Please help us to rename Rhodes Avenue Primary School. The Rhodes family and specifically Cecil Rhodes has a legacy born in white supremacy, imperialism, and apartheid, whose name and family name is plastered on parts of Muswell Hill and Tottenham as well as around the world.

The violent legacy of Cecil Rhodes and his family has been memorialised and immortalised in the form of Rhodes Avenue road and Rhodes Avenue Primary School. Rhodes Avenue Primary School is named after the Rhodes family. It is a family name which cannot be disentangled from the pursuit of white supremacy and the dehumanisation and subjugation of Black people.

We would like to see the name of Rhodes Avenue Primary School changed to honour Oliver Tambo the prominent Anti-apartheid campaigner whose statue stands in the park next door and who used to live in the area. We feel this would be a beautiful way to honour this area and the people who live here and to stand firmly with the broader Rhodes must Fall movement and with Black Lives Matter and the wave of global activism that was initially catalysed by the senseless murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in the United States.

Here in the United Kingdom, increased attention is being focused on the violent histories of British colonialism and racism which have previously been silenced or supressed. Specifically, how these atrocities are memorialised and how they inform both overt and covert forms of anti-Blackness in the UK every day.

Cecil Rhodes was a ‘quintessentially racist’ British Coloniser who pursued the idea that the Anglo-Saxon race was "the first race in the world”. Under this reasoning, "the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race". He described the indigenous Africans in the Cape Colony as "in a state of barbarism", and he was at the centre of actions to marginalise them politically. Cecil Rhodes was a white supremacist and history has come to name him as indisputably "an architect of apartheid". Rhodes is undoubtedly one of the most controversial figures of the British Empire.
The Rhodes family owned large areas of Tottenham and Muswell Hill. The school's name pays homage to a family whose most notable member fought against the ideals of great leaders in civil rights and anti-apartheid movement, such as Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo.
Oliver Tambo lived in our community, and there are two monuments to memorialise him in Durnsford Park, which sits adjacent to Rhodes Avenue Primary School. The ultimate irony appears that “imperialism and the man that helped to end its rule in South Africa are juxtaposed within a few hundred yards of each other”.

Rhodes Avenue primary school stands next to and has strong links with Alexandra Park School. Built on the grounds of Cecil Rhodes secondary school, when it was rebuilt, Alexandra Park School opened as a beacon of anti-apartheid sentiment in North London for the subsequent two decades. Not only honouring Oliver Tambo but its former late-teacher Mike Terry, who led the Anti-Apartheid in London Movement as his life’s work.

Why can't Rhodes Avenue Primary School follow in these footsteps?

Please sign our petition and give your support to the Renaming of  Rhodes Avenue Primary School to the new name of Oliver Tambo Primary School.

We are a group of former students who care deeply for the school and it's legacy.

Here's a link to our facebook page:  https://www.facebook.com/Rename-Rhodes-Avenue-Primary-School-112391867173804/

and twitter: @School65638884