Rhodes Scholars Are Split on New South African Awards

The New York Times ^ | July 6, 2003 | ALAN COWELL

[sarcasm]

XFORD, England, July 4 — The scholars were in casual dress, not gowns and mortarboards, and seemed well-heeled, as people in their position might be presumed to be, as they gathered to mark the centennial of an institution that has endured with a prestige sometimes denied to its founder, the British imperialist Cecil John Rhodes.

For much of this week, around 1,000 former Rhodes scholars — people, including former President Bill Clinton, who survived a rigorous selection process to win stipends from the diamond-laden Rhodes estate — have gathered and mingled in this old university town and in London to celebrate 100 years of an institution that has produced prime ministers and magnates, generals and scholars.

But no academic moment is complete without its spat, just as no evocation of Rhodes's colonialism in southern Africa — when he nourished an unfulfilled dream of building an empire from the Cape to Cairo — is complete without some postcolonial wrestling with guilt and redemption.

This week, the themes intertwined anew in the figure of Nelson Mandela, the former South African president. By promoting a new Mandela Rhodes Foundation that will devote its resources to the education of South Africa's poor instead of the world's elite, Mr. Mandela contrived both to close a historical circle between his country's past and present and to find himself drawn into a controversy over what the custodians of Rhodes's legacy should be doing with Rhodes's money.

"Payback would be too harsh a word," said Jakes Gerwel, the head of the new foundation, referring to the Rhodes Trust's decision to donate $1.6 million a year for the next decade to the new foundation. "Closing a circle is more poetic."

By committing the money, he said in an interview, the Rhodes Trust was showing a readiness to send some of its riches "back to the origins of the wealth that made the Rhodes Trust possible."

The creation of the new fund represents a remarkable shift in one of the world's most exclusive groups of alumni — selected, according to Rhodes's will, for their academic excellence, leadership and physical vigor. According to the trust, Rhodes "specifically directed" that there should be no discrimination on grounds of race or religion in choosing the scholars. He also said in his will that candidates should not be "merely bookworms." But the scholarships were long limited to men from the United States, Germany and countries in the British Empire at Rhodes's death in 1902. Women became eligible only in the late 1970's.

But not everyone agrees with this latest change.

Some of the current Rhodes scholars — 92 are admitted to Oxford every year — complain that the Rhodes Trust and its chief executive, John Rowett, have devoted too much time and money to the Mandela Rhodes Foundation, to the detriment of present-day scholars.

"There are those who disagree with the whole Mandela Rhodes initiative," Mr. Rowett said. "We have to say: we beg to differ. We make no apology whatever for saying that now is the time for Africa."

That, certainly, was the view of Cecil Rhodes.

Arriving in southern Africa in the late 19th century, Rhodes grew phenomenally rich from diamond mines and built a political power base fueled by what biographers have called an insatiable lust for power — even to the extent of having a country, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), named for him.

His wealth, Rhodes's critics say, was built on the master-and-slave economic forerunner of apartheid, the system of racial segregation that prevailed in South Africa from 1948 until the end of white minority rule in the 1990's. By contrast, Mr. Mandela, who was imprisoned for 27 years, spent his life fighting that system of white supremacy. So the combination of the two names in a single breath is seen by some scholars as lyrical evidence of something more profound in South Africa's quest for racial reconciliation.

"I have a personal belief that it's very appropriate and almost inspirational that the Rhodes Trust is looking outward and looking forward," said Jasmine Waddell, 25, a Brown University graduate and a current Rhodes scholar.

By fusing the two names, said Mr. Gerwel, the head of the foundation, the Rhodes legacy — long denied by many as an emblem of exploitation — "has been admitted into the collective memory" of South Africa.

Others have a different take.

According to British news reports, a letter circulated by about 115 Rhodes scholars complained that the focus on South Africa had distracted Mr. Rowett from his responsibilities to current scholars and had diverted funds that might have been used to allow them to extend their studies into a discretionary third year.

Some scholars who supported that letter declined to comment publicly today. And in a letter to a British newspaper this week, two of the protesters, Kim Mathiesen and Murray Wesson, insisted that the statement "in no way undermined the formation of the Mandela Rhodes Foundation."

All the same, as Mr. Rowett mingled with scholars from the 1960's and 1970's in tents set up on the pampered gardens below Rhodes House, he acknowledged that preparation for this week's centennial had added to his burdens. There had been a dinner for 2,000 people, including Prime Minister Tony Blair, Mr. Clinton and Mr. Mandela, in London, and an earlier celebration for 1,000 in Cape Town.

Just after Mr. Rowett spoke to a reporter, Mr. Clinton, a Rhodes scholar from 1968 to 1970, arrived at Rhodes House to meet others from the same generation of scholars.

What had made the real difference in the trust's ability to extend its generosity, Mr. Rowett said, was "the downturn in the markets."

According to York Membery, a spokesman for the Rhodes Trust, the fund now stands at the equivalent of about $220 million, compared with about $340 million a couple of years ago. So would the debate over the stipends overshadow the centennial?

"In the longer view of history," said Joseph S. Nye Jr., the dean of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and himself a Rhodes scholar from 1958 to 1960, the idea of "Mandela and Rhodes put together with a hyphen is going to mean more than any complaints that slightly disgruntled scholars of this generation might have."

[freekitty]

This is a nut idea. The leaders in South Africa are killing their people. There will be no one left to accept an award.