‘Rhodes must fall!’ shouted angry black students at the University of Cape Town. The problem is — and it is the profoundest problem of race relations — they were also demonstrating by their every action and desire that they want Rhodes to rise even higher.

Last month a black 30-year-old student, Chumani Maxwele, in a great blaze of publicity, threw ‘human excrement’ over the statue of Cecil John Rhodes on the steps to the university’s upper campus.