unmarried women seeking husbands, infertile couples seeking babies, failing farmers seeking rain… and corrupt politicians seeking votes.

Oxford’s culture wars over Rhodes’s statue are trivial compared to Zimbabwe’s equivalent conflict over his carcass. To many black Zimbabweans, his grave’s presence as a legally protected blot on the ritual landscape is an abiding insult to their ancestors’ memory, bringing bad luck. In 2012, an iconoclastic crowd of 600 veterans of the 1970s bush war against white-minority rule stormed Malindadzimu Hill, demanding Rhodes be sent back to Britain, as his presence was upsetting the dead so much they had blighted the fields with drought. In 2015, when more #RhodesMustFall student hysteria erupted at South Africa’s Cape Town University, with a prominent statue being toppled, calls for its original model to be exhumed and sent off to London resurfaced. Zimbabwe’s then-President Robert Mugabe told a South African audience: “We have his corpse, you can keep his statue… I don’t know what you want us to do with him. Should we dig him up? But perhaps then his spirit may rise again. We have decided to keep him down there.” In 2017, Mugabe again raised the prospect of Rhodes’s shade returning in rage, albeit this time dismissively: “If he is to rise from the dead, I am not going to order the boys to [waste] one bullet from an AK-47. I will order them to use [the butt of] a machine-gun to crush his head