In a lecture delivered in 1927, the Austrian writer Robert Musil (2006: 42) suggested that ‘there is nothing in this world so invisible as a monument’. Characterising monuments as ‘conspicuously inconspicuous’, he ventured that this paradox is true even of larger-thanlife figurative statues:

Although Marion Walgate's larger-than-life portrait of mining magnate and politician Cecil John Rhodes, formerly at the University of Cape Town (UCT), was one of the most prominently located commemorative sculptures in South Africa, Musil's insights seem to have tallied with the sentiments of many regularly passing the sculpture. Since the early 1960s, this work commemorating the benefactor of lands on which the primary campus was built had been poised above the rugby field and at the base of stairs leading to Jameson Hall, where Rhodes sat with hand on chin, his acquisitive gaze surveying Cape Town and beyond (Figure 9.1).

But despite its loaded iconography and the sculpture's being positioned in such a way that it was necessarily a point of focus for anybody standing lower down on the campus and looking upwards towards Jameson Hall, routine exposure to it by those in its surrounds appears to have rendered it somehow unremarkable to many. While concern was voiced now and then about the appropriateness of a commemorative statue of a figure such as Rhodes on a post-apartheid campus, these articulations – at least those recorded in the media – appear to have been occasional rather than frequent.