'Rhodes may not fall after all' says head of inquiry into Oxford statue's removal

A controversial statue of British imperialist Cecil Rhodes may remain in place at Oxford’s Oriel College, according to the woman leading an investigation into its future.

In an exclusive interview with The Telegraph, Carole Souter said it “was not a foregone conclusion” that “Rhodes would fall”.

Although the college’s governing body has expressed its “wish” to remove the memorial to the 19th century mining magnate, Ms Souter, chair of the Independent Commission of Inquiry into the statue, said: “We acknowledge politely that the governing body has expressed a view but there wouldn't be any point at all setting up this sort of Commission if it was already a foregone conclusion.

“If the question had been, ‘How should we take down the statue?’ that wouldn't have been a question for a Commission, that's a practical discussion to have within the college or with the relevant planning bodies.

“But I can't say absolutely this is what's going to happen because there would be no point in us gathering and talking about it.

“It's not a foregone conclusion in either direction.”

In June, Oriel College voted to set up the inquiry to deal with the issue of the Rhodes legacy along with a review of how the college’s 21st century commitment to diversity can sit more easily with its past.

It came after Black Lives Matter protesters pulled down a controversial statue of 17th century slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol and threw it into the harbour. Colston was prominently involved in England's slaving company, the Royal African Company, which transported tens of thousands of Africans across the Atlantic Ocean.

Although Rhodes was not a slave owner, critics have labelled him one of the “architects of apartheid” in South Africa, where he served as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896, when the government restricted black Africans' rights by increasing the financial criteria people required in order to vote.

The “Rhodes Must Fall” movement, established in South Africa in 2015, has lobbied for the renaming of Rhodes University in Cape Town and the removal of the statue at Oriel along with a plaque on King Edward Street.

In 2016, the college claimed it would lose about £100 million worth of gifts if it removed the statue of the politician and industrialist, who founded the De Beers mining company and set up the provisions of the Rhodes Scholarship, an international postgraduate award for students to study at Oxford. The College opened its Rhodes Building in 1911 after receiving a £100,000 from the former student, who died in 1902.

Oxford-educated Ms Souter, the current Master of St Cross College, Oxford (pictured below), said that as well as “talking to as many people as possible with as many different perspectives as possible,” the Commission would seek to clarify “what is currently understood truth and what is myth” about Rhodes.

On Tuesday, the Rhodes Must Fall campaign welcomed the diversity of the Commissioners, appointed by Ms Souter, which include the broadcaster Zeinab Badawi, former shadow culture secretary Peter Ainsworth, lawyer Margaret Casely-Hayford, and William Beinart, formerly Rhodes Professor of Race relations and founding director at the university’s African Studies Centre.

Confirming that a “definitive” set of recommendations would be made by the Commission to Oriel’s governing body in the New Year, Ms Souter added: “It was very important that we didn't appear to take too long over this and that it wasn't seen as another way of not dealing with an issue that's been live for a very long time.”

Ms Souter said the inquiry would “go beyond statues” to investigate “strand by strand the implicit messages that have been given out by this place about who it wants to see among its staff and students.”

“I think there is a risk that individual names or events sort of achieve a sort of - maybe mythic isn't the right word but a sort of status that carries all sorts of things with it, which may or may not be factually accurate and may or may not be based on on what actually happened,” she said.

“There's the whole debate about what was deemed to be acceptable at a given time, and what is deemed to be acceptable now. I think that if we can provide some clarity on that for a wider audience, that will be quite a big contribution.

“There's very little doubt that as with many people with a great personal impact that Rhodes was very complex and complicated. The more I read about Rhodes the more I discover that he’s an extremely complicated character.”

Ms Souter said she was conscious some critics will cry ‘whitewash’ if the Commission recommends that the statue must stay. Asked if the statue would still be in place if it wasn’t 30ft up on the front of the college, she said: “I don’t know. I hope it wouldn’t have been taken down without consultation of all of the parties.

“If we do our job properly, people may still disagree with the outcome. But I would be very committed to an outcome where people say, ‘We still think you're wrong but we see the stance you’ve taken’.

"If anyone thinks we’d decided before we’d even started, then we would have failed. We will need to set out our reasoning, whatever our recommendations. I think if we do it really well, there may well be lessons that other people will find useful.”

Oriel’s students are two thirds in favour of taking the statue down, but Ms Souter stressed the importance of “listening to the voices of the academics who've been here for many years” and “the alumni who were students once and the city and wider community”.

“My vice master here at the college, Professor Andrew Pollard is leading the coronavirus vaccine group right at the moment. I think one of the interesting things over the last few months has been that it's maybe slightly rebalanced that view of what is a university and who are the members of the university.

“I think there is no doubt that the view of individuals from the past changes enormously as time goes on. Is something that happened in Roman times going to have an immediate impact of hurt on any community today? It's unlikely but we're talking about the relatively recent past.

“If we are being told that there is hurt being caused, now, as a result of not just the actions but the way in which those individuals have then been memorialised, then that's something we should look at. And address what it is that's really causing the hurt.

"Is it that our society seems still to be saying that person was an unalloyed good when there are different stories about how that impact was felt around the world? It may be that that's one of the key things.”