The Beheading of Rhodes in Cape Town

NADIA DAVIDS

ON THE 14TH of July, I woke in Cape Town to the news that the memorial bust of Cecil John Rhodes had been decapitated. On a cold night during the most powerful storm in recent memory, someone slipped through the locked gates of a South African National Park, made their way up the mountain, and used an angle grinder to sever Cecil’s 176-pound bronze head from his neck.

That night, the unlit skies were wild with wind and hail, the forest full of skittish creatures, and that neoclassical building — the stuff of imperial fantasy — set like a stone temple on the slopes of the eerily named “Devil’s Peak.” To this place, someone arrived armed and ready for their private rendezvous with history. There was no public de-plinthing, no tumbling into a river, no triumphant crowd. Instead, it has remained anonymous; a secret between the statue and