It seems that everyone, who has ever had anything to do with UCT (including merely driving past it on the M3) has an opinion to offer - even if, in the case of some staff blogs, that opinion is vacuous equivocation - and the media have fallen upon this with glee. UCT sells papers.
While the Rhodes statue has provided a convenient flashpoint, the issues are themselves not new, and claims that the complaint has not surfaced previously are disingenuous - there were countless complaints about the naming of buildings, for example, or the composition of the staff and student body, the institutional climate / culture, the normalised whiteness and middle-classness that excludes so many of those who study or work there.
But while the statue is offensive in its own right, it is merely an indicator of far bigger issues, which have been left to fester far too long. Symbols are merely one aspect of that - and I hope that this action, and the response it has garnered, will be sustained beyond the relocation of one block of rock so that the threat inscribed on CJR's other memorial does not continue to hold sway:
BROODING
SPIRIT STILL
SHALL QUICKEN
AND CONTROL
LIVING HE WAS THE
LAND AND DEAD
HIS SOUL SHALL BE
HER SOUL
It is time to break his control, to sever the link between his soul and the soul of our land, and our Campus.