Cape Town - Rumours on social media that the Mandela Rhodes Scholarship is going to be discontinued have been dismissed as untrue by the executive director of The Mandela Rhodes Foundation.
Shaun Johnson told the Cape Argus that plans for the expansion of the scholarship programme were recently approved.
Social media gossips have been claiming that the scholarship was coming to an end as the trust was moving to the UK as a result of a clause in Rhodes’s will.
But Johnson said rumours about the discontinuation were “absolutely not” true.
He said there had been no consideration to discontinue the scholarship since the start of the campaign to have the Cecil John Rhodes statue at UCT removed.
Johnson said the foundation’s board of trustees had met in the city last month and approved “ambitious and exciting expansion plans” for the scholarship programme, “which is regarded as an exceptional African success story in its 11th year of operation”.
“Our dream is that by the 15th anniversary of The Mandela Rhodes Foundation (in 2018) we will have 100 Mandela Rhodes Scholars from all over the continent in residence. This suggests about 70 new scholarships per year by then, with 30 scholars in addition going into their second year of Masters study.”
The 2015 class of Mandela Rhodes Scholars has been made up of 40 students from eight African countries, studying at 12 different institutions of higher learning. There are also 15 second-year scholars from the class of 2014.
The Foundation was brought into being in 2003 when Nelson Mandela agreed to partner with the Rhodes Trust.
The statue of Cecil John Rhodes was removed last week after the UCT council voted to accept a proposal to have it removed.
It followed a month after student Chumani Maxwele threw human excrement on the statue and said he was acting on behalf of the collective pain and suffering of all black people, and was protesting the “colonial dominance” still palpable at UCT.
On March 18, vice-chancellor Dr Max Price announced that the decision process over the statue was being accelerated.
The university has indicated that the statue was taken to a safe location, which has been approved by Heritage Western Cape.
Cape Argus