Timeline

09 March 2015: Rhodes Must Fall protests begin

09 April 2015: Statue of Cecil John Rhodes is removed from UCT

September 2015: The Art Task Team is established by the UCT Council

15 February 2016: Shackville protests begin

16 February 2016: Artworks are burned in a fire during Shackville protests

March 2016: The Art Task Team releases interim statement

Early 2016: More than 70 artworks are removed from UCT

11 April 2016: Letter released by Max Price explaining UCT’s decision to remove artworks

September 2016: Shackville student protesters demand a TRC

February 2017: The Art Task Team releases a full statement

Early 2017: David Goldblatt withdraws his archive from UCT’s Special Collections Library in protest

Early 2018: The artworks remain taken down, and have not been re-installed

Context

To begin to understand the absence of Richard Keresemose Baholo’s artwork we need to look back at certain events. In fact, this story goes back a very long time, to the beginning of British colonialism, “the establishment of the Cape colony” in South Africa, and the embedding of a segregated schooling system in which schools acted as spaces for the “socialisation” of enslaved and colonial children, and their “respective roles within the colony” (Xaba, 2017: 97). During this time, “White schools and universities were the most resourced while Black schools and universities were deliberately under-resourced” (2017: 97). This cultural embeddedness precipitates the events and discussion in this project to a profound extent. This project, however, focuses on a few major events that are much more recent, and much more localised: all occurring at the University of Cape Town between 2015 and 2016. They include the #RhodesMustFall, #FeesMustFall, and #Shackville student protests.

#Shackville

Roughly one year after #RhodesMustFall, a group of students closely associated with #RhodesMustFall initiated the #Shackville protests, the name having “an overt intertextual reference to the Sharpeville massacre” (Oxlund, 2016: 9). So entwined are the #Shackville protests with the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements, that they can in many ways be seen as a progression rather than as separate or static events. During #Shackville, which occurred between 15-16 February 2015, student activists protested against a lack of university accommodation for black students. The students “erected a shack on University Avenue to demonstrate the reality that often confronts black students who have not been allocated university accommodation and do not have the finances to pay for off-campus lodging” (Mudavanhu, 2017: 22). The protests informed part of the greater “de-colonisation project” (Students cited in Jurgens, 2016), which had been initiated by Rhodes Must Fall. Specifically, the students aimed to put into focus the fact that “white students were given preferential treatment” (Jurgens, 2016) over black students.

During #Shackville, “activists petrol-bombed the vice-chancellor’s office, threw human feces at students who were writing exams”, and “burned down four vehicles” (Oxlund, 2016: 9). Significantly, on the second day of the protest, 23 artworks were taken from various residential halls at the university campus, and publicly burned. Two of Baholo’s artworks are confirmed to have been burned during these protests (Jurgens, 2016). Soon after #Shackville, more than 70 artworks were removed from the university campus, a number of which were by Baholo.