Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race

by Reni Eddo-Lodge

colonial businessman Cecil Rhodes on their university campus. As well as founding mining company De Beers Consolidated Mines (eventually diamond purveyors De Beers), Cecil Rhodes played a key part in expanding the British Empire in South Africa, based on the belief that the British were ‘the finest race in the world’. His colonial project displaced Africans from their land. The country we now know as Zimbabwe was once named Rhodesia, after Rhodes. The country’s citizens attempted to resist British rule, and paid with their lives. For many, Rhodes was the father of South African apartheid. When he lived in Britain, he attended Oxford’s Oriel College, and a statue of him still stands there today. It was in 2015 that students studying at the university let it be known loud and clear that they wanted that statue gone.