The Great Statue Reckoning of 2020 was an unexpected lightning rod for global debates on race. After the decision not to remove the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes from the façade of Oxford’s Oriel College, despite the protests of the Rhodes Must Fall campaigners, and the heated debate in Bristol about what to do next with Edward Colston’s statue (it is currently on display at a museum in the city), that moment of reckoning has spilled over into 2021. Weaponised by the culture wars, Rhodes and Colston force us to think more deeply about how history is made.
There is an irony here. For a century or more the public role that statues were expected to play—ie drawing attention to imperial virtues—aroused minimal popular interest. That role has now quite suddenly become real, but in reverse. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, the question of the historical value of statues, perhaps the most anachronistic of all forms of memorialisation, has reverberated around the globe. Yet, like Brexit, there is a seemingly unavoidable binary element to these debates. No end to the reckoning is in sight.
Why do we face such an impasse? The point of dispute is less the aesthetic merits of the public sculpture and more the version of the past it apparently endorses. Beneath noisy Fallist campaigns and rearguard Retainer responses lurk the swell of the culture wars and clashing conceptions of history.
Retainers dismiss statue-bashing as part of a “woke” moment. In doing so, they raise the spectre of the “erasure” of our history, an airbrushing of the past to make it acceptable to contemporary morality. To tear statues down is to lie about our history, Boris Johnson once tweeted. Retainers also tend to be wary of standing in judgement over acts which, however unacceptable today, were typical in other eras. Yesterday’s heroes easily become today’s villains. Reputations rarely endure. Different periods have different values. Ergo, retaining a statue does not imply support for the views of whoever stands on its pedestal.
Retainers further insist on the complexity of history and its legacies. “History is never as simple as the woke anti-imperialist strives to make it,” to quote Trevor Phillips. The flipping of national narratives from a source of pride to one of shame is viscerally opposed by some. Versions of history which tarnish national pasts, engaging their citizens in self-flagellation, deny how nations have often been a force for good in the world.
Meanwhile Fallists demand a full and frank historical accounting. Here they are talking not of pseudo-scientific balance sheets of empire; a form of cost-benefit accounting which lends a spurious symmetry to the workings of imperialism. Rather, Fallists are expressing the view that a mature political community addresses historical wrongs by acting on the just claims of others.
An earlier boom in statuary, when nations largely defined themselves through territorial ambition, now represents another form of oppression. History is seldom a comfortable place. Fallists are interested in how ressurecting the past can be part of ushering in a better future. By confronting the past they hope to create a focus on what can be done today to make a more equal and just society.
Retainers and Fallists are not entirely homogenous camps; a variety of views exist within both. Yet, a year on from the start of the great statue reckoning, what divides them is, if anything, deepening. Their alternative and at times antagonistic ways of thinking about the historical process come to a head over the question of what it means to take responsibility for the past. Can history furnish us with moral obligations? Does everything tend to have deeper roots than we are inclined to think? On what basis can people be held to be guilty for what their ancestors did in the past?
Different perspectives find forceful expression in recent opinion polls. In Britain, only 17 per cent of people asked whether British history was something to be ashamed of responded affirmatively, whereas 65 per cent said it was unfair to make judgements about their predecessors based on today’s values. Meanwhile, in a More in Common report, two-thirds of white people oppose resurrecting their country’s history for penance versus a third who wish to acknowledge mistakes made by the British Empire. Tellingly, for black and minority ethnic people the figures are reversed.
The truth is that neither removing nor retaining statues guarantees against historical erasure. Historicising statues requires both sides to engage with a far wider range of heritage—including memorials neglected and long since fallen into decay. Who put these statues up and why?
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In the case of Edward Colston (1636-1721), even during his lifetime he cut a divisive figure with a reputation for imposing Tory and High Church views on his many charitable bequests. Presented to Bristolians as the “father” of their city, Colston had in fact lived most of his life in London. Not until the 1680s did he take an active interest in his place of birth. The previous decade several of his immediate family were involved with the West African slave trade via the Royal African Company, the leading 17th-century purveyor of enslaved people to the plantations of North America and the Caribbean. Colston followed in their footsteps and acquired interests in the West Indian island of Kitts. After retirement he resolved to leave his mark on future generations through furthering his charitable benefactions to prominent Bristol institutions.
We should also be asking why Colston was memorialised some 170 years after his death by Bristol’s late-Victorian elite rather than by public subscription as was common at the time? Efforts to extract donations from Bristolians largely came to nought. Few wealthy donors or ordinary citizens wanted to stump up the money for a statue, leaving a local Liberal businessman—the city’s largest publisher and printer—to step in. It was for their own reasons, in the face of growing labour unrest, that Bristol’s business and civic elite foregrounded Colston’s philanthropy over his complicity in transatlantic slavery, from which part of his fortune was made.
In the case of the campaign to remove Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902), we should note that Rhodes deliberately set out to memorialise himself and his views. After his death Rhodes’ admirers likewise strove to keep him in the public eye. Some of Rhodes’ defenders today, like academic Nigel Biggar, conveniently ignore this concerted cultivation of a particular romanticised image, while firmly rejecting the idea that he was guilty of genocide in what is now Zimbabwe. It is true that Rhodes’ invasion of the Ndebele kingdom by his privately owned British South Africa Company from 1890-97, when he was simultaneously premier of the Cape, aimed at annexation rather than systematic elimination of indigenous peoples. The archival record nonetheless paints a disturbingly violent picture. This even entailed using dynamite to blow up caves in which African civilians as well as armed men were sheltering.
Not all of those in power at the end of the 19th century were willing to normalise the brutality of imperial conquest. Rhodes’ views on white supremacy were extreme and uncompromising even by the standards of the day. As James Rose Innes (later chief justice of South Africa) remarked, by the mid-1890s the statesman had turned himself into a devotee of the machine gun.
If a statue is part of the story a city (or college) tells of itself then it is not difficult to see why Colston or Rhodes, occupying prominent public spaces, have channelled controversy. To judge either figure by the standards of their day would seem to concede too much to the mores of the past. Some acts are sufficiently wicked to be condemned across the historical divide—transatlantic slavery and violent settler colonialism fuelled by highly speculative mining capitalism would seem to qualify as such. It is worth recalling, in addition, that Colston and Rhodes had critics in their own time, and not just among the people they oppressed.
Statues and the culture wars teach us that history isn’t ultimately about winning or losing one’s story but about how we engage in debates about the past. Most reasonable people would likely agree history can and sometimes should play a role in restorative justice, even if it is not history’s only role. For societies in rapid transition, memorialisation poses particular challenges. The urban landscape belongs at least in part to the sensibilities of the present. Reconciling the presentation of heritage with the 21st century’s more inclusive drive to recuperate the lives of those on the margins of power is entangled with issues of present identity.
This does not mean that history is merely an instrument. But the clamour of the culture wars arises from a far-reaching transformation of British society, which in barely half a century has become religiously, linguistically and racially diverse in a way it has never previously been. Most British institutions are now playing catch up. And people are left genuinely wondering, post-Brexit, about the historic identity of their country.
What, then, should we do? If nothing else the 21st-century’s great statue reckoning has revealed that many people have a broader interest in how their society came about than we had perhaps realised. What is now needed is to move beyond two warring Fallist and Retainer tribes to a more mature remembrance culture—a culture that allows for significant historical reappraisal in response to moments of profound social change, while at the same time leaving sufficient space for the commemoration of historical figures whose lives continue down the generations to interest, instruct and even inspire. The real antidote to the false binaries of the culture wars is surely a much deeper and far more varied engagement with the past.
