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.
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.”
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).
(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.
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.
