Hello, legacy listeners. This series, we're doing something a little bit different. We're revisiting

a controversial character whose legacy could not be more relevant to the current climate.

Cecil Rhodes. In the wake of student protests on campuses across the United States and far right

violence here in the UK, it's worth looking back at the life of a colonial giant who

became a symbol of the culture wars and someone who forces us to grapple with how imperialism

continues to shape our world. Sessel Rhodes is one of those figures, Peter, who everybody

knows a little bit about. But I really wonder how many people know the true complexity of his story and

his legacy. I certainly learned a lot from doing this series. So I feel like it will be useful for

people to really be able to get in. Well, remember, Afro, we went to record this, standing outside

Oriel College and looking up at the statue of Sassal Road, that I must have walked past, I don't

know, thousands of times, in my 30 years or so being based in Oxford. And like you say, to think

about living history, to remember to look upwards, to look at some of these statues, it's very

easy to kind of forget who's up there and why. And Rhodes kind of appeared not quite out of the

blue, but in 2015, he became the lightning rod for lots of different questions about things about

race, about integration, about exploitation, about the destruction of the environment as well,

the way that mining has scarred the world around us.

And I think thinking about Cecil Rhodes here in the 21st century has never felt more relevant

or more apposite.

I completely agree.

And one of the charges that sometimes made against protest movements is that they want to erase history.

Actually, this protest movement, the roads must fall, has given us a chance to really revisit the history in all its complexity.

So that's what I'm really excited to do.

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