Falling Like Dominoes ...

Edward Colston Statue, Bristol

Life under "Lockdown" - A London Diary #4

“May you live in interesting times” – so says the ‘Chinese’ proverb. Although many people don’t realise it, this isn’t a Chinese proverb at all. It sounds rather like some wise old Confucian adage, used most effectively as a faintly damning form of adieu – a subtle reversal of “mind how you go.” But like so many things nowadays, it’s actually ‘fake news.’ It’s thought the phrase was first coined in an American comic book circa the 1950s, used by some stereotypically racist Fu Manchu-like baddie. But fake news or not, we really do live in interesting times right now.

I shall keep this as short as I can – because there are far better qualified folk than me commenting on all this in every newspaper and media channel right now, but I just wanted to pen a few words about the present wave of radical action which has followed in the wake of recent Police brutality in the USA, and the #BlackLivesMatter protests which have been triggered by the killing of George Floyd. The sense of injustice suddenly seems intolerable, not just in America but elsewhere too. These incidents, which seem to have burst out from our collective unconscious, remind us that racial and social inequality is essentially systemic. It is inherently built into our modern societies and its roots are deep. All right minded people are morally outraged, naturally, but ‘thoughts and prayers’ are no longer enough. Right now such oft repeated hollow words and gestures are quite simply another negation, an apathy that attempts to whitewash over the cracks in our social fabric. Especially here in Britain, where our current Prime Minister has openly used overtly racist and xenophobic epithets on numerous occasions. Small wonder then, the deracinated state we’re now in. We live in a world filled with divisions. Angry people seem to be constantly barking at us to ‘stay in our lanes.’ Don’t buck the norms, while the social elites seem to be cynically bolstering the ramparts of their own hegemony. ‘Twas ever thus, but the wedge between ‘those who have’ and ‘those who have not’ is now visibly being driven ever deeper, widening the gap between our two camps. It’s little wonder then that some people are very pissed off. And right now they’ve quite rightly had enough.

One of the outcomes of this wider unrest is the focus on civic symbols of commemoration, namely statues standing in our shared public spaces. Over the last few days angry groups of people have come together to lasso ropes around the necks of some of these statues and pull them down from their plinths. These effigies, most commonly cast in illustrious bronze, have stood for varying lengths of time depending on who they commemorate and when the decision was made and the funds raised or allocated to commemorate them. They are usually described on the accompanying plaques on their plinths in eulogistic terms as souls suitably ennobled due to the civic benefactions they have bestowed upon our communities, either locally or nationally. But people have begun to take issue with some of these monuments, questioning why they so often tell a story from one particular angle only. Any decent historian or archaeologist will be the first to affirm that all monuments, the same as all public edifices, are consciously put up to serve political ends. They are meant to make a statement, to convey a particular message, and often – unlike, say, abstract art – they are specifically designed and social engineered to underline a particular rhetorical point. These statues may well look static, but they each embody a cognitive dynamism which is meant to speak to us down the ages.

In the UK the most notable of these recent direct actions has been the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol. A local civic grandee from the eighteenth century, whose good deeds included the founding and funding of schools and alms-houses for the poor, etc., as indeed the plaque on his monument duly attests. But so too, as the protestors have pointed out, what that plaque neglects to mention is that much of the personal wealth which enabled Colston to fund all these seemingly ‘selfless’ yet self-aggrandising gestures was derived from the profits of the slave trade and his use of enslaved people and their enforced labour in his plantations in the West Indies. As I understand it, the toppling of Colston’s statue wasn’t a spontaneous happening. It may have been spurred by the #BlackLivesMatter movement, but it was already a contested local issue which had long been simmering away, left unresolved amidst bureaucratic inertia. Moves had been taken via the ‘proper channels’ to debate whether the statue should be removed, or if the plaques on its plinth could be revised to give a more balanced accounting of Colston’s life, the source of his wealth, and the morally precarious balance between his good deeds and his bad ones. But, as a wry Bristolian take on the issue explains it – “We didn’t get anywhere pursuing things through the proper channels, so we took it upon ourselves to chuck him into the proper channel instead.”

Toppling Edward Colston Statue, Bristol - June 2020 (Washington Post)

During the lockdown I’ve watched as the mercury of my social media channels has incrementally risen up into a daily barrage of discontent and outright rage. Everyone seems to be angry about something – the Government’s handling of the Coronavirus; Dominic Cummings being Dominic Cummings; the on-going riots and repression in Hong Kong; Rio Tinto destroying unique sites of ancient Palaeolithic and indigenous cultural importance in Australia – the list seems as unfathomable as it is endless. I’m seeing fewer and fewer cute and fluffy cat videos on my time line. But, with my historian’s monocle wedged firmly in place, it has been interesting to see how the toppling and defacing of these public statues has really sparked a bigger debate about history, its purpose, its ways of interpretation and presentation. From statues of Colston to Columbus, Winston Churchill, Robert Baden-Powell, and, closest to where I live, Robert Milligan (another eighteenth century slave owner), the situation has clearly moved on from simply ‘Rhodes Must Fall’, but this is a massive issue to tackle given how culturally embedded these figures are within our civic environments – street names, place names, the names of schools, theatres, museums, houses, gardens, etc. History isn’t simply the past, history is what has created and defined our present. The future though is the one thing which we can define in thinking about how we deal collectively with our present times, and how we act now.

In Britain in particular over the last few years there have been growing calls for us as a nation to get to grips with our colonial past, to engage with the lingering influences of that heritage, to think more openly about how it consciously and unconsciously informs our present – from museums and public spaces to school curriculums and the way in which Government archives are managed and administrated, embargoed or destroyed. However, I recently saw one rather disappointing comment on one of the social media platforms I use which people have begun posting as a kind of quick and easy virtue-signalling meme; and on first reading it seems laudable enough, but pausing a moment before scrolling by I felt that it actually missed the point by a country mile. To paraphrase, it went something like this: 

“Historian here. We NEVER use STATUES to teach history. We use BOOKS to do that, and our young students have put what they’ve learnt to use. That’s why tearing down statues IS history.” 

So, here’s my take on this one in particular. Yes, tearing down these statues is history. What could be more symbolic that tying up the legs of the bronze statue of a white slave owner and chucking it into the sea – exactly as the white slavers used to do to enslaved persons who got sick whilst in transit on-board their slave ships in the mid-Atlantic? – I have no argument there, but I take issue with not using statues to teach history. This is something museums do every day as part of their core function, as one of my retired archaeologist colleagues pointed out in the comments below one of these posts using this meme. You only have to look at the example of the Meroe Head in the British Museum to see that this phenomenon is far from new or recent.

I’ve written about the efficacy of studying and interpreting statues on this blog a number of times before, as well as pondering the radical actions of destroying or tearing them down. From statues of Lenin and Stalin to those of Saddam Hussein or the unfortunate Bamiyan Buddhas, as well as various other examples in Syria and Iraq under ISIS. This phenomenon is rooted in history, but the point is our shared histories are constantly being revised, reinterpreted, and rewritten anew. Such direct actions are no less important in past instances than they are now, or will continue to be in the future. But mentioning museums raises another couple of contentious points too, which shouldn’t be skated over.

"Garden of the Generalissimos" - Chihu Park & CKS Mausoleum, Taiwan

I’ve seen many people on social media channels and newspaper comment sections urging a kind of compromise or literal middle-ground between those who are outraged these statues have been let to stand so long, and those who are outraged they have been so swiftly felled by mob intervention – and that’s those people who are saying that these old statues should be moved to museums and archives, or put in dead sculpture parks, like the one in Taiwan filled with rows of defunct statues of Chiang Kai-shek. In response to these suggestions I saw one archivist shout angrily back at these people saying: “Don’t dump your f**king toxic statues on my institution’s doorstep!” – They then quickly followed up this emphatic statement by pointing out that most public museums and archives lack the space, the funding, and the resources to adequately deal with what should be their core functions as it is. Flooding them with nuisance sculptures isn’t necessarily the logical panacea it might at first glance seem to be, indeed solving this contentious civic conundrum needs properly thinking through. Plus, many people feel our museums are largely institutions with their own culturally problematic colonial baggage to deal with as it is. Nothing positive can happen in either of these two regards without a calm and coherent discussion, nor without long term planning and proper funding of the heritage sector.

Hence all of this ultimately circles back to the same fundamental issue, and that is how we choose collectively to face our shared heritage; how we choose to frame our different histories; how we preserve these monuments, and the way we choose to memorialise the past. It is definitely a debate which needs to take place. And clearly now is the time to have that debate. Watch this space, as they say – or rather, watch those plinths, empty or otherwise, because we are ‘living in interesting times’ for sure.

Also on 'Waymarks'

The Sacred & The Profane

  

The Fallen Angel of Madrid

 Rebuilding the Bamiyan Buddhas 

'Colonial Loot' & Modern Museums