adminSifelani Tsiko Senior Writer
Africans must not be apologetic about the removal of Cecil Rhodes’s statue from South Africa’s University of Cape Town (UCT) by condoning neo-liberal views seeking to justify the continued existence of the symbol of white supremacy and imperialism, a renowned Zimbabwean archaeologist says.
Prof Innocent Pikirayi, a Zimbabwean archaeologist at the University of Pretoria, told The Herald at the just-ended Association of Southern African Professional Archaeologists (ASAPA) conference at the University of Zimbabwe that Africa should rid itself of white imperialistic symbols to liberate its knowledge systems and empower people to take pride in their own history.
“We must stand and take pride in the removal of Cecil Rhodes’ statue because it is also part of the decolonisation process,” he said.
“Some of these symbols are extremely offensive and we have been living with them for a long time. By removing the statue, we are also decolonising the knowledge and curriculum in our education system.
“To us, it’s a powerful tool for the liberation of the African mind as well as the filtering of the colonising ideologies that prevent Africans from taking control of their future as well as their past.”
Prof Pikirayi was firing a broadside at Prof Simon Hall, a UCT archaeologist and Rhodes Statue apologist who had earlier on in a presentation titled: “The Go-Between? Historical archaeology in southern Africa,” asserted that the removal of the symbol eroded the opportunity to generate revenue by marketing the past.
“The Rhodes must fall campaign has drawn attention to the issue of heritage management and its manipulation,” Prof Hall said hesitantly before archaeologists drawn from southern African countries . “The removal of the statue does not make history to go away…..Heritage tends to de-nature politics, bolster unity in nation building. It also applies to marketing the past.
“Selling the past is good business, its about jobs, its about opportunities.”
Prof Hall argued that there was need for archaeological practice to retain its academic scholarship and independence to free itself from political tentacles and interference.
“Our academic work of acting as go-betweens must retain independence,” he said. “We have to take care to retain our academic scholarship, our relevance and academic independence. We have to be sensitive to the portrayal of the African past and assert ourselves at a very broad level and de-nature politics.”
Prof Hall said it was important to encourage debate and discourse on various branches of archaeology and to tread cautiously on the tension between history and heritage.
“We need a very simple mind shift that can help to reconstruct social frontiers, dismantle social barriers. Without independence, we are compartmentalising knowledge and process. We should not be uncritical hand-maidens in the heritage discourse.”
Prof Pikirayi thought differently and said South African academics need to go beyond being mere apologists of the racist white supremacist legacy.
“We are calling for transformation of our thinking. We need to think radically and listen to the voices of reason which are liberating and empowering to the African mind,” he said. “The way they are thinking about knowledge and the interpretation of the past is wrong. We need to decolonise South African universities and enable our students to identify themselves with values that are truly African – both past, present and the future.
“People should not be forced to live with symbols they don’t like. We should reject western prescribed history and if we don’t we are disenfranchising the vast majority of our people.”
Decolonising archaeology, Prof Pikirirayi said, will help Africans re-invent themselves, to be thoroughly grounded in their history and empowered rather than be partial and enslaved.
The contentious statue of British imperialist Cecil John Rhodes was removed from UCT in April this year after students’ protests.
Students insisted the statue, unveiled in 1934, was a symbol of the institutional racism they say prevailed in South Africa two decades after the end of white-minority rule which marginalised blacks.
Online Reporter