#RhodesMustFall

Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa

B. Nyamnjoh

• Publisher: Langaa RPCIG
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9789956763429
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book on rights, entitlements and citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa shows how the playing field has not been as levelled as presumed by some and how racism and its benefits persist. Through everyday interactions and experiences of university students and professors, it explores the question of race in a context still plagued by remnants of apartheid, inequality and perceptions of inferiority and inadequacy among the majority black population. In education, black voices and concerns go largely unheard, as circles of privilege are continually regenerated and added onto a layered and deep history of cultivation of black pain. These issues are examined against the backdrop of organised student protests sweeping through the countrys universities with a renewed clamour for transformation around a rallying cry of Black Lives Matter. The nuanced complexity of this insightful analysis of the Rhodes Must Fall movement elicits compelling questions about the attractions and dangers of exclusionary articulations of belonging. What could a grand imperialist like the stripling Uitlander or foreigner of yesteryear, Sir Cecil John Rhodes, possibly have in common with the present-day nimble-footed makwerekwere from Africa north of the Limpopo? The answer, Nyamnjoh suggests, is to be found in how human mobility relentlessly tests the boundaries of citizenship.

Chapter 1

Sir Cecil John Rhodes:
The Makwerekwere with a Missionary Zeal

If whiteness and blackness are afflictions, burdens or blessings, they are the permanence of no particular pigmentation in a dynamic world of ever unfolding permutations of human agency and socialisation. The Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola (1952, 1954) teaches us that there is more and less to bodies than meets the eye, just as there is much more and much less to what strikes us in things or facets of things. When copies or shadows mimic or parody in convincing ways, what reason is there to argue against a thing and its double being two sides of the same coin or cowry? While surfaces are obviously important and often suffice for many ends and purposes, delving beneath appearances and digging deep into the roots of things is critical for understanding eternally nuanced and ever-shifting complexities of being and becoming, and in acknowledging the necessity to supersede the often frozen or static gazes at our beck and call. Delving deep makes impossibilities possible, just as it makes the possible impossible. Being and becoming as works in progress require borrowings and enhancements to render them beautiful and acceptable. It is this capacity to enable and disable simultaneously that makes absence present and presence absent in certain places and spaces, private and public alike. Particular contexts challenge us in particular ways to elevate or lower the bar and threshold of acceptability and tolerability.

Our bodies as humans are envelopes or containers for forms of consciousness that have been shaped by the external world, which in turn is shaped by our consciousness (Bourdieu 1990; Butler 1990, 1993; Foucault 1988; Mauss 1973; Martin et al. 1988; Salpeteur and Warnier 2013; Sanders 2008; Warnier 2006, 2007, 2009). As vehicles, containers or envelopes, bodies are malleable, amenable to being compressed, contorted and extended, dissected, dismembered and remembered, and branded. Auras and essences are as much attributes of the parts as they are of the whole, just as the part is in the whole and the whole in the part. What seems more important than the forms bodies take is the consciousness which inhabits bodies and body parts. Even when a body is seemingly palpably the same and contiguous, the consciousness that inhabits it may be fluid and flexible, pointing to a reality that impoverishes fixations with permanence and stability. The human body can assume the consciousness of an ordinary human just as it can that of a god or a spirit, as well as it can project its own consciousness onto a plant, an animal, or whatever other element of nature is available and handy. Bodies and forms are never complete; they are open-ended malleable vessels to be appropriated by consciousness in its multiplicity. Bodies provide for hearts and minds to intermingle, accommodating the dreams and hopes of both, and mitigating the propensity of the one to outrace the other. As melting pots and mosaics of possibilities, bodies are amenable to being melted and mosaicked by possibilities.

If we take the underlying idea of makwerekwere as a mechanism for detecting strangers, outsiders or those who do not belong, then there is no reason why we should confine the idea of an outsider or a stranger to a particular skin colour. The borders or intimacies we seek to protect can be violated by anyone with a capacity to cross borders. Seen more in terms of consciousness than container, makwerekwere is any outsider or a perfect stranger who crosses borders nimble-footedly. A makwerekwere often comes uninvited and without seeking consent from those who regard themselves as bona fide sons and daughters of the native soil or homeland. He or she has little mastery of local cultures, tends to stutter in local languages or to speak in foreign tongues, has an unmistakeable nose for a quick fortune at all costs, and is usually perceived to be ruthless and greedy in his or her pursuit of self-interest.

Seen in these terms, Sir Rhodes, the nimble-footed 19^th century adventurer-treasure-hunter from England, was an exemplary makwerekwere. As one would expect of a makwerekwere, Rhodes sought to penetrate and harness opportunities in distant unfamiliar lands, with the assistance of maps. As Jordan puts it, ‘Maps had a fascination for him and he was always studying them’ (Jourdan 2010: 163). ‘I want to see all that red’, he once declared, pointing to a vast area on a map, ‘between the Orange river and the great lakes of Central Africa’ which he coveted for the British Empire (Maurois 1953: 55).

Rhodes had a lot in common with all other sweet-footed amakwerekwere, be they Europeans, Asians, Americans or Africans. He was ‘not afraid of risks and... did not believe in chance’ (Maurois 1953: 31). Writing about Rhodes’s last voyage to Africa, William Plomer notes that ‘Many weeks of his life had been spent on voyages’ (Plomer 1984 [1933]: 155). Only a makwerekwere who had taken seventy days to voyage from England to Durban by ship (Plomer 1984 [1933]: 14; Maurois 1953: 26), and who believed in flexible mobility of people, things and information could have distinguished himself the way Rhodes did with the reputation of ‘the greatest builder of railways and telegraphs that Africa has known’ (Lunderstedt [undated]: 4).¹ His single-minded devotion to his quest in a foreign land, even at the risk of jeopardising personal comfort and health, was characteristic of the amakwerekwere of his day and still resonates with many amakwerekwere today, be they foreign or internal migrants. The arrivals of fortune-hunters in Kimberley in Rhodes’s day is hardly dissimilar from the influx of amakwerekwere to various centres of accumulation in today’s South Africa. As William Plomer puts it, Kimberley in those days was characterised by feverish activity:

Fortune-hunters of all kinds arrived in a steady stream, many from the slums of Europe. It was not unusual for as many as thirty wagonloads of newcomers to arrive in one day, and at New Rush there was soon a collection of forty thousand people, all living under tents or corrugated iron, amid heaps of gravel, clouds of dust, and a variety of smells. ‘The dust of the dry diggings,’ said an eye-witness, ‘is to be classed with plague, pestilence and famine, and if there is anything worse, with that also.’ The price of necessaries was very high, and water cost threepence a bucket. In Rhodes’s own words, the place looked ‘like an immense number of ant-heaps covered with black ants, as thick as can be, the latter represented by human beings.’ (Plomer 1984 [1933]: 16-17).

Rhodes may have had a heart condition upon arrival, but ‘there was profitable business to be done’ in Kimberley, and this made his heart ‘throb with eagerness’ (Plomer 1984 [1933]: 19). Rhodes apparently ‘loved property ... for the power that it brings’ (Plomer 1984 [1933]: 106-107), and had ‘few wants’. ‘His servants found it difficult to get him to wear decent clothes, to eat proper meals or even to dress for and attend theatrical performances’ (Brown 2015: 22). This makwerekwere attribute of Rhodes’s and others is very well depicted in the following passage about life in Kimberley during the 19^th century diamond rush:

When one considers how Rhodes lived — in an unsanitary tin shack without running water — and with whom he lived — a mixture of ruffians, Jewish diamond buyers and money lenders, poets, sons of the world’s aristocracy, black peasants from remote tribes — in an environment of murder, mayhem and drunkenness, there is every possibility that there was a touch of madness in this nineteen-year-old son of the manse. Yet it was here, on the edge of the Big Hole, and clutching Marcus Aurelius as his bible, that Rhodes refined his plan for a secret society, led by himself, that would eventually control the world (Brown 2015: 28).

Be that as it may, Rhodes was very conscious of the need for distinction in taste and status between whites and blacks, and among whites of different categories and backgrounds. His recognition that both the Dutch and English were dominant races, and that ‘There is always trouble when two dominant races have to live side by side’ (Stent 1924: 22), meant that he had to explore ways of legitimising himself and his Britishness as superior to being Dutch and the whiteness that came with Dutch identity in general, and in South Africa specifically. As soon as the wealth of diamonds started materialising, Rhodes and his fellow white amakwerekwere used their membership of the Kimberley Club to distinguish themselves. Vere Stent describes the Kimberley Club as ‘the last South African word’ in ‘comfort and in elegance’. It was at the Kimberley Club that ‘the best of the Diamond Fields people’ ‘sought refreshments after their day’s work’ and where they went to dine and talk, and to display their satisfaction with their outlook on world affairs, and their contentment with their prospects and happiness (Stent 1924: 1). This improvisation of using the Kimberley Club to activate ideas of social distinction among amakwerekwere from Europe constitutes a key moment in and building block of the historical construction of whiteness with a South African flavour.

In other regards, Rhodes was unlike most amakwerekwere from Africa north of the Limpopo whose mobility seems reduced to push and pull factors and tends to be confined effortlessly when it ventures across borders. Rhodes was white, unlikely to be physically mistaken by black Africans as ‘one of us’, irrespective of whatever intimacies and interests they shared digging for diamonds in Kimberley. The fact that Rhodes lived among ‘black peasants from remote tribes... in an environment of murder, mayhem and drunkenness’, and ‘in an unsanitary tin shack without running water’ (Brown 2015: 28), did not undo the fact that he was white and in charge. Unlike the amakwerekwere of today who are black (thus likely to be mistaken by black South Africans as ‘one of us’), and who also share the same underserved townships with mostly black South African labour migrants, Rhodes was a very powerful makwerekwere and a missionary for the ways and values of his people, to which he clung with evangelical zeal.

Of course, Rhodes did not arrive in South Africa an allpowerful individual; he earned his power and activated himself to higher levels of potency through his interactions with others on the ground and back home in Britain. His attitude, drive and vision set him apart. Unlike many other amakwerekwere of his day, white and black alike, he thought himself on a divine mission to change the world. He felt himself divinely ordained to ensure that ‘the English people ... fulfil their divine mission of ruling the world to the exclusion of war and for the greater happiness of mankind’ (Maurois 1953: 52).

Other amakwerekwere of his day, including his business associate Charles Dunnell Ruud, a Scot, wanted to accumulate a personal fortune. Rhodes wanted wealth that would facilitate his game of empire building (Brown 2015: 30). As a man with political ambition, Rhodes ‘wanted money — a great deal of it — not for what it would buy, but for the power it conferred’ (Maurois 1953: 40-41). His prime objective for accumulating wealth was ‘the defence and the extension of the British Empire’ (Brown 2015: 40). Armed with a dream to conquer and impregnate the world with the superior values of the British in God’s name, Rhodes arrived in what in those days was a ‘free-for-all of Southern Africa’ in 1870 (Brown 2015: 9), as a poor, unknown seventeen year old, and within a short time, ‘he had been blessed with the gift of the Kimberley diamonds’ (Brown 2015: 21), where he dug his ‘way to enormous, untold, inconceivable wealth’, just what ‘he needed to finance his dream’ (Brown 2015: 9).² According to Brown, Rhodes:

had arrived in South Africa penniless and unknown, and within five years he was a millionaire with a fortune growing exponentially, with no end in sight. Within another five years he was prime minister of the Cape, and English privy councillor — and about to acquire a fiefdom a quarter the size of Europe.

As his fortune and political influence grew, as the arid earth and the high savannah produced a cornucopia of diamonds and gold beyond imagining, Rhodes began to feel he had been put on this earth for some greater purpose. He would expand the English-speaking sphere of influence until it was so powerful that no nation would dare oppose it, and war would be a thing of the past... (Brown 2015: 18).

Like all other treasure hunters, Rhodes came uninvited, indulged unauthorised and conquered unprovoked. Brown describes Kimberley of the late 19^th century as a place where ‘Every conceivable cast and colour of the human race’ — ‘a smattering of people from every nation of the face of the earth’ was represented, ‘digging, sifting and sorting from morning until night, day after day, month after month until they ... [had] obtained a sufficiency’ (Brown 2015: 26). In tune with his missionary fervour ‘Rhodes had come to believe that, unlike lesser mortals, he had the benefit of divine guidance’ (Brown 2015: 32), even if he ‘feared death, and had no hope for an existence after death except the one that history could make for him on earth’ (Flint 1974: 173). Thus driven by ‘a concern for a heroic and immortal place in history’ (Flint 1974: 212), Rhodes ‘believed that his good fortune was nothing more than destiny justifying his messianic beliefs and ambitions’ to facilitate the governance of the world by Britain (Brown 2015: 86). He saw himself as ‘a messiah, the prophet of Anglo-Saxon dominion’ (Maurois 1953: 106; see also Marlowe 1972: 105).

Instead of being defined and confined by the locals of the host communities of his encounters (the way most amakwerekwere are nowadays), Rhodes defined and confined those he encountered in his hunter-gatherer endeavours. It was o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Michael Rowlands
• Introduction
• 1. Sir Cecil John Rhodes: The makwerekwere with a Missionary Zeal
• 2. Black Pain Matters: Down with Rhodes
• 3. Not Every Black Is Black Enough
• 4. UCT Fires on All Cylinders
• 5. Lessons from Rhodes Must Fall
• 6. Pure Fiction: What I Almost Had in Common with Rhodes
• 7. Conclusion: We Are all amakwerekwere
• Epilogue 1 by Moshumee Teena Dewoo
• Epilogue 2 by Sanya Osha
• References