If statues are torn down rather than reimagined to honour victims we will lose resources to understand our history
I had an interesting day on Monday after releasing a thread of eight tweets on the toppling of statues around the world. I had pondered hard whether to release the thread, suspecting it would raise the ire of the more intolerant of our activists. I was not disappointed.
The irony is that my position was not diametrically opposed to theirs. I held the view that the rage against statues of racist and colonialist figures was understandable and had to be addressed. But I also noted that the attacks on statues had gone beyond slave traders to politicians and other historical figures, and I raised the almost trite point that historical figures need to be understood and judged in their context.
At one level the response to my argument is understandable given the hurt experienced by victims and their descendants as a result of slavery, colonialism and racism. But on another level one must be concerned at the intolerance of the responses; the message was you are either with us or against us. No dissent, however minor, was to be brooked within the community of those opposed to the statues. This almost enforced homogeneity just cannot be an enabling attitude within democracies.
I responded by indicating that there were memorials to victims in Germany, but Maimane held that they were “acreation”. I again responded that “reimagining a statue can fundamentally transform its meaning ... but this is something we can respectfully disagree on”. I called on him to respond to the other parts of my recommendation, namely that decisions on statues should flow out of public deliberations and that in most cases historical figures need to be understood in their historical context.
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