CECIL RHODES

In Brexit Means Brexit: How the British Ponzi Class Survived the EU Referendum, I wrote:

Although the attempt to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes failed (set out in The Genesis of Political Correctness), still the agitation continued. In January 2017, it was reported that one of the leading organisers of the campaign Rhodes Must Fall had been awarded £40,000 as a Rhodes scholar. Joshua Nott, who was privately educated, from Johannesburg, boasted that he would ‘never toast Cecil John Rhodes’. He further objected to the statue of Rhodes outside Oxford’s Oriel College. In the campaign to remove a statue of Rhodes in Cape Town, Nott said: ‘I think protests should not be degraded … But you can only get your voice heard if you engage in extreme or violent protests. I use the Rhodes scholarship to defeat the very ideals of what it originally stood for.’ A Rhodes Trust spokesman said: ‘We pick young people of enormous ability without regard to any particular political affiliation.’ Those actively stirring up anti-English hatred are being showered with money to come to Britain instead of being kept out. It is sad that the Rhodes Trust has been taken over by the politically correct, who are using its funds to besmirch Cecil Rhodes and his legacy.

In THE GENESIS OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS: The Basis of a False Morality, I had written:

Meanwhile, a plaque dedicated to Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902), a dominant figure of the British Empire and South African statesman, at Oriel College in Oxford, was to be removed after some students branded it as racist. Those students also demanded that a statute likewise be removed. A so-called Rhodes Must Fall campaigner, Annie Teriba, had claimed that ‘There’s a violence to having to walk past the statue every day on the way to your lectures, there’s a violence to having to sit with paintings of former slave holders whilst writing your exams.’ Another organizer from that organisation, Ntokozo Qwabe alleged that African history had been written by European tourists and that the reading list for political sciences ignored African scholars: ‘The list was dominated by white male Europeans and Americans.’

The campaign was supported by a leading human rights lawyer, Sir Geoffrey Bindman QC, who argued that to remove the statue would be ‘no more than a symbolic and cost-free mark of disapproval of a man who manifested his racism in the commercial exploitation of those whom he considered inferior. The huge sum he gave to the college was its product.’ Cecil Rhodes was a firm believer in the value of education and created a scheme whereby students would be funded to attend Oxford (Rhodes Scholarships) – the scheme was and remains open to all, no matter their ethnicity. The above mentioned Ntokozo Qwabe, a Zulu from South Africa, was himself a Rhodes Scholar – a fact that attracted some comment, leading Qwabe to proclaim that he was ‘no beneficiary of Rhodes’ but ‘a beneficiary of the resources and labour of my people which Rhodes pillaged and slaved’. It is to be noted that Bindman refers to Rhodes’ alleged ‘commercial exploitation’ – a term that any Leninist would happily use.

The fact that Rhodesia, even under Ian Smith after declaring UDI, was the breadbasket of southern Africa and that South Africa experienced significant immigration even under Apartheid, whereas Zimbabwe became a typical communist basket case under Mugabe (whose power stemmed from rigged elections) with Britain continuing to receive asylum applications from Africans from Zimbabwe, requires no further comment.

The attack on Rhodes was merely a sideshow of a larger campaign, run by the Oxford Campaign for Racial Awareness and Equality, the co-chair of which, Chi Chi Shi, announced: ‘It is very important to see the statue as a symbol of Oxford’s colonial past and history but also how that relates to the experience of BME [black and minority ethnic] students, especially in terms of the whiteness of the curriculum and Eurocentricity … Challenging the narrative that the West discovered science … rather than seeing it as a collaborative process in which Islamic science is fundamental.’