Negotiating Offence of Fallist Proportion

Abstract

The removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town in 2015, prompted by the student Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) campaign, represents a window into how questions of race, art and inequality intertwined as they played out some twenty-five years into South African democracy. Since RMF then turned to the artwork exhibited at University of Cape Town, finding in it a collectively degraded vision of blackness − even though much of it was created in support of the anti-Apartheid struggle − this interpretive mismatch then became central to the university’s conflict. The sense of offense felt by RMF over these artworks could, in all probability, not have been negotiated at the time, leading to the abstract question of how such offense might ideally be negotiated. About this, I introduce a dialogical notion, one involving reflection on the part of both parties: the offender and the offended.