Rhodes Must Fall activists are curiously selective in their targets

A campaign is currently underway to have Bristol’s Colston Hall renamed because Edward Colston was a slave trader. This has set me thinking. How gross does someone’s moral turpitude have to be before memorials to him are considered ripe for removal?

Two years ago, the Rhodes Must Fall campaign successfully lobbied for the removal of a statute of Cecil Rhodes from the campus of the University of Cape Town. The campaign then spread to Oxford, of which Rhodes was a graduate and at which he endowed the scholarships that bear his name. Rhodes was targeted as an architect of repressive anti-black colonialism. But not everything that was done in the name of colonialism was necessarily bad. In 21st-century terms, Rhodes harboured racist views. But he also said that: ‘I could never accept the position that we should disqualify a human being on account of his colour’. And as well as endowing the Rhodes Scholarships he laid the foundations of modern South Africa’s physical infrastructure.