"Rhodes Must Fall" is a protest movement that began in March 2015 seeking the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town. The protest movement subsequently spread across South Africa and further afield, including to Oxford University's Oriel College, where a statue sits on the facade.

Rhodes was a British mining magnate and politician in southern Africa who served as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896. Today, he is seen as a white supremacist and brutal imperial overlord, having overseen the mass expropriation of lands and the disenfranchisement of millions of black voters.

Rhodes should not be celebrated, but removing the statue is not sufficient to bring about change. A democratic vote should ensue to decide the fate of the statue

Firstly I would like to acknowledge that I am a white British individual so the following opinions are not intended to speak over the voices of BIPOC.

The Rhodes statue at the University of Cape Town stood as a symbol of oppression which misrepresented history and glorified the life of a racist white supremacist coloniser and a painful reminder of the past.

However for others such as Siya Mnyanda, a student a UCT, the statue should remain as "Removing these symbols of the past does not change the future. So while I believe the statue should stay, what should not go unaddressed are the real issues that have arisen at UCT thanks to its legacy." I feel this is a good argument as removing these symbols is not sufficient to bring about change, and the presence of the Rhodes statue has shown to have brought to light issues which she mentions such as the lack of African philosophy taught in the curriculum, and the still-present colonisation of the curriculum.

On the otherhand, I believe the "generosity" of Rhodes should not be celebrated with so much as a statue since much of his wealth was acquired by despicable methods that often involved forcefully evicting African people from their land and raising the cost of property requirements with disproportionate effect on black people.

The statue of Rhodes in Oxford does not serve to remind us of any of his brutal past, rather it celebrates his donation to the college and to passers-by decorates him as an innocent and generous individual with no mention of the rest of his history, so I would argue that counterarguments such as that preserving the statue prevents us forgetting that part of history do not apply so much here.

I feel the solution going forward, for the remaining Rhodes statues and similar circumstances, is to consult those who his legacy has affected and who must face the statue every day, for example in this case the students at UCT or Oxford, in a democratic vote and/or meeting to discuss the impacts and different views and agree upon an outcome.

We should not celebrate a historical figure for their actions, when those actions would not be celebrated in present day.

• We cannot praise people from the past who we would not praise now. If people have done something wrong, whether is slave trading, colonisation, stealing from others (arguably the last two are the same) they do not deserve to be celebrated.
• A statue implicates celebration. It suggests that that person has done something great, something worthwhile, something good. If that person hasn’t done those things, then they do not deserve a statue in a public place.
• Arguably, ripping down statues in protests is not necessarily the right way. Instead they should just be taken down, and placed in a museum.