When you visit big cities in South Africa, you are greeted by statuses of white male colonialists.
The same applies to some of our higher-learning institutions. This gives an impression that South Africa is still under the white minority rule. However, the opposite is true: the country was liberated from undemocratic white in 1994. It is interesting to note that it has taken 21 years of our hard earned democracy for the nation to finally realise there is something wrong with these statues in our cities and higher learning institutions. But it’s better late than never.
In the recent past days, the UCT students waged a war against the statue of one Cecil John Rhodes. Students demanded that the statue be removed. They protested for days until their demands were met. Rhodes has since fallen.
It is important to mention that UCT students were not only fighting for the removal of a statue but also against the snail pace of transformation (a sticky issue in our country) at the institution. There are more white professors than blacks at UCT. Out of 200 professors, only five are black. If that is not lack of transformation, I don’t know what it is.
Now the demand for the removal of statues of other former white colonialists has spread to other parts of the country. There is a demand that the statue of Paul Kruger in Pretoria must also fall. The ANC in Tshwane supports the move, but not its vandalism.
But there are those who are against the above demand. It is interesting to note that some of the people who are against the removal of these offensive statues are black people. How soon they forget. Some of them argue that there are more important and pressing issues to focus on than the removing of these statues. What a simplistic argument.
These statues celebrate colonialists and symbolise white power. We cannot be celebrating colonialists in this epoch, not after 21 years of our democracy.
And the struggle against white power continues. The country’s wealth remains in the hands of the white minority.
We should not even be debating whether these statues should fall or not. Fall they must. And they should be placed where they belong: in a museum. It is the defacing and vandalism of these statues that should be discouraged. We should instead strengthen the demand that they be removed speedily.
Having these statues in public spaces is very offensive, especially to black people who have suffered and died cruelly in the hands of white oppressors.
And as such, we cannot continue keeping a blind eye on them as if they mean nothing, as some would have us believe.
The wave of protests about the removal of statues is not about racism per se; it is about righting the wrongs of the past. It is also about doing the right thing. The matter should have been dealt with a long time ago. Now there is anger brewing about the time it has taken to deal with this matter. The anger is understandable but it should be contained.
The democratic government should move swiftly in dealing with this issue.
There is a danger that it may get out of hand, and that opportunists may also use it to score cheap political points. That’s very dangerous. So the ball is in the government’s court.
