The unfinished business of Rhodes Must Fall, Sarah Baartman and Jameson

Mail & Guardian

01-05-2025

#RhodesMustFall protest.
Ten years ago, on the slopes of Table Mountain, known long ago as Hoerikwaggo, the mountain rising from the sea, the #RhodesMustFall student movement at the University of Cape Town achieved its first aim: the statue of Cecil John Rhodes was removed, but echoes of fissures remain.
On 9 April, the university held an official commemoration attended by the vice-chancellor, a deputy-VC, a dean, a chair and select
There are several Rhodes Must Falls in #RhodesMustFall. We can hear multiple voices in Rhodes Must Fall, that are diverse and discursive, colliding and competing, that contest and oppose each other, even and especially within the same movement and same place. Under the differences was this movement's ability to critically engage across differences and act with clarity, cohesion, precision and tenacity .
A diaspora of MustFalls flowed from this place on the mountain. The movement created a language for addressing tangible and intangible, cultural and material, individual and structural, symbolic and embodied, ideological and curricula issues that people faced in many other places and forms.
#RhodesMustFall was not only about the statue, it was also about imperialism. And a removal is not only an end, it is also a beginning. It's been a decade since #RhodesMustFall emerged from here. What work remains? How do we remember the past and make better futures?
What do South Africans do with public memory? What does the university do with the public memory of Rhodes Must Fall? How does the University of Cape Town treat it?
Look at some ways we've done so before. Bury it, deny it? Discard it like body parts left on the side of the road to rot, like the dead dogs left on the sides of Joburg's highways? Or put it in an ossuary and tack it onto a coffee shop like the Prestwich Memorial in Cape Town, which holds thousands of bones in brown boxes, the remains of people who were enslaved and mass-buried in District 1, taken from the earth and put on shelves? Or just … forget it?
Forgetting is not an action one can 'do', it happens if conditions are met for a memory to be forgotten, for it to lose its charge, for it to heal. It can happen when what haunts us is dealt with. Forgetting is different from erasure and silence. Erasure is a speech act of writing over one text with another; painting over ink with Tipp-Ex, rubbing out pencil markings, deleting information on a computer. Erasing does not remove what was there before but rather re-addresses resources; it marks the resource-storage-address as free so that new data can be written over the old data.
Silence is like erasure — an act of covering up something; striking through text and writing over, often called 'blank space'. In both cases, traces remain of what was there before. While South Africans try to (or are gaslit to) forget certain things, erasure by way of strategic silence in official statements, media releases and so forth, abounds. These missing and misleading pieces of information shape memory and history, and often haunt us.
Perhaps what South Africans do after years upon years of deafening, haunting silence is better. They build a monument, a memorial, have a press event, an exhibition or move some graves from here to there. Or put photographs on the internet of some skeletons held by the university. Or remove a name off a building and put up a new one for use — only to not do so in other places.
I am talking about the building that is the face of the university and where students have their graduation ceremonies. Jameson Memorial Hall was renamed Sarah Baartman Hall in December 2018, with the old name coming down and the new name going up in August and September of 2019, with no public announcement or ceremony at the time.
It took two more years for there to be a ceremony for this renaming — in 2021. It was one of three Khoi cleansing ceremonies: one at the Rustenburg Remains site, a slave memorial; one where the Rhodes statue once stood at UCT on Table Mountain; and one at Sarah Baartman Hall.
But there are still places where the old name lives. It seems Sarah Baartman is not allowed to grace the library. Why delete the old name in some places and not others? Is this how to deal with public memory? Surely deletion must be from all devices, formats, databases, libraries and servers? In whose interest is it to erase new public memories; at whose cost?
So that is South African public memory. It confuses. And this confusion works against the work of re/pairing our histories, and futures.
Her name was summoned. Her memory. That bears ethical responsibilities. Sarah Baartman is a historical, biographical person who has been 'made into' a public figure in our national memory. A diaspora of voices also flows from her. Is this the way to treat her, and them?
The university is now a hybrid institution. The dynamics of hybrid institutions, governance, accountability and dissent are important for us to consider at this 10th anniversary of the MustFall moments, alongside an embodied, increasingly digital planet.
Perhaps many people no longer use the library, perhaps no one noticed this contradiction, perhaps people don't mind. I do. I mind.
One needs to ask, what is at stake? Truth, memory, dignity, rolling back the story, and the accountability of institutions to its publics.
Histories and memories and bodies are written over. Silence. Erasure. Deletion. Sarah Baartman remains missing, somewhere.
Vikram IK Pancham is a public artist, researcher and educator, and a PhD candidate at the African Studies Centre at Leiden University and the Centre of African Studies at Edinburgh University.