Affective politics and colonial heritage, Rhodes Must Fall at UCT and Oxford

Abstract

The article analyses the spatial entanglement of colonial heritage struggles through a study of the Rhodes Must Fall student movement at the University of Cape Town and the University of Oxford. We aim to shed light over why statues still matter in analyzing colonial traces and legacies in urban spaces and how the decolonizing activism of the RMF movement mobilizes around the controversial heritage associated with Cecil Rhodes at both places-a heritage that encompasses statues, buildings, Rhodes scholarship and the Rhodes Trust funds. We include a comparative study of the Facebook use of RMF as it demonstrates significant differences between the two places in the development of the student movements as political activism. Investigating in more detail the heritage politics of RMF at UCT we fledge out what we call an affective politics using non-representational bodily strategies. We argue that in order for actual social movements to mobilize in current political controversies, they need to put affective tactics to use.

Hashtag Activism, Politics and Resistance in Africa: Examining #ThisFlag and #RhodesMustFall online movements

“…Similarly, the smearing of human excrement on the Rhodes statue symbolised pain and powerlessness especially to Black South Africans who had hopes of a better future in post-apartheid South Africa (Nyamnjoh, 2015). What these experiences demonstrate is that social media allows its users to challenge and ‘reverse power geometrics’ (Knudsen & Andersen, 2019, p. 254). In this article, the South African case is a clear indication of this power reversal since the Rhodes statue ultimately fell.…”

“…It is important to note that vandalising the Rhodes statue was not a new thing and did not start in 2015. Knudsen and Andersen (2019) have noted that during the University’s 150th anniversary in 1979, a section of students at UCT defaced the statue with pink paint to protest the policies of apartheid South Africa. Knudsen and Andersen argue that even though opinions have always differed about what to do with the statue, for Black South Africans it was a symbol of white supremacy and had to be taken down.…”

“…Nyamnjoh (2015) remarks that ‘to smear Rhodes with excrement was a sort of balancing of equations, and in-vitiation to experience, however momentarily, how those in Khayelitsha lived in common with excrement and often reduced to excrement themselves’ (p. 49). Knudsen and Andersen (2019) use the phrase, ‘shit politics’ to refer to the significance of human excrement in contemporary South Africa where ‘bodies are being understood in brain-body-world entanglements in a bio-social sphere’ (p. 250). They refer to multiple cases of protests against lack of proper sewage systems in poor Black townships in South Africa.…”

“…For instance, in 2013, protesters from Khayelitsha, where Maxwele got the bucket, threw buckets full of human excrements at the Cape Town International Airport and on the busy highway (N2) that leads into Cape Town. These protest acts were very incisive and demonstrate that ‘when shit is handled overtly as a political weapon, it enumerates insurgent citizenship and the unequal distribution of space and right claims of housing, transportation, sanitation acclaimed by non-privileged city-dwellers’ (Knudsen & Andersen, 2019, p. 250).…”

Urban fallism

“…His action was supported by a group of fellow students and professors, which rapidly grew into the protest movement 'Rhodes Must Fall' (RMF) calling for the monument' s removal. The protestors, who referred to themselves as 'Fallists' , saw the presence of the monument as an act of discrimination and violence against black students and staff because, as they argued, it glorified the colonial ruler who carried out a politics of white supremacy based on exploitation, discrimination and violence against black indigenous people (Marshall 2017;Timm Knudsen and Andersen 2019). Their protest resulted in a broader call for the creation of a more inclusive memorial landscape on campus, which would recognize the history of black people who built the university and acknowledge the sites of violence and graves of black slaves that lay under the university buildings.…”