In solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement in the US, a local group in South Africa, the Black People’s National Crisis Committee, has called for the removal of Anglo-Boer War general Louis Botha’s statue outside Parliament.
According to iol.co.za, committee convener Songezo Mazizi said: “As the Black People’s National Crisis Committee (BNCC), it is our understanding that these colonial relations still find concrete expression in the realities of so many black people in the country, in the continent and (among) the diaspora.”
“The landlessness of black people is at the centre of all our ills, the mass unemployment, the increase in violence against black women and men, the extremely exploitative labour relations; all indicate that blacks are still subjects of the colonial system, which manifests itself today in South Africa as a settler colonial society,” he said.
“The exploiter and the exploited, the oppressor and the oppressed. It is on this basis that the BNCC stands with millions of other black people in calling for all colonial statues to be removed, starting with the Louis Botha monument in front of Parliament.
“These monuments are an insult to black people, who still have to deal with the material and psychological repercussions of the settler colonial conquest.”
It’s not the first time calls for the statue of Botha to be removed have surfaced. The statue was vandalised and smeared with red paint in April 2015, after the EFF encouraged its members to destroy statues of what they called “apartheid icons”.
This came in the wake of the #RhodesMustFall movement, which led to the removal of the statute of British colonialist Cecil John Rhodes, which previously overlooked UCT’s rugby fields for more than 80 years.
Abroad, similar calls are being made following the death on May 25 of George Floyd, the 46-year-old black man who was killed in Minneapolis during his arrest for allegedly using a counterfeit banknote.
His death drew outrage, exposed racial division in the US, and has led to a reassessment of historical statues across the globe.
Source: iol.co.za