part of no part

The Mass Media has been alive with reporting on the Rhodes Must Fall protests and have on the face of it been a valuable source of information which has served to not only educate the broader public but also to spread the spirit of the protest to other universities both within South Africa and abroad. The vital role of the media has been reaffirmed and welcomed as the discourse between the old and the new, the Eurocentric and the Afrocentric, the progressives and conservatives and the liberals and radicals has been provided with increasing space within the pages of the mass media.   The exchanges of intellectual barbs and the battle to claim the ideological and moral high ground has been riveting and entertaining, but it has lacked a focus on the role of the media in the colonial project. Within the landscape of a constitutional South Africa, the media has quietly evaded any substantial interrogation of their complicity within the colonial project, while Rhodes, as ...

“ The Government looks upon them as living in a native reserve, and desires to make the transfer and alienation of land as simple as possible.. .” Cecil John Rhodes On the 27 July 1894, in what was described as a rousing speech, Cecil John Rhodes introduced the Glen Grey Act, which was to become the forerunner of the 1913 Land Act, to the Parliament of Cape Town, stating emphatically if not arrogantly that “ We have given them (The Natives) no share in the government — and I think rightly, too — and no interest in the local development of their country” By 1994 almost 100 years to the day, Rhodes had suffered his first defeat.  The natives had ascended to the lofty heights once held exclusively by the white race. But the question today, 21 years after this apparent defeat, is what else has changed from the grand imperial vision so forthrightly and unambiguously expressed in his speech to parliament in 1894.  Apparently not much. In the mining sector, ...