South Africa: Anti-Statues Movement Symptomatic of Growing Frustration
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12 16 April 2015 South Africa: Anti-Statues Movement Symptomatic of Growing Frustration Leighton G. Luke Manager Indian Ocean Research Programme Key Points The movement to take down colonial- and apartheid-era statues from public areas across South Africa is heavy on symbolism, but is merely symptomatic of a wider disenchantment with the rate of transformation in South African society. It also reflects the uncertainty over how the country should best tackle its difficult past. The African National Congress government is attempting to strike a fair balance between South Africa’s painful history and the Mandela vision of a unified, inclusive “Rainbow Nation”, but scandals and service delivery failures are undermining its authority. The Economic Freedom Fighters party has called for all such memorials to be torn down and the popularity of the party’s radicalism may force the ANC to adopt more populist polices across the board. Summary The furore surrounding the removal of the statue of nineteenth-century imperialist Cecil Rhodes from its prominent position at the University of Cape Town has spread to encompass other statues in other cities across South Africa. Although high-profile, simply removing the former icons will not address the continuing racial inequalities that are at the heart of the matter. The presence of the Rhodes statue and others like it merely became the catalyst for an outbreak of pent-up frustration at the slow rate of transformation in post-apartheid South Africa. Analysis After a month of protest, the statue of British imperialist Cecil Rhodes, which had dominated the picturesque Upper Campus of the University of Cape Town since 1934, has been removed. On 9 April, exactly one month after student Chumani Maxwele initiated the debate by flinging human excrement at the statue, the university authorities voted to put it into storage. The announcement was met with cheers from the Student Representative Council and its supporters, who had been campaigning for its removal on the grounds that it was an offensive and outdated symbol, under the slogan “Rhodes Must Fall”. Regardless of one’s perspective, that Rhodes left a larger-than-life legacy is unquestionable. As Punch magazine noted even at the time, Rhodes strode like a colossus across southern Africa for much of the period from the 1870s until his death in 1902. In South Africa alone, he was instrumental in paving the way for the disenfranchisement of black South Africans that would culminate in the Natives Land Act of 1913 and, from 1948, apartheid. But it is a conflicted legacy, as Rhodes established the prestigious Rhodes Scholarships that have enabled over 7,000 students to study at his alma mater, Oxford University. He also founded Rhodes University in what is now South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province and donated the land for the University of Cape Town (UCT) and the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens. Elsewhere in Cape Town, Rhodes remains immortalised by two Sir Herbert Baker-designed statues: the grandiose Rhodes Memorial on the slopes of Devil’s Peak and, in the city centre – right across from Parliament – in the Company’s Garden park. Other statues, of King George V in Durban and of Afrikaner president Paul Kruger, which occupies centre place in Church Square in Pretoria, the heart of the country’s executive capital, have not been not been so fortunate. Both are among a growing number of statues to have been daubed with paint. The Cape Town memorial to Afrikaner war hero and first Prime Minister of the unified South Africa, Louis Botha, was defaced with red and blue paint on 9 April; its counterpart in the grounds of Pretoria’s Union Buildings so far remains untouched. Page 2 of 5 But it is not just statues of the leading men of colonialism that have come under fire. A statue of Mahatma Ghandi in downtown Johannesburg was cloaked in white paint on 11 April for his alleged racism during the 20 years that he spent in South Africa. In Port Elizabeth, a memorial to the horses that served with the British and Commonwealth forces in the 1899-1902 second Boer War, was damaged by a member of the populist left-wing Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party, when the soldier giving water to his horse was toppled from the plinth. Also in Port Elizabeth, a statue of Queen Victoria was splattered with green paint, although the EFF stated that it was not responsible for the second act of vandalism. The legacies of Rhodes and his contemporaries have been, however, simply the catalyst for what is, in reality, a mounting frustration among large numbers of South Africans at the lack of change two decades after the country’s first all-race elections. Multi-racial democracy may be thriving in South Africa, but for large numbers of its citizens, little has changed since liberation. Given the scale of the gap that existed between whites and everyone else in 1994, the African National Congress, which has ruled the central and provincial governments since that year (bar only Western Cape since 2009), has indisputably made significant progress in its attempts to improve living standards and economic prospects. Those efforts, however, have been undermined by various scandals, including the 2012 failure of the ANC Limpopo Provincial Government to supply textbooks to school students and the multi-million rand upgrade to President Jacob Zuma’s homestead at Nkandla, not to mention the ongoing power shortages and rolling blackouts implemented by state electricity generator, Eskom. Even more powerful was the shooting of more than 40 striking miners by police in August 2012 during the bitter Marikana mining strike. That the police in the new South Africa would open fire on their fellow citizens had previously seemed unthinkable and revived memories of the violence meted outed by the security forces during the apartheid era. Such failures and incidents provide fertile ground for the populism of the ANC-breakaway Economic Freedom Fighters party led by Julius Malema. Prior to his expulsion from the ANC and the founding of the EFF in June 2013, Malema was the party’s youth leader. His youthfulness, charisma and populist statements have endeared him to a large number of supporters, propelling the EFF into Parliament at the 2014 general elections. Malema and his colleagues have called for the complete removal of all colonial and apartheid memorials, even going so far as to say that, in the future, such statues would be thrown into the sea. In a Times Live report, on 9 April, an unnamed EFF representative stated that: The EFF has long held the conviction that it is these monuments that continue to inspire white people to think they are superior and have the right to celebrate their murderous and racist past even 21 years after 1994. Let all statues fall‚ together with their legacies of landlessness‚ racism and poverty.1 1 Capazorio, L., ‘Louis Botha Statue outside Parliament Defaced’, Times Live, 9 April 2015. <http://www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2015/04/09/louis-botha-statue-outside-parliament-defaced>. Page 3 of 5 According to the EFF, the money spent on protecting and cleaning the statues should instead be spent on disadvantaged South Africans and that, by saving the money, the party was, in reality, doing the government a favour.2 For all the attention-grabbing statements and headlines, the statues debate speaks of frustration at the lack of change more than 20 years after the fall of apartheid. Spearheading that frustration is the younger generation – the so-called “born frees” – who either were not born before 1994 or are too young to have any personal recollection of the injustices of apartheid, yet have seen few improvements to their standards of living over the course of their lifetimes thus far. In the townships, large numbers of residents still live in shacks with no access to electricity, sanitation or running water. Even with government efforts to fix them, many schools still have no potable water or plumbed toilet facilities, particularly in poorer provinces, such as Limpopo and Eastern Cape. Between January 2014 and February 2015, three young school students drowned after falling into the open-air “long drop” latrines at different schools in Limpopo and KwaZulu-Natal. Combined with issues such as the above, plus the slow pace of land reform and restitution, the accounts of racism still being experienced by black South Africans, and what they see as the “Eurocentrism” and lack of African staff and perspectives in higher education, this younger generation is also now even beginning to do the previously unthinkable and question the legacy of Nelson Mandela. Many younger South Africans see the ANC as having been too lenient on the country’s corporate élites and, indeed, on whites in general, now often referred to as “beneficiaries of apartheid”. 2 Spies, D., ‘Tributes Laid At Vandalised Horse Memorial’, News24, 8 April 2015. <http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Tributes-laid-at-vandalised-horse-memorial- 20150408>. Page 4 of 5 The ANC has taken a reasoned approach to the issue, noting that the statues are merely outdated representations of a past that, while often brutal, nonetheless happened and which has contributed to the modern day “Rainbow Nation” envisaged by Mandela. President Zuma has promised that the government will consult with all affected groups over the statues’ futures and described the vandalism being meted out to the monuments by the EFF as something that ‘flies in the face of the preservation of the history of our country, including the repulsive apartheid colonial history.’3 Under current legislation, any statue more than 60 years old is classed as a heritage property and, as such, it is illegal to damage it.