Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford campaign takes swipe at former South African President F.W. de Klerk’s open letter, calling it ‘cute’

Oxford students tell former President: 'The more your bald patch grows, the more your moral conscience recedes'

Former South African president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate F.W. de Klerk delivers a speech during the F.W. de Klerk Foundation Conference in February 2015 in Cape Town (NARDUS ENGELBRECHT/AFP/Getty Images)

The University of Oxford’s Rhodes Must Fall campaign has taken a swipe at former South African President F.W. de Klerk - after he said it was “regrettable” so see the “folly” campaign has spread from South Africa to Oriel College - calling his views “cute.”

In a letter to The Times, Mr de Klerk acknowledged how that “my people - the Afrikaners - have greater reason to dislike Rhodes than anyone else.” He added: “He was the architect of the Anglo-Boer War that had a disastrous impact on our people.”

Criticising the students behind the Oxford movement for campaigning to have a statue of the “racist” 19th Century British colonialist, Cecil Rhodes, removed from Oriel College, the former president continued: “Yet the National Party government never thought of removing his name from our history.”

However, retaliating with an open letter of its own - headed “Dear Freddy” - the Oxford campaign told the Nobel Peace Prize winning politician his recent letter “was cute,” and added: “Freddy, Freddy, Freddy, we think you should be ashamed of yourself.”

The letter continued: “It’s hilarious you think the National Party - one of the most evil institutions of the 20th century - is a model for how to deal with colonial symbols. What’s next, the FW de Klerk School for Black Consciousness?

“And as for playing the victims of colonial oppression off against each other by whitewashing history, that was very slick, Freddy. Don’t get it twisted: the only reason you didn’t remove statues of Rhodes in South Africa was because you were committed to white domination, not because you cared about black people.”

In his original letter, Mr de Klerk rounded-off: “Students have always been full of sound and fury, signifying very little. However, one would have expected an institution as venerable as Oriel to be a little more gracious in its treatment of its most generous benefactor. If Oriel now finds Rhodes so reprehensible would the honourable solution not be to return his bequest, plus interest, to the victims of British imperialism in southern Africa?”

However, the group at Oxford replied: “Freddy, we know why you wrote to a British newspaper: no one in South Africa takes you seriously anymore. We have a theory: the more your bald patch grows, the more your moral conscience recedes. You’re nearly out of hair, Freddy. In a qualified way.”

Speaking on the matter recently with the Independent, former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott warned how Oxford would “damage its standing as a great university” and would also be would be substituting “moral vanity for fair-minded enquiry” if it bowed to pressure to pull down the statue.

To this, the Oxford group said to Mr de Klerk: “You and Tony Abbott should get coffee sometime. You two soldiers for racial justice are really onto something by lecturing black students, who are cleaning up your mess, about how ‘misguided’ they are.”

The Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford campaign launched in May this year shortly after the University of Cape Town in South Africa was forced to remove Rhodes’ statue when it increasingly became a focal point of protests against “the father of apartheid.”