Context? What context? Rhodes Must Fall: past, present, and future.
The eighteenth century — the peak of the triangular Atlantic slave trade — has never been so much in the news. In my job at St John’s College, Oxford, I teach and research eighteenth-century French literary and cultural history. But, having been a student at Oxford too, and having grown up near Bristol, I am well aware that the eighteenth century isn’t just history. Significant parts of Bristol and Oxford were built on the slave trade; its legacy is ever present in these cities: in racist road names, libraries, chapels and, indeed, statues.
Many people, in particular black people of African descent and people of colour, need no reminding of this racist histoire. (I use the French ‘histoire’, for it means both ‘history’ and ‘story’ — not just past, but a tale still being told, and lived, in the present, as this article by Tadiwa Madenga eloquently describes.) Walking past the statue of Cecil Rhodes looming over Oxford High Street, it is no neutral history that stares down; there’s no such thing anyway. Rather, it is a reminder of the fact that the institution at the heart of (but not equal to) this city chooses to continue glorifying the values Rhodes upheld: racism, discrimination, and imperial values[1]. The Rhodes Must Fall movement in Oxford, inspired by the original one at the University of Cape Town in 2015, began precisely to oppose this; what follows stems from what has already been articulated by members of this movement.[2]
On 11 June, the vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford, Louise Richardson, stated that ‘hiding our history is not the route to enlightenment’, adding, ‘we need to understand this history and understand the context in which it was made’. She gave the example that for most of the university’s nine hundred-year existence, Oxford’s dons refused to admit female students; rather than ‘denounce those people’, Richardson states, ‘they have to be judged by the context of their time’. On 12 June, Boris Johnson echoed Richardson’s sentiments in response to graffiti on the statue of Churchill in Parliament Square. Acknowledging that Churchill expressed views that ‘were and are unacceptable to us today’, Johnson nevertheless stated that ‘we cannot now try to edit or censor our past. We cannot pretend to have a different history. The statues in our cities and towns were put up by previous generations. They had different perspectives’. The flaws in logic of these arguments made by a man educated at Oxford and the woman at its head reflect decidedly poorly on the much-touted quality of an ‘Oxford education’.
For a start, it’s entirely possible both to ‘denounce those people’ — and thus to remove their statues — and to consider their views in their contemporary (i.e. historical) contexts. Considering the past from these multiple perspectives is precisely what humanities students do every week in their essays and tutorials; being able to do it well, to think in nuances and from multiple angles, is what makes them not only skilled critical thinkers but also engaged global citizens.
Larger problems lie, though, in what Richardson and Johnson say about the ‘contexts’ of Rhodes, et al.. When they claim that these men held ‘different perspectives’, they appear to be referring narrowly to ‘the prevailing view’ of race, empire and slavery in their lifetimes or at the time their statues were erected — a view which they assume to have been ‘pro’ white supremacism and violent colonial racism (values Rhodes explicitly held). Except, as experts on colonial history have pointed out, this is not the case. Indeed, Oriel College’s own webpage about its alumnus, Rhodes, presents evidence to the contrary, stating plainly that ‘Rhodes’s activities in Africa, and the vision of empire that he represented, were controversial in his lifetime’.
The statue of Rhodes at the centre of present debate, however, was erected in 1911. In his study The Cult of Rhodes (2005), Paul Maylam notes that by the early twentieth century, ‘times were not propitious for a triumphant celebration of empire’, and that after the Second Boer War (which ended in 1902) there emerged in Britain ‘a school of intellectuals who were increasingly critical of empire’.[3] In 1906, meanwhile, an alumnus of Oriel wrote of a plaque erected in Rhodes’s memory that he ‘could have wished it were not Rhodes’s statue that should appear above the gate into the High. I am not in love with the “Imperial” spirit.’ It is simply not the case that by 1911 there was ‘prevailing’ support for Rhodes’s ideologies. Indeed, as my students know, as far back as Colston’s era, in the eighteenth century, prominent voices were speaking out against imperial violence wrought against non-white bodies.
This week I have marked excellent student essays on the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French and Francophone figures (including Condorcet, Claire de Duras, Diderot, Toussaint Louverture, and Voltaire) who were already condemning slavery and racism. Established scholars, such as Sankar Muthu, have shown there were European ‘Enlightenment’ voices that were ‘against empire’. However, as scholars (and my students) rightly note, the picture is complicated; this was not Black Lives Matter avant la lettre. While Diderot penned an excoriating condemnation of slavery in Raynal’s Histoire des deux indes (1770–1780), at other points in his life he wrote orientalising tales that treat black and brown bodies as objects of fascination for the entertainment of white readers. It’s barely possible to establish ‘the prevailing view’ of race and empire held by this single author, let alone that of an entire century, nation, or continent. Whose view would that be? That of the wealthy and powerful, or of those writing and publishing? How do you establish a ‘prevailing view’ if the voices of many (women, or people of colour themselves) were never recorded?
If someone in many years’ time were to describe our present moment, they might say that the ‘prevailing view’ was opposition to the removal of statues portraying racist individuals. But we know that many support the removal of such monuments. If by ‘prevailing view’, then, Richardson and Johnson in fact mean ‘government view’ (and since ‘government’, historically, largely means ‘Oxbridge-educated’), they must own up to this lie, for it both is and is not a white one. What it hides is an absurd, self-satisfied tautology: that Oxford will continue to do what Oxford has always done, because it says so.
The Rhodes Must Fall movement, from its origins in South Africa, has sought to topple white supremacism by first toppling statues. Statues are at the heart of this matter. Therefore, if we are truly to judge statues of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century figures ‘by the context of their time’ we must also judge them according to historical ideas about statues — what they do, when to put them up, and when to take them down. These ideas are part and parcel of the baggy notion of ‘context’.
There is every reason to believe that Colston’s contemporaries would have supported our demolition of his statue, according to their understanding of statuary. In Diderot and d’Alembert’s famous compendium of contemporary knowledge and opinion, the Encyclopédie (1751–1772), the sculptor Étienne Falconet writes that public sculpture has two functions. The first is ‘to perpetuate the memory of illustrious men and to provide models of virtue’.[4] The second is to provide ‘decoration or embellishment, but these sorts of sculpture can still direct the soul towards good or evil.’[5] In both functions, statues encourage viewers to behave in certain ways. The statues of Colston, Rhodes, et al. were never mere decoration. So, in Falconet’s taxonomy, they can only be of the former kind — celebrations and models for imitation.
Falconet’s taxonomy was representative. Across the century, statues served the dual purpose of celebration and encouragement to emulation. We see this in Pigalle’s ‘Voltaire nu’, commissioned in Voltaire’s honour by his friends and colleagues. We see it in the statues of French ‘grands hommes’ commissioned for the grand gallery of the Louvre, in 1776. And we see it work the other way round, too: when the subjects of statues were no longer perceived as great, down they came. The clearest example is the toppling of statues of the Bourbon monarchy, across France, during the French Revolution. Indeed, the destruction of the bronze statue of Louis XV that once stood on what is now Place de la Concorde in Paris bears striking similarities to the recent downing (or drowning) of Edward Colston. The felling of this Louis was not authorised by the then government, but it was hardly carried out in secret: it happened in broad daylight, a ‘public reflex to the collapse of the monarchy’.[6] (Andrew McClellan also recounts the excellent witness account that a ‘prominent artist’, watching the struggles of the de facto demolition crew, contributed 30 sous and instructed one of them to ‘go to an ironmonger and buy a saw’.) And so the ironies pile up. Colston is sunk in the docks his slave ships sailed from, while Louis XV (like his younger relatives) fails to escape the Revolution without having bits of him chopped off…
Statues were not — and are not — neutral records of history. ‘In context’, they were glorifications to encourage reproduction of the subject’s actions. Statues may portray people from the past, then, but their purpose has always been about the future. And when they no longer represented what the public wanted to be, they were removed. Of course, this is what we still do today. It’s why a statue of Jimmy Savile, erected at a leisure centre in Glasgow, was taken down in 2012. It’s why, after the Charleston Church massacre in 2015, a number of monuments to the Confederate States were removed. And it’s why the statue of Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town was removed, around a month after the Rhodes Must Fall campaign there began. We do not need to look as far back as the eighteenth century to find precedent for the removal of statues that no longer have their place.
Now, the history of our hero-worship is an important history to tell. We must keep a record of our acts of glorification, of the people we honoured in the past, and teach future generations why we once honoured them but no longer do. However — and this is where I must respectfully disagree with Professor Mary Beard’s recent article — to leave statues in situ is not to keep the record of glorification, but to keep the act of glorification itself. To retain it as an historical record, it must be taken out of the context that makes it an object of glorification, for example, by placing it in a museum. Maintaining the statue of Cecil Rhodes in its place above Oxford High Street sends the message that Oriel College — and Oxford University — commends white supremacism. Quite apart from the fact that this is an abhorrent message, it runs counter to the University’s stated ‘commitment to diversity’, desire that students and staff of colour ‘feel respected’, and ‘zero tolerance for racist comments or behaviours’. Either the vice-chancellor has not recognised these paradoxes, or the University’s commitment to anti-racism is a sham.
Johnson and Richardson call for contextual readings of statues. This is a contextual reading. It shows that, in whatever context you frame it, the claim that statues are ‘history’ is incorrect. It shows that, in any of the ‘pasts’ under consideration, there was no such thing as ‘the prevailing view’ that favoured violent racist discrimination. When Johnson contends that ‘we cannot now try to edit or censor our past’, both the past and the present show us that actually, ‘yes we can’. Or rather, they show that removing statues was never ‘editing or censoring our past’ anyway.
When members of the Rhodes Must Fall movement at the University of Cape Town gained the support of then vice-chancellor, Max Price, and succeeded in toppling the statue of Rhodes, or when the public in Revolutionary France upended statues of the Bourbon monarchy, they were not ‘editing their past’, they were constructing their future. Professor Olivette Otele (the UK’s first black female history professor, and Bristol University’s first professor of the history and memory of slavery) has shown that, in the recent Black Lives Matter protests, history is just the start. Once this Oxford Rhodes has fallen, which will surely happen soon, we must all help build a truly anti-racist future.
[1] On Rhodes’s values, see the entry on him written by Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
[2] See, for instance, this excellent recent article by a founding member of Rhodes Must Fall Oxford, Simukai Chigudu, now one of around just seven black professors at Oxford.
[3] The Cult of Rhodes: Remembering An Imperialist in Africa (Cape Town: 2005), p. 118.
[4] My translations. The original French reads: ‘Le but le plus digne de la Sculpture, en l’envisageant du côté moral, est donc de perpétuer la mémoire des hommes illustres, & de donner des modèles de vertu d’autant plus efficaces, que ceux qui les pratiquaient ne peuvent plus être les objets de l’envie.’
[5] ‘La Sculpture a un autre objet, moins utile en apparence ; c’est lorsqu’elle traite des sujets de simple décoration ou d’agrément ; mais alors elle n’en est pas moins propre à porter l’âme au bien ou au mal.’
[6] McClellan, ‘The Life and Death of a Royal Monument: Bouchardon’s Louis XV’, in Oxford Art Journal, 23.2 (2000), 3–27
