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Luan Staphorst and Elleke Boehmer, Rhodes Trustee and his study leader at the time of the inscription, in front of Rhodes House.
Cecil Rhodes was a student at Oxford (although he never graduated there), and in his will he established the Rhodes Scholarship for students from across the world to study at Oxford.
The Rhodes Trust, which was created to administrate the awards, built Rhodes House as a space for the scholars to meet.
The Rhodes Trust has been deliberating over how Rhodes House could be reimagined to address Rhodes's legacy as someone who accumulated wealth through colonial exploitation, Luan says.
Rhodes House already has an inscription - in Latin - which honours Rhodes. The decision was made to create a new inscription that could "speak back" to the uncritical Latin inscription.
Since there is limited space, and not all relevant southern African languages could be included, |xam was chosen since it is a "dead language" (which cannot be "claimed" by contemporary Rhodes Scholars as is the case with other southern African languages) on the one hand and since it is reflected in South Africa's coat of arms on the other.
The new inscription therefore links back to South Africa's colonial past and to an important symbol of post-apartheid South Africa, he says.
In English “Our work remembers and honours those who laboured and suffered to generate this wealth,” and in |xam: Si-ta dĩken ǀku a, ha ǀku-g ǀne ǀka:ti ǁkx'ã̰̄ ki ǂĩ ǃke ē ǀne loep dī ǃxū a a, au hi-ta tang, hing koa hi-ta ta̰ba a ǀgīya, ĩ̄.
The 29-year old alumnus obtained his MA and BA Hons in Linguistics, as well as a BA Hons in Afrikaans and a BA MCC., all at Mandela University. He also completed a MA in Philosophy at the University of the Western Cape and a MSc in African Studies from Oxford.
His doctoral research is entitled “Between Archive and Afterlife: Translationality, Desire, and |xam Orature in South African Letters”.
Read more (Article published on 4 March 2025 in the Conversation)