On January 21, 2016, Rhodes Scholar Ntokozo Qwabe, a South African law student, rose to speak at the Oxford Union debate on whether Cecil Rhodes's statue should remain at Oriel College. Rhodes, the nineteenth-century British mining magnate who extracted wealth from southern Africa using forced labor, endowed the Rhodes Scholarship in 1902 explicitly to "further the British Empire" and cultivate leaders spreading what he called Anglo-Saxon dominance. His statue has stood at Oriel College since 1911 and his scholarships remain among the world's most prestigious.
Before Qwabe could begin his prepared remarks, he had to address what he called "the backlash against me particularly because I am on the Rhodes scholarship." Critics across British media had attacked him for days. The Guardian quoted an Oxford alumnus who called Qwabe's position "the height of hypocrisy." A member of Parliament tweeted: "If Cecil Rhodes is so offensive, give back the scholarship." The Times ran a profile of Qwabe's father, a retired school caretaker in rural KwaZulu-Natal, emphasizing that Qwabe had grown up herding cattle. The implication was clear: he should be grateful, not biting the hand that fed him. One commenter told him to "go back to the continent," invoking, as Qwabe put it, "the same tropes that basically the likes of Rhodes did."
The critics treat Qwabe's position as a contradiction: either accept the money and honor Rhodes, or reject both. But Qwabe responded: "I will not be told that I am a hypocrite for taking money that was stolen from my people." The Rhodes Must Fall movement, which began at the University of Cape Town in 2015 calling for the decolonization of education, emerged precisely because decolonization cannot happen from outside colonial institutions. Students at formerly colonial universities inhabit buildings, curricula, and degree-granting systems built by colonialists using extracted wealth. The movement asks what happens when you occupy compromised ground and speak anyway.
The intensity of the backlash reveals what Oxford wants to hide: the Scholarship and the statue come from the same source, honor the same man, and are funded by the same violence. Oxford's institutional response demonstrates this separation strategy. When Rhodes Must Fall protests intensified, Oxford kept the scholarships running while forming committees to "contextualize" the statue, eventually retaining it with added plaques. The scholarship functions as reputation laundering: it allows Oxford to benefit from Rhodes's colonial wealth while positioning itself as progressive through its "diverse" scholar cohort. But Qwabe's presence as a Rhodes Scholar arguing Rhodes Must Fall makes this contradiction visible. Oxford cannot partially honor Rhodes and benefit from his wealth while claiming to reject his racism.
What Grammar Teaches Us About Power
Robin Wall Kimmerer's meditation on Potawatomi grammar offers an unexpected lens for understanding what Qwabe does. Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist, describes in "Learning the Grammar of Animacy" the experience of learning her ancestral language. She struggles with the Potawatomi's verb-heavy structure, which expresses concepts that are nouns or adjectives in English. She encounters wiikwegama – "to be a bay." A bay, she thought, is a noun: a geographic feature, a thing. In English, saying "it is a bay" treats water as an object fixed between shores, contained by the word. But in Potawatomi, "to be a bay" treats water as acting, as choosing.
Kimmerer writes: "To be a bay holds the wonder that for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise." The verb form recognizes possibility. The water could flow to the ocean, could evaporate, could become a stream.
This grammatical difference is ontological: it distinguishes between treating something as a fixed object versus an active being capable of choice. This difference, Kimmerer argues, has ethical consequences. "When we tell them that the tree is not a 'who,' but an 'it,' we make that maple an object, we put a barrier between us. We set it outside our circle of ethical concern." If the maple is "it," you can cut it without thought. If the maple is "she," if she is actively maple-ing, you hesitate. The verb creates relationship, therefore responsibility.
From Noun to Verb
This grammatical insight illuminates what Qwabe does at Oxford. The institution treats "Rhodes Scholar" as a noun, a fixed identity conferring specific obligations. The Rhodes Trust describes scholars as embodying the values Rhodes himself held dear: leadership, moral character, public service. The category assumes gratitude, defines what you are and what you owe.
But when Qwabe stands as "Rhodes Scholar" arguing Rhodes Must Fall, he breaks this mold. He is not confined by the category but acting through it. He is Rhodes Scholaring, and he is Rhodes Scholaring against Rhodes. The noun becomes a verb. He explains: "Those of us from southern Africa who take the money of the Rhodes scholarship do so because we are here for change. We are here to take back the money. We are here to at least have some dignity that we take away from that undignifying dispossession and plunder that the likes of Rhodes committed on the continent." The category does what it was never designed to do: not honoring Rhodes but indicting him, not celebrating the empire but demanding reparations. As Qwabe puts it: "We can NEVER be 'hypocrites' for taking back crumbs of the colonial loot of Rhodes and his colonial cronies."
Treating "Rhodes Scholar" as a verb rather than a noun changes the ethical relationship. Just as Kimmerer argues that calling the maple "it" places it "outside our circle of ethical concern," treating "Rhodes Scholar" as a fixed noun creates an ethical relationship of debt. The scholar is what Rhodes made possible; therefore the scholar owes Rhodes honor, or at minimum silence. But treating it as a verb, as action the scholar performs, opens the question of how that action unfolds and toward what ends. Qwabe insists: "I think this idea that money can somehow buy our silence is exactly what the problem is. This is exactly what we are confronting." He Rhodes Scholars toward different ends than the Rhodes Trust expects. The category cannot contain what he does with it.
The Problem of Colonial Language
Jamaica Kincaid, the Antigua-born writer whose work examines Caribbean colonial history, confronts a parallel bind in "In History." Taking up gardening in Vermont, she finds herself forced to use Latin botanical names like "Eupatorium" despite resenting their colonial origins. She prefers common names, but Latin names structure the entire field. To garden seriously requires accepting them. Here, Kimmerer's insight about language becomes Kincaid's lived constraint: verb-based animacy in Potawatomi imagines relationships that English grammar forecloses, but Kincaid cannot access alternative naming systems. She must use the colonizer's taxonomy or remain outside botanical discourse entirely.
Carl Linnaeus created the binomial system in the eighteenth century while working for George Clifford, a director of the Dutch East India Company. This history is often softened, she notes, hiding the fact that Clifford directed the violent extraction of resources from colonized lands. Linnaeus named plants in Clifford's greenhouses, plants taken from Java, Ceylon, the Cape of Good Hope. The scientific names carry this history whether botanists acknowledge it or not.
Kincaid writes: "In almost every account of an event that has taken place sometime in the last five hundred years, there is always a moment when I feel like placing an asterisk somewhere in its text, and at the end of this official story place my own addition." She has just placed that asterisk. When she now writes "Eupatorium," readers see Clifford's greenhouse, the Company, the ships, and the violence.
Both Kincaid and Qwabe operate within systems they critique, exposing what institutions want hidden. But the mechanisms differ. Kincaid adds historical context to existing categories. "Eupatorium" still refers to the same plant; she expands what readers know about the name but cannot change how taxonomy functions. Qwabe, however, transforms what "Rhodes Scholar" can mean. By using the scholarship to condemn Rhodes, he makes the category do something it was designed to prevent. Kincaid adds a footnote while Qwabe tries to redefine the category itself.
Living in the Contradiction
Kincaid never resolves her opening question: "What to call the thing that happened to me and all who look like me? Should I call it history?" This refusal to settle does work. As long as the question remains unresolved, readers cannot forget that language is inadequate, preventing them from treating "history" as neutral or sufficient. Qwabe creates similar openness. His position, neither grateful beneficiary nor pure outsider, forces Oxford to confront what it wants closed: Can Rhodes be honored partially? Oxford wants to celebrate his philanthropy while acknowledging his "problematic" views, to keep the scholarships while adding "context" plaques. But every time Qwabe speaks as Rhodes Scholar against Rhodes, he reopens the question. The contradiction becomes visible again.
The risk in this argument is romanticizing Qwabe's position, as though occupying colonial categories from within offers an easy path to decolonization. It does not. Kincaid captures the exhaustion of this position when she describes learning Latin names: "The threads in my brain were all knotted and the harder I tried the tighter the knots became." Using colonial categories requires constant negotiation with their violent histories. The work is never complete. Kincaid still writes "Eupatorium" even after placing her asterisk. Qwabe still accepts Rhodes's money even as he argues Rhodes Must Fall. The scholarship continues. But what else is available?
The Illusion of Choice
The question "How can you take his money and demand his erasure?" assumes that Qwabe possesses real choice. He could refuse the Rhodes Scholarship and speak from outside Oxford. But from outside he would have no platform at the Oxford Union, no power to force the institution to confront its own contradictions. Rhodes's influence shaped southern African education systems and access to universities worldwide. Refusing the scholarship does not escape Rhodes's influence; it only reduces power to challenge it.
The critics want Qwabe silent or absent. They want him either grateful, thus legitimating Rhodes, or gone, thus invisible. What they cannot accept is Qwabe Rhodes Scholaring: using Rhodes's name to dismantle his reputation, thereby refusing the very terms of the choice the institution offers. As he writes in his Facebook response to critics: "Oxford is as much MY institution as anyone else. So called 'British institutions' were built and have continued to be sustained on the colonial plunder of MY resources, and on the labour of MY people who were enslaved. These are OUR institutions and we have every right to challenge them to change."
Making the Invisible Visible
Kimmerer writes that Potawatomi grammar constitutes "a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, for the life that pulses through all things." The language makes visible what English obscures: that water acts, that plants choose, that the world is full of beings rather than objects. What Qwabe does is similar: he makes visible what Oxford's language obscures. "Rhodes Scholar" in institutional usage treats Rhodes's wealth as a neutral resource available for "good" purposes like education. The institution wanted to use Qwabe, a Black South African student benefiting from Rhodes's "generosity", as evidence that Rhodes's legacy transcends his racism. Qwabe refuses this use. His presence proves that Rhodes's legacy is Rhodes's racism, and benefiting from colonial wealth does not require honoring colonialism.
The work of Rhodes Scholaring, of occupying colonial categories while refusing their categorization, is work without end. It does not resolve. Kincaid asks her opening question again at the essay's close: "what to call the thing that happened to me and all who look like me? Should I call it history?" The repetition shows the question cannot be answered with existing language. But the inability to answer does not mean inability to act. Kincaid gardens. She uses Latin names while revealing their origins. She writes essays that place asterisks in official histories. Qwabe accepts the scholarship, speaks at Oxford, and argues for the statue's removal. He Rhodes Scholars without letting "Rhodes Scholar" define him. The category breaks under pressure of what he makes it do, revealing that colonial categories were never as stable as institutions pretended. If "Rhodes Scholar" can mean what Qwabe makes it mean, other transformations become thinkable. The water could do otherwise. The scholar is doing otherwise. The verb opens futures the noun foreclosed.
Citations
- Ali, Aftab. "Ntokozo Qwabe: Student Who Accused Oxford of Propping-up 'Existence of Systemic Racism' Says He Is 'Tired' of Being Asked Why He Goes to the University." The Independent, 31 Dec. 2015, Link .
- d'Ancona, Matthew. "Must Rhodes Fall?" The New York Times, 28 Jan. 2016, Link .
- Khomami, Nadia. "Oxford Scholars Reject Hypocrisy Claims amid Row over Cecil Rhodes Statue." The Guardian, 13 Jan. 2016, Link .
- Kimmerer, Robin Wall. "Learning the Grammar of Animacy." Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Milkweed Editions, 2013, pp. 48–59.
- Kincaid, Jamaica. "In History." Callaloo, vol. 24, no. 2, Spring 2001, pp. 620–26.
- Maclean, Ruth. "Global Notoriety Has Not Reached Scholar's Village." The Times, 16 Jan. 2016, Link .
- Oxford Union. "Must Rhodes Fall? | Full Debate | Oxford Union." YouTube, 21 Jan. 2016, Link .
- Oxford Union. "Ntokozo Qwabe | I Am Not a Hypocrite | Rhodes Debate." YouTube, 20 Jan. 2016, Link .