Detail from CJR, a mixed-media artwork by Mikhael Subotzky.
How Rhodes lost his nose.
Letter from Cape Town. Harper’s December 2021 (& podcast).
The nose disappeared from Cecil Rhodes’s face in September 2015. It was sliced off the bronze bust in the Rhodes Memorial on the slopes of Table Mountain. The plinth below was spray-painted: THE MASTER’S NOSE BETRAYS HIM. Since then, the appendage has been at large. Was it stashed at the back of some cupboard or put to use as a paperweight? Did it go underground at a safe house, or was it ironically mounted on the wall by student comrades? Maybe it fled to New Zealand, trying to shuck off its colonial past and live in peace.
I work at the university just downslope from the memorial, and around the time of the disappearance, I was teaching Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 story “The Nose.” In it, the nose of a St. Petersburg bureaucrat, Major Kovalyov, vanishes under mysterious circumstances. He wakes up to find a blankness, “quite flat, just like a freshly cooked pancake,” in the middle of his face. We follow this hapless and petty man as he tries to find and confront his nose, which has taken on a life of its own. It is gallivanting round town, wearing a uniform of higher rank than the major, disowning him at every opportunity. “Whatever you may say, these things do happen in this world,” the narrator reflects. “Rarely, I admit, but they do happen.”
So when Rhodes’s nose vanished, I felt intrigued and somehow implicated. I admired the gesture. Each year, as I taught the Gogol again, I was reminded of the unsolved mystery, and would ask for information at the end of lectures, promising to protect my sources. I dreamed of holding that bronze nodule in the palm of my hand. I wondered where it had been and what its adventures might reveal. At a time when political and cultural debates seemed so fraught, I wanted to understand this more cryptic element of the decolonization process.