PERVEZ Hoodbhoy, in his article ‘Don’t tear down statues’ (June 27), enters the fray surrounding the removal of statues five years after students at Cape Town University launched the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign seeking the removal of Cecil Rhodes’ statue from campus as a step in the struggle against white supremacy.

The movement galvanised an international response extending to students in elite universities such as Oxbridge, merging with calls to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum. Unlike Hoodbhoy, they understood the commemorative value of the statue, associating its continued presence with the refusal of ex-colonial powers and their cheerleaders to contend with the histories and legacies of empire.

The Black Lives Matter movement understood the link between statues and the violence that is routinely unleashed upon people of colour. George Floyd’s murder brought this movement to world attention, sparking mass demonstrations of solidarity across continents.

Responding to the demonstrators’ demands, Oriel College Oxford passed a motion to remove Rhodes’ statue from its façade, while Princeton announced the removal of US president Woodrow Wilson’s name from its public policy school. It is far-right organisations with Nazi sympathies that have championed preserving statues of slavers and racists in a series of violent counter protests.

Alas, the article confirms a truth universally acknowledged: whilst others move to dismantle legacies of white supremacy, however falteringly, Pakistani liberals continue cheerleading for the sahibs’ and memsahibs’ relics. The statues the writer defends were erected more recently than he thinks, and for the veneration of specific political and imperial projects. Their removal to museums should be celebrated as an act of deepening decolonisation, for there can be no progress, democracy or justice without decolonisaton. This is true for Pakistan as it is in the rest of the world.

Salman Sayyid
Chair in Social Theory and Decolonial Thought
University of Leeds, UK

Published in Dawn, July 5th, 2020