Rhodes must fall

The day before yesterday thousands of people filled The High outside Oriel College to peacefully protest for the removal of the statue to Cecil Rhodes that adorns the frontage to the college. All this in the wake of the toppling of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in an anti-racism demonstration in Bristol, one of many in the UK sparked by the death of George Floyd while he was under arrest in Minneapolis in the United States last month. The statue, which will probably end up in a museum, has since been retrieved from Bristol harbour early this morning - the absence of protesters that early in the day itself says something.

Cecil Rhodes statue, Oriel College

Quoting, the frontage ...displays a statue of Rhodes himself, under a shell canopy propped by barley-sugar columns. At his feet a relief inscription reads E[X]: LARGA: MVNIFICENTIA CAECILII:RHODES, ie 'Out of the splendid generosity of Cecil Rhodes', the raised letters (here in bold) forming the laborious chronogram LMVIICICILIID (ie, reshuffled, MDCCCLLVIIIIII, ie 1911). the date when the building was completed.

The Rhodes Building owes to the initiative and generosity of Cecil Rhodes, intermittently an Oriel undergraduate between 1873 and 1881, whose £100,000 legacy included £40,000 'for the extension to the High Street of the college buildings': £22,500 was to be for building, the rest to replace income from tenements to be destroyed.

Four years ago there was a similar hue-and-cry to have the statue removed, and then it was apparently quashed when furious donors threatened to withdraw gifts and bequests worth more than £100 million if it was taken down.

The whole business is ridiculous IMHO. Firstly, in order to be consistent, if the statue is to be removed the inscription must also be erased and, indeed, the whole building ought to be demolished as it was built with funds supplied by Cecil. Secondly my own education owes itself in part to Cecil's generosity - in my first year I lived in the Rhodes Building, I came up to Oriel on a scholarship, not the prestigious Rhodes scholarship but it was probably funded in part by the Rhodes' legacy. History is history and should ideally be presented as both truthful and unbiased - yes in retrospect slavery was wrong, yes the holocaust was evil, yes both black and white and any other colour of lives matter and yes I owe my wonderful Oxford experience and its positive effect on my life in some small part to the generosity of a historical figure who represented white supremacy and was steeped in colonialism and racism. Does this make me culpable?

Floreat Oriel!