Abstract
The work of the anthropologist Francis Nyamnjoh, #RhodesMustFall: Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa, is a disconcerting book. Through five academic chapters and a sixth one explicitly labeled as ‘pure fiction’ plus a preface and two autobiographical epilogues written by two of his students, the author reflects on the current stakes of citizenship in South Africa, a subject he has studied and worked on at length in the past, particularly in relation to mobility and migrations.
This time, citizenship and the stakes of inclusion are examined in turn through various lenses: Cecil Rhodes’ life, recent student mobilizations on South African campuses (particularly the movement #RhodesMustFall at University of Cape Town (UCT), which denounced the westernized and colonial dimensions of their curriculum and the absence of Black thinkers in it), the xenophobic attacks of 2015, and finally the state of the University in Africa and in South Africa in particular. His ambition, in such contexts, is to show that identities are inserted in plural references, changing through time and space, and to insist on the compulsory mobility of any human existence in particular in the current globalized world.
No specific fieldwork research is referred to in order to do so, but a significant number of newspaper extracts, books, Facebook pages and personal observations, as well as colleagues’ commentaries on the author’s ideas and quotations from novels are mentioned. If from our point of view those materials – which are often very interesting – do not compose a real field it is because too often they are not accompanied by any analysis. They tend to be presented one after the other with no proper introduction or transition between them. They are punctuated by comments and statements by the author, but as a result of the absence of analysis, they tend to be tacked on in a seemingly random manner. So much so that the nibbling of the title seems to have invaded the authors’ intellectual reflection itself. Most of the time the issue at stake is skimmed over rather than discussed.
Nonetheless, if one reads the books as a collection of essays, one will discover a series of interesting questions and reflections. The first chapter carefully scrutinizes the life and times of Cecil Rhodes in order to question acquired and assigned identities. In order to do so, Nyamnjoh adopts a provocative thesis: what if Cecil Rhodes was just a makwerekwere (the derogatory term applied to those deemed to be foreigners) more powerful than others? While he insists on the ambitions and achievements of the colonizer, the author shows how whiteness has influenced people’s minds. This demonstration enlightens the fact that Rhodes’ statue was targeted by those who demanded the decolonization of the university. Still, like some scholars who have read Nyamjoh’s manuscript and who he quotes, one might be perplexed when seeing Rhodes qualified as a makwerekwere. Indeed, in xenophobic attacks in South Africa today, this name is applied to Black (supposed) migrants only. No White foreigner or White South African is ever referred to in this manner. What does this mean? The author gets back to this issue only in chapter 3 when analyzing xenophobia, he contends that township dwellers do not live with White foreigners, hence they do not call them makwerekwere.
The second chapter focuses on the impact of whiteness on identities, and as a consequence examines how students attacked its symbol: Rhodes’ statue which sat enthroned on the UCT Campus. The author looks more particularly at Maxwele, a Black student from the townships, who initially threw faeces on the statue. Analyzing what those excrements symbolized in terms of persisting and outrageous inequalities in South Africa, Nyamnjoh considers that Maxwele represents not only himself but a whole generation. Is this not too simplistic an account? When he mentioned various campuses that were on strike, Nyamnjoh insists that their demands were diverse. And on occasion he notes that the ways they mobilized Fanon’s thinking, for instance, were many too. In that case can Maxwele and the symbolic stain of the statue epitomize the movement? By capturing the student movements through identity on the one hand, and a participant observation of the curricula at university (the authors being himself part of university), on the other, there might be a risk of reducing and impoverishing the plurality and complexity of actual political ideas represented amongst the students during the strikes.
Chapter 4 examines precisely how universities dealt with the students’ demands. To do so it uses a variety of speeches and letters emanating from the institutions concerned. At that stage, the book becomes more chronological. It follows the events carefully and the reader learns about the internal controversies in the various universities and the models at work to (not) resolve the issues at stake.
Finally, chapter 5 gets back to the general problem of South Africa: how to live together more than 20 years beyond the end of Apartheid? How to use cultural heritage, how to deal with identities? It is not easy to see what the author suggests beyond his call for conviviality, following Paul Gilroy an idea that serves as a basis for his conclusion.
On the whole, Professor Nyamnjoh’s book will be of interest because of the density of the material mentioned and the richness of the paths he opens to all those who are concerned with citizenship and identity in South Africa today. This will be so providing readers do not expect to find a specific and rigorous analysis of student mobilization as the title of the book, and the photograph on the cover picturing Rhodes’ statue, being dismantled might suggest.