Unsettled Matters, Falling Flight - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

Unsettled Matters, Falling Flight
Decolonial Protest and the Becoming-Material
of an Imperial Statue

Joanna Ruth Evans

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Cifra 1. On the evening of 12 Marzo 2015, students at the University of Cape Town cover the Cecil John
Rhodes statue in white and red cloth, following a mass debate on Jameson Plaza earlier that day. (Photo by
Rebecca Hodes)

On 9 Marzo 2015, at a small, unauthorized protest at the University of Cape Town, political sci-
ence student Chumani Maxwele hurled a full portaloo container of human excrement onto a
statue of the 19th-century British imperialist Cecil John Rhodes. This large, bronze statue sat
on a stone plinth at the heart of the University of Cape Town’s colonial façade. It was flanked
on either side by imitation Georgian buildings covered in a Virginia Creeper with Ivy League
aspirations. Aquí, the Rhodes statue had remained for 81 años, slowly oxidizing to a minty
verde, streaked in the chalky guano of generations of sea birds. It had survived two regime
cambios: South Africa’s exit from the British Commonwealth (1961), and the dismantling of
apartheid (1994). On 9 Abril 2015, one month after Maxwele’s action, the statue was hoisted
by a crane from its plinth and driven on the back of a truck to an undisclosed location. Este
removal followed one month of intensive student protesting known as Rhodes Must Fall (RMF).

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130

Student Essay Contest Winner

Joanna Ruth Evans is a theatre artist from South Africa. She holds a BA in Theatre and
Performance from the University of Cape Town and an MA in Performance Studies from
New York University. Her research follows decolonial movement, drawing on queer,
afectar, and new materialist theory, black studies, and decolonial theory. Her plays have
toured throughout South Africa, and to international festivals and theatres in Italy,
Alemania, Iran, Réunion, Hungary, y los estados unidos. She lives in Brooklyn, where she
makes work with just about anyone she can, but especially her best friend, Lua. In Fall
2018 she will begin the PhD program in Performance Studies at NYU.

What does it mean “to perform,” and what does performance do? Located in the
heart of New York City’s vibrant art scene, The Department of Performance Studies at
NYU is dedicated to the analysis and study of cultural enactments of all kinds, y para
understanding how they can produce meaningful change. Combining an interdisciplinary
range of approaches including feminist and queer theory, critical race theory, and other
modes of analysis, with an equally diverse range of research methods, Actuación
Studies offers graduate and undergraduate students the opportunity to explore and
think critically about the world-making power of performance in theatre, actuación
arte, dance, sound/music, visual and installation art, activism, and online, as well as in the
performance of “everyday life.”

The Department of Performance Studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts was established
en 1980 as the first of its kind, and is ranked #1 for doctoral programs in Theatre and
Performance Studies by the National Research Council.

RMF described itself as a “collective student, staff and worker movement mobilising for direct
action against the institutional racism of UCT” (see Indrajith 2015). As debates raged over what
should be done with the statue, its material form was already engaged in many acts of doing,
as it collided with shit, cloths, trash bags, paint, plywood planks, hazard tape, and climbing and
assembling bodies. These material interactions were far in excess of institutional proceedings.
They unsettled the university’s latently colonial representational order by exposing an entangle-
ment of matter and symbol, history and present.

The emergence of Rhodes Must Fall was felt to be a tipping point, the beginning of a

fraught public reckoning with the failures of South Africa’s “Rainbow Nation” ideals. “Next the
invisible statues” stated one of RMF’s leaders in a televised debate after the statue’s removal
(Big Debate South Africa 2015). In the years that followed, a large student movement known as
Fees Must Fall (FMF) spread across campuses nationwide, taking on the “invisible statues” of
financial exclusion, latent colonialism, and institutional racism. After the widely celebrated suc-
cess of RMF, FMF was met with governmental inertia and partisan manipulation, institutional
suppression, police brutality, and growing public criticism. FMF’s embodied and material prac-
tices (occupations, walk outs, sit-ins, barricades, etc.) were vehemently criticized and used as evi-
dence of a supposed lack of political strategy. In light of this, it is important to consider how a
dismissal of material animacy and action might inscribe protest into racist representational log-
circuitos integrados. To do so I trace the changing material form of the Rhodes statue over the initial month of
RMF protesting. I draw on photographs, video footage, news and social media reports, and my
own memories of this period, during which time I was working in Cape Town, having graduated
from UCT in 2012.

Attending to the material site of the statue raises a number of questions: What was the
Rhodes statue doing at UCT — what work was its presence performing? How was the statue
activated such that after only one month of protest it was expelled from the university? Y, a
expand this into a broader enquiry, how and what might decolonial protest move?

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131

Unsettled Matters

The Overrepresentation of Cecil John Rhodes

The world is nearly all parceled out, and what there is left of it is being divided out, conquered and colonized.
To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds that we can never reach. I would annex
the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.

— Cecil John Rhodes (1902:190)

Rhodes was a fortune hunter turned statesman, known even in his own time for his cruelty and
excesses of ego and ambition. En 1870 he came to South Africa and built his vast fortune in the
frantic exploitation of labor and land that was the Kimberley diamond rush. Amongst his many
excesses, he is remembered for “the outlandish decision to invade and occupy a vast chunk of
Southern Africa which he then named after himself ” — Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) (Nyamnjoh
2016:28). Like many with ambitions of legacy, he turned to education to memorialize himself,
setting up the prestigious Rhodes scholarship, and donating the land on which the University of
Ciudad del Cabo (UCT) was built. Of said construction, Rhodes claimed, “I will build the university
from the stomachs of kaffirs” (in Johnson 1967), marking in chillingly truthful terms the direct
relation between the material architecture of the university, and the brutal subjugation of the
people of South Africa.

Slightly hunched, chin rested on a clenched fist, the Rhodes statue was posed as Rodin’s
The Thinker (1910) — that quintessential figure of modernity’s existential crisis. A self-identified
social Darwinist who devoted his life’s work to extending “the influence of the English-speaking
race” (Rodas 1902:98) in the name of a God whose existence he placed at “a fifty percent
chance” (89), Rhodes embodied the contradictions of the West’s “modern man.” In The Order
of Things, Foucault describes the figure of man as emerging on the cusp of modernity — “only
a recent invention” ([1970] 1994:27) — as the result of a “mutation” in the “arrangements of
knowledge” (397). Through this mutation the newly secular and social Darwinist Western
man came to recognize himself within nature, and yet, in being supposedly alone in recogni-
tion of this, de alguna manera, distinct from nature: simultaneously transcendental subject and empirical
object. This “mutation” enclosed the emergent figure of man permanently within representa-
tion’s existential crisis: the crisis of how he can at once represent The World to himself, mientras
being simultaneously representative of said world. This paradox produced the illusory void
between self and world/other that shapes Western epistemology — a void in which countless
atrocities are committed and permitted. The settler colonialist response to the impossibility of
being simultaneously transcendental subject and empirical object was (es) to build a world out-
side of oneself that is representative of oneself. This was the dream of Rhodes, and of empire
and its war on difference. Encapsulating this dream, the inscription on the statue’s plinth — a
verse from “A Song of the English” by Rudyard Kipling — announced Rhodes’s unfulfilled plan
to build a railway from the Cape to Cairo: “I dream my dream, by rock and heath and pine / De
Empire to the northward. / Ay, one land / From Lion’s Head to Line!” The mountain slopes
behind the university are populated with said pine trees — a sunlight- and water-hogging alien
species introduced by the British, in whose shade indigenous plants cannot grow.

In “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the After Man, es
Overrepresentation — An Argument,” Sylvia Wynter troubles the soils and spoils of Foucault’s
archaeological dig in The Order of Things. She exposes the unearthed skeletons, tightly packed
earth, and teeming mass of life whose uncounted forms surround the scaffolds of Western
modernity’s thought. Wynter’s transnational and transhistorical excavation reveals that Western
modernity’s figure of man is not coincidence, Foucauldian mutation, or by-product. Bastante, es
simultaneously the primary product and facilitator of Western expansion and subjugation of the
“rest” of the world, which is to say, the world itself. The West’s exclusionary and hierarchical
definition of the human emerged with Western expansionism in order to legitimize the subju-
gation of what became deemed “subhuman” life (Wynter 2003:264). Replacing an earlier God/

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Joanna Ruth Evans

Man order, the newly secular
West’s human/subhuman hier-
archy emerged with the pro-
duction of what Aníbal Quijano
names the “idea of race,” which
became “the most effective
tool of domination in the last
500 years” (in Wynter 2003:263).
Wynter’s corrective reveals that
the new descriptive statement
that Foucault named man was,
bastante, White Man: the represen-
tative subject of the human, y
originator of representational
thought about a world of differ-
ently raced and therefore sub-
human objects/others. Wynter
claims that it is through Western
Man’s persistent overrepresen-
tation that an ongoing global
order of inequality and human
and environmental subjugation
is maintained, perpetually orga-
nized around a human/subhu-
man hierarchical binary.

“There is nothing in this
world as invisible as a mon-
umento,” states Robert Musil
([1957] 2006:42). If monumen-
tality produces invisibility, el
monument is built and main-
tained not to become invisible,
but rather to materially acti-
vate and distribute invisibility
as an organizing structure. Para
the university to cohere with the
monumentalized Rhodes in its
midst, certain zones of invisibility had to be maintained: matter could not be seen as active, y
the colonial past could not be seen as present. Like a paperweight, the statue pinned down these
epistemological negations, helping to maintain UCT’s latently colonial representational order.
Its invisibility reproduced the same cleaving of the material from the symbolic as the racialized
human/subhuman hierarchy that produced coloniality. Despite post-apartheid transformation
políticas,1 por 2015 UCT in many ways still served the will of the person whose statue occupied
pride of place at its center. Twenty-one years into South Africa’s democracy the university still

Cifra 2. Cecil John Rhodes posed as “The Thinker.” The statue
held a place of prominence on the University of Cape Town
campus since 1934. (Photo by Danie van der Merwe, courtesy of
Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index
.php?curid=6880780)

1. “Transformation” is the umbrella term used to refer to the redress of racial inequality post-apartheid. UCT’s

stated transformation goals include: “making the university a more representative institution in terms of its aca-
demic and support staff, and of its student body, promoting enhanced intellectual diversity, transcending the idea
of race, improving institutional climate and having an enhanced focus on our intellectual enterprise on African
perspectives” (GroundUp Staff 2015).

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133

Unsettled Matters

felt white, spoke English, had a disproportionately white student and staff body and exclusionary
fees structure, and reproduced Western values of academic mastery.2

Foucault’s assurance is that if the “fundamental arrangements of knowledge” that produced
(Western) Man were to disappear, “one can certainly wager that man would be erased” ([1970]
1994:397). El problema, por supuesto, is that through self-perpetuating overrepresentation Man
continues to reproduce these arrangements, which — though continually updating, recoding,
mutating, and short-circuiting — remain oriented around a human/subhuman organization of
vida, where the category of the Human is afforded via proximity to Western Man. So how to
forestall Western Man’s self-perpetuating descriptive statement? Similarmente, how to make present
an already too-present statue? The task is not merely to critique the figure of Western Man and
all it represents, but to override or unsettle the very epistemologics3 of representation through
which this overrepresentation occurs. It is this overriding of the logics of representation that
hurtles us into the performative, aesthetic, and insurrectionist realms, and necessitates an atten-
dance to the material transformations of the statue.

The Becoming-Matter of Cecil John Rhodes

The black imagination is omni[present],
It is the convergence of all existence based on the experience of blackness
: in a system that does not recognize its existence.

— from “Introductory Poem: The Black Imagination” (Rhodes Must Fall 2015)

The institutional response to the “controversial” monument is, “but what should we do with
él?” This deflects engagement with the pricklier question of, “what is the monument doing?"
To ask this question means engaging with the monument as a material actant.4 The Rhodes
Must Fall protests saw the university attempting to draw students away from the body of the
statue and into the realm of dialectic debate and institutional procedure. And though the stu-
dents engaged intensively (and on their own terms) with these procedures, they also repeatedly
returned to interact with the statue’s material form. These often spontaneous, anonymous, y
seemingly incidental interactions were in excess of the institutionally legible dimension of the
protests: as transformation was debated, the statue itself was already transforming. It was here
that the latently colonial constructs of the representative human subject and materially inani-
mate object imploded.

This implosion began when stone, bronze, and shit collided, as Chumani Maxwele hurled
the full portaloo container onto the statue. He wore black tights and a pink construction hel-
met. Two signs hung over his naked torso: “Exhibit White Arrogance UCT” read the sign on
his front; “Exhibit Black Assimilation UCT” read the sign on his back. Maxwele had brought
the portaloo that morning from the township of Khayelitsha where, in the absence of sanita-
tion services, the government supplies small plastic portable toilets, which “compromise privacy
and produce lingering smells in people’s homes” (Robins 2015). This action was resonant with
the service delivery protests by the Ses’khona People’s Rights movement, who hauled portaloo

2. GroundUp conducted a five-part report on transformation at UCT at the time of the protests. This report covers
student and staff demographics, curriculum issues, and fees and financial exclusion (see GroundUp Staff 2015).

3. I use “epistemologics,” making noun of adjective, to highlight the thingly nature of the epistemological mechanics

that construct not only what is considered logical, but what is considered at all.

4. “Actant” is from Bruno Latour’s “Actor Network Theory” and refers to “literally anything” (es decir., any human or

nonhuman entities) that acts or “is granted to be the source of an action.” The term helps to perceive action and
effect beyond what is instituted by the intervention of individual human subjects (see Latour 1996). Jane Bennett
has also taken up the term in Vibrant Matter, see especially chapter 1, “The Force of Things” (2010:9).

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Joanna Ruth Evans

containers “from the shacks of the urban periphery to Cape Town’s centers of political, cultural
and economic power — the steps of provincial parliament, the Cape Town International Airport,
[y] an upmarket city gallery” (Robins 2015).

Maxwele named the event a “poo shower,” saying, “This poo that we are throwing on the
statue represents the shame of black people. By throwing it on the statue we are throwing our
shame to whites’ affluence” (in Bester 2015). With this action, the Rhodes statue was activated
as the source of not past but current “black shame.” A sudden intimacy emerged between time,
body, y arquitectura, with the soiled statue pulling its surrounds into direct relation. Mientras
the majority of Cape Town’s black population live on the outskirts of the city without access to
basic sanitation services, the leafy suburbs around the university are connected to seamless sew-
erage networks. The mere presence of refuse from the township in these suburbs was an his-
toric event. The legacy of Rhodes’s empire’s ongoing domination became undeniably present,
in the reality of a city so racially segregated that even its shit does not mix.

Much of the news reporting opened with a description of the stench rising up the stairs of

the university. Even the air was refused emptiness and revealed as a thick and visceral inter-
locutor between the statue, the university’s architecture, and the living bodies (and olfactory
senses) occupying the space. All was implicated; nothing was empty. This sudden intimacy of
historical, spatial, and bodily sense collapsed the void that had previously neutralized the stat-
ue’s presence. “Power creates emptiness. Emptiness attracts power,” write the French collec-
tivo, The Invisible Committee, “leaving the paradigm of government means starting politically
from the opposite hypothesis. There is no empty space, everything is inhabited” (The Invisible
Committee 2015:79).

This might have been a small, isolated, and barely witnessed incident — but the smell spread.

Inserted into the prestigious, hallowed zone of the university, the abjectness of this material
was simultaneously impossible to ignore, and impossible to reconcile: a generative contra-
diction. The viscerality of the shit both demanded and repelled engagement, as is evidenced
in the manner in which public discourse simultaneously obsessed over the shit and wished
it away. Repeatedly it was treated as contingent to the “larger issue,” and public debate cir-
cled around the legitimacy of the protests despite the abjectness of the instigating material.
The university’s official statement emphasized their encouragement of “freedom of expres-
sion” and “open debate,” but condemned as “reprehensible” and “unacceptable” the throw-
ing of shit (in Nyamnjoh 2016:72), ignoring that it was precisely this that had produced the
newfound urgency to respond to the statue’s presence. The inability to recognize the material
collision of shit and statue as a political actant rendered materiality as contingent upon tem-
porality: positioning the protests as an inevitable progression of a contemporary present, y
their objects (statue, shit, bodies) as passive representations of this progression. This perception
imagined empty objects within a linear present, objects that were animated only via the narra-
tion of Western Man. Within these temporal logics, the material activation of the statue was
eclipsed by what the institution deems its merely “symbolic” significance as a representative of a
finite history.

This portrayal of history as finite and only symbolically accessible is part of an exclusionary

temporal logic within South Africa, and under global neoliberalism more generally. Wynter’s
human/subhuman hierarchy could be seen to distribute itself around the representation of the
temporal such that the human (Western Man) is attributed a full and living present, mientras que la
subhuman is relegated to a past that can be mourned but never redeemed, and a future that is
always yet to come. This state of continual deferral is maintained through the overrepresen-
tation of Western Man’s conception of time, which comes to be the descriptive statement of
temporality: namely that of an empty present in which man imbues all that he touches and per-
ceives (all that he represents to himself) with contemporaneity, while that which he cannot (o
no lo hará) touch or perceive is rendered nonexistent. The epistemologics of contemporaneity
become what Christopher Pinney describes as “the most powerful trope of homogenous empty

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135

Unsettled Matters

time” (2005:264). This homogenous, temporal void permits the ceaseless deferral of atten-
dance to the material reality of precarious life. It suppresses the multiple, cusping potentiali-
ties of the dense and dangerous nonhomogeneous and noncontemporaneous present, en el cual
each moment and matter holds the potential for the emergence of a new politic, an upheaval, un
insurrection, or a redistribution of the sensible.5

The image that proliferated through print and web captures the yellow-brown liquid in

the moment it is air-bound. On the plinth, an abstract shape has appeared: the shadow of
the oncoming shit. Jonathan Jansen, chancellor at the University of the Free State, dismissed
the action as “crude,” claiming that Rhodes Must Fall was “not in fact a movement. fue un
moment” (in Fairbanks 2015). This cleaving of the emergent “moment” from the political
“movement” reveals the petrification of representational epistemologics in the face of a dense
and nonhomogeneous present. Ironically, this statement finds its self-validation in a democ-
racy founded by the highly organized anti-apartheid movement, which has been so thor-
oughly monumentalized into the national descriptive statement that we forget that it too
comprised a multitude of emergent moments. It took materiality’s strange torque to unsettle
this monumentalized notion of political action and implode the historical movement into the
precarious present.

The generation who grew with the “new” country knows what it is to live in a temporal void:

in the stagnating present of a simultaneously bloody and bloodless revolution that, in the end,
does not end, but slows to an almost imperceptible pace. When students of this generation say
that they are still living under apartheid, what would it be to understand this not as a metaphor?
What are the representational logics that render apartheid an event of the finite past? And what
does it take to disrupt these logics, such that the void of a homogenous contemporaneity erupts
into many and multiple temporalities — many living pasts and historical presents — all of which
might be ethically addressed? In an implosion of linear time into matter, the waste-product
of shit became politically productive. The shit that was expelled from the body as waste — as
devoid of value — and itself expelled by bodies treated by the state as devoid of value, began to
generate. The generative effects of the shit’s very actual, very material presence collapsed the
institution’s progressive logics of gradual transformation, and its sanitization and containment
of history.

Soon after the shit was thrown, the Rhodes Must Fall movement erupted into the pub-
lic eye. Over the next few weeks the university scrambled to hail the statue in from the unset-
tling realm of abject materiality, to the seemingly stable, representational realm of rhetorical
debate. No longer able to contain the event of the shit to the act of “an individual” (Klopper in
UCT Media 2015) as their initial statement had claimed, the university began positioning the
growing intensity as a democratic positivity of its representational structures (Newsroom 2015).
According to the logics of these structures, the sudden urgency of Rhodes’s presence and what
it revealed of the latent coloniality of the university might have been resolved through policy
debate. By the promise of this political logic, what is presentable, what UCT historian Rebecca
Hodes termed “empirical facts” and “reasoned arguments” (Hodes 2015), becomes increasingly
overrepresented, while that which is unrepresentable (black pain and anger, the historical pres-

5. Jacques Rancière speaks of the “distribution of the sensible” as “a generally implicit law that defines the forms of
partaking by first defining the modes of perception in which they are inscribed.” Participation in the commons
is dependent upon power’s distribution of what is perceptible, sensible, legible etc. A “redistribution of the sen-
sible” is the moment of political emergence in which these terms are unsettled, and the conditions for inclusion/
partaking are thereby shifted. At UCT, this redistribution happened not at the level of institutional policy, pero,
foremost, in the realm of the sensory — through an unsettling of what could be sensed, and thereby what was
thought to make sense (see Rancière [2010] 2015:44).

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Joanna Ruth Evans

ent, matter’s animacy) is exiled to the surrounds of politics proper.6 But as UCT abstracted
the experience of institutional racism into the realm of policy debate, students returned to the
material site of its systemic production.

After a mass debate held on Jameson Plaza on 12 Marzo 2015, a small group of students

once more materialized Rhodes’s body. A dusky photograph shows students standing pre-
cariously on the plinth’s ledge, pulling sheets over the body: first white, then red (the tradi-
tional colors of isiXhosa funerals). The form changes: Rhodes’s great bulk is measured anew
by the size and softness of the sheets, taking on a stooping, clergical quality. There is a ritual-
istic clarity and aesthetic simplicity to this action of concealing, marking, altering, and soften-
En g. Having been materially activated by the shit — its presence surfacing into the politics of the
university — the statue can no longer remain as it once was. Rhodes must fall, but he must also
be felt. Like a body being prepared for burial or embalmment, the statue cannot simply be dis-
posed of, or swept under the carpet of institutional bureaucracy. Neatly cut strips of blank paper
are pasted over the name and inscription on the plinth, burning brightly on the greying stone.
The whiteness of the cloth and the paper is not the whiteness of latent colonialism’s false neu-
trality, or the sanitization of history. It is an anticipatory white: not blank, but ready.

This material excess to institutional proceedings is contextualized within a post-1994 South

Africa in which the material is itself in excess of democratic transformation. With the disman-
tling of apartheid and the transition to the democratically elected, black-majority governance
of the African National Congress in 1994, South Africa’s legislature was transformed and a new
constitution (one of the world’s most progressive) was adopted. Moral accountability was redis-
tributed via the Truth and Reconciliation hearings.7 However, these legislative and symbolic
transformations were unaccompanied by a significant redistribution of wealth and land, dirigir-
ing Achille Mbembe to name South Africa, “the only country on Earth in which a revolution
took place which resulted in not one single former oppressor losing anything” (Mbembe 2015).
From Dutch and British settler colonialism’s invasion of land; to imperialism’s extraction of
wealth and exploitation of labor; to the apartheid state’s exiling of South Africa’s black popula-
tions not only to the surrounds of citizenship (via disenfranchisement and segregationist legis-
lature) but to the geographical surrounds of the land itself (to the very edges of cities, or to the
small and arid “indigenous homelands”), the history of South African governance is a history
of state-executed exploitation and theft of land and people. En 1994, the democratically elected
African National Congress, inheriting the apartheid state’s debt, had little choice but to adopt a
neoliberal economic policy counter to their ideals. “The South African case is particularly trou-
bling,” writes David Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalism:

Emerging in the midst of all of the hopes generated out of the collapse of apartheid
and desperate to reintegrate into the global economy, it was partly persuaded and partly
coerced by the IMF and the World Bank to embrace the neoliberal line, with the predict-
able result that economic apartheid now broadly confirms the racial apartheid that pre-
ceded it. (2005:40)

6. For more on the “surround” to politics see “Politics Surrounded,” in Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s The

Undercommons. They open this chapter with a spatial metaphor of the colonial laager as the field of operation
for majoritarian political control and distributions of power. Outside of the laager is “the surround” — the realm
of minoritarian dissent, world-building, planificación, and simply staying alive. Under the myth of self-defense,
the laager continues to invade, co-opt and repurpose the space of the surround. Politics therefore is an “ongo-
ing attack on the common — the general and generative antagonism — from within the surround” (Harney and
Moten 2013:17).

7. For a brief overview of this transition period, see “The Transition in Context” in Book 6: Negotiation, Transition

and Freedom by Christopher Saunders (Saunders 2004).

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137

Unsettled Matters

The blatant material dispossession of colonial and apartheid rule has been eclipsed by “dem-
ocratic” neoliberalism, which perpetuates this same dispossession via the wealth accumulation
of the economic elite, but now under the liberatory guise of “individual entrepreneurial free-
doms” (2) and private property rights. As wealth and land remained consolidated around the
(now slightly racially diversified) economic elite, the promise of land and wealth redistribution
was written out of South Africa’s democratic imaginary.8 The realm of the material is therefore
in excess of democratic governance, even as the government hitches itself to material promises.
In its perpetual deferral of redistribution, the “new Democracy” functions via an avoidance of
the material; a void within which the elite accumulate vast material excess. This void — between
the perpetually lagging democratic promise and the lived urgency of materially precarious
lives — produces a cynical fallacy at the heart of the social in South Africa, and under neoliber-
alism globally. This hypocrisy continues to be deemed the only possible state of affairs, legiti-
mated by the overrepresentation of the global hegemony of neoliberal logic (the new discourse
of Western Man), such that it has “become incorporated into the common-sense way many of
us interpret, live in, and understand the world” (harvey 2005:3). So pervasive are the logics of
private ownership that the repeated justification for the presence of Rhodes’s statue was that he
donated the land and money for the university, negating that it is the very fact and conditions of
this “ownership” that mark his presence as brutal.

In the microcosm of UCT, the material transformations of the statue reveal the entangle-
ment of matter and rhetoric that representational epistemologics conceal. De hecho, more than an
entanglement, they reveal that the rhetorical itself is always already material, and that any illu-
sion otherwise is a void of power’s functioning. At a transformation debate on 16 Marzo 2015,
the deputy vice chancellor’s opening statement attempted to cleave the material cite from dia-
lectic rationalism: “The events of the past week cannot be taken out of the equation, but it is
crucial that we leave this meeting with confidence of what a university is all about — a space
that is fundamentally about position, counter-position, argument and counter-argument” (en
Farber 2017). According to this logic, the “events” of the statue’s re-materialization are tangen-
tial to the representational debate that a university is all about; once more, the university’s coher-
ence depends on making matter contingent upon representation. The SRC president, Ramabina
Mahapa, walked out of this meeting, stating, “We can no longer breathe. The winds of change
are blowing through UCT […] You revolt when you can no longer breathe, and we can no lon-
ger breathe. We have reached an impasse with management at requesting transformation and
this university cannot continue [as if it is] business as usual” (in Farber 2015). This invocation of
breath — of the actual sensation of suffocation — evokes the intimate relation between the mate-
rial and psychic environment of the university and the bodies occupying it. Under these condi-
ciones, the recourse to UCT’s procedural protocols becomes somewhat ridiculous; how can one
debate when one cannot breathe?9

That Sunday, after the debate, the statue transformed once more. On the sports fields
below Rhodes, the Cape Epic cycle race was celebrating the finish of its first stage. The Cape
Epic, with its promotional banners, flags, and kiosks, was overshadowed by the improvisa-
tory assemblage of the protest, with its bedsheet banners, spray paint, and black plastic trash
bags. Students wrapped the statue in a patchwork quilt of these bags, secured with packing
tape and string. On its back were pages with the words “RHODES MUST FALL” (a “kick me”
sign taped to an unsuspecting back). The suffocating environment referenced by Mahapa con-

8. En 2018, speeding up land reform has come to the forefront of the political agenda (see Roelff 2018).

9. “I can’t breathe” has flown from the pages of Fanon (see Fanon [1952] 2008:12), to the lips of Eric Garner

caught in a police headlock, to the Black Lives Matter movement, and to the University of Cape Town. This cry
is not now a metaphor, now a desperate plea for bodily survival, now a political rallying call, and now an institu-
tional critique; es, from the moment of its utterance, all of these.

138

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Joanna Ruth Evans

gealed in the form of the black plastic bags engulfing the body of the statue (could Rhodes
breathe under there?). The plastic is synthetic, cheap, and potentially suffocating, but it is also
soft, durable, and black — a new epidermis for the transforming body of the statue. Rhodes was
simultaneously blackened and marked as disposable — and the more black the statue became,
the sooner the institution would move to dispose of it. This altered form, this new materializa-
ción, began to act on Rhodes’s
temporality and futurity. De
the imperceptibly slow time of
bronze, stone, and monumental-
ized history, the statue was now
revealed to be in intimate rela-
tion with the university’s pres-
ent: over the next few days its
form gradually altered for all to
ver, as the plastic shredded and
scattered in the wind, until only
one long strip was left billowing
from the head. Mahapa’s “winds
of change” metaphor, cual
had already been embodied
through the invocation of breath
and suffocation, now material-
ized through this interplay of
wind and plastic. The trash bags
marked Rhodes as hyperbolically
disposable: imagine a future in
which the colonial order could
be hauled off by a waste removal
truck — what dump would be
big enough, and far enough?
Within a couple of weeks, en un
self-manifesting entanglement
of metaphor and matter, Rodas
would indeed be driven away on
just such a truck.

Cifra 3. The statue after students wrapped it in a patchwork quilt
of trash bags secured with packing tape and string, and the words
“RHODES MUST FALL,” March 2015. (Photo by Rodger Bosch)

This turn to the site of the

Cifra 4. The statue covered in black trash bags and tape with
Table Mountain in the background, Marzo 2015. (Photo by
Rodger Bosch)

statue to unsettle latent colo-
nial power came after decades
of transformation debates,
both nationally and within the
university. The realm of rep-
resentative politics was not not
engaging with transformation; but this was not where, En realidad, colonial power was situated, o
where change could emerge. The protesting students knew from the national phenomenon of
South Africa’s partial democracy that colonial power’s survival was inscribed in the architec-
tural construction of the material world. The Invisible Committee describe contemporary polit-
ical movements’ tendency to take on material structures as revealing an “intuition” about the
nature of power under global neoliberalism: “Contemporary power is of an architectural and
impersonal nature […] Anyone who means to undertake anything whatsoever against the exist-
ing world must start from there: the real power structure is the material, technological, físico
organization of this world” ([2014] 2015:85).

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139

Unsettled Matters

On 29 Marzo 2015, in a material recoding of the funerary rites evoked by the earlier white
and red cloths, UCT erected a coffin around Rhodes: a plywood cube that looked about to tum-
ble down the stairs. This attempt to restore a perceptual void around the statue reveals just how
present it had become. In UCT’s report to the provincial Heritage Council proposing the stat-
ue’s permanent removal, Ashly Lillie writes, “It is an uninspired work that was derived directly
from Rodin’s highly acclaimed Thinker. It therefore not only lacks originality, but also has very
limited aesthetic merit” (Lillie 2015). The overrepresentation of Rhodes, emphasized by the
proliferation of The Thinker’s pose, had become suddenly too present, too blatantly evident:
unsettlingly so.

Pero, by that point, the statue was no longer exactly Rhodes as he once was. The risk that
the statue now presented to the university was not only its animate presence, but also its con-
stant state of transformation. One could not know what form it would take next; it might no
longer act in the university’s best interests. The statue had become responsive, entering into
direct relation with those who were most attendant to it: the student protestors. This relation
of responsivity with its social environment made it antithetical to the lag of institutional pro-
cedure and immaterialized democracy. After one month of material-becomings with the many
interventions and improvisations of student protestors, it was no longer the stabilizing force of
an overrepresented colonial epistemology. It no longer represented and reproduced the latently
colonial epistemological voids of deactualized symbolism, empty contemporaneity, and inani-
mate matter. Bastante, the statue was becoming the materialized intensity of an emergent black
radicality. In its proliferating transformations, its imploding temporalities and symbolisms,
its responsivity to affect, the frantic looping of its changing image through media, mente, y
moment, the statue had become the nexus of something like popular, endogenous epistemol-
ojos, as described by Francis B. Nyamnjoh: “Far from subscribing to rigid dichotomies, pop-
ular epistemologies build bridges between the so-called natural and supernatural, physical and
metafísico, rational and irrational, objective and subjective” (2012:131). The statue’s mutat-
ing matter had itself become this bridge. It was a zone of mobility between past and present, rhe-
torical and actualized; what Deleuze and Guattari name a “line of becoming.” They describe
this line as “a zone of proximity and indiscernibility, a no-man’s-land, a nonlocalizable relation
sweeping up the two distant or contiguous points, carrying one into the proximity of the other”
([1980] 1987:293). Precisely because of the between-ness of this bridging role, the statue was no
longer contingent upon, nor co-optable by, any one fixed interpretation, ideology, or epistemol-
ogia. It was instead drawing all possible functions into a “deterritorialized” relation. This deter-
ritorializing function meant that, far from serving the majoritarian power of latently colonial
epistemology, the statue was, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms “becoming-minoritarian,” as it
was becoming-matter (293).

On 9 Abril, the day of the removal, Rhodes was enclosed in a high wire fence and sur-
rounded by a sea of bodies. The architecture was overcome by a rising wave up the Jameson
steps — students singing, climbing lampposts, ululating, chanting in disjointed unity, cellphones
craning, a drone in flight overhead. The crowd hummed with that communal affect of being
within history, and within a moment; eso es, before it has solidified into its representable form.
Rodas, who now had bright orange paint streaked across his eyes, was harnessed with green
ropes and rigged to a crane. The intensity continued to build, until the statue, it seemed, era
ejected by the intensity of the crowd. O (more cynically put), the university pulled the plug,
finally flushing the shit that started this all. Even as Rhodes rose up, the crowd continued to
chant, “Rhodes Must Fall, Rhodes Must Fall.”

Rodas, in the end, did not fall, but floated. Or rather, the statue’s falling was a flight of
sorts, perhaps a fleeing. Disjointed from the stone plinth, Rhodes became, quite literally, a base-
less ideology. The statue spun slowly on its ropes, locating unseen vistas with its hazard-orange
gaze. “In popular systems of knowledge,” writes Nyamnjoh, “the opposite or complement of
presence is not necessarily absence, but that which is beyond the power of the senses to render

140

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Joanna Ruth Evans

Cifra 5. The Rhodes statue is suspended in mid-air as a crane lifts it into falling-flight, 9 Abril 2015.
(Photo by Micha Serraf, hello@thecapetownphotographer.com)

observable” (2012:132). En el
moments of Rhodes’s falling-
flight, the dichotomy of presence
and absence imploded. Intensity
shifted from the statue’s body
to the space of its absence: el
empty plinth. For a moment
the plinth remained empty,
and a deep hole — a void — was
revealed at its center. Entonces
the fence was broken and peo-
ple streamed in to occupy the
plinth. Behind them, Rhodes was
secured to the back of a truck.
A student climbed the truck
and attempted to cover the stat-
ue’s face, releasing the surrounds
from its unseeing gaze.

Cifra 6. The statue being secured to a truck for removal, 9 Abril
2015. (Photo by Sipho Mpongo)

Days after the statue’s removal, a dark shadow spread from the base of the empty plinth,
descending the full flight of stairs, ending in a stooped shoulder, a curved head resting in the
crook of a fist. Spray painted anonymously overnight, each distinguishable stroke hashes out the
moments of its making. While the plinth has since been boxed in plywood, the shadow has not
been scrubbed away.

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141

Unsettled Matters

Sylvia Wynter’s claim that the overrepresentation of Western Man is the struggle of our
time holds a double imperative: to unsettle the West’s exclusionary descriptive statement of
the Human (es decir., of itself), and to establish autonomy for the plurality of humans “ourselves.”
This autonomy necessarily needs to be sought beyond the assumption “that the mode of being
in which we now are (have socialized/inscripted ourselves to be) is isomorphic with the being
of being human itself in its multiple self-inscripting, auto-instituting modalities” (Wynter
2003:132). Understanding Rhodes’s falling-flight as both an unsettling of Western Man and an
emergence of endogenous epistemology, gives a clue as to the nature of the autonomy Wynter
calls on. Namely, that it has no one “nature.” If “the being of being human” is “in its multi-
ple self-inscripting, auto-instituting modalities,” then autonomy from power’s stratifications
and overrepresentations is found (insomuch as it is never “found”) within perpetual inven-
ción, improvisation, and responsivity. As soon as the unsettling is thought to be done, settle-
ment returns — perhaps in a different guise, but nonetheless sedimenting into familiar patterns
of overrepresentation. The decolonial motion that I see emerging through Rhodes Must Fall
is one of perpetual unsettling via the multiple re-turns to transform the statue. I want to con-
sider this re-turning as a choreography of decolonial movement: a turning motion that attends

as it unsettles. It is a turning
that takes in the full vista, refus-
ing the fixed mark of Rhodes’s
metallic gaze, and its petrifica-
tion of past, persona, world, y
the knowable.

In Matter and Memory Henri

Bergson writes that “there
is in matter something more
than, but not something differ-
ent from, that which is actually
given” (2005:71). This “more
than” is no mystical phenome-
non. Bastante, it is matter’s insis-
tent excess beyond the division
of self from world, subject from
object, animate from inanimate,
and human from nonhuman
vida. This “more than” quality
could be described, in Stefano
Harney and Fred Moten’s terms,
as “torque” (2013:52). Neither
the force, nor the object, pero el
spin, torque is always unpredict-
able and in excess of its parts.
Harney and Moten attribute
torque to blackness, to fugitiv-
idad, to that which is anoriginary to governance, and which leaves governance, por lo tanto, always
on the back foot: always reactive, never creative (2013:52). It is this torque, this “more than,"
that colonial power voids in its representation of matter, and materially precarious life, as imma-
terial. It is also this torque that sets off an unfurling of invention: of shit colliding with metal,
draping blankets, windblown bags, el (im)possibility of weightless bronze, absent-presence,
and falling-flight.

Cifra 7. The fading graffiti shadow of Rhodes descending the stairs
from the base of the plinth, cual, after three years, remains boxed
in gray plywood, Abril 2018. (Photo by L. evans)

142

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