 |
| Colston upright |
 |
| ...and coming down |
As usual, Shakespeare got it right, not with one quotation but two: “Use every man according to his desert and who shall ‘scape whipping” (Hamlet) and “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones”. The later remark is from Mark Anthony in his famous speech in praise of Julius Caesar in which he expertly whips up a mob against those who had assassinated Caesar.
We saw, for want of a better word, a mob whipped into a frenzy by the sight of a statue of Edward Colston in Bristol recently. Colston was a benefactor of Bristol who endowed schools and other institutions there but his money had come from trading in slaves so that put him beyond the pale and down he came, ending up in the River Avon before he was fished out. After it is restored Colston’s statue will be displayed in a museum in which his misdeeds will be put into context.
These misdeeds had already been highlighted in a plaque attached to the statue. The people of Bristol had debated what to do about this embarrassing monument, wanting to both acknowledge his generosity towards the city and the terrible trade which had made it possible. In a good old British compromise they decided to leave Colston standing and to confine their condemnation of slavery to the new plaque.
That was not good enough for the anti-racism campaigners, however, who felt that his slave-trading had put him beyond the pale so down he was pulled and pushed into the harbour by a group of demonstrators who displayed a mixture of self-righteousness and jollity in ridding Bristol of its slaver statue. The police stood back and allowed the crowd to take the law into their own hands. This might seem like a sensible move but, if strength of feeling is allowed to override local democracy, what is to stop a group of racists from taking down the statue of the black nurse Mary Seacole outside Saint Thomas’s Hospital and dumping it into the River Thames?
This is not an argument for leaving every public statue up forever, just for going through a rigorous discussion every time we see that someone had bad aspects to him as well as the good ones that he (usually) is being celebrated for. This is what Sadiq Khan is proposing for London - a commission to examine statues. This may be a bit slow and long-winded but it is better than mob rule, no matter how much fun it might have been in Bristol recently.
Cecil Rhodes will probably go next. Although slavery had long gone by the time he had made his money, he believed in the innate superiority of white people, even if that same money paid for a lot of both black and white students to study at Oxford. Lord Nelson may stand on top of his column in Trafalgar Square but he too was a keen supporter of slavery. You had best stand well clear if he comes down.
Even rugby union is now ‘reviewing’ the song Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, which was written by a slave, Wallace Wills, and became an unofficial anthem for the England team. Yet singing a song written by a slave is surely not an endorsement of slavery. It is rather an example of destroying the achievements of an enslaved people in the name of condemning their lack of freedom. While the civil rights movement adopted the song, the Nazis banned it in 1939. Which ship do you want to sail in?
While the institution of slavery was despicable - and sadly still is in some places - individuals almost always have redeemable features. Even Donald Trump is a good father to his children, if not a very loyal husband to his wives. A crowd full of righteous anger, however, is not interested in the redeeming aspects of someone’s life and makes judgements based on just one aspect of those lives. To dredge up another quotation, from Benjamin Franklin: “It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation and only one bad one to lose it.”
I can imagine it was satisfying to topple Colston. In the wake of the protests after the terrible killing of George Floyd in the USA, the righteous anger against a white man who did not question the inherent racism that made slavery possible was understandable. In the words of local writer Philippa Gregory (who once attended a Colston school) slavery was ‘a respectable trade’, the title of her book which may have been inspired by his life. Respectability does not make it right, however.
But Gregory’s novel was written two hundred years after the period in which it was set and attitudes have changed since then. “That was then this is now” is what I say to people who want to take down all the statues of people who accepted slavery. Even William Wilberforce, who opposed - and effectively ended - the trade in human beings had reactionary and what we now consider unacceptable views on the rights of men to organise themselves to campaign for better wages. He was someone who wanted to preserve the status quo but to reform it and to give it greater humanity. This humanity would always be granted from above and would not be tainted with dangerous ideas like democracy, which allows campaigning for justice from below.
Wilberforce is one of my heroes, even if I disagree with many of his views. He had the energy and determination to rid Britain of slavery without undermining the society of which he was a privileged member. In fact, he probably succeeded in his campaign because less enlightened men in power did not see him as a dangerous revolutionary but as a fundamentally sound chap, if a little soft-hearted at times. Wilberforce should be celebrated as a great reformer who achieved a massive advance from a position of white privilege.
He was also – as he would have been the first to admit – a flawed human being and might not expect to escape whipping if he put forward those some of those views today. We should honour people for their achievements without forgetting their faults.
______________________
My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com
Edwin Lerner
