Keith Allen
UCT student Chumani Maxwele, the poo protester who started the Rhodes Must fall campaign, is devastated after finding out he targeted the wrong statue.
Sharp-eyed researchers scouting for more information about Rhodes in Cape Town archives came across a musty old tome that has literally knocked the entire past few weeks of statue protests sideways.
A long-forgotten chapter on the positioning of the statue, on the grounds Rhodes himself made available, has revealed that TWO similar statues, both sculpted by Marion Walgate, were prepared for erection the same month in 1934.
But, as fortune would have it, the rigid wagon transporting the prone statues of Cecil John Rhodes and his close friend Leander Starr Jameson, the black sympathiser of the botched raid on Paul Kruger’s Transvaal Republic known as the Jameson Raid (December 29, 1895 to January 2, 1896), struck a rock and the two heavy bronze statues shifted.
Jameson’s statue evidently (though not maliciously, it is noted) “elbowed” Rhodes’s, causing the famous man’s face to split between the eyes only hours before the unveiling.
The damage was hastily reported to the authorities of the day who, to spare themselves the embarrassment of unveiling a statue with a badly cracked face to a critical audience of university dignitaries and government figures from South Africa and abroad, decided to erect only one.
Jameson thus became Rhodes and no one was any the wiser, given that the two men were of much the same stature.
Three weeks ago, in calling for transformation, Maxwele said: “This poo that we are throwing on the statue represents the shame of black people. By throwing it on the statue we are throwing our shame to whites’ affluence.” Yesterday, he said: “Who would have thought the colonialists could be so underhanded? Ah well, it wasn’t really poo anyway, I collected bucket loads of leftover speeches from Parliament and let them ferment in water.”
UCT management has promised to convene an urgent meeting to look into the matter so that the rights of future poo protesters to fling faeces in the proper faces will be protected.