British activists want to tear down more racist statues from their past
Ahmed Kaballo
Press TV, Oxford
Recent protests in the UK that were ignited by the killing of an unarmed African-American man in Minneapolis have now sparked a fierce debate about whether the UK's failure to confront its colonial past has shaped race relations in Britain's present.
The answer for the Black lives matter movement in Bristol was a resounding yes.
That is why the statue of Edward Colston, a racist slave trader who was responsible for trafficking at least 80,000 African men, women and children was torn down and thrown into the very harbor some of his slave ships sailed in on.
The action was condemned by the British prime minister and the British Home secretary as thuggery and vandalism yet the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has called for a review of all the statues and street names in the British Capital with any links to the slave trade.
Indeed on Tuesday following public pressure, the statue of notorious slaveholder Robert Milligan was removed from outside the Museum of London Docklands.
Yet for many campaigners, there are not many statues that represent Britain's racist colonial history more so than that of Cecil Rhodes and there was a huge turn out in Oxford on Tuesday, asking for his statue to be torn down next.
The University of Oxford presents itself as an inclusive institution that is open to the world, yet for many, the fact that the university honors a man that believed that the Anglo-Saxon race was superior brings into question those so-called values.
They call it Great Britain, often without ever acknowledging what made it Great. Many campaigners argue that the UK, rather than attempting to reconcile its colonial history, has celebrated it with the men responsible for inflicting so much pain on the rest of the world immortalized throughout the streets of Britain. Yet with the revival of the black lives matter movement that has galvanized so many young people throughout the world, that all might be on the verge of changing, one statue at a time.
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