Vamika Sinha reviews a group exhibition of seven southern African artists in Rhodes House, Oxford, reflecting on colonialism, monuments and memory
Installation view of ‘Entangled: Southern African Artists reflect on Colonialism, Monuments & Memory’ at Rhodes House. Courtesy of Rhodes Trust.
This year marks a decade since Rhodes Must Fall, the student-led movement which began at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in March 2015. Protests to bring down the statue of Cecil Rhodes – a profoundly racist British imperialist, businessman, and eventual Prime Minister of the Cape Colony – erupted not only across South Africa but also to Oxford, UK, home to the Rhodes Trust. Here, annual batches of Rhodes Scholars meant to be among the most prestigious students in the world come to study and congregate – as desired by Rhodes himself. In his will, the colonialist left a handsome sum for executing a particular vision: “the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom, and of colonisation by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour and enterprise…”
Critics of Rhodes Must Fall have fluttered arguments: that was history! Another place, another time, those people didn’t know better. Or, taking down a statue of a man does not erase what he did. But is our present really so different? Larger-than-life men governing powerful nations continue to name buildings, statues, initiatives, schemes, and philosophies after themselves while we watch our communities divide and crumble. Where else have we seen a famous businessman-politician surname slapped on a giant structure in the name of expansionism, of making something great, slogans, shaking fists, and all? Back in 2015, UCT’s Rhodes was toppled within a month. In Oxford, debates fumed around what to do with the statue outside Oriel College, where Rhodes studied. The statue is still there, now with a supplementary plaque – part of a “temporary contextualisation”, reads Oriel’s website, before something more permanent “in due course.”
Isheanesu Dondo, (left) Masons Talking Geometry, 2024. Pen and ink on paper, 29.7 x 21cm. (right) What Inspired The Zimbirds?, 2024. Acrylic and ink on paper, 29.7 x 21cm. Courtesy of Rhodes Trust.
Rhodes House, meanwhile, has started to use public contemporary art programming as its method of redressal. One exhibition is plainly titled ‘Living with the legacy of Cecil John Rhodes’. Another group show, ‘Entangled: Southern African Artists reflect on Colonialism, Monuments & Memory’, was curated by Julie Taylor. First open in June 2024, the exhibition, which currently has no public end date, features work of varied mediums by Nicola Brandt, Isheanesu Dondo, Raymond Fuyana, Muningandu Hoveka, Tuli Mekondjo, Zenaéca Singh and Gift Uzera, contemporary artists from Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.
“It has been exciting – and also a substantial responsibility – to be part of some of the first contemporary art programming at Rhodes House,” Taylor states. Being a white Zimbabwean and former Rhodes Scholar herself, she has used her position as founder of Johannesburg-based African art gallery Guns & Rain to bring some of its artists’ works back into the master’s house. All the works have been made since Rhodes Must Fall began; they comprise not the movement’s aftermath, but its very afterlife.
Nicola Brandt, (top) Nightfall, Cape Town, 18 April 2021. Archival pigment ink on Baryta paper. Edition 1/3 + 1AP. 40 x 60cm. (bottom) Molteno Reservoir, Cape Town, 20 April 2021. Archival pigment ink on Baryta paper. Edition 1/3 + 1AP. 40 x 60cm. Courtesy of Rhodes Trust.
Artist-scholar Nicola Brandt is showing photographs from the Rhodes Memorial Site by Table Mountain, an area afflicted by devastating fires in 2021 (at the time of my viewing, the LA wildfires were raging on). The exhibition’s digital catalogue draws out the wry link between colonialism and climate: “colonial-era pine trees that encircled Rhodes’ former estate and [UCT’s] main campus contributed to the partial destruction…” Rhodes was also a zealous “mining magnate”; many of South Africa’s current socioeconomic inequalities can be traced back to his machinations within extractive gold and diamond mining.
Taylor further highlights the show’s recontextualising of colonial imagery – on a broader level, that these artworks have migrated especially to interact with and within this building, designed by imperial architect Herbert Baker. And on a more granular level, through the art: self-taught Tuli Mekondjo literally embroiders over photographic postcards bought from a controversial antique shop that sells Nazi memorabilia to European tourists in Windhoek. More abstractly, Isheanesu Dondo’s drawings show “new, indigenous depictions of the Zimbabwe Bird”, Taylor explains, “in a context where Rhodes and Baker appropriated and deployed that symbol multiple times in different ways for their own ends.”
Zenaéca Singh, Five Generations, 2023. Sugar, Plaster of Paris and Resin, 25 x 27 x 26cm. Courtesy of Rhodes Trust.
A standout is Zenaéca Singh, who lets her form perform her content: commenting on the sugar economy, she crafts images and sculptures from molasses and melted sugar. The Indian community in South Africa – and the wider region, a diaspora of which I myself am part – may be large, but is also relatively understudied. Singh simultaneously draws on and enriches its archive, focusing especially on Indian indentured labourers who worked on sugar plantations in KwaZulu Natal under British colonial rule. Her sculptures are confections of trauma and gendering – sugar-encrusted clay tea sets, little cake stands bearing sugar ships that once carried labourers, and photo paintings in two vintage frames where the landscape is painted in molasses. At the same time, the (female) figures appear ghostly as negative white space. Singh’s work deals with a kind of double colonisation of the brown woman: first by the coloniser, then by the patriarch.
Installation view of Making Everyday Sweeter with they came with sweetness not of sugarcane or cotton, but of air, the Stare and their roots grew deeper and their roots touched the sky. Courtesy of Rhodes Trust.
It is admirable that these artists are firm in their politics and that their practices are robust and exciting, too. Singh is an emerging artist; she is showing internationally, and her work is in such rich contextual dialogue with its surroundings that it is thrilling for a viewer to see and anticipate where her practice could go. Taylor has also admirably constituted an array of South-South solidarities within the exhibition, one that highlights but doesn’t fully centralise (as is the norm) colonisation as a thing of the past done by evil white men, but rather as a mutating, ever-present logic and belief system, that can, effectively, be activated by anyone. South Africa, Namibia, and Zimbabwe each experienced different shades of “what the white man came and did” to them, and those histories have resulted in varied presents for each nation. Many might be unaware that after the Germans gave them independence, Namibia was then occupied by South Africa from 1915-1990. Many may also be oblivious to the history behind why there are so many Indian South Africans. Works like Singh’s or Brandt’s collaborative performance piece with Uzera and Hoveka, which depicts the dismantling of German colonial officer Curt von François’s statue in Windhoek, create bridges of solidarity across the southern African region against the very logic of colonialism itself rather than any one nation or man.
“All freedoms are inextricably linked,” Brandt states. “This sentiment returns to the underlying message of the activist movement, which is to combat structural violence, inequality, sexism, patriarchy, and homophobia, which are seen as a perpetuation of coloniality…The more events and exhibitions that support these causes, the better.” Taylor builds on this, saying how the show “reflects just a small fraction of a wide range of work being undertaken by African artists to counteract a European colonial monopoly on public and other forms of memorialisation.”
Tuli Mekondjo, Momulonga ohatu ka nangala ongali / In the river, we will lay on our backs, 2021. Image transfer on canvas, cotton embroidery thread, crochet yarn, silk fabrics, 94 x 162cm. Courtesy of Rhodes Trust.
As Oxford may continue to wring its hands over new “contextualisations” for its histories, ten years on from the start of Rhodes Must Fall, we can honour what those students before us at UCT began –– an urgent insistence that we rewrite the logic of this all in the first place. It is not enough to bring down a statue or stage an exhibition at the master’s house in the name of decolonisation; nothing will be enough for the centuries of pain that have wrought who we are today. It is simply too much to ask of ourselves. Yet each one of these gestures – the movements, petitions, performances, artmaking, curations, the labouring to produce every tiny decolonial act – gather not as an ultimate corrective but a request, to each other, for each other, against the very possible uglinesses of our nature as humans. This is work we must do every single day.
The exhibition opened on the 19th of June 2024 and will be on view until September 2025. For more information, please visit Guns&Rain and Rhodes Trust.
Vamika Sinha is an Indian-born, Botswana-raised arts writer living in London. She holds an MA in Comparative Literature from SOAS University of London and is interested in entwinements of postcoloniality, cosmopolitanism and feminism. More on her website vamikasinha.com
