Rhodes Must Fall was picked up in Oxford by student activists during my last term there, in response to a landscape just as marked as Cape Town by Rhodes and his money. They set their sights on similar goals: “the plague of colonial iconography,” the “Euro-centric curriculum . . . which frames the West as sole producers of universal knowledge,” the “underrepresentation and lack of welfare provision for Black and minority ethnic (BME) amongst Oxford’s academic staff and students.”

It was about more than a statue, of course, but the statue wasn’t incidental. Its continued presence, they write, “is incompatible with a community that posits itself as progressive, enlightened and intellectually honest.” That last bit is mischievous, raising the excellent question of what you’d expect the physical environment of Oxford to look like given everything it says in the prospectus. (The short answer: fewer statues of colonialists, and those that remain framed to reveal just what they thought and did.)

For the first time, I had a student in my John Stuart Mill class wanting to talk about the East India Company rather than the harm principle. It can be hard to know what to do when you get what you want. There were awkward conversations with other scholars of my vintage and older: Why had we been so quiet, so complacent? What were we scared of? And why did we, most of us, settle for the centrist-parties-and-think-tanks vision of engagement, for being seminar-room-only insurgents, for assuaging our political consciences with monthly donations to approved charities? It took effort not to get defensive, not to retreat into irony, to be happy that someone was saying out loud what I’d felt and had found unsayable.

The usual apologists appeared in the broadsheets with the usual arguments (it’s complicated; we gave them the railways; we shouldn’t erase history; who’s next once Rhodes falls?), and it’s impossible to go through the rote replies (not as complicated as all that; the railways weren’t a gift; whose history?; Winston Churchill, probably) without an acute feeling of déjà vu. More generally, the movement had the effect on the mainstream press of all student protests: consternation at the fact that the students were holding up placards and no attempt to read what was written on them (This Is Not “Rhodes” House, Make Rhodes History, Take It Down). Everyone was talking about universities as a way of not talking about colonialism.