I’ve been revisiting my feelings about the toppling of Edward Colston; merchant, politician, philanthropist, slave trader.
In 2020 his statue in the centre of Bristol was torn down and dumped in the Cumberland Basin by a group of protestors involved in a Black Lives Matter demonstration.
My daughter, unsurprisingly, was wholly in favour of the action. Past generations pushed away from their parents by accusing them of being staid and conventional while they themselves were liberated and able to enjoy the full gamut of human experience. The current generation is more concerned to define their parents as morally suspect and to separate themselves so that they can stand on ‘the right side of history’.
And here’s the rub: History is such a vague and slippery thing. The cliché that it’s written by the victors just illustrates the fact that what comes down to us is one perspective of remembered events that gained enough support to be adopted as fact. We end up with a simplified, biased account of events that are actually complicated and nuanced.
What disturbed me, watching the events of June 8th was that it had the tone of a lynching. There was the same emotional charge; the same unleashing of ‘righteous’ violence, the same sense of working together in a worthy cause; the same glee as the hated statue hit the ground and eventually glugged to the bottom of the dock. I was left with the feeling that they might well have treated the real Edward Colston in much the same way had he been there in the flesh rather than in bronze.
In a lynching, all nuance is subsumed in hatred of ‘the other’. The individual disappears and all that’s left is a symbol of the hated black man. He may have been a hard worker, a loving husband, a community activist a tender lover; all those things, but now he is simply a black man who has committed some real or imagined crime and must pay the price.
Colston was remembered in bronze for the good things that he did for the city of Bristol and its inhabitants. This, of course, was also an un-nuanced expression and represented only one facet of his life and his impact on the men and women of his time.
But is the answer to erase him? As we look back and seek to gain a better understanding of the past, is it helpful to simply replace one caricature of events with a different one? Was Colston a devil or a saint? Does he belong on a plinth or at the bottom of the Cumberland Basin?
Of course, just like the rest of us, Colston did both good and harm. His intentions were both worthy and despicable. He had clear sight of some issues and closed his mind to the truth about others. He was neither a devil nor a saint; he was a human being.
So, if we’re really grasping for a better understanding of the past, we need to add information rather than erase it. We need to form a higher-resolution picture of the individuals we’re concerned with, rather than reducing them to two-dimensional cartoons.
My suggestion, then, is that as we add to our understanding of these characters of the past, we also add to the monuments that represent them. I propose that we commission artists who hale from the communities that were oppressed and abused by these men and ask them to enhance the statues and, in so doing, enrich our understanding of these people and the roles they played in our history.
Colston could be reinstated but given slave manacles to hold, with chains trailing to the ground beside his flowing robes. A second figure could be introduced to represent the many, many individuals who suffered death and abuse as a result of his involvement in the slave trade. It’s not for me to prescribe the details but it would be easy enough to bring the hidden aspects of Colston’s story into the public view.
The result would be disturbing and this would be a very positive thing. The purpose of art is to cause a reaction and, in so doing, invite us to think about issues we might otherwise have ignored. This would be much more constructive than staring at an empty plinth.
Ultimately, if Colston is forgotten then his crimes will be forgotten as well; and this is not, I think, what the mob was going for when they disposed of his effigy.