'The Rhodes Trust solemnly acknowledges and honours the people in southern Africa whose labour and riches created the original wealth for the formation of the Rhodes Scholarship,’ reads a carved inscription in the |Xam language at Rhodes House, Oxford, unveiled in the summer of 2025.
Noble rue. We give thanks.
Like most truths, set (un)comfortably for us to look – past.
A sleeping
(extinguished)
language: |Xam served chilled on steel trays.
Place your ears a little closer.
These dead speak through their dreams and we are their voices.
Not quite frozen, not quite thawed.
How did we set about foregrounding the foundational role of southern Africa in the Rhodes Trust’s institutional memory? This is a legacy whose reputation changes wardrobe by the decade and the method we adopted was assertively considered. We advanced a programme educating Rhodes Scholars using first-hand, in-person experiences, thoughtfully designed to stoke the diverse individual interests towards which their lives and studies have led them. Southern Africa, beyond being the arena of the Rhodes Trust’s origin, is centred as a sociopolitical ecosystem appropriately representative of the many questions Scholars come to ask, ‘having not found [the] answers in Oxford’ (as one Scholar commented).
The Rhodes Southern Africa Trip, which took place from 27th June to 12th July 2025, was hard-earned for every participant selected. Clear objectives were set out to inspect, interrogate, and distil personal formulations of institutional legacy, and by doing so, bridge widening chasms of perspective and purpose. A pilgrimage by all accounts, the itinerary was intense, a multifaceted rite, offering knowledge and engagement. These were balanced against moments of respite for the spirit’s quiet reflection – as another Scholar noted, ‘I have absorbed much already, it is now better suited that I just be.’
The inaugural Trip catalysed each person in the trip group to go off into themselves and create personal meaning from the realities they encountered. A richness of experience was achieved alongside this, undergirded by laughter, fortitude, and such authentic bonding that it almost had to have been scripted. Yet it wasn’t. Each Scholar was a puzzle shape managing to find their matching part(s), making whole on interactions that played out effortlessly and authentically amongst one another. A nod to the trip group selection process and ultimately, to respect and grace paid forward. The privilege of being let loose to learn as immersively as any opportunity afforded in Oxford was not lost on us.
But how, in Africa? Because a bringing together of assorted ideas and the people who spark them (in the absence of disingenuity) irrefutably increases the standard of learning in any educational setting. Southern Africa Trip participants bore connections to vast geographies: North America, South Asia, East Asia, Southern Africa, East Africa, West Africa, the Middle East, West Asia, the Caribbean, and the Antipodean. All gifted the honour of Africa’s truest philosophical wisdom: bonding with one another over the replicability of human experience.
This, and much more, is how the Rhodes Southern Africa Trip achieved its success.
The Rhodes Southern Africa Trip had the explicit aim of understanding and addressing the legacies – historical and contemporary – of Cecil John Rhodes and the Rhodes Trust in Southern Africa. The packed itinerary visited three countries – South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Zambia – in just 15 days. At each itinerary point, trip participants engaged with local experts and interlocutors, with the aim of spotlighting local knowledge and perspectives. Rather than focusing merely on how Cecil Rhodes and the Rhodes Trust influenced the region, the Trip attempted to understand how the region influenced Cecil Rhodes and the Rhodes Trust, highlighting stories of agency and resistance in Southern Africa.
A trip of this nature was groundbreaking for the Rhodes Trust. For the first time in its more-than-120-year history, the institution facilitated an official trip of its Rhodes Scholars to three countries in the region from which its wealth originated. We take the opportunity to express our gratitude to the numerous individuals and teams who helped realise the Trip, which was co-created in a collaborative effort within and beyond the Rhodes Trust community. The Trip was made possible by the generous financial support of three donors and administrative, operational, and fundraising support from the Rhodes Trust.
10 years on from the start of the #RhodesMustFall movement at the University of Cape Town (UCT), a former #RMF activist, Qondiswa James, guided the trip group around the UCT campus, providing a powerful moment to reflect on social movements, institutional change, and historical injustice. This experience – like numerous others on the trip – challenged the trip participants to reflect on their own positionality as Rhodes Scholars, and on the relationship between the Southern African region and the imperialist history of the Rhodes Trust, in conversation with the imperial present.
A few months after the trip, many of these same trip participants were leading tours around Rhodes House, contextualising to new Rhodes Scholars the iconography and symbolism still contained in the House, and drawing on the same archival and secondary-source research that informed the inaugural Rhodes Southern Africa Trip. Amongst this iconography are replicas of the Chapungu Bird – the national emblem of Zimbabwe derived from soapstone sculptures found in the ruins of the medieval city of Great Zimbabwe. The trip group had visited the awe-inspiring remains of this city – the same city Cecil Rhodes had dismissed as ‘too advanced’ for Africans to have created – and seen first-hand the original soapstone carved birds. The dissonance this caused was stark, knowing that the Rhodes Trust continues to contain in its logo the Chapungu Bird.[i]
The Rhodes Scholars’ journey through South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Zambia offered a layered exploration of the legacy of Cecil Rhodes within the broader context of colonialism and its enduring effects. Taking place during Rhodes’ birth month (July), the trip carried symbolic significance, encouraging deeper reflection on his life and influence. A central stop was Cape Town, where Rhodes built his political career and consolidated power, making it essential for understanding the foundations of his authority.
Zimbabwe formed a crucial part of the journey, as it was a central site of Rhodes’ colonial expansion and administration under the British South Africa Company. It is also where he is buried at World’s View in the Matopo Hills, a place he had renamed, over its original identity as Malindidzimu – which means ‘Hill of the Ancestral Spirits’ – a sacred spiritual site for indigenous communities. Visiting Zimbabwe allowed Rhodes Scholars to engage directly with the impact of colonial conquest, including the destruction of indigenous states such as the Ndebele state, and to reflect on the cultural and spiritual implications of Rhodes’ presence in the landscape.
Zambia was also significant, as Rhodes, through the British South Africa Company, contributed to early mining developments, particularly the copper industry that later shaped the country’s economy. Visiting sites tied to both colonial administration and anticolonial resistance allowed the Scholars to situate Rhodes’ legacy within a continuum of domination and defiance.
Rhodes’ rise began after his arrival in Durban in 1870, leading to immense wealth through enterprises such as De Beers Consolidated Mines. His imperial ambitions facilitated the colonisation of Zimbabwe and Zambia, entrenching systems of land dispossession and racial hierarchy. Rhodes died in 1902, and his final words – ‘so little done, so much to do’ – reflect the unfinished nature of his imperial vision, accounting for his hand in the imperial blueprint visibly in operation today.
Engagements with local communities provided diverse perspectives blending Afrocentric and Eurocentric viewpoints, deepening understanding of colonial legacies and persistent inequalities. The journey also resonated with movements such as #RhodesMustFall, at its decade anniversary, emphasising the ongoing need to challenge colonial legacies and rethink systems of knowledge. Ultimately, the experience fostered a nuanced and critical engagement with Rhodes’ contested legacy.
The Rhodes Trust lauds concrete action. This Trip delivered it. From town hall to terra firma in 18 months. The Rhodes Southern Africa Trip, a hallmark of what can be accomplished in between essay submissions and Oxford’s residual buzz, by Scholars who found each other, refused erasure, and stitched together dense histories, against the din of a chilling rhetoric now taken hold. If the Rhodes Trust absolves its stewardship in the re-telling of this story for years to come, take liberty to draw your own conclusions, just like we endeavoured to in southern Africa. Some 120 years ago, shapeshifting prejudices were encoded. Today, they are re-coded again. Upload, erase, remember. All this will come to capture a unique time in the imaginary.
We have spoken of dreams materialised; our voices grow warmer yet.[ii]
[i] The last outstanding original Chapungu Bird (of eight) was repatriated from South Africa to Zimbabwe on 15th April 2026, reuniting now with seven unique royal Chapungu totems in the foothills of Great Zimbabwe’s Hill Complex, after more than a century in possession of Cecil Rhodes’ Groote Schuur Estate in Cape Town. The repatriated totem was hacked from its stone plinth in 1889 by Wilhelm Posselt, before selling it onwards to Cecil Rhodes for £80.
[ii] For more on the inaugural Rhodes Southern Africa Trip, check out the Scholars’ Report, the Trip Photo Album, and Dr J Daniel Luther’s Reflections on the Pilot Rhodes Southern Africa Trip.