write:” BeforeEuropeans brought history to Africa and places like it Trevor-Roper went on there was merely“the unedifying gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevan

and attributed them instead to a Mediterranean civilisation. In time
I came to see thecarving atop Rhodes house as the negative image of what would soon become a much morefamous statue: a larger-than-life likeness of Rhodes that peers down on to Oxford’s High Streetfrom a niche high up Oriel college’s facade
above a Latin inscription thanking him for hismunificence. If the statue of Rhodes portrayed him as a great benefactor
the Zimbabwe birdstood for the wealth extraction and human exploitation on which Rhodes’s fortune was built
as well as for the racist ideology that helped him justify his colonial programme.Colonialism continued to shape Oxford in less concrete ways
too. I wasn’t there long before Ilearned that the dim view of Africa and Africans held by Rhodes had been shared by many ofOxford’s most esteemed historians. Hugh Trevor-Roper
who for a quarter century heldOxford’s most prestigious history chair
infamously pronounced in the 60s that there was noAfrican history
“only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness.” BeforeEuropeans brought history to Africa and places like it
Trevor-Roper went on
there was merely“the unedifying gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of theglobe”. This was only a touch crasser than what a Fellow at Balliol College said to me at adinner in my second year at Oxford: “African politics? What a mess. How could you possibly fixthat?”Among the handful of Oxford scholars who actually studied Africa
however
most had anuanced understanding of the continent and shared my disgust at Rhodes. William Beinart
who was then the Rhodes Professor of race relations
quipped that his title was anembarrassment
like having the position “Goebbels Professorship of Communication”. Butalthough my professors at the African Studies Centre were rigorous scholars
I couldn’t helpbut notice that they were all white. This is true throughout academia: there aren’t a massivenumber of Black people in the UK – only about 3.3% of the population – but there are far fewerBlack academic faculty (about 2%) and about 140 Black professors in the whole country.My studies and my family’s history as colonial subjects came together most painfully in aseminar on the history of political imprisonment and punishment in Africa. My father had toldThe Cecil Rhodes statue on the facade of Oriel College in Oxford.Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA’Colonialism had never really ended’: my life in the shadow of Ceci…https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/jan/14/rhodes-must-fall-…8 of 141/16/21
10:33 PM