The news that students at Manchester University have painted over Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem “If” (which, ironically, had been put up in the students’ union to inspire them) and replaced it with Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise” does not come as a surprise, following as it does the attempt of Oxford University students to have a statue of Cecil Rhodes removed.
Kipling, like Rhodes, was an imperialist, born at a time when the British Empire stretched around the world, colouring the map a satisfactory pink in the eyes of generations of public schoolboys whose ambition was to take up “the white man’s burden” – as another poem of Kipling so arrestingly put it – and spend their lives working in the then colonial civil service.
