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Daily Cusack: The Epiphany 6 January 2016

Architectural historian Gavin Stamp argues that if Rhodes really was such a vicious baddie as his opponents claim, why stop with just removing his statue?

South African academic and Rhodes scholar R. W. Johnson has compared the campaign to remove Rhodes statues to ISIL’s destruction of antiquities in the Middle East while clerical commentator Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith recalls the damnatio memoriae.

Most interesting perhaps is the treatment of Rhodes not in the ivory towers of Oxford or Cape Town but in the land that once bore his name. Rhodes’s grave still lies in a prominent spot in the Motopos, but even President Robert Mugabe is against exhuming him.

From the Telegraph:

The last time that a call was made for the grave in the Matopos to be exhumed, Middleton Nyoni, then Town Clerk of Bulawayo, offered a telling response. “It is the Taliban who destroy history – and I am not a Taliban,” he declared. “After Rhodes’s grave, who is next?”

When Rhodesia became Zimbabwe in 1980, the city fathers of Bulawayo shifted Rhodes’s statue from the town centre to the town museum, while covering up the plaque commemorating his indaba with the chiefs of the Matabele. But in 2010 the city council voted to uncover the plaque while last year the Zimbabwean playwright Cont Mhlanga provocatively suggested returning Bulawayo’s statue of Rhodes to its former place of prominence.

U.C.T. has dumped Rhodes – though he remains elsewhere on Table Mountain – and his statue is still at Oriel… for now.

– This time last year, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry asked if the Christian revival was starting in France. My pilgrimage to Chartres provided me with evidence that the faith across the Channel is deep, strong, and growing.

Now, looking forward to the year ahead, P.E.G. notes that Catholic France used to be old and rural — now it is young and urban: “In the major cities, all the churches are full on Sunday morning, something unthinkable even 10 years ago.”

– Former CIA agent Philip Giraldi visits Russia for the first time.

— All across the world, evidence shows that poverty is dropping dramatically. Why then, Fraser Nelson asks, is it so hard to believe?

Bicycle polo at the Wellington Monument in the Phoenix Park, 1938.