The Rhodes Must Fall Movement and Imperial Memory

The Rhodes Must Fall movement, which began at the University of Cape Town in March 2015, was the most consequential campaign to reconsider imperial commemoration in modern history. The movement spread from Cape Town to Oxford, and from Oxford to Bristol in 2020, when a statue of the slave-trader Edward Colston was pulled down and pushed into the harbour. The movement has produced a wideranging debate about how imperial history should be commemorated, what monuments are for, and whose memory deserves to be preserved. The position taken in the most thoughtful work on the question — including Stuart Hall’s “Whose Heritage? Un-settling ‘the Heritage’, Re-imagining the Post-Nation” and Paul Gilroy’s writings on the imperial unconscious — is that the debate is itself a sign of the unfinished business of the post-imperial settlement.

The Origins of the Movement

The Rhodes Must Fall movement began at the University of Cape Town on 9 March 2015 with a campaign by the student Chumani Maxwele, who staged a series of protests at the statue of Cecil Rhodes on the campus. The protests were a response to what Maxwele and other activists saw as the university’s continuing veneration of the British imperialist and the broader failure of South African universities to address the colonial roots of their institutions. The #RhodesMustFall hashtag quickly became the principal means of organising and publicising the campaign. The movement’s founding statement, “Why is this statue still here?,” was a deliberately simple question with very large consequences.

The Campaign at UCT and Oxford

The campaign at UCT gathered momentum in March and April 2015, with daily protests, sit-ins, and a national debate. The University Council voted on 8 April 2015 to remove the statue, and the statue was taken down on the morning of 9 April 2015. The decision was the first of its kind in a South African university and was widely reported in the international press. The #RhodesMustFall movement at UCT then broadened into a “Fees Must Fall” campaign, which closed South African universities for weeks in October and November 2015, and into a longer-term project of curriculum decolonisation that has reshaped South African higher education.

The Oxford campaign began in late 2015, with a petition calling for the removal of a statue of Rhodes at Oriel College. The petition — drafted by the historian Diriye Osman, the sociologist Subhadra Das, and the law student Chris Ilunga — was signed by 154 Oxford academics and submitted to the Oriel governing body in January 2016. The petition argued that the Oriel statue was a “political statement” of “colonial nostalgia” and that “we are inheritors of a system that has benefited some and disadvantaged others on the basis of race.” The Oriel College governing body voted in May 2016 to retain the statue, despite a clear student and academic majority in favour of removal. The College revisited the question in 2021, with the same outcome — although the College has now pledged funding for the contextualisation of the statue and a Centre for Global Ethnic Inequalities.

The Bristol Toppling and the 2020 Reckoning

The 7 June 2020 toppling of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol was the most dramatic moment in the wider history of imperial monument debates. The statue, erected in 1895 to honour Colston’s philanthropy, was pulled down during a Black Lives Matter protest and pushed into the harbour. The Colston statue had been the subject of a 2018 petition with 11,000 signatures, a 2018 city council vote to add a second contextualising plaque, and a 2019 petition of 3,000 signatures for removal. The actual toppling, on the day after a Bristol protest in solidarity with the American Black Lives Matter movement, was a moment of direct action that no subsequent British government has been able to accommodate. The statue was recovered from the harbour and, after a 2022 council vote, transferred to a museum.

The 2020 reckoning produced a wave of reassessments. The National Trust’s September 2020 report on the colonial connections of its properties; the government-commissioned Colston Legacy Review of December 2020; the renaming of buildings at the Universities of Cape Town, Oxford, Cambridge, and elsewhere; the introduction of contextual plaques at the Cenotaph, the Foreign Office, and the Imperial War Museum; and the 2020 establishment of the History Education Advisory Group in England were all responses to the debate. The 2022 essay by Afua Hirsch, “Why we need to talk about slavery and empire in British schools,” and the 2023 collection edited by Reni Eddo-Lodge and others, have made the case for a national reckoning that the government has so far declined to lead.

The Arguments For and Against Removal

Proponents of removal emphasise the racist legacy of Cecil Rhodes, the use of forced labour and violence in the British South Africa Company, the disenfranchisement of black South Africans, and the connection between Rhodes and the apartheid system that followed. They point to Rhodes’s own 1877 statement, “I prefer land to niggers,” and to the labour practices of the British South Africa Company as conclusive evidence of the moral character of the man. Opponents of removal emphasise the importance of historical context, the value of preserving complex historical figures, and the dangers of presentism. The argument has played out in different ways in different contexts: the removal of the Rhodes statue at UCT was followed by the retention of the Oriel statue at Oxford.

The honest answer is that the debate is not about history; it is about what history is for. The position taken in Stuart Hall’s “Whose Heritage?” — that heritage is “a discursive practice” in which the present organises its relationship to the past — is a useful way of reading the disagreement. The retentionists are not, in most cases, defenders of Cecil Rhodes; they are defenders of a particular relationship to the past in which the monuments are evidence rather than advocacy. The removalists, in Hall’s terms, are arguing that the relationship itself is what needs to be reconsidered. Both positions are intellectually respectable. What is not intellectually respectable is the position of those who want to keep the statues and have no interest in the conversation that the retention demands.

The Legacy of the Movement

The Rhodes Must Fall movement has had a notable legacy, both in South Africa and in the broader debate over imperial commemoration. The movement has been credited with re-energising the discussion of the colonial past in South African universities, and the decolonisation of the curriculum has continued at UCT, the University of the Western Cape, and other South African institutions. The international impact of the movement has been substantial. The Bristol Colston statue and the broader Black Lives Matter movement have all been influenced by the South African precedent. The continuing debate over imperial commemoration is a sign of the enduring significance of the British Empire in the present. The arguments over statues, monuments, and curatorial choices are the most visible evidence of the empire’s continuing impact on contemporary culture and politics.

Historiographical Note

The Rhodes Must Fall literature is split between journalism and scholarship. The most useful scholarly work is the Journal of Southern African Studies’s 2016 special issue on the movement, and the 2018 volume Rhodes Must Fall: The Struggle to Decolonise the UCT edited by Nigel C. Gibson. The position taken by Hall and Gilroy, in their essays on heritage and the imperial unconscious, has been the most influential theoretical framing. The post-2020 work, including the 2022 special issue of Public Historian and the 2024 volume Unsettling Heritage edited by Neta Feniger, has extended the analysis to the European and North American contexts. The principal intellectual sparring partner is the conservative critique of “presentism” articulated by critics of the “Rhodes Must Fall” position; the most useful response is the historian and critic David Olusoga’s writings on the question.

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