The statue of colonizer Cecil Rhodes was not thrown to the ground on Tuesday June 9, nor dragged to the Thames, a few hundred meters from Oriel College in Oxford, whose facade it adorns. However, she was the second on the list of statues to be slaughtered, after that of the slaver Edward Colston, who finished his race in the port of Bristol on Sunday June 7, dragged by demonstrators galvanized by the slogan "Black Lives Matter" ( BLM).
It was far too high up and too well guarded by police on alert. But his days seem to be numbered, so much the determination of the thousands of young people gathered at his feet on Tuesday seemed great to end this "Murderer, symbol of British colonial oppression" as the organizers of the RhodesMustFall campaign chanted. In the United Kingdom, for the past ten days, the emotion aroused by the murder of George Floyd has rekindled deep wounds and given rise to a vigorous work of memory.
"In 2016, in 2017, in 2018, in 2019, we pleaded with the College of Oriel for them to remove the statue of Rhodes, we accepted the discussion, argued … in vain. Now it's over, we won't be begging anymore, we just want it to be taken away, put in the museum " explains one of the organizers of a movement born in Oxford five years ago, just after another statue of Cecil Rhodes was moved from the University of Cape Town, where he lived when he was Prime Minister of the "Cape Colony" at the end of the XIXe century.
"When you roll your eyes, you see this murderer! "
Young people massed at the foot of Oriel college, blacks but also many whites and Asians (of Indo-Pakistani origin), know the close relationship that Rhodes has had with Oxford so far. Born in 1853 in Hertfordshire (central England), Cecil Rhodes was a successful businessman, convinced of Anglo-Saxon superiority, who devoted part of his life to the African extension of the British Empire . He got his hands on the diamond mining monopoly in South Africa (he created the famous firm De Beers), colonized huge swaths of territory for Queen Victoria, gave his name to two countries (Southern Rhodesia and from the North, which became Zimbabwe and Zambia). Before he died, he made major donations to Oriel College, where he studied and created a scholarship (the Rhodes Scholarship), reserved for male Commonwealth students.
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