Given that my work intersects with a range of colonial actors, it’s not really a surprise that I’m sometimes asked my opinion about monuments being torn down. Should statues of people judged to be on the wrong side of history be knocked off their plinths? In general, I’ve fallen in the middle with an unsatisfactory maybe — but a recent trip to Bristol showed me the possibilities of what a museum can do with unpopular artefacts from unpleasant times. 

Toppled statues have been in my line of vision since long before I had the chance to see one in the flesh, so to speak. The earliest I can recall came with fall of communism and the wider clear-out of Stalin statues. In the early 21^st century, the world saw the toppling of Saddam Hussein symbolised with the dramatic tearing down of his likeness in Firdos Square in Baghdad, not long after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. Closer to home — and more of a harbinger of what lay ahead — was the Rhodes Must Fall protests in 2015 over statues of arch-colonialist Cecil Rhodes, first in South Africa and later at Oriel College at the University of Oxford in the UK.

However, those images came to me through the news and the internet. It wasn’t until a trip to Berlin in 2017 that I encountered an actual leader who had been torn from his plinth, in this case Hermann von Wissmann, a soldier, explorer, and administrator of what was German East Africa in 1895-1896. Von Wissmann had also spent a spell working for King Leopold II of Belgium, helping him establish the hellish Congo Free State, a personal African fiefdom the king would use to enrich himself through a violent regime of enforced labour that produced rubber and other valuable commodities. 

Von Wissmann was on display at the German History Museum (Deutsches Historisches Museum) in an exhibition called German Colonialism — Fragments Past and Present (Deutscher Kolonialismus – Fragmente seiner Geschichte und Gegenwart). It was an eye-opening show. German colonialism doesn’t often get equal billing in terms of historical attention compared with other European empires, in part because it was short-lived, only existing from 1871 until the territories were taken from Germany after the First World War. In that time, the German imperial realm mainly extended into areas of East and West Africa (parts of today’s Ghana, Cameroon, Namibia, Burundi, Rwanda, and Tanzania), and was scattered across the Pacific, including parts of New Guinea, Palau, the Mariana islands, the Marshall Islands, and part of Samoa. Of course, Germany’s next chapter rather eclipsed this period, and so the German empire remained in the shadows of its history, which was why this exhibition was very much welcome, if not overdue. 

What was arresting about Von Wissmann and what made it so memorable was the presentation. He was on his back on a small museum riser, not very far off the floor (this photo is under copyright but see his positioning here). The viewer could, quite literally, look down at him. He remained decorated with the yellow graffiti painted on to him, presumably done around the time he was pulled down in 1968. The Von Wissmann statue had been constructed in Tanzania in 1909 and was later shipped over to be put in a prominent place at the University of Hamburg, where he remained, a monument to the failed experiment of German imperialism until student protests in the late 1960s. And now, here he lay, prone and frozen. It was a strange, ghostly proximity. A metal cadaver. I wondered if some viewers had to restrain their urges to kick, deface, or spit upon his inert form. It certainly drove home the power of positioning, as expressed in English idioms, such as putting a person ‘on a pedestal’ or knocking someone ‘off their plinth’. It’s easy to focus on the person being memorialised, but really what gives him his power is the height and scale of the statue. The viewer is forced to look up and, in theory, be filled with admiration. It is disconcerting to see a likeness submerged below eye level, drained of its power, and an object of scorn — now within kicking range. 

In the wake of the protests in 2020 that began after the death of George Floyd, many statues were toppled or significantly damaged, in the US and elsewhere. They included Confederate generals, Christopher Colombus, Catholic priests, and even abolitionists. I wrote about one in The Great Resistance: 

Despite now having seen Von Wissmann and a few empty plinths, the question of what to do with such objects and spaces remained unresolved for me, but the Edward Colston exhibition at M Shed, which is the city museum of Bristol, seems to have forged an instructive way forward.

In general, what has been important to me regarding the question of whether to remove a rendering of a hated historical figure, is that the public remembers the reason the person went up in the first place. I was flexible on the question of whether the contextualisation should be on the site, or in a museum. Leaving it intact but putting signs that contextualise the person comes with some problems, not least that the person is still on his plinth. The issue with the other option is that a statue can come down and then simply be destroyed or shunted into storage. This denies the public the opportunity to learn from its context — and to feel the many emotions of being able to gaze down at it — as I did with Von Wissmann, though in his case there was not a lot of context or explanation about him in the exhibit.

Bristol has nudged me towards the ‘tear it down, but put it in a museum’ camp, in part because of the excellent way M Shed has decided to deal with the Colston statue. He is perhaps the most controversial person to be pushed off a plinth — and thrown into a canal — in Britain. Colston was both an enormous benefactor to the city of Bristol and deeply, horrifically involved in the slave trade as an official of the Royal Africa Company.

Instead, Colston looks like a sort of colonial specimen dredged out of the waters of the past and put on display. His glass box is surrounded by many displays offering context, with explainers of what happened in Bristol and of the aftermath, alongside a larger timeline of Black history in the city. Some of the signs ask difficult questions such as: ‘can we judge the past by today’s standards?’ and ‘who decides when it’s time to “move on’?” I’m not sure there are any answers to those questions yet, but it seems like M Shed is positioning them in a useful way and trying to create a space of dialog with enough of the history to arm visitors with some facts. 

How the past is commemorated or forgotten is always a question of the present. These ghosts of empire will continue to haunt public spaces for some time yet, but the exhibition in M Shed shows one promising way of how to handle them.    

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What I’m … doing 

Winging it. Absolutely winging it. And you can watch me wing it! 

Back in April I had a wonderful event at A Capella Books in Atlanta, which was recorded by C-SPAN for its weekend BookTV programming. Just one little problem: I was not prepared. My publicist told me back in February or March that C-SPAN might be there and I — quite wrongly — assumed someone would be in touch to give me a heads up. As it turned out, C-SPAN sent out a local production team to film, and no one told my publisher. The director cheerfully informed me 10 minutes before the event was due to start that I needed to fill an hour. I had prepped a quick 5-minute reading. Worst of all, I HAD NO POWER POINT, which is basically the public speaking equivalent of being naked.  

My jolly afternoon was turning into a nightmare. Mercifully, my dear friend Crystal Paulk-Buchanan, who is a communications professional, was on hand to save the day. We quickly decided that she was going to Q and I was going to A, and we would fill that hour with a terrific Q&A, plus questions from the audience, which was full of friends and family who made terrific contributions. I think we got away with it. Watch and see for yourself. It’s scheduled to be broadcast on C-SPAN Book TV at 12pm Sunday, July 26 (EDT) and repeated at 12am on Monday July 27. Let me know what you think!

If you’re not familiar with C-SPAN Book TV, you can watch one I did earlier, in 2019, at the Southern Festival of Books, where I was in conversation with the excellent Christina Proenza-Coles.

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