A white South African student who successfully campaigned to have a statue of the 19th century British businessman Cecil Rhodes torn down has won a place to study at Oxford University – as a Rhodes scholar.
Joshua Nott, 23, was a driving force in the Rhodes Must Fall movement in South Africa which lobbied to have a statue of Rhodes removed from Cape Town University in 2015, believing it to be a sign of white oppression.
Now he has won a Rhodes scholarship worth almost £40,000 ($50,000) from the educational fund established in Rhodes’s will when he died in 1902. It is considered one of the world’s most prestigious educational awards. Bill Clinton is among thousands of previous Rhodes scholars.
Thanks to Rhodes, Nott will study postgraduate law at Oxford.
Although a Rhodes Must Fall campaign has also been established at Oxford – whose aim is to remove Rhodes’s statue from Oriel College – it has so far failed.
Nott, who grew up in Johannesburg and was privately educated, compared the statue of Rhodes in Cape Town to a “a swastika in Jerusalem” and has called the statue of Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford “perverse”.
Accord to the Daily Mail, Nott said he would “never toast Cecil John Rhodes” but claimed he would not join the Rhodes Must Fall movement there.
His biography on the Rhodes Trust website, which runs the scholarship, does not mention this activism but says he “pioneered a number of workers’ rights and student focused initiatives”.
However, during his time at university Cape Town, Nott was apparently so involved in the campaign to remove Rhodes’s statue that he used radio broadcasts to state Rhodes “has a history of brutality to his name.”
Rhodes studied at Oxford in the 1870s, founded the De Beers diamond company in southern Africa and was Prime Minister of the Cape Colony. The Rhodes Trust awards 95 Oxford scholarships each year to foreign students who “demonstrate a strong propensity to emerge as leaders”.
