This week, the Black People’s National Crisis Committee (BPNCC) said it would intensify protest if activists are not listened to.
On Youth Day, the group held a protest in front of Parliament, calling for the Louis Botha statue to be taken down.
BPNCC member Wandile Kasibe, who was part of the Rhodes Must Fall movement, said the campaign to remove the figures, which was lit in 2015, has now been reignited. In 2015, activist Sulyman Stellenboom campaigned to draw awareness to colonial and apartheid-era statues around the Cape Town central business district. The same year students at the University of Cape Town successfully lobbied for the statue of one of the institution’s major benefactors — Cecil John Rhodes — to be removed from campus.
“I still want those things removed. It’s a curse on our nation. Even the way Rhodes is sitting at Rhodes memorial, he’s looking out over the Western Cape, laughing. He and Jan van Riebeeck were not good people,” Stellenboom said. At the time of the Rhodes Must Fall movement, Arts and Culture Minister Nathi Mthethwa said his department would embark on “consultative community engagements” to find answers to the role of colonial statues and memorials.
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