Whitewashing the Blackboard
5th January 2016
Taki is delightfully dyspeptic today.
If ever there was a case of having one’s cake and eating it, this has to be it, and the only hypocrite missing for the moment is our old buddy William Jefferson Clinton, a beneficiary of Rhodes if there ever was one, who has as yet not demanded for the removal of the plaque and statue. Using the cash while whitewashing Rhodes out of history is hardly new. Our black brothers and sisters are doing just that as I write. Soon those who shaped our destiny, dead white folk like Washington and Jefferson and Madison, will be part of the history that does not dare speak its name. As one Oxford professor, a historian by the name of Mary Beard, said: Students should “look up at Rhodes and friends with a cheery and self-confident sense of unbatterability—much as I find myself looking up at the statues of all those hundreds of men in history who would vehemently have objected to women having the vote, let alone the job I have.” Now, there’s a lady speaking truth if there ever was one.
Sometimes that happens. It cannot, however, be depended upon.
The irony is that there were, from the start, lots of black Rhodes Scholars, mainly from Jamaica, then a British colony. Of course, Rhodes’ imperialism is now out of fashion, except for with George W. Bush and his neocon friends, who thought the Iraq invasion would be a cakewalk and that it would cost less than what Rhodes left that ungrateful Oxford college. (It’s cost a trillion if it cost a dollar.) Rhodes’ accomplishments in southern Africa transformed the continent into a modern one, and he did that while squeezing in nine terms as an undergraduate at Oxford. The once great nation of Rhodesia was named after him, and the poorest and most corrupt country today is called Zimbabwe, after Rhodesia was renamed by that nice democrat Robert Mugabe.