As he prepares to unveil his fourth plinth sculpture, the cigar-smoking, boxing-glove-wearing artist talks about hat-banning colonialists, his journey from Africa to Oxford – and the joys of renouncing ambition
Samson Kambalu’s solution to running late for an interview is characteristically swashbuckling: he drives his flash car up on to the pavement outside the front gates of an ancient Oxford college, fishes me out of the porter’s lodge and screeches off to the car park round the back. He’s carrying a large bunch of keys with which, like a dandified Hagrid, he unlocks the secrets of the Potterian world in which he has found himself, as associate professor of fine art at Ruskin College and fellow of Magdalen.
The problem with Oxford’s much contested statue of Cecil Rhodes, he tells me, as we negotiate a winding staircase up to the senior common room, stopping off en route to pick up a glass of wine, is not that he was a particularly villainous British imperialist. “He was a nobody,” says Kambalu, “who hit upon a diamond mine in southern Africa and didn’t know what to do with this money. The only problem was lack of taste, vulgarity. Everything in Oxford was built with dodgy money. If the sculpture was good, no one would have noticed it. But because it’s not, Rhodes has become the bogeyman.”
