A student leading a campaign to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes from an Oxford college has turned his fire on the university itself, accusing it of spreading “injustice” around the world by educating future leaders with a “skewed” and “Eurocentric” mindset. South African Rhodes scholar Ntokozo Qwabe claimed that students there endure “systemic racism, patriarchy and other oppressions” on a daily basis.
The 24-year-old also said that the university’s admissions and staff recruitment systems “perpetrate exclusion” and suggested that even Oxford’s architecture is laid out in a “racist and violent” way.
Mr Qwabe shot to prominence after Oriel College agreed to remove a plaque under a statue of the colonial era mining magnate and politician and consider talking down the statue itself.
It followed protests by his ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign group, which takes its inspiration from a movement in South Africa which has succeeded in having statues of Rhodes removed.
He say the statue glorifies a figure seen as one of the architects of South African apartheid and is therefore “offensive and violent” to students.
Oxford University has, he added, yet to “atone” for its “coloniality.”
The University has recently begun an overhaul of its humanities and social science curricula to ensure it has more “diverse” content.
A spokesman added: “We recognise that we need to do more to get students from more excluded and less traditional backgrounds in to Oxford and we work on that through outreach.”
In response to the suggestion that students suffer daily examples of “racism, patriarchy and other oppressions”, he said: “The University wants to be a welcoming place where people from across the United Kingdom and across the world can study and learn.
“If anybody has any specific concerns or if there are specific incidents they can raise them and they will be looked at appropriately.”
