Why Rhodes must fall

The international Rhodes Must Fall campaign has reinvigorated public interest in the legacy of Cecil Rhodes, Empire and the production of historical memory. But it has also been subject to a fierce backlash in the rightwing media, which has fought against the campaign at an Oxford college to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes both on the grounds of free speech (and the right to offend) and on the grounds that Rhodes must be judged by the standards of his time. Here, the author revisits Rhodes’ legacy in Africa, detailing not only his imperial exploits via the British South Africa Company but the way he was reviled by British politicians, thinkers, and writers at the time – even at Oxford itself

"The lesser evil": Orwell and America

George Orwell is often assumed to have been uninterested in the United States with his thinking immune to any American influences. This neglects his interest in American literature, in particular his concern with the work of Mark Twain, Jack London and Henry Miller. During the Second World War, he came under the influence of the US magazine, Partisan Review, for which he wrote his ‘London Letters’. Even though he considered the USA politically backward, in the post-war years he came to the reluctant conclusion that if the choice was between a world dominated by Soviet Union or the USA, he would prefer the USA, although he hoped for a Socialist revival as offering an alternative

Contextualising Apartheid at the End of Empire: Repression, ‘Development’ and the Bantustans

This article examines the global dynamics of late colonialism and how these informed South African apartheid. More specifically, it locates the programmes of mass relocation and bantustan ‘self-government’ that characterised apartheid after 1959 in relation to three key dimensions. Firstly, the article explores the global circulation of idioms of ‘development’ and trusteeship in the first half of the twentieth century and its significance in shaping segregationist policy; secondly, it situates bantustan ‘selfgovernment’ in relation to the history of decolonisation and the partitions and federations that emerged as late colonial solutions; and, thirdly, it locates the tightening of rural village planning in the bantustans after 1960 in relation to the elaboration of anti-colonial liberation struggles, repressive southern African settler politics and the Cold War. It argues that, far from developing policies that were at odds with the global ‘wind of change’, South African apartheid during the 1960s and 1970s reflected much that was characteristic about late colonial strategy

Orwell and America

Did Orwell ignore the United States? Was he so focused on England, Europe, Burma and the Soviet Union that he turned his back altogether on the country that in his lifetime was to become the most important in the world? The answer is no. Orwell wrote his most important wartime journalism for the US magazine Partisan Review. He wrote about American literature, most notably about Jack London. He was very concerned about the US influence on Britain, both political and cultural. Towards the end of his life, he made clear that he regarded the Labour government’s subservience to the United States as an obstacle to progress towards socialism and at the same time proclaimed that in the event of a war between the Soviet Union and the United States, he would support the United States. How did he come to these conclusions