Who was Cecil John Rhodes, the man at the center of the mayhem around South African statues? Rhodes is different things to different people; some call him evil, others say he was a hero. Whatever he was, he has caused a storm 114 years after his death.
Rhodes was a British expatriate who amassed a fortune in Africa from diamond and gold mining – the Aliko Dangote of his day. He died in Muizenberg near Cape Town, South Africa, in 1902. His corpse was transported by train to be buried in Malindidzimu in the Matopos Hills near Bulawayo, in Zimbabwe, as he wished.
More than a century later, his body and his imposing statue at the University of Cape Town (UCT) lay undisturbed.
<div id="attachment_3607" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-3607" class="size-medium wp-image-3607" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/469050928-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA &#8211; APRIL 09: Students cheer as the Cecil Rhodes statue is being removed from the University of Cape Town on April 9, 2015 in Cape Town, South Africa. The statue of British colonialist Cecil John Rhodes was removed from the University of Cape Town as a result of a month long protest by students citing the statue &#8220;great symbolic power&#8221; which glorified someone &#8220;who exploited black labour and stole land from indigenous people&#8221;. (Photo by Charlie Shoemaker/Getty Images)</div>
On March 10, it all changed when Chumani Maxwele, a fourth year political science student at the university, dressed in black tights, running shoes and a pink construction helmet, for a solitary protest. Maxwele poured excrement on the statue and placed a placard: “Exhibit White Arrogance @ UCT”. That was the birth of the great statue protest of 2015 that spread across the country.
Xolela Mangcu, a professor at UCT, supported the students’ movement that became known as Rhodes Must Fall.
“When I first arrived here three years ago, I was struck how white and European the university identity was, not just in terms of number of students but the content that is being taught. Nothing in the curriculum says you are in a South African university. The whole question whether UCT can imagine itself as an African university is what I have been raising in my intervention in both my columns and the university itself. The fact is that there are five black full professors out of 200. And there’s not a single South African black woman professor. That’s how I got into this debate. But I was ignored,” says Mangcu.
The debate had legs. Around 872 kilometers from Cape Town, in the heart of the Eastern Cape province, in the city of Grahamstown, lies Rhodes University, named after the British mining magnate in 1904. Grahamstown was named after Lieutenant-Colonel John Graham who drove the Xhosa tribe off their land. There have been calls to change the names of the city and the university.
Nomalanga Mkhize, a history lecturer at Rhodes University and a newspaper columnist, says the anger over Rhodes vindicates Mahmood Mamdani, a Ugandan scholar. As head of the Centre for African Studies at UCT in 1998, he developed a new curriculum elevating African scholarship, but the university waved it away.
“No doubt, the ‘Mamdani Affair’ is now embarrassing for UCT. It has become clear that he was right and his detractors were wrong,” says Mkhize.
Not every academic agrees. Shadrack Gutto, a professor from the University of South Africa and a constitutional rights expert, says preservation of the past is critical to progress and those who want to wipe the history because it is hurting are wasting their time and are ill-informed.
“History is never made on a clean slate. If you are talking about proper history, you are talking about history of tragedies, grief, happiness, periods of prosperity and periods of decline. From that point of view, you need to preserve all of it, in order to know where you are coming from, where you want to go. I don’t agree with the destruction of symbols of the past, they need to be there, the question is how are they explained and placed. We may disagree on where you place them. But to try to wipe them out, I think it is foolish and something that defies the understanding of people,” says Gutto.
“I support the spirit of 1976 students in the current UCT students. Whether they change their names or not or they have a black vice chancellor, the fact remains, universities have not been transformed.”
Gerhard Papenfus, Chief Executive of the National Employers’ Association of South Africa, says Cecil John Rhodes the person. He says Rhodes oversaw the death of his Afrikaaner ancestors 114 years ago, in the Anglo-Boer War, but he disagrees with the statue removal.
“So, after Cecil John Rhodes’ statue has been removed, followed by the statues of perhaps King George V at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Queen Victoria in Parliament, and then Paul Kruger in Church Square in Pretoria; and perhaps after convincing Robert Mugabe to remove David Livingstones’ statue from Victoria Falls and to exhume Rhodes bones from his grave on Malindidzimu, and after every street and school has been renamed and the history have been rewritten – then what?” asks Papenfus.
A month after Maxwele’s lone protest, statues of Mahatma Ghandi; an Indian human rights champion and Paul Kruger; the Afrikaaner leader and nemesis of Rhodes, along with others were smeared with paint and broken down.
The students at UCT got their wish. At 5:37AM on April 9, management removed the Rhodes statue to the cheers of students in an atmosphere thick with revolutionary slogans.
One would have thought that the removal would settle the dust. But members of the Rhodes Must Fall campaign continued occupying Bremner Building, a main administration block, which students renamed Azania Building – the Pan-Africanist name for South Africa.
University officials served Maxwele and other students with an eviction letter and threatened to go to court. Three days later, the students left.
UCT council chairperson, Njongonkulu Ndungane, says the university will take up the transformation debate.
Zimbabwe president, Robert Mugabe, was coincidentally in a two-day state visit to South Africa during the Rhodes debate. In a press conference in Pretoria there was laughter as he quipped about the debate over statues in South Africa and a grave in Zimbabwe.
“We have his corpse and you have his statue. What do you want us to do with him? Dig him up? We cannot tell you what to do with the statue but we and my people feel we need to leave him down there.”
One can argue that the noise Rhodes made in his life hasn’t stopped.

#RhodesMustFloat

The Statue  That Moved

She has been listed as one of the ‘12 Names to Change the World’ by the Spanish National Centre for Research on Human Evolution as well as one of the top 10 most influential women in science and technology on the African continent by technology news website IT News Africa.
That’s 62-year-old professor Tebello Nyokong from Rhodes University in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, who is breaking the boundaries of science in cancer research.
Meeting her in her office at the university, one is immediately drawn to her warm personality and the twinkle in her eye. By her own admission, she likes to laugh a lot, and loudly.
Yet, the work she does is no laughing matter.
As Professor of Medicinal Chemistry and Nanotechnology at the university, as well as Director of the DST Mintek Nanotechnology Innovation Centre, Nyokong has attracted millions of rands in funding towards her research based on photodynamic therapy (PDT) of cancer.
PDT, which uses dyes and light, is already available for some cancers in the United States (US), Europe and Russia, but currently has strong side effects as the drugs hone in on healthy as well as cancerous tissues.
“Our whole aim is to make molecules that are cancer-specific so that healthy tissue will not be affected,” says Nyokong, going on to detailing the specifics, which any lay person would find hard to understand.
“In our research, PDT is combined with nanoparticles that absorb and re-emit light, thus enabling for visualization in addition to cancer treatment. In cancer therapy, nanoparticles act as delivery agents of the drugs selectively to the cancer tissue. This is due to the fact that cancer has leaky vasculature which allows nanoparticles to enter.”
Simply put, this means the drugs will specifically target cancer cells, which will see cumbersome treatments such as chemotherapy move into the dark ages.
Having overseen several formal collaborations with counterparts across the globe, Nyokong has also been awarded a prestigious Adjunct Professorship by the University of Tromsø in Norway and numerous international scientists have visited her laboratory. She has also hosted many postdoctoral candidates from around the world.
But she is quick to point out that her research is still in the pre-clinical trial phase and many years away from reaching the market.
Considered an icon in the world of science, Nyokong’s state-of-the-art laboratory is a far cry from her primary school days in Lesotho where as a child, she spent alternate days tending sheep and on the weekends, assisted her father who was a construction laborer. These tasks led her to conclude she could do anything a boy could do.
“At the start my father influenced my path. He believed that the apartheid system could only be defeated through education and I was encouraged to excel at a very young age,” she says.
And excel she did, having chosen art subjects for her matric, she changed to science two years before sitting her matric exams.
“The teachers accepted me after this mad move from arts to science and when I entered the University of Lesotho, I was greatly influenced by my lecturer, Dr Gray. After that I was driven by my desire to beat the odds,” she says.
Nyokong went on to obtain her PhD from the University of Western Ontario in 1987 and a Fulbright Fellowship for postdoctoral study at the University of Notre Dame in the US.
“I had academic loneliness, since there were very few women when I started. Now my past students have become professors and are my academic colleagues,” she says.
And she is excited and outspoken about Africa’s potential to excel in science.
On being awarded the National Research Foundation Lifetime Achiever Award last October, she says, “I am driven by being an African, completely, I’m passionate to see us succeed.”
And she is equally passionate when it comes to her students.
“I urge all young people in the country to study to the highest possible level [PhD]. The development of South Africa will depend on highly skilled labor. No country can have lasting economic growth or development without a solid science base. Science is thought to be hard, no, it’s not difficult,” she says. She wishes schools were not judged on their pass rate, but rather on their pupils’ abilities in maths and science.
Her work ethic is phenomenal and her research output has been described as simply extraordinary. In 2012, she published 51 articles, all of them internationally peer-reviewed; in 2013, she released 52 publications and 17 so far this year.
Nyokong admits she has a hectic schedule, between supervising students and attending scientific conferences around the world, which includes going to Oman this year for the World Academy of Sciences conference, where she will be the global representative in chemistry.
And when she’s not in the lab or traveling, Nyokong loves walking, as well as gardening, which she describes as “physical activity with a purpose”. She confesses a great weakness when it comes to beautiful bags and shoes and her ‘must reads’ are Malcolm Gladwell’s  David and Goliath
and Outliers.
A grandmother of two, her favorite holiday destination is Mauritius. As we end the interview,
3I ask her what it’s like to have come from a shepherd girl to a leading woman of science.
“Sometimes I think gosh, that is not me. I’m just doing my work, that’s all it is. I love my students and I embarrass them a lot sometimes.”
When she laughs, it’s from the core of her being. And with the list of honors and accomplishments she has garnered, no wonder she smiles – and the world of science with her.

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The Statue That Moved

From Shepherd To scientist