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IT is striking that when the statue of Edward Colston was ripped off its pedestal and dumped in Bristol harbour a couple of weeks ago, no one of note was willing to publicly claim that it was a worthy landmark. Even those who lamented the circumstances of its removal either categorically or implicitly acknowledged it ought not to have stood there in the first place.
The likes of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and opposition leader Keir Starmer argued it should have been removed through some sort of democratic process — ignoring the fact that over the years, campaigns and petitions for such action came up against stiff resistance from the city authorities.
Like most people, I had never heard of Colston until very recently, but any number of civic and industrial institutions in Bristol bear his name. As a director of the Royal African Company, he was generous to the city — on the basis of resources accumulated from trading in human lives. His ships are estimated to have transported over 84,000 enslaved Africans to British colonies in the Caribbean, almost one-fourth of whom perished during the voyages.
Black lives clearly did not matter to him, and that was broadly the norm among colonisers and imperialists in the 17th and 18th centuries. But does any of them deserved to be honoured with a public memorial in 21st-century Britain? The plaque beneath Colston’s bronze 1895 effigy made no mention of the slave trade, yet noted the statue had been “erected by the citizens of Bristol as a memorial of one of the most wise and virtuous sons of their city”.
Tear down yesterday’s statues, but focus on tomorrow.
If anything, Britain owes a debt of gratitude to the (mainly white) activists who tore down Colston, instead of decrying them as thugs, as Johnson and some of his obnoxious cabinet colleagues have done. The statue was eventually fished out of the water and might now find a home in a museum — which is fine as long as it is properly contextualised.
Johnson whinges about an attempted erasure of history, but that accusation deserves to be hurled at the British education system — and for that matter the education systems of all too many other countries, including Pakistan and India. By all accounts, the British curriculum largely excludes the nitty-gritty of the nation’s imperial past.
Even today, in the hullabaloo over the purported threat to a statue of Winston Churchill in London’s Parliament Square, the tendency among the media and political establishment is to acknowledge his intellectual flaws in passing while doubling down on his practical achievements as a wartime leader. The BBC’s “in-house philosopher” David Edmonds for instance, contends: “Churchill held opinions that would disbar him from political office today — despicable yes, but surely massively outweighed by the scale of his accomplishments.”
It’s not just his despicably racist opinions — which encompassed most of the global south, from India and the Arab world to Africa and beyond — that should be cause for a spot of bother, but also his role in catastrophes such as the 1943 Bengal famine and as a strident advocate for the use of poison gas against “uncivilised [Kurdish] tribes” in Mesopotamia in 1920, long before Saddam Hussein was even born. Even Churchill’s granddaughter Emma Soames has conceded his statue may be better off in a museum, while arguing he was a “complex man, with infinitely more good than bad in the ledger of his life”, and describing him as someone whose views “now are regarded as unacceptable but weren’t necessarily then”.
By the same token one could argue that Adolf Hitler’s views weren’t necessarily considered outrageous in the 1930s — by many Germans as well as the British royal family — so why not erect a monument to him in the ample grounds of one of the Windsor palaces?
It would obviously be absurd to categorise Hitler and Churchill as comparable monsters. But histories are always complex, and many of the characters that feature in them deserve a nuanced approach. Were that the norm, quite a few Americans would not be struggling to understand why so many of their fellow citizens have a problem with emblems of the Confederacy or, for that matter, Christopher Columbus. Once the genocides that facilitated white settlement in countries such as the United States and Australia are airbrushed out of what is taught in the classroom, too many people are left wondering what the fuss is all about.
They include Donald Trump, who seems clueless — as on so many other fronts — about why the US army might wish to change the nomenclatures of bases named after generals who fought to preserve slavery in the 19th century.
The reckoning with history is overdue in all too many parts of the world but, important as it is, the urge to tear down icons of the toxic past should not overshadow the efforts to decontaminate the toxic present.
Published in Dawn, June 17th, 2020
