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© Francis B. Nyamnjoh 2016
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Acknowledgement
When Rhodes Must Fall and related student protests erupted and unfolded in 2015, I was on
sabbatical and mostly away from Cape Town and South Africa. These student protests were
preceded by violent ‘xenophobic’ (others would insist more appropriately on ‘afrophobic’)
protests against foreign nationals mostly from African countries. The more I followed the
developments from a distance, the more it dawned on me how the two forms of protest were not
as disconnected as portrayed in media reports and commentary. Hence my decision to write this
book showing commonalities between xenophobia and calls for the decolonisation of university
education. Documenting and reading meaning into the effervescences of post-apartheid South
Africa may contribute to understanding the growing impatience with and across racial, ethnic,
gender and generational divides. The book delves into Cecil John Rhodes the person and as an
embodiment of the dreams, aspirations and superiority syndrome of imperial Britain, as a way of
accounting for Rhodes’s resilience and immortality in South Africa and globally. I hope it offers a
framework for situating the possibilities and limitations of current clamours for decolonisation,
as well as a way forward from #WhatMustFall to #WhatMustRise, in a dynamic process of
ongoing cultural creation and societal regeneration.
I would like to express my most sincere gratitude to all those who in one way or another
contributed with humbling generosity their ideas, time, suggestions, and intellectual and related
energies to kindle and rekindle my efforts. Of special mention are Deevia Bhana, Tinyiko
Maluleke, Patience Mususa, Malizani Jimu, Sakhumzi Mfecane, Lindiswa Jan, Ayanda Manqoyi,
Crystal Powell, Mohini Baijnath, Divine Fuh, Michael Rowlands, Sanya Osha, Kharnita
Mohamed, Lauren Paremoer, Daniel Ogwang and participants at the British Institute in Eastern
Africa (BIEA) Annual Lecture, which I delivered on 8 April 2016 in Nairobi, Kenya.
As someone who was not on the ground during these protests, I would like to acknowledge
all the assistance I received from various sources in writing this book. As you will notice from my
endnotes and references, the various protests have generated an enormous wealth of resources,
ranging from articles in newspapers and social media, to video footage and official statements by
university management and the South African government. I owe a debt of gratitude to all these
sources.
My gratitude goes as well to all those who read and commented various drafts and sections
of this book, pointing me as they did to sources and resources for further enrichment of my
argument and its substantiation.
I am most grateful for two fellowships, one from the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced
Study (April — June 2015) and one from the Graduate School of Asian and African Area
Studies of Kyoto University (June — July 2015), which fellowships enabled me to write sections
of the book. I benefitted enormously from the generosity, both intellectual and social, of fellows
and staff of the two institutions. I am in their debt. I am also grateful to Steve Howard and his
colleagues of Ohio University, for a visiting scholarship (August — September 2015), which
enabled me to write a substantial portion of the book.
Special thanks go to Mike Rowlands who generously agreed to write the Foreword, and to
Moshumee Teena Dewoo and Sanya Osha who each wrote an Epilogue. I acknowledge with
profound gratitude the editorial contributions of Kathryn Toure and of the Human and Social
Research Council Press, which press published an earlier much shorter version of this book as a
prologue to their State of the Nation for 2016. I am equally indebted to Mohini Baijnath, Patricia
Johnson-Castle, Manya Van Ryneveld and Joanna Woods for assistance with proofreading.
Last but not least, I am grateful to Wandile Goozen Kasibe, Public Programmes Coordinator
at Iziko Museums of Cape Town, for permission to use one of his photos of the Rhodes Must
Fall campaign.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword by Michael Rowlands
Introduction
1. Sir Cecil John Rhodes: The makwerekwere with a Missionary Zeal
2. Black Pain Matters: Down with Rhodes
3. Not Every Black Is Black Enough
4. UCT Fires on All Cylinders
5. Lessons from Rhodes Must Fall
6. Pure Fiction: What I Almost Had in Common with Rhodes
7. Conclusion: We Are all amakwerekwere
Epilogue 1 by Moshumee Teena Dewoo
Epilogue 2 by Sanya Osha
References
Foreword
The Future Belongs to the Impure
Michael Rowlands
Emeritus Professor in Anthropology University College London, UK (His interests in cultural heritage
encourage him to explore issues of social rupture and repair)
‘The future belongs to the impure. The future belongs to those who are ready to take in a bit of the other, as well as being what they themselves are. After
all, it is because their history and ours is so deeply and profoundly and inextricably intertwined that racism exists. For otherwise how could they keep us
apart” (Hall 1998:299)
This plea from Stuart Hall was made at the end of an intervention in a conference on ‘The House
that Race Built’ in which considerable disagreements were voiced by the participants. The focus
was on the legacies of the civil rights movements in 1960s USA. Could there be any doubt, Hall
asks, that as a movement, civil rights struggle had not produced new ‘black subjects’? On the
other hand could they be ‘new’ without being historically contextualised — evoking the tradition
of struggle, in this case going back to the beginnings of slavery?
Traditions differ and part of the reason for disagreement was, no doubt, the fact that Hall
was writing as someone who arrived at black consciousness in conjunction with a particular form
of civil rights movement in Jamaica in the 1960s. In the 1970s as a migrant to Britain, he was to
find the signifier ‘black’ being adopted as a political category of struggle both by Afro-Caribbean
migrants and by migrants from the Asian continent. People who had never experienced the term
‘black’ as race before, adopted it since, as they said, “Since the British can’t tell the difference
between us, ... we, might as well call ourselves by the same name”. This is no longer the case. The
significance has gone. Things have moved into a new kind of ethnicised politics of difference.
Paul Gilroy, in his new introduction to the 2013 edition of ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack
laments the decline of race as a means of political mobilisation in Britain.
Cobbling identities may therefore be our way of preserving ourselves in new conditions of
modernity. The kinds of xenophobic nationalism that are emerging in the world, are not about
race or being ‘black’ and ‘white’ but about being American (are you not a Christian if you want to
build walls rather than bridges to keep the ‘other’ out?) or English or South African. And this is
the crux of the argument that Francis Nyamnjoh presents to us here. If, regardless of colour, all
South Africans are Amakwerekwere, what kind of ‘cobbling’ will work to provide the flexible
forms of citizenship that create conditions of harmony within some unified idea of tradition?
One might imagine that this would have to entail some flexible ideas of what it is to be
African as well as South African. It is an easy step to reduce these identities to the encounter with
‘blackness’. To be black is a feature of the encounter with whiteness or as Nyamnjoh says, quoting
Fanon ‘every Antillean, however black physically, ‘expects all the others to perceive him in terms
of the essence of the white man”’ (Fanon 1986 [1967b]: 63). The idea that all kinds of social
visibility crucially depended on fantasies of whiteness subtly or not so subtly puts being ‘black’ as
inferior in a white dominated society.
Ironically, whilst this should be reversed in a black majority post-apartheid South Africa, the
idea of being superior through the opportunities of becoming ‘white’, sets being ‘black’ in South
Africa in a deadly opposition with the identifications of being black elsewhere in Africa. As a
guide to understanding the demands for reform in South Africa, we might remind ourselves of
Abner Cohen’s classic study of the politics of elite culture in Africa, in which he showed how
‘creole’ cultures in Sierra Leone and Liberia were formed through the creation of dense networks
of amity based on a ‘civilising’ ethos of their distinctiveness through historical absorption into
‘whiteness’ (Cohen 1981). Written before but anticipating the tensions and contradictions that led
to ‘civil wars, the clash between ‘civilising’ elites and provincialized Africans, has uncanny
similarities to aspects of the political process in contemporary South Africa.
‘Decolonising the mind’ produces several other scenarios. One is to follow Ngugi wa
Thiong’o (1986). To break the bonds of pain and suffering requires an end (cognitively) to the
‘language’ (sic English) that perpetrates the consciousness of its reproduction. A second seeks the
end of education in Afrikaans in favour of English in traditionally Afrikaner universities such as
Stellenbosch, Pretoria and the Free State. Another is to re-examine the shared values promoted
by Thabo Mbeki’s espousal of ‘African Renaissance’. But, as we know now, his idea of ‘African
Civilisation’ is profoundly Eurocentric, requiring that Africa has textual literacy and monumental
architecture rather than its own ‘Civilisation’ based on orality and intangible knowledges. As
Nyamnjoh has written elsewhere (Nyamnjoh 2004), African knowledges taught in universities in
Africa, have been ‘westernised’. Products of the Northern ‘knowledge factory’ return, if at all, to
Africa with ‘superior’ credentialism to pursue the inculcation of the same knowledge as regimes
of truth. ‘Decolonisation should mean instead to pursue the project of an ‘African archive’ now
dispersed on a global scale and in a multitude of moral and aesthetic forms. Also, as Mbembe1
writes, this is not a pure archive but has, for long, been part of the Western archive, if not a co-
maker of it.
Again, it is ironic that the opportunity presented to Oxford University to recognise the fact
that it has been integrally involved in the creation of this hybrid archive, has been refused. This
was in the face of Oxford students who demonstrated in sympathy with students of the
University of Cape Town, and on 6 November 2015, protested against maintaining Rhodes’s
statue at Oriel College. The argument against was that this was a separate matter for the
University, which could not accede to the demands of the Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford group,
because it would mean indulging in a revisionist history and a devaluation of the contribution of
Rhodes Scholarships. Yet this seems to give little thought to how badly this isolationist position
would be received by many moderate Africans who see these protests as part of a more
globalised and interconnected order.
Another again would be to ask ‘when was black’ and where. Black as signifier appears globally
as a consequence of the Civil Rights movement in the US after the 1960s. But this is a
consequence of being marginal and oppressed in a majority ‘white’ population. Uniquely, quite
the reverse pertains in South Africa, and elsewhere in Africa, where a white influenced dominant
elite had historically taken hold but has now been displaced, or just about. As Mbembe writes, it
is surely part of the distinctiveness of South Africa, that a politically majority ‘black’ African
population can change the ‘language’ and break the bonds of pain and suffering through
renouncing self-imposed marginality and embracing better conditions of inclusion to create new
forms of life. But some good thought on strategic ‘cobbling’ is clearly needed to achieve this.
This is where the volume presented to us provides nuanced and subtle ideas of engagement.
The rage of the ‘born free’ is, after all, seen by all as a positive and energetic force that can be the
spearhead to achieve this. But when and where? The turning back in anger on the Mandela
generation is one, perhaps needed, but dispiriting consequence. As Martin Luther King saw it in
his 1963 ‘Letter from a Birmingham jail;’ — ‘the stumbling block on the road to freedom is not
the Klu Klux Klan... but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice’ ( King
1986: 91). His indictment of the moderate (black or white here) anticipated the liberal retreat
from race that would become the hallmark of the post-civil rights era (e.g. the ethnicising of race
that Hall and Gilroy detect in the case of race politics in Britain, for instance). But in South
Africa, it will be a potential condemnation of black moderates by other black South
Africans/and Africans.
Is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission era in decline as a moderate force that valued
order over the pursuit of equality and justice? If so, where will the anger be directed towards?
There are several candidates in play. The lack of transformation and the corruption of a
burgeoning new black middle class elite who benefit from the moderate control of order is one.
More prevalent is the anger directed against the makwerekwere, in township contexts where the
means to offset the rapacious behaviour of new elites is limited and other more vulnerable
groups can be targeted instead. In ‘civilisational’ terms it is also the implicit value that Nyamnjoh
indicates by naming a chapter Not every black is black enough. By turning anger on the presence of
other Africans as inferior beings, black South Africans are distracted from understanding their
presence as the mutual construction of white and black identities. We can go on, but the dangers
of an anger and crisis ridden South Africa is appreciating.
What are the indicators provided to us by Francis Nyamnjoh to lessen the dangers? His
‘shopping basket’ critically includes all Africans in South Africa of whatever race or faith in
searching for solutions. The appeal for a universal black humanism is both global and local and
includes the role of whites in Africa. The right to a ‘flexible citizenship’ does not start with the
western autonomous rights based individual but more historically situated in the ‘family’ or the
‘homestead’ as a collective right, recognising that ‘individualism’ in South Africa has a different
history of labour migration, both apartheid and post-apartheid, and its destruction of tradition.
And there is the appeal to maintain the ideals of Mandela — Tutu Truth and Reconciliation and
take them forward from a therapeutic cathartic release to a massive political and economic
transformation of conditions for health, education and employment for all in South Africa.
Pope Francis says that, building bridges rather walls, makes a good Christian2. Let’s hope it
also makes a good South African.
_____________________
Notes
1 Achille Mbembe, Decolonizing knowledge and the question of the archive,
http://wiser.wits.ac.za/system/files/Achille%20Mbembe%20-
%20Decolonizing%20Knowledge%20and%20the%20Question%20of%20the%20Archive.pdf, accessed 26 February 2016
2 On February 18, 2016, Pope Francis said of Donald Trump, “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may
be, and not building bridges, is not Christian. This is not in the Gospel”, see http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/pope-person-
who-thinks-only-about-building-walls-not-building-bridges-is-no/#ixzz41l6xEhfK, accessed 2 March 2016.
References
Cohen, Abner, 1981, The Politics of Elite Culture, Berkeley. University of California Press
Fanon, Frantz, 1986 [1967], Black Skin, White Masks, London: Pluto Press.
Gilroy, Paul, 2013 [1987], There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, London: Routledge
Hall, Stuart, 1998, ‘Subjects in History: Making Diasporic Identities’, in: Wahneema Lubiano, (ed), The House That Race Built, New
York: Vintage Books.
King, Jr, Martin Luther, 1986, ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’, in: I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches that Changed the World, (ed),
James Melvin Washington, New York: Harper Collins.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 1986, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, London: James Currey.
Nyamnjoh, Francis B., 2004, ‘From Publish or Perish to Publish and Perish: What “Africa’s 100 Best Books” Tell Us About
Publishing Africa’, Journal of Asian and African Studies, 39(5): 331-355.
