The streets of Britain are littered with monuments to colonisers and slave owners. They sit on
top of our hospitals and universities and schools.
But today there is one less, the statue of Edward Colston, one of the most notorious
slavers in history – was pulled down, dragged across the streets of Bristol and dumped into
the same harbour where his slave ships used to dock.
We walk past these statues every day, yet few of us even notice them,
let alone understand the implications of the people and systems that they memorialise.
And it’s only when the descendants of those enslaved and colonised contest the legitimacy
of these statues that their significance becomes visible.
Our economic system relies on the extraction of wealth and the exploitation of the people
of the Global South. Yet we hardly talk about this. The system, which is powered by inequality,
just brands itself as a meritocracy, in which violence against racialised people is merely
incidental or even deserved. We are told that removing statues ‘erases
history’; that colonisers and slave owners were products of their time, so cannot be
judged by today’s moral standards. Yet the very existence of these statues erases
the histories of the enslaved and colonised, When we look at the statue of British coloniser
Cecil Rhodes in Oxford and its inscription calling him ‘a munificent benefactor’,
this shows us nothing of the brutalisation and subjugation of Black people that made
him his fortune. When we declare that no one at the time knew
better, we are ignoring the struggles of the oppressed, who always knew that what was being
done to them was wrong. Both arguments rely on the notion that black
people are not and never have been people; let alone people who matter.
The function of these statues and memorials is propaganda, it ensures that only a particular
version of history is quite literally set in stone for future generations.
History is not confined to the past, Modern Britain was literally built on slavery and
colonialism. The Industrial Revolution itself was paid
for by money given to slave owners as compensation for the loss of their slaves.
Many of the injustices of today – of massive wealth inequality, climate breakdown and extreme
labour exploitation – are rooted in these histories.
The displacement and dispossession of people of colour continues, and our global economy
is actively driven by coloniality. Our relationship to historical figures like
Colston is important because these are the figures who wrote the blueprint for the world
we exist in today. But the truth about the role of empire and
slavery in building Britain is concealed so that the economic priorities of white supremacy
can continue. The violent hostile environment policy, for
example, relies on the idea that immigrants should not have access to Britain’s resources
- the erasure of imperialism from the story of Britain ensures that the spoils of empire
continue to be exclusively preserved for white Brits.
Statues like that of Edward Colston don’t teach us about Britain’s past.
They stand in the way. They represent an ideology based on the erasure
of Black histories and the devaluing of racialised lives.
Only by pulling down these statues can we make the space necessary for a meaningful
and transformative re-education on how Britain came to be.