The Bristol statue that went for a dip

Feelings are running high around the world after the death of George Floyd in America at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis, nowhere more so than in Bristol, where a controversial statue of slave trader Edward Colston was dragged from its plinth and down to the harbour-side, where it was then pushed into the Bristol channel, to the delight of the assembled crowd.

Most Bristol take so far:
“They’re saying we should’ve gone through the proper channels to get im down. Well we tried that for years and were ignored, so now e’s in the proper channel.” pic.twitter.com/cq1LDTMiIO— 20th Century Flicks (@20thCFlicks) June 7, 2020

In a BBC report the statue was described by Bristol mayor Marvin Rees as "an affront" to the city's community but that it would most likely be retrieved from the water and placed in a museum - hopefully with explanatory panels about the horrors faced by those who were taken into slavery by traders such as Colston in the 18th and very early 19th centuries.

The slave trade was mainly in the hands of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French and the British. Slaves went to the New World, mostly to Brazil and the Caribbean. From 1660, the British government passed various acts and granted charters to enable companies to settle, administer and exploit British interests on the West Coast of Africa and to supply slaves to the American colonies.

Bristol was, of course, the major slave port in Britain and, along with London and Liverpool, much of their wealth came from philanthropists such as Edward Colston who made their fortunes from the slave trade before the final abolition of the slave trade by The Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807.

As so many of our port cities were built as a result of the profits of slavery, and many of those will have statues or memorials to those traders whose fortunes helped develop them, so some commentators are arguing that we should be grateful to them for their philanthropy whilst ignoring the issue of slavery, whilst others (myself included) feel that these symbols of oppression should be removed.

Statue of Edward Colston in Bristol, image by Simon Cobb and used under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication

In most places the names of slave traders will have passed out of memory, but in Bristol the Colston Society exists, and every year holds events and services to remind the city of how wonderful their man was, with no mention of his heinous crimes against humanity, no reminder of the thousands of slaves who died as a result of his trading, just a celebration of him as a city benefactor not as the man who, as recent research has confirmed, can be directly linked to the deaths in transit of at least 20,000 African slaves, including more than 3,000 children. It's no wonder that Bristol became a flash-point at the weekend, and understandable that protesters wanted to make the ultimate point by tearing down the statue of Edward Colston that so many found offensive.

Whether or not you agree with the tearing down of the statue*, it has opened up the public debate on historical slavery in a way that no amount of council discussions or school homework over the years has managed to do.

There are many such public memorials to slavers in places in the UK, as this country's wealth was built on the enslavement of the peoples of the colonies and the exploitation of its home population, in industries such as cotton, sugar, spices, rum, timber etc.  It's time to remove these commemorative symbols from our public places and relocate them into museums of slavery and population history, where the stories of the exploitation of the people can be shown in the context, both of their abuse of the people involved and the fabulous wealth that the traders generated for themselves.

The stories of those who were enslaved in the pursuit of profit must be told, whether stolen from their own lands by slavers or our own native population forced to work in often appalling conditions for little money, they are our history and our ancestors.

Glorification of the slave owners and traders is not appropriate in the 21st century, irrespective of how philanthropic those people may have been and, whilst we cannot change our country's history, we can and should learn from it. If that means changing the names of buildings, such as community centres, schools, streets etc, from those of slavers to something more appropriate then this should be done.

If government and local authorities do not take heed of what has happened in Bristol, or if they respond in an inappropriate way, then they are opening the door on mass public action by people across the country who feel their voices are not being heard.

It's a wake up call!

See also The list of monuments and memorials removed during the George Floyd protests.