It began with a container of excrement.

On March 9, a South African student protester tossed feces on a statue of British colonialist Cecil John Rhodes at the University of Cape Town, igniting nationwide calls to remove other statues of former white leaders. A statue of Britain's King George V on a University of KwaZulu-Natal campus was splattered with white paint. Some activists want a statue of Paul Kruger, a white Boer leader in the late 19th century, to be shifted from a central square in Pretoria, the capital, to a museum.

The uproar is part of a larger discourse about change in South Africa, where the legacy of apartheid, the white minority rule that ended two decades ago, is often blamed for economic inequality, a struggling education system and other problems.