In the Wake of Colston: Wake Work after Woke Work
- Jacob Badcock and Jovan Owusu-Nepaul
- Jun 22, 2021
- 19 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
What does it mean to defend the dead? To tend to the Black dead and dying: to tend to the Black person, to Black people, always living in the push toward our death? It means work. It is work: hard emotional, physical, and intellectual work that demands vigilant attendance to the needs of the dying, to ease their way, and also to the needs of the living. —Christina Sharpe[1]
A world divided into compartments, a motionless, Manicheistic world, a world of statues: the statue of the general who carried out the conquest, the statue of the engineer who built the bridge; a world which is sure of itself, which crushes with its stones the backs flayed by whips: this is the colonial world. —Frantz Fanon[2]
The fall
On 7 June 2020, amidst anger in the wake of the murder of George Floyd (who suffocated under the knee of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin), the statue of Bristol slave trader Edward Colston was pulled down by Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters before being unceremoniously dragged through the streets and dumped in Bristol harbour.[3] The statue was erected in 1895 to celebrate Colston’s philanthropic contributions—donations to schools and hospitals—to the city of Bristol. These were funded by his involvement in the Royal Africa Company (RAC), which was responsible for shipping up to 84,500 slaves to the United Kingdom from West Africa, and for at least 19,300 fatalities.[4] This monument to Colston was one of many late-Victorian attempts to, quite literally, cast the mythology of British exceptionalism. It should be unsurprising that the commissioning of Colston’s statue coincided with a period of violent corporate-colonial expansion. This was the ‘Scramble for Africa’, which followed the partitioning of the continent during the 1884–85 Berlin Conference by European powers.[5] Empire soldiers attacked kings and chiefs who failed or refused to comply with the attempts of the British Empire to establish commercial monopolies on raw materials. They plundered villages, raped women, and looted artefacts and regalia. In the years immediately before and after the installation of Colston’s statue, the British Empire waged several small wars and punitive expeditions across West Africa,[6] notably the Anglo-Ashanti war of 1895, which established the British Empire protectorate over Ashanti, and the Benin Expedition of 1897, which resulted in the sack of Benin City and theft of the Benin Bronzes. This corporate-colonial expansion was undertaken on ostensibly anti-slavery, humanitarian grounds. It purported to free enslaved Africans from the fetish rule of ritual sacrifice and cannibalism and to establish free trade. It therefore upheld the post-Wilberforce myth that Britain stood for the progressive emancipation of slaves the world over, whilst consolidating material dominance over Black Africans through a racialised capitalism. It was a Victorian ‘war on terror’ comparable to the liberal interventionism of the Major and Blair governments.[7] The paradoxes of post-slavery Britain were thus, literally, and figuratively, embodied in the statue of Colston from the moment it was erected. The statue projected to future generations a euchronia in which colonial exploitation was compatible with charitable goodwill. It stands as an index of the hypocrisy of the British Empire, which, after slavery, cloaked its expansion of imperial power abroad in the language of liberation whilst continuing to celebrate slave owners at home. Therefore, we can say that the end of slavery in 1833 had done nothing to halt the implementation of a state-backed ideology of White supremacy and imperialism. In 1895, three years before the Colston statue was unveiled, this ideology was given a particularly theatrical expression, to much fanfare. Incoming Secretary of State for the Colonies Joseph Chamberlain, father of future prime minister Neville Chamberlain, said the following: