Boycotting Rhodes

In 2000, Professor Kwaw “Andreas Woods” Imana stepped up to the podium to give the valedictorian speech at Morehouse College’s graduation. Morehouse is a private all-male historically black college, and it has produced the most black male Rhodes Scholars in the world. To the audience’s surprise and raucous support, Professor Imana revealed during his speech that he would not be accepting his own award. He spoke:

“In a time when we honor our most prolific black scholars, our most prolific black academic achievers, with the names of one of the most racist and insidious murderers of black people that the Western world has produced, let us know that we have forgotten who we are…Cecil Rhodes wrote and I quote “the native’s blacks must be treated like a child and denied the franchise. We must adopt a system of despotism in our relations with these black barbarians and establish an order with the right race as the ruling class”… And we honor this man. And we hear institutions brag and boast that they had this many Rhodes Scholars, they had that many Rhodes Scholars. If we recognize who we are as a people, there will be a better chance of giving a person of Jewish descent a Hitler scholarship or to give an elderly black man from the backwoods of Mississippi a Ku Klux Klan scholarship than to honor me or any black person with the Cecil Rhodes scholarship.”[su_pullquote]”There will be a better chance of giving… an elderly black man from the backwoods of Mississippi a Ku Klux Klan scholarship than to honor me or any black person with the Cecil Rhodes scholarship.”
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On the Rhodes Trust’s website, the most aim of the Rhodes Scholarship is cited as, “ identify[ing] young leaders from around the world who … would forge bonds of mutual understanding and fellowship for the betterment of mankind.” Why does Dr. Imana reject this vision? Should his anger be our anger? Fourteen years later, the Rhodes Scholarship receives the same recognition that it did when Dr. Woods first applied. We have yet to debate whether it deserves its place.

Artwork by Michael Avery and Maggie Chuang

The Rhodes Scholarship is the oldest and most prestigious scholarship in the world, bringing together a global collective of young students to pursue a master’s or bachelor’s degree at Oxford at no cost. The scholarship was created in 1902 through Cecil Rhode’s final will, which used his wealth to establish the Rhodes Trust to administer the scholarship. In his will, Rhodes hoped that the scholarship would unite “English-speaking peoples throughout the world and [encourage] in the students from North America who would benefit from the American scholarships.”

Today, the Rhodes Scholarship shapes the American cultural and academic landscape. In Wikipedia articles, a person’s introduction almost always pays tribute to the award of a Rhodes Scholarship. Every introduction of an academic or esteemed figure at a conference or lecture, on a podcast, or in the byline of a news article pays heed to the scholarship. In America, the Rhodes Scholarship plays a particularly important political and social role. Many famous politicians, academics, writers, and scientists studied under the scholarship including former President Bill Clinton, newscaster Rachel Maddow, and surgeon-writer Atul Gawande. The United States also receives the lion’s share of Rhodes scholarships with 32 reserved spots out of 100, more than double that of any other country or region. In comparison, India, a former colony of the Commonwealth with a population of 1.2 billion, has five Rhodes Scholarships, and Southern Africa, the region that Cecil Rhodes pillaged in his colonial exploits, has merely ten.

Despite the scholarship’s prestige and global renown, Cecil Rhode’s name continues to anger people throughout the world. To understand the visceral reaction that the name Rhodes receives, one must understand the history of Cecil Rhodes. Rhodes is known by critics as “the godfather of apartheid.” Using funds from the British imperial government in his British South Africa Company, Rhodes bought most of the world’s diamond mines as part of the De Beers diamond company. He later obtained a Royal Charter, which allowed him to broker with Matabele Chief Lobengula to gain exclusive rights to mine gold in Matabeleland and Mashonaland, territories of modern-day Zambia and Zimbabwe. After no gold was found in Mashonaland, Rhodes waged a proxy war to conquer the Mashonaland territory and integrate it into the British Empire. By 1890, Rhodes was the Prime Minister of the Cape Colony (present-day South Africa), and he instituted the Glen Grey Act, which severely limited land ownership rights for native Africans and disenfranchised them while preserving voting rights for white Afrikaners. In his time in South Africa, Cecil Rhodes began to drain South Africa’s natural resources in the British Empire’s interest. He did so with the labor of the native Africans who were subjugated under what was the precursor to modern apartheid.

The Rhodes Scholarship and the Rhodes Trust attempt to correct for Cecil Rhodes’ colonial past. In 2002, the Rhodes Trust partnered with the Mandela Foundation to offer thirty Mandela Rhodes Scholarship to build leadership and excellence in South Africa by studying in South African universities. Many of the Rhodes Scholars in the last twenty years have pursued master’s degrees in Migration Studies, Development Studies, Comparative Social Policy, African Studies, and Refugee Studies; Rhodes Scholars are allowed and encouraged to be openly critical of Great Britain and Oxford’s colonial history while studying at the institution. The Rhodes Scholarship committee even accepted the anti-Rhodes activist, a leader of the South African “Rhodes Must Fall” movement, Ntokozo Qwabe, who accepted the scholarship and continued to study at the university.

Can the Rhodes Scholarship and Oxford even correct for the colonial past of Cecil Rhodes? How can one build leadership, excellence, and infrastructure in South Africa when the goals of the scholarship are to create a global collective of young scholars to study at Oxford, a British institution? The Rhodes Scholarship and Trust are institutionally incompatible with the development goals of South Africa. However, the priorities of the Rhodes Trust and Oxford lie inevitably in developing the legacies of their own British institutions, with the majority of the supported scholars studying in the U.K. at Oxford. There are more American Rhodes Scholars (32) than Mandela Rhodes Scholars (30) who study at South African universities. Oxford itself is also an overwhelmingly white institution. Eight of the 38 Oxford colleges admitted two or fewer Black British students between 2015 and 2017. This includes Balliol College which has 655 students and Magdalen College which has 573 students. White British applicants were twice as likely to be admitted to undergraduate courses as their black British peers: 24% of the former but only 12% of the latter gained entry. Is the Rhodes Scholarship just a program that brings people of color to a white-dominated institution to ease criticisms of Oxford’s colonial legacy and lack of diversity?[su_pullquote align=”right”]The Rhodes Scholarship and Trust are institutionally incompatible with the development goals of South Africa.[/su_pullquote]

Thinking about the legacy of Cecil Rhodes’ scholarship made me consider my own frustration with wanting to protest colonialism while having few legitimate means to do so. Must people of color, as largely the children of colonialism passively accept the power of established colonial institutions and take out our pent-up anger of having our histories erased, rewritten, and hidden on the people around us? At times, it can feel as if these institutions, the Rhodes Scholarship and Oxford among others, are the only institutions that can arm us with the skills, connections, and creative potential to promote meaningful change in the world. It is difficult for people of color to pursue socially ambitious work through historically exploitative institutions without feeling like they “sold their soul,” without feeling as if they betrayed their own conscience by giving their talent to an institution historically designed to marginalize them.

Artwork by Michael Avery and Maggie Chuang

It can be hard to assess who is the true beneficiary in the relationship between the Rhodes Trust and its scholars. While the scholars are given a unique educational opportunity that is fully financed by the Rhodes Trust and an extensive alumni network of world-renowned figures in every field, the trust continues to establish its institutional legacy and its place in academic, social, and political circles through the work and influence of its recipients. While the Rhodes Trust touted that the program was going global in 2018, the majority of Rhodes Scholarships continue to go to students from universities in the Global North (60) while the Global South only has forty scholarships. In the future, Rhodes Scholars from the Global South may more heavily carry the burden of diversifying Oxford itself, an institution where as of 2017 only 1.8% of students identify as black and 8.3% identify as Asian.
[su_pullquote align=”right”]We can refuse to offer our talents and our backgrounds as fodder for bolstering the scholarship’s reputation amidst the inadequacy of its actions to correct for its troublesome past.[/su_pullquote]
As I looked deeper into the Rhodes Scholarship, I was increasingly convinced that I could not support or study under such a scholarship in good conscience. I initially viewed my actions as a personal decision, but given the close tie that the Rhodes Scholarship has to the American elite, I believe that American college students can exert a strong influence on the direction of the Rhodes Trust. By abstaining from applying from the scholarship, we practice educational divestment. We can refuse to offer our talents and our backgrounds as fodder for bolstering the scholarship’s reputation amidst the inadequacy of its actions to correct for its troublesome past. While other students choose to study under the scholarship in hopes of reforming it for the better, it can be just as strong of a message to boycott applying to the Scholarship. Boycotting would create a public discussion about Rhodes Scholarship funding and whether its mission to create a global community of scholars is being adequately fulfilled. It could also could force the trust to prioritize developing educational opportunities for Southern Africans, providing reparations to decrease inequities between Southern Africa and the developed world.

Ishaan Shah ‘20 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences.  He can be reached at ishaanshah@wustl.edu.

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