Incompleteness engenders an understanding of resilient colonialism epitomised by Cecil Rhodes’ monuments and statues in Southern Africa. It draws on Tutuola’s metaphorical ‘The Complete Gentleman’ and the lessons on being and becoming from Tutuola’s skull to remind us that Rhodes’ legacy still suffers from illusions of completeness and a denial of debt and indebtedness. The call for humility and alertness to the imagined dream of a rainbow nation demands that South Africans stop learning the wrong lessons from Rhodes as exclusionary articulations of belonging informed by superiority and zero-sum games of conquest.
