Rhodes must not fall

Anyone walking down Oxford’s High Street could be forgiven for missing Oriel College’s statue of Cecil Rhodes. Of limited aesthetic merit, small, and at a substantial height on Oriel’s north-facing building, he looks as if someone asked Willy Wonka to sculpt a caricature of a Victorian. As recent events have reminded us, however, he is far from forgotten.

I went up to Oriel at Michaelmas 2015, and the original Rhodes Must Fall rallies were the backdrop to my first four terms at Oxford. They ranged from the mundane to the marvellously musical, and I remember eating late breakfasts at my window as protesters took turns directing poetry at the closed college gates. Even now, when I am at my desk, I occasionally miss the metronomic chants of ‘de-de-decolonise’, which used to work their way down the streets for hours.

Interest in the Rhodes Must Fall campaign died down in 2016, after the college introduced signs to contextualise Rhodes’ legacy and promised to disseminate information about the history of the figure.