On 9 June 2020, more than a thousand people gathered in central Oxford demanding that Oriel College remove the statue of imperialist and mining magnate, Cecil Rhodes. Congregating in defiance of the Covid-19 pandemic, protesters drew renewed attention to the long-standing struggle to decolonise
education and tackle institutional racism at British and South African universities. They also knelt with
fists raised for over nine minutes in tribute to George Floyd, a man whose recent murder at the hands of
Minneapolis police marked only the latest atrocity in a long history of racialised violence in the United
States. Amid the local and global reckonings over race and racism taking place in the wake of Covid-19
and Floyd’s murder, the 2020 Rhodes Must Fall protest marked the latest iteration in a fight to remove
Rhodes from campuses that began over five years earlier.1
In 2014, after completing his master’s degree at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa,
Ntokozo Qwabe won a Rhodes scholarship to study a Bachelor of Civil Law (BCL) degree at Keble
College, University of Oxford. Qwabe arrived in Oxford amid growing calls for the removal of the
statue of Rhodes back home. UCT students argued that Rhodes’s monument embodied the pervasive
white privilege at the university, and that tackling those problems required removing his oppressive
figure from campus. On 9 March 2015, students accelerated their demands for change. Political science student Chumani Maxwele hurled excrement at Rhodes’s statue. Others occupied UCT offices and posted