“A dead man who never caused others to die seldom rates a statue,” wrote the poet W.H. Auden in his Marginalia. That aperçu has assumed new relevance as anti-racism protestors in Britain, Scotland, Europe, America and elsewhere have defaced, toppled, or called for the removal of monuments – or for the renaming of streets and public squares – which honour those who committed historical crimes such as slavery.
Black Lives Matter protestors tore down a bronze statue of the slave trader Edward Colston (one of Bristol’s “most virtuous and wise sons” according to its inscription), then dumped it into the harbour after dragging it through the streets. Reactions to this were predictably polarized. Social media celebrated and politicians condemned. “Utterly disgraceful,” said Home Secretary Priti Patel; “completely wrong” said the new Labour party leader Keir Starmer, though he added that the statue should not have been there in the first place. Later, when a statue of his personal hero Winston Churchill had been defaced, prime minister Boris Johnson complained that the protests had been “subverted by thuggery.”
In the face of such condemnation it is worth considering, briefly, some of the legacies of the men honoured by such statues. Edward Colston, for instance, transported at least 80,000 African slaves to the Caribbean and the Americas, searing their flesh with his corporate acronym RAC (Royal African Company). King Leopold II of Belgium, whose statue was recently removed after protests in Antwerp, caused the deaths of ten million Africans during his brutal reign over the Congo Free State (1885–1908). Leopold’s monstrous misrule was enforced by the mercenary Force Publique which helped him extract a vast personal fortune in ivory and rubber – money that was used to build many of Belgium’s most imposing public buildings. (The country’s current monarch is a descendant of Leopold’s nephew and successor, Albert I.)
Then there is Winston Churchill, Britain’s most lionized modern prime minister, a man whose heroic speeches and indomitable spirit are often considered inseparable from a certain strain of Britishness. In his less glorious moments Churchill said that Gandhi “ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back.” For good measure he added that “Gandhi-ism and everything it stands for will have to be grappled with and crushed.” When the “seditious fakir” refused to yield, it pushed Churchill even further. “I hate Indians,” he admitted. “They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” Other races and nations seemed to annoy him just as much. Palestinians were “barbaric hordes who ate little but camel dung” and in a secret memorandum he chided colleagues who were squeamish about using chemical weapons in northern Russia with the line: “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.”
Similar attitudes and opinions abound through Churchill’s life and writings and clearly informed his policies, but that is hardly all that can be said about his life and achievements. Such flaws are one example of why revisionism can become an incendiary enterprise but they also expose the nonsensical argument that we should leave the past reverentially intact. Revising the mythology of a former hero, or removing their statue, does not discharge a society of its moral obligation to confront the past. If anything, it should be the first step towards a larger reckoning.
When asked about the origin of The Black Jacobins, his magnificent history of the Haitian rebellion, C.L.R. James said he was tired of reading condescending colonial historians and wanted “to find some story where blacks are doing things to people and not being done things by people. So I made up my mind when I went to England [to write] about Toussaint L’Ouverture.” On the strength of that book alone, all West Indians should ask themselves why we still have monuments to Queen Victoria (however tattered) or British military figures like Horatio Nelson but so few of heroic characters like L’Ouverture? The work of Eric Williams, C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney and many other postcolonial writers and historians have done far more to reclaim our history and agency than the destruction or removal of any statue ever could.
