HAVING lived in the south-west of England for many years, up until 2003, may I point out that the statue of Colston has long been an open sore in Bristol.
There were requests in the late 90s for the statue to be placed elsewhere than on what was the edge of the university and main non-white area of Bristol. The statue has long been a target for protests against racism by students and others and was forever being daubed with paint. Yet the Tory-run Bristol Council backed by “independents” (aka Tories in disguise) refused all and any suggestions and was not going to give into a minority of trouble-making students and “blacks”.
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Just before I came back to Scotland, the Bristol Race Relations organisation suggested at least putting a plaque on the statue to explain Colston’s role, or better still move the statute to the Museum of Slavery that was being created to better inform the folk of Bris’l of their role in the slave trade. The council once more refused to remove the statue, and have dithered about the wording on the plaque in the hopes this would all blow over and be forgotten.
The removal of Colston’s statue has a long history and was not a spur-of-the-moment action; the dumping in the harbour reflected Colston’s orders to his captains on dumping slaves overboard and the irony is that the daubed statue, recovered from Bristol harbour, is going to be placed in the Slavery Museum where most Bris’l folk have long thought it should be.
This is the prism through which the removal of Colston’s statue should be seen, a long-standing protest against the racist attitudes of Bristol Council’s Tories and independents.
If there is to be any move against statues of the like of Dundas then it should be informing folk of their role or moving them to an appropriate museum setting, with one exception: the “Mannie” in Sutherland.
The Duke of Sutherland’s callous killing by indifference of what were native people, pushed to the shore’s edge and destitution by his agents, is up there with the Ottoman’s treatment of Armenians, the Nazi and Japanese death camps or Churchill’s disregard of the Bangladesh famine during the Second World War.
If there is to be a memorial to what the Duke of Sutherland did, it should be the restoration of one of the many clachans his agents destroyed so folk can see the culture and way of life he ended.
Peter Thomson
Kirkcudbright
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