I was really disappointed at the University of Cape Town’s (UCT’s) decision to move the statue of Cecil John Rhodes. I saw the vice chancellor of UCT on TV and, quite frankly, he looked like a scared rabbit. My opinion of him plunged. Where is the pride of UCT, a fine institution with a great history behind it?

I am disappointed for a few reasons. A university is a centre of learning and culture. It is a place of reason, of discussion and of intellectual interaction. It is not a place where rowdy students make demands and damage property, and where university authorities then just crumble like weaklings.

As my postuniversity years passed, I realised more and more just how much I had learned at tea breaks and at discussions in the pub or under a tree. It is during such times that we learn to listen to others, to ponder answers and to interact like a truly educated person. University study is not just a case of answering exam questions. In fact, such an approach is positively dangerous. If people graduate just by answering exam questions, then the type of graduate produced is an ‘unthinking’ type who reproduces the textbook without necessarily understanding what it says. That type of person is a disaster for the image of the university and for South Africa.

Government has a programme to stimulate more people to study for PhDs at university. As I have said before, this is not just to produce graduates, but to develop a PhD-thinking culture within university departments. As PhDs graduate, they should leave behind an improved department waiting for the next candidate, so that the thinking, analytical PhD culture grows within the university.

The other really bad aspect of removing the Rhodes statue is that a university should be a place that accumulates history and artefacts of all sorts to generally enhance the culture of students. Rhodes is part of the history of this country and the university, no matter what anybody’s political visions are. I would like to see statues of people like Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, and so on, in the grounds of universities. Just because they are there does not mean that the university does or does not agree with their visions.

It could also be that foreign benefactors may donate statues of people such as Barrack Obama, Winston Churchill or Count Dracula. The university can place them all in its grounds without this meaning that the university support these people or their actions. Dracula was also known as Vlad the Impaler. He lived in Transylvania and impaled his victims on long wooden spikes. Today, tourists visit the Dracula castle in Transylvania and there are Vlad the Impaler statues there for them to see. That is history. It does not mean that the local municipality or government, or anybody else, supports impaling people on wooden spikes, or that they admire Vlad.

Rhodes did some dramatic things and, whether you like it or not, his actions will be taught in the history and geography departments of the university, where students will be taught to study and think about his and other people’s actions. Students could also sit under a tree together and look at the Rhodes statue and discuss what motivated a previous generation to put it there and how society functioned at the time.

This is what education is. Having one group of students ‘cleansing’ the area and removing the statue because of their political feelings is not in the spirit of higher education.
King Shaka of the Zulus killed thousands of Zulus. When his mother died, his grief was such that he went out and killed a huge number of his own people. I happen to admire Shaka. I think he was a military genius who developed the stabbing spear, the battle shield and military tactics remarkably similar to those used by Julius Caesar. His weapons and tactics were used years later against the British army with such skill that the Zulus inflicted massive defeats on one of the greatest armies of the world at the time. The battles were so dramatic that they were reported in the London newspapers in awe.

Since then, the Royal Navy has named four of its warships HMS Zulu as a mark of respect for Zulu fighting prowess. I would be pleased to see a statue of Shaka on the campus. It would not mean that the university does or does not agree with anything he did. It would merely mark him as someone of historical significance in Southern Africa.
Same with Rhodes.