Statues Defaced as S. Africans Protest Colonial-Era Symbols
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The Economic Freedom Fighters, South Africa’s second-biggest opposition party, said its members were among people who defaced statues in protest over symbols that remain from the country’s colonial and apartheid past.
The statue of Paul Kruger, a president of the Afrikaner-led Transvaal Republic before the Anglo-Boer war, and four figures of townspeople around him, were splashed with green paint in Pretoria’s Church Square on April 5. Statues of Britain’s King George V in Durban and Queen Victoria and the Horse Memorial in the coastal town of Port Elizabeth were also vandalized over the Easter holiday weekend. In March, the statue of Cecil John Rhodes at the University of Cape Town was smeared with human excrement.