Toppling of UK slave trader’s statue woke many to nation’s dark history

Anti-racism protests that led to the toppling of a statue in the UK after the death of black American George Floyd in US police custody have thrown the spotlight on the British narrative of its own slave history. The event has fuelled discussion about other UK monuments to historic figures, and whether they should remain standing. Tens of thousands of people took part in 200 protests up and down the country on Sunday in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. But the one that has triggered most discussion was in Bristol, a former slave port in southwest England. There, a group of mainly white female protesters managed to pull down a 130-year-old bronze statue of the 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston and tossed it into the harbour. The size and the determination of the UK protests has taken the government of Boris Johnson by surprise as it struggles with Covid-19 and finalising Brexit. In a video released on Monday evening, Johnson expressed sympathy with the reasons for the protest but vowed to clamp down on violent demonstrators and called for social distancing. Let us work peacefully and lawfully to defeat racism and discrimination wherever we find it, and let us continue to work together as we put Britain back on its feet. pic.twitter.com/onUqXbcCGB — Boris Johnson #StayAlert (@BorisJohnson) June 8, 2020 “The death of George Floyd took place thousands of miles away in another country under another jurisdiction and yet we simply cannot ignore the depth of emotion that has been triggered by that spectacle of a black man losing his life at the hands of the police,” he said. He said the government was well aware of the injustices faced by people of black and ethnic minority backgrounds, but said the UK has “taken great strides” in eliminating inequalities since the 1970s when he was growing up. “I must say clearly that those who attack public property or the police – who injure the police officers who are trying to keep us all safe – those people will face the full force of the law; not just because of the hurt and damage they are causing, but because of the damage they are doing to the cause they claim to represent.” Anti-immigration Home Secretary Priti Patel, the daughter of Indian refugees from Uganda, was more stridently critical. Thousands march in protests across Asia, from Australia to Japan “It’s hooliganism, it’s utterly indefensible there is no justification for it,” she told the House of Commons, claiming she herself had been called a “Paki” at school. Government critics however say Johnson’s Conservative Party was responsible for the surge of anger and the rise in racism that surrounded the 2016 Brexit referendum to leave the European Union. The Covid-19 pandemic threw the spotlight on racial inequalities in the UK where people from non-white backgrounds have suffered a massively disproportionate number of deaths, especially in the National Health Service. A report from the Intensive Care National Audit & Research Centre found 30 per cent of Covid-19 victims were from Black, Asian and other minority backgrounds – people that make up just 13 per cent of the UK’s population. There has also been widespread anger over the 2018 “Windrush” scandal concerning the children of Jamaican migrants in the 1940s who were wrongly detained, denied legal rights, threatened with deportation, and in at least 83 cases, wrongly deported from the UK by the Home Office. Survivors of the 2017 burning of the Grenfell Tower housing block in west London where 72 people died, mainly from ethnic minority backgrounds, due to faulty cladding, have still not been adequately compensated. George Floyd’s death reminds France of police brutality victim Adama Traore But the jingoism triggered by Brexit, supported by Johnson and the “Global Britain” stance of his government has coincided with the global anger surrounding racism in the US, the overtly provocative stance of US President Donald Trump. It has also once again turned the spotlight on the dark side of Britain’s colonial legacy that many believe has been whitewashed in school history text books and civic monuments. For nearly four decades, anti-racist campaigners in Bristol tried to have the Colston statue removed and set the record straight on his local reputation as a major philanthropist, with roads, a school and a concert hall also named after him. As deputy governor of the Royal African Company, Colston traded more than 80,000 Africans and an estimated 20,000 of them died on the horrendous journey between England and the Americas. Why Hongkongers are divided over lessons from American unrest “The American system of slavery was an English system of slavery – and then they made it their own when they became an independent country. But they only kept slavery going for 30 years longer than we did,” said David Lambert, Professor of Caribbean History at the University of Warwick. “The issue in Britain is a lot of our history happened ‘overseas’ in the empire out of the eye of the British public, so we don’t think about it as ‘British history’. “Statues come down all the time – we have all seen the images of Saddam Hussein or the pulling down of Soviet era statues – these things happen. We pull them down, we stick them up. Such statues basically tell us what a society thinks is important at a particular time – or least what those who are rich and powerful think.” Local Labour Party politicians in Oxford have called for the removal of a statue of the white supremacist and imperialist Cecil Rhodes at the city’s famous university as Black Lives Matter protesters planned to gather on Tuesday. Others on the list include statues of the Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi, who was said to have held racist views of indigenous Africans from his time spent in South Africa and Edinburgh’s 45-metre high Melville Monument, erected in 1821 in memory of the former home secretary Henry Dundas, who was best known for delaying the abolition of slavery in 1792. There were many more. A statue to Winston Churchill, Johnson’s hero, was also defaced during the weekend demonstrations, leading Patel to call for legislation to protect Britain’s war memorials. Debates over how to handle monuments were also raging in other nations. In the United States, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam announced plans last week to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in the state’s capital city of Richmond. In Belgium, an online petition calling for the removal of statues of colonial-era King Leopold II has garnered thousands of signatures. His troops decimated Congo in the late 1800s. So far, no one has made any calls to haul the Colston statue out of Bristol’s harbour. One idea was to let it rust for a while, then haul it out and place it horizontally in a museum, surrounded by Black Lives Matter placards. Additional reporting by Thomson Reuters Foundation