This week we’ve been reading ‘Decolonising the University’ edited by Gurminder K. Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial, Kerem Nişancıoğlu.
In 2015, students at the University of Cape Town (UCT) demanded the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes, the imperialist, racist business magnate, from their campus.
Exactly a month later, the UCT Council voted for the statue to be removed.
The battle cry '#RhodesMustFall' sparked an international movement calling for the decolonisation of the world's universities.
In June 2020, the Rhodes Must Fall campaigners picked up their banners to demand the removal of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes that stands outside Oriel College in Oxford, UK.
In ‘Decolonising the University’, students, activists and scholars discuss the possibilities and the pitfalls of doing decolonial work in the home of the coloniser, in the heart of the establishment.
“The teaching of history in schools has to re-read the history of empire, not as some dangling appendage, which you either can or cannot know about, but as something that is deep at the heart of British identity.” – Stuart Hall