An American policeman killed George Floyd. Now Europe is re-examining its colonial history
London and Bristol, England (CNN)At an old stone harbor in the English city of Bristol, young people gather at a bent railing by the water and peer into the murky deep. They're looking for the defaced statue of the 17th century slave trader Edward Colston. And just maybe, they're looking at an era gone by.
Protesters
last weekend wrenched Colston's statue from the plinth, rolled it down
cobbled streets and tossed it into the very same waters on which his
ships arrived hundreds of years ago, carrying shackled African men,
women and children for him to sell on as slaves in the Americas.
Protesters
throw the statue of Edward Colston into the harbor during a Black Lives
Matter protest in Bristol, England, on June 7.
The
police killing of George Floyd in the US last month has galvanized a
global anti-racism movement. Now it is forcing Europeans to re-examine their colonial histories and even question their national identities.
Few
Europeans will explicitly defend their country's historical use of
slavery, yet challenging the celebration of the very leaders and
merchants who profited from slavery and the horrors of colonialism is
proving a less comfortable conversation.
In
Bristol, schools, streets, pubs and the main hall bear the name
Colston, in celebration of the merchant's philanthropy on which the city
was built. Colston is as entwined with Bristol as Rockefeller in New
York or Eiffel in Paris.
And
therein lies the problem. It can be difficult for a people to
acknowledge that national heroes also traded slaves, or held deeply
racist views, or profited from oppressing other civilizations, perhaps
even genocide.
Colston's role in slavery is no secret in Bristol, yet some there say they never learned the details of what he did.
He was a member of the Royal African Company, which transported more
than 100,000 slaves from West Africa to the Americas, some 20,000 of
whom died during their voyage, their bodies thrown overboard.
"Walking
past that statue every day, knowing that that's a symbol of you being
oppressed because of your immediate relationship with racism today --
and your ancestors, family, in the past that have been oppressed and
exploited and murdered, tortured and raped -- is a great offense," said
Miles Chambers, Bristol's first poet laureate, who addressed protesters
last week.
Poet-laureate Miles Chambers in the English city of Bristol on June 9.
He
said people had been petitioning the council to bring it down for more
than 20 years. "It needed to be ripped down and pulled down."
It's
a sentiment that many people in the United Kingdom share. Even Bristol
police chief Andy Marsh instructed officers to stand by and allow
protesters to bring the statue down, something unlikely to have happened
a month ago, before Floyd's death.
But
this sentiment is not shared by all, not least the country's leader.
The Conservative-led government responded to the statue's toppling with
the threat of force.
"I will not
support or indulge those who break the law, or attack police or
desecrate public monuments. We have a democracy in this country. If you
want to change the urban landscape you can stand for election or vote
for someone who will," Prime Minister Boris Johnson said, adding that
anyone attacking public property would "face the full force of the law."
On
Friday, Johnson joined a chorus of critics saying toppling statues was
an attempt to erase British history, pointing particularly at protesters
who had vandalized a statue of former Prime Minister Winston Churchill,
widely regarded a hero for his leadership during World War II.
Churchill was also known to hold racist views and protesters last week
spray painted the words "was a racists" after his name.
"Yes,
he sometimes expressed opinions that were and are unacceptable to us
today, but he was a hero, and he fully deserves his memorial," Johnson said on Twitter.
Johnson's rise to leadership in itself may say something about the way the country regards its past. As a journalist in 2002, he wrote an article for The Spectator
entitled, "Africa is a mess, but we can't blame colonialism." In it, he
claimed: "The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we
are not in charge any more."
It wasn't a one-off. Johnson regularly wrote controversial columns and used racist terms for Africans and
other ethnic minorities in the past. Even though these have been well
documented -- and resurfaced as recently as 2016, when he became Foreign
Secretary -- the country last year re-elected him with a commanding
majority.
But changes are happening around the country, even if they aren't in Westminster.
Demonstrators at a Rhodes Must Fall protest outside Oriel College at the University of Oxford on June 9.
On Wednesday, the Scottish Parliament unanimously passed a motion to establish a museum devoted to the history of slavery.
London
Mayor Sadiq Khan has ordered a review to ensure landmarks fairly
reflect the capital's diversity and achievements. The opposition Labour
Party had instructed its 130 local councils across the country to do the
same.
They may need to act quickly. Activists under a group called Topple the Racists have
identified 60 statues across the UK of people who had links to slavery
or colonial violence. One, of 18th century slave trader Robert Milligan
in east London, has already been taken down after protesters vowed daily
demonstrations if it stayed standing.
And
students at the University of Oxford have renewed protests demanding
the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes -- whose trust finances the
well-known Rhodes scholarships -- one of Britain's most dedicated
imperialists who was known to hold racist views.
Decolonizing Belgium's streets
Statues
have become a target in Belgium too. In the city of Antwerp, one of
King Leopold II was so badly burned and defaced that authorities were
forced to remove it. They plan to repair it and place it in a museum.
Across the country, the king is commemorated not only in statues but in the names of streets, buildings, squares and parks.
A group called Repair History has attracted more than 70,000 signatures
in a petition calling for all King Leopold II statues in Brussels to be
removed by June 30, the 60th anniversary of the Democratic Republic of
Congo's independence from Belgium.
A vandalized statue of King Leopold II in Brussels on Wednesday.
It's
difficult to understand how King Leopold II even came to be so
celebrated in the country. He was regarded as one of the most brutal of
Europe's colonizers, even during his time, as he made an enormous swath
of central Africa his personal piggy bank. He was not even backed by the
Belgian government when he proclaimed the land for himself and named
it, euphemistically, the Congo Free State. And despite the fortune he
gained from the colony, the king never set foot in it.
Some historians estimate he was responsible for 10 million deaths,
around half the population. His army was notoriously known for cutting
off the hands of the Congolese and collecting them in baskets to lie at
the feet of European post commanders. It was so brutal the Belgian
government was forced to take control of the colony in 1908 under
international pressure.
The
activist group Bamko-Cran of Congolese-Belgians wants all celebratory
statues and references to King Leopold II in the country removed.
"We've
been calling on political actors to do this type of thing for 30 years,
and they did not understand or listen. It's as if Germany and Germans
decided to have statues of Hitler in all of their cities," said the
group's president, Mireille-Tsheusi Robert.
"When
we erect a statue that means that we applaud the actions of that person
that is represented. That we are in agreement with their work. Here we
are not in agreement with the genocide that Leopold II carried out in
Congo," she said.
Belgium wasn't
the colonial power that the UK, France and Spain were. Its conquest came
later than its European neighbors and was shorter lived. It spent much
of its post-colonial decades simply ignoring its footprint on what is
now the Democratic Republic of Congo, historians note.
A
group of women in Accra, Ghana, on February 17, 1961, mourning Patrice
Lumumba, the former leader of the Congo who was assassinated with
Belgian complicity.
But
in recent years, there has been some renewed interest in the country's
colonial history and a collective memory is forming. A series of
television documentaries on the subject was widely watched, a museum
exhibiting colonial propaganda in Brussels has been renamed and reopened
to tell a more accurate story of the time, and a square in the capital
was in 2017 named after Patrice Lumumba, the DRC's first prime minister,
who was assassinated in a coup backed by Belgium.
Still, there are Belgians of prominence who want to keep the king's statues standing.
"He never went to Congo, I don't see how he could have made people suffer on the ground," Belgian Prince Laurent told Sudinfo in a short interview. King Leopold II was Prince Laurent's great-great uncle.
"You only have to look at what King Leopold II has done for Belgium and you will understand," he said.
While
they are a minority, there are still some historians who paint
colonialism as a success. Bruce Gilley from Portland State University
even called for its resurgence in a highly controversial essay, "The case for colonialism," in 2018. In it he wrote, "Maybe the Belgians should come back" to the DRC.
But
it's easy to find holes in the arguments of such supporters. Yes, the
British built a rail network in India, as is often pointed out. But it
feels like a stretch to expect celebration for trains that were built to
pillage the country, to transport its food for export as people there
died in the millions in times of famine.
"Many
people still have racist conceptions in saying that 'you would have
nothing, we brought you technology, we brought civilization,' forgetting
that there already was a civilization, simply a different one," Robert
said.
A black curriculum
Much of this positive take on colonialism can be found in the history lessons taught in schools.
In
France -- where Black Lives Matter protesters have used the death of
George Floyd to address its own problems with police brutality -- there
has been continued debate on how colonialism should be viewed and
taught.
The
French held empires or colonies at several points since the 17th
century, losing much of its overseas territory after World War II,
particularly in Africa and Southeast Asia, as independence movements
around the world gained force.
In
2005, the French parliament passed an education law, part of which
obliged schools to include "positive aspects" of French colonialism in
history lessons. The law was so controversial that President Jacques
Chirac was forced to override it with a decree and the Supreme Court
agreed the law shouldn't determine how schools teach history.
Yet
the conversation doesn't appear to have gone much further since. The
colonial period is a source of pride among a certain section of French
society, who still like to think of France as something of a world
power, according to Pap Ndiaye, a historian with The Paris Institute of
Political Sciences.
"I would say
that when reading conservative newspapers and listening to conservative
politicians, you have this ambiguous discourse saying that, 'yes,
colonialism was not maybe a good idea, but colonialism brought good
things overall and we should have a balanced and fair understanding of
the French colonial past," he said.
"Historians
like myself, we do not say history is about a positive column here and a
negative column there. It's about the overall purpose of colonization,
which was to exploit and dominate parts of the world, and when looking
closely at the so-called good things that colonialism did, speaking of
education, for example, a very small part of the colonized had access to
education. And when it comes to medicine, it was first and foremost for
the Europeans to survive in tropical areas, to fight tropical diseases,
and also to allow Europeans to have manpower in colonized areas."
Protesters call for Algerian independence and peace in Paris on November 18, 1961.
He
says there is also a fear in France that admitting to wrongdoing would
lead to legal actions and "open a Pandora's Box" of demands for
reparations, which gives another incentive to carry on with this
narrative of positive colonialism, Ndiaye said.
Very
few European nations have paid compensation for human rights abuses or
what were likely atrocities in their former colonies. In 2013, the UK
agreed to compensate victims of torture at the hands of British colonial
forces in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s, to name a
rare example. In 2011, the Dutch apologized and compensated the
relatives of men and boys who were killed in a massacre in the
Indonesian town of Rawagede.
In the
UK, the issues of transatlantic slavery and the fall of the British
empire are in the curriculum for history, but there is little oversight
into the way those topics are taught, which often leads to a
whitewashing of events, according to Sam Okyere, a sociologist from the
University of Bristol, who studies the legacy of the slave trade.
Okyere
points out that UK schools often focus on the success in abolishing of
slavery in the British Empire in 1833, 15 years before France and 32
years before the United States. The government paid out huge sums of
money in compensation to former slave owners to finally end the
practice.
Former
Dutch Ambassador to Indonesia Tjeerd de Zwaan, center, leaves flowers
at the graves of victims of a 1947 massacre, in Rawagede, Indonesia, on
December 9, 2011, when the Netherlands made a formal apology.
"There's
still is a lot of naivety and misunderstanding about it. So we have
here in the UK, where government ministers would rather naively call on
the British public to pat itself on the back for having paid for the
liberation of slaves, when the reality was that slave traders and
plantation owners were given compensation for the fact that they held
slaves, even though those who were enslaved, or former enslaved peoples,
were given no such compensation. So, there is a lot of collective, if
you want, amnesia or deliberate or wilful ignorance about the past or
the role Britain played in the transatlantic slave trade," he said.
Lavinya Stennett, who founded The Black Curriculum
social enterprise, is trying to change the way black history is taught
in schools. The curriculum is still taught through the lens of the
European experience, she said, and it's too often up to individual
teachers to try and present the black experience truthfully.
As
the name suggests, her organization has created a curriculum on black
British history, heavily focused on the arts, and offers schools
consultations, teacher training and certification.
"The
current school curriculum, it does not include black history or
attitudes or even the experience of colonialism," she said. "It lacks
reflection on the gravity of empire and colonialism -- it celebrates it.
The experiences are seen more as achievements rather than cases of
brutality and murder."
Stennett is
calling on the government to adopt her organization's curriculum, or
take influence from it, while the issue of race is at the forefront of
so many people's minds.
"In
light of the events of the past few weeks, as the country is
grief-stricken and as there's been unrest, this would be a really
positive move. There are parts of the government who could help create a
lasting, systemic change, and make sure this isn't a moment that is
something that in two months we forget about. This could shift a
generation."
A previous version
of this story incorrectly stated when slavery was abolished in the UK
and US. It was abolished in 1833 in the UK and 1865 in the US.
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