13 statues that stand on the right side of history, from Rosa Parks to Nelson Mandela
- Around the world, countries are reckoning with the past and the historical figures chosen to represent it
- But not all who are commemorated need to come down – these activists, academics and political leaders are welcome to stay
There has also been a vote to remove Oxford University’s statue of imperialist Cecil Rhodes, perhaps moving it to a museum, where his legacy can be discussed rather than lauded.
Britain in particular is wrestling with its collective conscience over the issue of who it commemorates and how. Of the nation’s 828 public statues, only 174 are female and it wasn’t until 2016 that the country had its first memorial to a named black woman – the Crimean war nurse Mary Seacole, who has long been overshadowed by her contemporary Florence Nightingale.
Here are some other statues of historical figures that are likely to remain on the right side of history.
Member of Parliament for Yorkshire, William Wilberforce supported the campaign for eradicating slave trading in Britain. In 1825, he retired from politics due to ill health but the tireless social reformer continued to lobby on behalf of those who were already enslaved and, in 1833, the year he died, an act was passed granting freedom to all slaves in the British Empire.
A statue of the politician stands in the garden of Wilberforce House, in Kingston upon Hull, East Yorkshire. The abolitionist’s birthplace is now a museum showcasing his life and work.
When a neo-Nazi rally took place in Växjö, Sweden, in April 1985, Danuta Danielsson decided to take matters into her own hands. The housewife clobbered a shaven-headed member of the Nordic Reich Party with her handbag – an act captured by a photojournalist and subsequently picked up by the global newswires.
Danielsson’s mother was a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps and the idea of commemorating the act of defiance gathered momentum. When authorities dismissed the idea, Swedes began draping handbags over the arms of existing statues in protest and the government relented. The Woman with the Handbag is on public display in the town of Alingsas, to the northeast of Gothenburg.
A bronze bust of Alexander Fleming being saluted by a matador outside the main bullring in Madrid was funded by grateful bullfighters because the Scot’s discovery of penicillin resulted in far fewer deaths from gangrene. There is also a Doctor Fleming Street in the Spanish capital. Whether the gory sport stands the test of time is debatable but the Father of Antibiotics’ legacy seems safe.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested after she refused to give up her seat on a public bus for a white man. The episode led to the Montgomery bus boycott, which in turn resulted in the US Supreme Court’s ruling that segregation on buses was unconstitutional. Parks received the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999 and a bronze homage to the civil rights pioneer was unveiled in the Alabama capital last year.
He only spent five weeks in the Galápagos but while exploring the Ecuadorean island group, Charles Darwin encountered wildlife that inspired him to develop his theory of evolution. The English naturalist, geologist and biologist has streets, snakes, tortoises and even human inhabitants named after him – not to mention numerous statues across the archipelago. The largest and most imposing can be found on the island of San Cristóbal, where Darwin first made landfall on his voyage aboard the Beagle in 1835.
Born in what is now North Macedonia, Mother Teresa is commemorated with a statue in the capital, Skopje. On a visit last year, Pope Francis prayed at the memorial before paying tribute to the Nobel Peace Prize winner: “History is written by people like this, people unafraid to offer their lives for love.” The Roman Catholic nun and missionary was ethnic Albanian and there is also a monument to her outside St Paul’s Cathedral on – you guessed it – Mother Teresa Square in Tirana, Albania.
You can find statues of Nelson Mandela everywhere from Palestine to Pretoria, where the nine-metre-high bronze likeness is the world’s tallest tribute to Madiba.
In 1962, while walking past a statue of former South African prime minister Jan Smuts, in London’s Parliament Square, the anti-apartheid activist turned to African National Congress colleague Oliver Tambo and remarked that “someday there would be a statue of us in its stead”. Mandela’s prophecy came true in 2007, when he was cast in bronze with his arms open as a gesture of reconciliation.
Talking of South Africa, there is a statue of a saluting Fidel Castro in Bloemfontein, which, coincidentally, is a four-minute walk from one dedicated to anti-apartheid campaigner Oliver Tambo. The Cuban Marxist revolutionary leader played a role in the struggle for South Africa’s freedom and democracy. Regardless of one’s ideological standpoint, Castro’s long-term investment in health care has resulted in a surplus of medical professionals – more than 30,000 Cuban doctors are currently working in 67 countries, including 2,000 medical workers who are fighting Covid-19 in 23 countries.
Believing she had been chosen for the role by God, medieval peasant girl Joan of Arc led the French army to victory over the English and their allies in the Hundred Years’ War. The Maid of Orleans was later captured, tried for witchcraft and heresy and burned at the stake in 1431, aged 19. There are a number of statues of the venerated saint, the best known of which is the gilded equestrian monument at the Place des Pyramides, in Paris.
Canadian doctor Norman Bethune pioneered tools and techniques in thoracic surgery. At the outbreak of World War I, he signed up as a stretcher bearer and, on his return to Canada, he worked at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, often caring for patients for free. Bethune travelled to Spain during the civil war, where he set up the world’s first mobile blood transfusion service and, in 1938, he headed to China at the time of the second Sino-Japanese war.
Despite serving with the Red Army, he treated and performed battlefield surgery on the injured of both sides. He contracted septicaemia and died in 1939, aged 49. In 1978, a white stone sculpture of Bethune was offered as a gift to the city of Montreal by China, a replica of which can be found in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province. Bethune remains one of the few non-Chinese to have had statues erected in their honour in China.
In 1943, Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski gave the Western Allies eyewitness reports of the mass murder of Jews, Poles and others in German-occupied Poland. His first-hand accounts detailed the horrors suffered in the Warsaw Ghetto and the transport of Jews to the extermination camps.
Although his descriptions of Nazi atrocities didn’t result in immediate action, Karski received Polish civic and military decorations, and he was honoured with the Righteous Among the Nations distinction by the Yad Vashem organisation in Jerusalem. A statue of the Holocaust whistle-blower seated on a bench is located in old Krakow’s Jewish Quarter.
Also in Central Europe are statues of two Nics. A monument to Polish-born astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, the man who declared the Earth revolves around the sun, can be found in the capital, Warsaw.
Nikola Tesla, meanwhile, has a statue in his birthplace, the Croatian city of Zagreb. The pioneering electrical engineer also has a bronze likeness in Palo Alto, California, which rather fittingly incorporates a Wi-fi hotspot. The Silicon Valley city is also home to the headquarters of electric car company Tesla.
