Something unusual happened in the south-western English port city of Bristol on Sunday, 7 June 2020. An 18-foot-high, Grade II-listed, bronze statue was pulled off its plinth, where it had sat undisturbed since 1895, and was then rolled down Colston Avenue into the waters of Bristol harbour. The statue was that of Edward Colston, a High Anglican merchant, slave trader and philanthropist, who had served as Tory MP for Bristol from 1710 to 1714. The incident formed part of a Black Lives Matter protest that took place in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis during the previous month. Opinions about this act of public landscaping inevitably varied. Some called it an act of vandalism and said that it involved an illegitimate rewriting of history. Others claimed that it was an act of cleansing- an undoing of past injustices. Yet others stayed indifferent and presumably couldn’t care less.
Despite the dismantling of his statue, the name of Edward Colston (1636-1711) is still to be found everywhere in Bristol, indirectly highlighting the major role of the slave trade in the development of the city. Roads, buildings, schools, pubs, charities, and a sweet bun all bear the Colston name to this day. Even while supporting various nefarious activities abroad, Colston was undoubtedly a major benefactor back home, and his domestic efforts were accordingly well received by all his many beneficiaries. In particular, the Society of Merchant Venturers, an organisation with which the Colston family had long-standing and close links, has remained active in keeping his name alive through various charitable ventures and annual ceremonies.
Objections to the widespread use of Colston’s name have arisen because of his actions as a slave trader. He joined the Royal West Africa Company, which had a monopoly on the trade in African slaves to the Americas and the Caribbean, as a member in 1680, rising to become a deputy governor in 1689. Between 1672 and 1689, Colston’s ships carried around 84,500 African men, women and children, on their one-way journeys of despair. To add to their indignity, all those transported were painfully branded with the company’s initials RAC. Around 19,000 or so of these unfortunate people died en route and were then unceremoniously tossed overboard into the high seas. Since the late 1990s, increasing awareness of this tainted legacy has led to repeated demands for the removal of Colston’s statue from its prominent city centre site. These demands were unexpectedly fulfilled on 7 June, although not in the way originally envisaged.
Humans have demonstrated a desire to build statues for at least 30,00 years. Many ancient civilisations, such as the Greeks and Romans, excelled in the depiction of both real and mythological persons, while in other traditions, such as the Islamic faith, reproductions of the human form were strictly forbidden. Over the years, statues have been constructed for a variety of reasons, ranging from celebrations of the lives of eminent statesmen, reformers, scientists, writers, artists, sporting personalities, philanthropists and many others whose contributions have been highly regarded, either locally or nationally. Funding for these projects has come from a variety of sources, ranging from public taxes, voluntary subscriptions, crowd funding, as well as substantial individual contributions. In some cases, self-glorification has motivated people with immense power to encourage a narcissistic process of memorial building. The power of exuberant statuary is particularly noticeable in many countries under dictatorial rule, where dictators actively encourage personality cults- a prime example of which is to be found in present-day North Korea. On the other hand, many statues of long-forgotten people are to found in public spaces throughout the world. These decaying memorials now serve solely as perches for birds seeking a degree of solitude in otherwise busy towns and cities.
In recent years, the deliberate removal of certain statues has formed part of a global movement which seeks to sanitise history. Statues of those engaged in undesirable activities, such as slavery, aggressive colonial expansion and mass genocide, are regularly being pulled down, and in some cases replaced by more acceptable alternatives. In the US, statues of Confederate soldiers are either being removed by the authorities or alternatively being defaced or demolished by protesters, in actions once unthinkable in the Deep South. Such actions are, however, by no means universally popular in a deeply polarised country. For example, the riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, from August 11 to 12 2017, were precipitated by the impending removal from a public park of a statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee.
Some “rewriting” of history seems inevitable. After all, history has frequently been written by the victors, thereby denying the opportunity for the losers to give their side of the story. There is an undeniable need to redress this imbalance. This does not mean that the perpetrators of past injustices should be forgotten, but that rather that their infamous deeds are recounted in museums or memorials, such as those depicting the horrors of the Holocaust or the tribulations of life in segregated societies, rather than glorified in the form of triumphalist erections in public spaces. There can be no escaping the fact that a newly-found anger in some circles will lead to the dismantling of many other statues before any planned and deliberate actions can be taken.
Ashis Banerjee