Rhodes statue to be removed

The University of Cape Town decided on Wednesday to remove a contentious statue of British imperialist Cecil John Rhodes which has triggered protests from students over the past month, writes Wendell Roelf for Reuters.

The statue of a seated Rhodes overlooking the main rugby fields of the university, one of Africa's top academic institutions, has been covered up for the past few weeks as students, both whites and blacks, regularly marched past with placards calling for its removal. They insist the statue, unveiled in 1934, is a symbol of the institutional racism they say prevails in South Africa two decades after the end of white-minority rule which marginalised blacks.

The protests against the statue have triggered similar reaction at other institutions of higher learning in South Africa and against other symbols, with a statue of Afrikaner Paul Kruger in the capital Pretoria vandalised with green paint recently. The council said the Rhodes statue would be taken down to protect it, and kept in storage pending a decision from heritage authorities on its final resting place.
Full report on the Reuters site