Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford: a critical testimony

Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) announced its presence in the University of Oxford through rigorous calls to tackle ‘the plague of colonial iconography (in the form of statues, plaques and paintings) that seeks to whitewash and distort history’ throughout the university and beyond. In addition, RMF aimed to reform the Eurocentric curricula that dominate the university’s pedagogy across diverse fields of study and to address the under-representation and inadequate welfare provision for black and minority ethnic staff and students at Oxford. The first of these major aims soon concentrated on the removal of a statue of the British colonialist, Cecil John Rhodes, and set the stage for a national controversy as public debates erupted in Britain about the complex relationships between history, racial injustice and the role of elite universities in the modern world. In this article, I revisit some of these debates from the vantage point of my own involvement in RMF. By delineating the origins and trajectory of RMF in Oxford and critically analysing the admiration and admonition the movement evinced, I show how a particularly potent British national imaginary has memorialized the country’s imperial past and is unable to deal with racism in the present.