Fallen Idols by Alex von Tunzelmann

Author:Alex von Tunzelmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2021-08-20T00:00:00+00:00

9

Colossus

Cecil Rhodes

Location: Cape Town, South Africa

Put up: 1934

Pulled down: 2015

Thomas Carlyle put forward his Great Man theory of history in 1840. Cecil Rhodes was not born until 1853—yet he would embody the idea of a Great Man who made history through the force of his will. Rhodes was born a vicar’s son in Hertfordshire. Over the course of a short, dramatic life, he went on to unimaginable wealth and power in southern Africa. He told Leander Starr Jameson, his longtime companion, that he expected to be remembered for “four thousand years.”1

Rhodes was nicknamed “the Rhodes Colossus” by Punch magazine: a spin on one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, the Colossus of Rhodes. The original Colossus was a bronze-and-iron statue of the god Helios by the harbor at Rhodes. It was built between 292 and 280 BC, but stood for only fifty-four years before collapsing in an earthquake. Rhodes’s ambition to be remembered for four thousand years may not be going quite the way he would have hoped, but he might have been comforted to know that his statues mostly stood for longer than the Colossus. The one at the University of Cape Town lasted for eighty-one years—before being showered in human excrement and dragged away in disgrace.

This story is about how those who seek to become a symbol might be careful what they wish for.

The Rhodes statue at the University of Cape Town was commissioned to commemorate Rhodes’s bequest of land to the university. Its unusual seated pose was suggested by the former viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, to solve “the difficulties of modern dress associated with the standing effigies of Rhodes.”2 To many people, statues in suits just looked weird. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century dress, with cloaks, frock coats, and hats, had played to the form: these costumes added volume to the figure, making it appear grand. In the twentieth century, kings and potentates were often depicted wearing their flowing robes of office. Lenin was habitually sculpted in his billowing greatcoat. By contrast, a man in a suit could look small and comically ordinary. One alternative, common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was to depict contemporary figures in classical dress, like ancient statues. By the turn of the twentieth century, this had fallen out of fashion. If a man had lived to see telephones, automobiles, and the cinematograph, it seemed pretentious to doll him up in a toga. Heroic nudity was, of course, right out. The suit had to work.

Rhodes himself had encountered this problem with the only statue he ever posed for, which showed him in a suit with his hands clasped behind his back. The sculptor, John Tweed, tried to make the fabric billow to add volume. The regrettable result was that Rhodes appeared to be wearing baggy clothes and facing down a high wind. Nevertheless, Rhodes liked the clay model when he first saw it, until one of his admirers—trying to be nice—described it as “almost plain.” This was the kiss of death.

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