ABSTRACT
On 9 March 2015, Chumane Maxwele, a student at the University of Cape Town (UCT), threw a bucket of shit at a statue of Cecil Rhodes, prominently sited at the main pedestrian entrance to the university. The statue was removed a month later following concerted protest action by the student-led social movement #RhodesMustFall. This chapter situates the Rhodes statue and the events of #RhodesMustFall in historical relation with the broader memorial and symbolic landscape of the Groote Schuur estate, the landscape of which UCT forms a part. It argues that an imperial legacy is deeply inscribed in this landscape in architectural form, the organization of space, and in forms of the gaze and embodied habitus. The UCT upper campus was conceived in terms of two architectural tropes: the idea of the Temple on the Hill, and the idea of the site of prospect. These, in turn, derive from Rhodes Memorial, located slightly further up the slope. In this context, the Rhodes statue was the most obvious materialization of a more generalized coloniality, which remains a part of the ambiguous legacy of the Groote Schuur estate and UCT.
