PK and “The Power of One” created a vivid picture of overcoming struggle, and of Oxford and the Rhodes Scholarship, for me. Cecil John Rhodes casts a shadow over South Africa with a bloody complicated legacy (or blerrie complicated, as my Grandfather would say to avoid swearing). Which includes an Oxford-like university in Grahamstown called Rhodes, surrounded by places like King William’s Town, Queenstown (where my Mom was from, with family on both sides of the Anglo-Boer war), Port Elizabeth and East London, in the area where the 1820 Settlers arrived after the Napoleonic Wars. Smack in the middle of a 100-year conflict between the Xhosa Kingdom and earlier European settlers. Rhodes’ statue also used to preside over the Rugby fields, looking with South England ambition towards the mountains, outside my leafy residence at the University of Cape Town. I applied for the Rhodes Scholarship, but didn’t get an interview. I still ended up in Oxfordshire on a different path. Living just outside the city in a small medieval market town called Burford. A Buhr is an old English fortification. A ford is a river. Crossing rivers. Crossing continents. Crossing cultures. Unpacking blerrie complication.
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