Akin Jimoh 00:11
Hello, welcome to Science in Africa, a Nature Careers podcast series. I am Akin Jimoh, chief editor of Nature Africa. I work and live in Lagos. And I’m passionate about promoting science and public health journalism in my native Nigeria and across Africa.
In this series we explore the practice of science in this wonderful continent, the progress, the issues, the needs, and in the words of the African scientists who are based here.
In this third episode, we explore decolonizing science in Africa. We start in South Africa, a country where you could say colonizing powers held on longest. And we centre the discussion around a significant event when the statue of Cecil Rhodes was removed from the University of Cape Town.
Paballo Chauke 01:13
My name is Paballo Chauke, and I am a training and outreach coordinator for bioinformatics, at the University of Cape Town. I’m also a PhD student in the environmental geography health sciences department at the same university.
So I’m South African, born and bred in Pretoria. However, I decided “Let me go to the coastline to study. It’s the best institution in South Africa, but also in Africa. And it’s part of the top 200 in the world. And I’m very passionate about science. I’m passionate about learning and becoming something in the world because I wanted to become a scientist. Let me go to UCT because this is where my mind is going to be shaped.”
And walking into UCT in 2010 for me was a shock, because I am Black, and I’m South African, where the population of this country, I’m the majority in terms of numbers.
But I was in a campus where I wasn’t seeing myself, either In my class (I was one of few Black people). The people that were teaching me were not Black people. The only Black people were cleaners and, and, like, sort of supporting staff. But academics were mainly white. Mainly white men, even. Not just white but white straight men.
And even though I didn’t have the language to describe what I saw, because I was like 18-19, I was like, this is weird. And this is not okay, that in a country, in a university that claims to be in Africa, there’s not a presentation of Black people.
So I wasn’t represented. I felt like an imposter, like “What am I doing here? Am I good enough to be here? Are they doing me a favour? What’s happening? Why am I here? Because I’m not seeing people who look like me, who speak like me, who are in this institution.”
Akin Jimoh: 02:54
There was this thing that happened in 2015. It has to do with taking down of a statue. And which statue was that?
Paballo Chauke 03:03
There was a statue of Cecil John Rhodes, at the University of Cape Town, that was taken down around 9 April 2015, if I’m not mistaken, after like, a month or so of protests by students at the University of Cape Town.
Akin Jimoh: 03:18
Do you know, the statue is part of history, so to say. Why was it taken down?
Paballo Chauke 03:24
Well I mean, obviously, there’s, there’s been a lot written about this. There’s academic journals and newspaper articles written about this, sort of explaining why the statue was removed. There was a lot of debate about it as well, because it cost money to remove it.
But also people were saying, “What’s the point of trying to erase history?” And that was not what we were trying to do. The protesters were not trying to sort of erase history, actually, they were trying to underline it, and sort of highlight the pain and the suffering that history has caused in the present as well.
Akin Jimoh: 03:57
So when it was taken down, you were there? Can you go back and, you know…What were the things that happened, you know, while watching, you know. Can you take me there?
Paballo Chauke 04:11
it was a sunny day in Cape Town, and it started with….because we had colonized (I use that word) the administrative building for the Vice Chancellor, the former Vice Chancellor, Max Price, of the University of Cape Town.
So we walked from middle campus to upper campus. So the University of Cape Town is on a mountain. So when you’re at middle campus, you are at the bottom. So essentially, you have to walk up as though you are walking upstairs. And you are doing that because UCT is on a mountain. Protesters, like hundreds of us had placards and wearing T shirts saying “Rhodes must fall.” And they were singing and chanting. So South Africa has a history of singing and protesting and dancing. So if you don’t know, if you think we are enjoying ourselves and we’re happy, but we are actually angry but we’re singing and smiling. That’s how we express, sort of, our pain, through singing and dancing.
Obviously, we knew on the day that the statue was going to be removed. So we went there. There was a group prayer, there were speeches.
So I want also to highlight that protesters were not just mindless people protesting and things. We were doing readings. We had workshops. We had lectures, we actually invited lecturers and speakers and we were debating and we were thinking. So it wasn’t just, “Oh my God, Rhodes must fall, the statue must fall.”
There was theory and practice behind why the statue must fall. The students were informed about why this must happen. There isn’t just an emotional, “Oh my God“, the statue must go. We read books. I Write what I Like by Steve Biko. Books by Toni Morrison, and Malcolm X, and Audre Lorde. We were philosophical, sociological, we were thinkers. People must know that “Rhodes must fall” was a thinking movement. So we’re thinking, we’re moving, we’re speaking, and we prayed. Then we protested up to where the status was. And obviously the crane came. And it was, I mean, (you should google the pictures).
It’s very….and it’s good. There was so many people. There were like thousands. I think other people joined from, not just from the University of Cape Town, I think other people joined from different parts of Cape Town, just to see, because no one expected.
And it was Black people, coloured people, white people, different ages, children, old people, activists who fought apartheid, people that were just born the other day were there. And I think, for me, everybody was just like singing and chanting and celebrating, and there was that.
It was like, like ancestors were there. It felt as though the slaves that built the history of Cape Town, and who are buried there, and no one wants to talk about it.
We’re saying, we are fighting back, that this is obviously a small win, but it’s something, and it’s showing that unity, you can actually sort of address the issues that killed us. The issues that keep us suppressed and buried without anyone knowing.
So it was like, it was a cathartic moment. I mean, I personally cry, and I don’t cry a lot. I mean, I get cut by knives, and I don’t cry. But that day it was “Oh my god.” It was like a a release, there was like a cascading moment of like a waterfall.
Emotions took over, emotions took over. And that wasn’t just me, men and women were all crying and chanting and singing and celebrating. And I’m sad to know and note that that moment, lasted for like a week.
And after that, things were sort of swept under the carpet. People were being recruited, silenced. And, and it’s sad to watch. But I think that for me shows what’s possible. And it was like a breakthrough.
Shannon Morreira: 08:02
My name is Shannon Morreira. I’m an anthropologist at the University of Cape Town. I was born in Zimbabwe, and I now work in in South Africa. And I teach on an extended degree social science program as well as teaching in undergraduate anthropology and postgraduate anthropology. And my research is really concerned with, with knowledge systems, the production of knowledge systems, how we make knowledge, how we value knowledge, and the ways in which, in which colonialism has has impacted on that historically,
Akin Jimoh: 08:39
Look, for people who don’t know, who was Cecil Rhodes? And why was his statue taken down in 2015?
Shannon Morreira 08:48
So Cecil Rhodes was born and raised in England and came to Southern Africa in the 1870s, as a young man, as a teenager. He was a very successful businessman, primarily through mining.
But what Rhodes did that’s had such a lasting impact on Southern Africa, was that he combined his economic interests in the colony with political interests. So he was a very strong imperialist. He had a huge strong belief in expanding and consolidating the British Empire.
And the company that he founded and ran, The British South Africa Company, which had a royal charter from England, was really integral in combining economic and political colonialism across much of southern Africa.
Rhodes became prime minister of the Cape Colony in the 1890s. And while he was Prime Minister he really took very strong steps to to turn Black Africans into members of a labour pool, who were essentially dependent on colonial industrial capital, in order to survive.
So moving people from one way of life into into another.
Akin Jimoh: 10:06
Yeah. So he was powerful?
Shannon Morreira 10:10
He was very powerful. And he’s remembered now as as, a man who sort of defines a moment in which a huge amount of dispossession occurred.
AkinJimoh: 10:13
So from that height, to the statue being taken down, what were the events leading to this? You know, because it’s, I mean, it’s like someone held in high esteem. And then this happened.
Shannon Morreira 10:29
So the statue that was taken down, it’s kind of, in a in a very central position at the University of Cape Town. And the reason why it’s there is that the land that the University of Cape Town is situated on was was donated by Rhodes estate.
So it was after Rhodes’ death it became the university. The statue has actually been contentious for a pretty long time.
So as long ago as the 1950s, there were Afrkaans nationalists who protested against the statue, because it was a statue of a British imperialist, through into the present into the postcolonial moment where…
