JOHANNESBURG (AP) – Excrement thrown at the statue of British colonialist Cecil John Rhodes began a wave of vandalizing protests in South Africa.
Memorials to South Africa’s colonial past were defaced by mainly young black protesters, as statues of British monarchs Queen Victoria and King George VI were splashed with paint, in the cities of Port Elizabeth and Durban respectively.
Founding fathers of Afrikaner nationalism were also targeted. In Pretoria, the statue of 19th century Afrikaner leader Paul Kruger was painted green twice, while the statue of Marthinus Pretorius, who founded the capital city, was splashed with reddish brown paint, according to local media reports.
The statue of Louis Botha, the president of the South African Union in the early 1900s, was daubed in red paint outside parliament in Cape Town on the same day that the Rhodes sculpture was removed from its perch overlooking the University of Cape Town, after weeks of student protest.
In the Free State province, a statue of Boer General Jan Fick was painted red in the town named after him in 1883, Ficksburg. Vandals poured paint over Scottish-South African missionary Andrew Murray’s statue in the Western Cape.