General Introduction

Abstract

The author Salman Rushdie once commented that ‘the trouble with the English is that their history happened overseas, so they don’t know what it means’. 1 The volumes presented here contemplate this observation and are published in the midst of what has been denoted as the ‘statue wars’ that have broken out on both the university campus and in social media over the last few years. 2 The war is essentially about the place the British Empire should hold in popular memory, its representation in public space and the way in which it is taught within the academy. It also occurs in the context of a call to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ in terms of the history taught to both school children and university students. 3 In 2015 the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign emerged on the campus of the University of Cape Town, when Chumani Maxwele, a scholarship student studying political science, picked up a bucket of horse manure from the kerbside and threw it over the statue of Cecil Rhodes, a statue that had stood on the campus precinct since its unveiling in 1934. Marion Walgate, wife of the architect Charles Walgate had designed the new Cape Town Campus, sculpting the bronze figure. The campaign to remove the statue originated in the 1950s, as Afrikaner students saw Rhodes as a figure of imperialism, and holder of concomitant racist views. Rhodes had perceived the Afrikaners to be less than British and had therefore begun the process of segregation that led to the more overt Apartheid policy of the second half of the twentieth century. Subsequently, protestors targeted statues of Jan Smuts, twice-Prime Minister of South Africa and Maria Barnard Fuller, the first woman to gain a degree at the university. By 2016, the movement had become a transnational phenomenon, reaching both North America and Britain. At Oxford, the movement also targeted a statue of Rhodes, located on the face of Oriel College. The statue remained in place, despite calls for its removal, as donors threatened to withdraw their contributions to the university if removed. The Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign can be viewed from multiple perspectives. 4 It illustrates the revival of student politics after an extended period of dormancy and the rise of a post-colonial anger at the continued representation in public space of 2imperial figures from the European past that signify older imperial attitudes of racism and oppression. The movement triggered a debate across the wider popular media as to whether imperial figures who held values now distasteful to the twenty-first century citizen should be removed from public space. In Bristol, the ‘Countering Colston’ movement similarly attempted to have the statue of slave trader and public benefactor Edward Colston removed from the city. The journalist Afua Hirsch suggested the removal of Nelson from his column in Trafalgar Square, given his support for slavery − a call rejected by the military historian Max Hastings. 5 The call for Nelson’s removal was but one aspect of the post-colonial approach to empire, which since the 1970s had grown as an academic perspective. Its agenda was to hear the ‘subaltern speak’, that is to say those at the wrong end of the colonialism of the European power of the nineteenth century. It drew attention to the shameful episodes in the imperial past and to the inveterate racism within it.