Zimbabwean youths were stopped yesterday from digging up the remains of Cecil Rhodes from his grave in the Matopos Hills, just outside Bulawayo.<\/p>\n
The Zanu-PF youths assembled at the party’s Bulawayo offices, from which they intended to go to the hills. They apparently planned to exhume Rhodes’s remains so they could be repatriated to Britain.<\/p>\n
But a directive from Zanu-PF headquarters in Harare put an end to their plan.<\/p>\n
Zweli Malinga, a Zanu-PF youth activist from Masotsha Ndlovu district, where Rhodes is buried, reportedly told NewZimbabwe online: ”We cannot stand seeing whites coming from abroad every day to honour and conduct rituals before their ancestor who is here buried on our own land. The sooner they take [Rhodes] to their own land the better. If they do not we will do it ourselves.”<\/p>\n
Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe in 2012 blocked attempts by “war veterans” to exhume Rhodes’ remains.<\/p>\n
A member of the Zanu-PF politburo, Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, said: “We decided to preserve it after independence for historical [reasons].”<\/p>\n
The deputy head of communication at the British High Commission in Pretoria, Isabel Potgieter, said it was up to South Africans and Zimbabweans how they handled the Rhodes saga.<\/p>\n
“It is not for us to comment. It is for stakeholders in the countries to decide,” she said.<\/p>\n
The Rhodes Must Fall campaign has spread from UCT to Kimberley, with calls for a statue of him there to be removed.<\/p>\n
Comment boards placed next to the Rhodes statue at UCT were removed after being covered in racist remarks prompting vice-chancellor Max Price to whine about “hate speech”, something he somehow finds perfectly in order when directed against Afrikaners.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Zimbabwean youths were stopped yesterday from digging up the remains of Cecil Rhodes from his grave in the Matopos Hills, just outside Bulawayo. The Zanu-PF youths assembled at the party’s Bulawayo offices, from which they intended to go to the hills. They apparently planned to exhume Rhodes’s remains so they could be repatriated to Britain. … Continue reading “Mugabe defends Rhodes”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2961,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[186,6930,1345,11296,179,180],"class_list":["post-18205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-south-africa","tag-britain","tag-cecil-john-rhodes","tag-hate-speech","tag-max-price","tag-robert-mugabe","tag-zimbabwe"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2961"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18205"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18206,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18205\/revisions\/18206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}