Over the past two years, I have had the joy of working on an incredible and complex learning experience alongside a community of dedicated and passionate Rhodes Scholars. This experience centred around co-designing and embarking on a trip to Southern Africa to learn from people and communities in the region on the many ways in which history and legacy interacts with the present and shapes the future. Our trip also included engaging with the contemporary negotiations and resonances with the past and specifically the legacy of Cecil John Rhodes.
The trip held closely and courageously the many contradictions and complexities of learning about Rhodes’ time in Southern Africa and the difficult histories borne from it. This included the long shadow of coloniality as well as continuing resistances to the legacies of skewed imperial power relations, extraction, and exploitation. Of the many critical conversations we had on this learning journey, two questions around leadership and service to community stood out for me.
The first question on service to community emerged from engaging with the work of the many people, groups, and communities we met in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Bulawayo, Harare, Lusaka, and Ndola. This question centres the importance and immensity of the strength and resilience it takes to struggle on the long road towards a just and equitable future for all. For me, this question asks how do we — as people vested in equitable futures — shift our perspective of success and inspiration away from singular stories of individuals to see the immensity and resilience of the multiplicity of people whose energies contribute to shifting the structures and systems which perpetuate inequality?
I found incredible inspiration in the work of so many communities and collectives of people at both international and regional organisation, and at cultural, governmental, and academic institutions. These included the International Court of Justice, the Nelson Mandela Foundation, the Mandela Rhodes Foundation, students and staff at the University of Cape Town, and the University of Zambia. The work of artists, archaeologists, historians, curators, practitioners, amongst so many other thinkers across several museums such as the Zeits MOCCA, the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, make visible the multiplicity of effaced contradictions in hegemonic narratives. It was humbling to learn from them. I appreciated the work of those in roles of positional leadership who continued to make space for their communities and justice. To me the history of inspirational people fighting injustice borne from the long shadow of imperial ambitions and power-relations, such as Nelson Mandela, Winnie Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to many inspirational heroes, felt more grounded as also a history of the communities that have tirelessly strived for a different and better future for many.
This question of communities striving towards better more equitable futures, is one of service to many people without prejudice to who they are. It stands out to me as a powerful question emergent from our trip about what it means to be in service to people, a sense of giving of energy, time, effort, resources for positive change.
My second question brings me back to the role of positional leadership today. How much and why is the world now, as it was then, still continually impacted by unequal power relations exacerbated by positional leadership? This question is perhaps better elucidated through a stark contrast between two different monuments we visited. The first the Rhodes Memorial, a large imposing monument at Devil’s Peak in Cape Town, and the second the Great Zimbabwe ruins near Masvingo. Where the former, a large monument built in 1912 by Herbert Baker (architect to many a colonial office in both Southern Africa and South Asia) stands out against the place it sits upon, the Great Zimbabwe ruins, built by the ancestors of the Shona people between the 11th and the 15th Centuries, is consistent in its embrace of the place it is in and upon.
This juxtaposition is not necessarily one of the clash of civilisations, rather it marks the ways in which leaders have shaped and been shaped by the places in which they have lived and worked. Where the memorial, sitting high atop the mountain side, references solitude, isolation, and imposition, the ruins are adroit in their assimilation into the natural surroundings, rocks, boulders, and cliff edges. Where the former has grandiloquent imposition in its stark pillars, linear planes, and heroic statues the latter finds elegance in all-encapsulating stone curves, undulating and intertwining enclosures, and imbricated natural and manmade environments. As a visitor, I felt, they carried tales of two different stories of the kinds of leaders and their impact on the place and the people therein. They leave open to question the role of these leaders, and more importantly their responsibilities, in their impact on those around them, people and environment.
I return to one of the other stops on the trip, a marker of both the struggle to redress the past, and to create another possibility for many. At the University of Cape Town, the shadows painted on the staircase, under the plinth of what once housed the now removed statue of Cecil Rhodes, is a reminder of the strivings of many people and generations in their journey to create more equitable futures. The shadows, in the shape of the statue of Rhodes, seated in a pose of Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’, stretches down the stairs towards the city. It reminded me starkly of that long shadow of coloniality, which continues long after the physical and bounded domination of land and people ends, and the longer arc of the work that still needs doing. This work does not centre one but is a marker of many struggles built one atop another. Undertaking this journey with members of the community of Rhodes Scholars in Residence, as part of the work we do at the Rhodes Trust, is a reminder that the work to build a better future is one that is of constant and continuous striving towards the betterment of all. It includes building a shared understanding of the responsibility of the work that is yet to be done.