The Rhodes Less Travelled

For me, the current campaign to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes from outside Oriel College in Oxford High Street and the similar targeting of statues of British imperialists and slave traders elsewhere, raises more questions than answers. I for one would not be sorry to see the back of any statue commemorating the white supremacist who drafted the blueprint for South Africa’s notorious apartheid system, or to see the toppling of effigies of similar shady characters in other cities. However, focusing so much attention on the man who bequeathed the Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, while at the same time turning a blind eye to the brutal character of overseas regimes that currently fund the University, begs the question: does this simply encourage a lopsided, racialised view of history, and if so, how does this, in any way, help us, as a society, to move forward?

Film footage of Oxford-based Islamic cleric Sheikh Ramzy leading the Rhodes Must Fall protesters this week in chants of ‘Take it down’ and ‘Justice for all’ and calling for an end to overseas ‘genocide’, appears incongruous to say the least. Yet it serves as a perfect example of the hypocrisy and twisted logic at the heart of the campaign. 

Ramzy, a man of conservative, right-wing views, calls for the Rhodes ‘evil’ statue to be taken down as it is a ‘symbol of genocide’ and ‘excactly the same as Hitler’. Yet Ramzy doesn’t seem to apply the same standards to modern day genocidal maniacs. He has visited Turkey as a guest of Recep Erdoğan’s proto-fascist, Islamic government. Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AK Parti) is committed to erasing the last vestiges of secularism in the country and replacing it with an Islamic dictatorship. AK Parti is also directing an ongoing systematic targeting and ethnic cleansing of the Turkish Kurdish population. In the face of international pressure, Erdoğan continues to refuse to acknowledge the Ottoman government’s systematic mass murder of up to 1.5 million Armenians during World War One. The wholesale slaughter of the Armenians, which is commonly viewed as the first modern genocide, was later referenced by Adolf Hitler when planning the Jewish Holocaust. Anyone still not joining the dots, should maybe consider the fact that a Pro-Erdoğan documentary, The Mastermind, has aired on a Turkish ‘news’ channel, repeating the same discredited anti-semetic conspiracy theory that was used by the Nazis and their Middle Eastern allies to whip up hatred of Jews and create an atmosphere conducive to genocide.

Rhodes Must Fall student protesters introduced a highly unwelcome racial twist to ancient Town & Gown enmities when they were filmed chanting ‘fuck white people’ and ‘white privilege’ at last week’s demonstration. They should know that, within the working class communities of East Oxford, black and white people have lived, worked and socialised together for over 60 years and that we have always resisted attempts by racists to divide us. 

White people do not have a monopoly on terror and brutality, either before or after colonialism. The transatlantic slave trade, a horrific stain on human history, was aided and abetted by black African slave traders who had created a ready-made market for the European colonialists to tap into. Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, the descendant of a Nigerian Slave trader, describes one such branch of the operation:

‘Long before Europeans arrived, Igbos enslaved other Igbos as punishment for crimes, for the payment of debts, and as prisoners of war. The practice differed from slavery in the Americas: slaves were permitted to move freely in their communities and to own property, but they were also sometimes sacrificed in religious ceremonies or buried alive with their masters to serve them in the next life. When the transatlantic trade began, in the fifteenth century, the demand for slaves spiked. Igbo traders began kidnapping people from distant villages. Sometimes a family would sell off a disgraced relative, a practice that Ijoma Okoro, a professor of Igbo history at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, likens to the shipping of British convicts to the penal colonies in Australia: “People would say, ‘Let them go. I don’t want to see them again.’” Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, nearly one and a half million Igbo slaves were sent across the Middle Passage’.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/my-great-grandfather-the-nigerian-slave-trader

Pascal Bruckner takes up the story, post-colonialism, in The Tyranny of Guilt. An Essay on Western Masochism:

‘For half a century the heart of darkness has no longer been the epic of colonialism. It is independent Africa, “that cocktail of disasters,” as Kofi Annan modestly called it in 2001: the murderous reign of the Red Negus, Mengistu; the macabre buffoonery of Idi Amin, Sékou Touré or Bokassa; the madness of Samuel Doe or a Charles Taylor in Liberia; in Sierra Leone, the blood diamonds of Foday Sankho, who invented short sleeve mutilation by cutting people’s arms off at the elbow and long-sleeve mutilation by cutting their arms off at the shoulder; the use of child soldiers, killer kids who were beaten and drugged; detention camps; mass rape; the endless conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea; the civil wars in Chad, Sudan Somalia, Uganda and Côte d’Ivoire; cannibalism in the Congo; crimes against humanity in Darfur; and, last but not least, the genocide in Rwanda and the Great Lakes War, with its three to four million victims since 1998. Decolonialisation was a great process of democratic equality: the former slaves achieved within a few years the same level of bestiality as their former Masters’. 

While the desire to pull down statues that commemorate colonialists is laudable (as long as we do not also bury the knowledge of the individual’s crimes against humanity and the ability to learn lessons to help prevent future atrocities), is it not inconsistent, fraudulent and, to be blunt, cowardly, to concentrate on the historic crimes of some past tyrants, ignore others and give a free pass to their brutal modern-day equivalents? 

In 2016, the Qatar Development Fund donated £3 million to Oxford University’s Thatcher Scholarships fund, established by Somerville College, Margaret Thatcher’s alma mater. Qatar’s economy is propelled by a labour force consisting of 90% migrant workers. According to Amnesty International, last November, the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention urged Qatar to ensure that workers could leave their employers without fear of being arrested and that allegations by employers against workers do not lead to the automatic detention of workers during investigations. In December, the group highlighted “the severe human rights violations that still persist, including on the basis of national origin, and the existence of racial, ethnic and national stereotypes and discriminatory structures”. Amnesty also reported that ‘The abuse and exploitation of low paid migrant workers, sometimes amounting to forced labour and human trafficking, have been extensively documented since the World Cup was awarded to Qatar. In October 2013, 44 Nepali workers died in Qatar in just a two-month period, while Amnesty International reports have documented large-scale labour abuse in the construction sector, including forced labour, such as at Doha’s Khalifa Stadium. In 2014 the UN Special Rapporteur on Migrant Rights also described how “exploitation is frequent and migrants often work without pay and live in substandard conditions”.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2019/02/reality-check-migrant-workers-rights-with-four-years-to-qatar-2022-world-cup/

Since 1986, Oxford University and the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies have received more than £105 million in donations from sources such as the Saudi royal family, the Malaysian government and the Bin Laden dynasty. https://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/03/university-saudi-british 

While the Slavery Abolition Act outlawed chattel slavery across the British Empire in 1833, Saudi Arabia, which has, without doubt, one of the world’s worst human rights records, did not officially abolish it until 1962 and today, according to Human Rights Watch, many migrant workers, most notably those from Africa and South East Asia, live and work in conditions of ‘near-slavery’. According to Amnesty International, under the ‘kafala’ sponsorship system (the same system implemented in Qatar) workers risk imprisonment or deportation if they leave their jobs without the permission of their employers, and under the scheme an employer’s permission is also needed for a worker to leave the country. This system often results in workers being subjected to unfathomable abuse at the hands of their employers. 

Unless those involved in the Rhodes Must Fall protest begin to channel their rage into a wider movement to expose the University’s relationship with present-day human rights abusers, there is a risk that after the campaign peters out, it will go down in history as nothing more than an exercise in gesture politics. More damningly, there is a tangible prospect that protesters, many of whom are themselves living the privileged Oxford life courtesy of bestowed blood money, will be viewed by future generations as having collaborated in a conspiracy of silence over the monstrous crimes of their tyrant patrons.