Rhodes must not fall
Anyone walking down Oxford’s High Street could be forgiven for missing Oriel College’s statue of Cecil Rhodes. Of limited aesthetic merit, small, and at a substantial height on Oriel’s north-facing building, he looks as if someone asked Willy Wonka to sculpt a caricature of a Victorian. As recent events have reminded us, however, he is far from forgotten. I went up to Oriel at Michaelmas 2015, and the original Rhodes Must Fall rallies were the backdrop to my first four terms at Oxford. They ranged from the mundane to the marvellously musical, and I remember eating late breakfasts at my window as protesters took turns directing poetry at the closed college gates.
