CAPE TOWN: A bronze bust in a Cape Town park honouring 19th-century British imperialist Cecil Rhodes has been decapitated, the South African government said Wednesday. A white supremacist, Rhodes made a fortune from mining and colonised swathes of southern African territories in the name of the British crown. "The head of the statue was cut from the bust with what seems to be an angle grinder somewhere between Sunday night or the early hours of Monday morning," Rey Thakhuli, the spokesman for South African National Parks, said in a statement.
The statue is located at a memorial site on the slopes of Cape Town's Table Mountain, near its Devil's Peak.
It is the latest statue emblematic of colonialism or slavery to be attacked since Black Lives Matter demonstrations erupted over the killing of George Floyd, a black American, by a white police officer in Minneapolis in May.
Rhodes was already a target of anti-colonial anger, particularly by South African students. The Rhodes Memorial was built in 1912 on the slopes of Table Mountain overlooking the city.
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