Bristol Harbour

No, no, they managed to keep Cecil Rhodes up.

It was Edward Coulson that they chucked into Bristol Harbour.

That's right.

Who very few people actually think of as a hero, but he was a great philanthropist of Bristol University and so on.

Um, and at the same time, Black Lives Matter in 2020, I think was a crucial moment.

It meant that a lot of the hidden parts of empire came to light because the activists who toppled Edward Colston's statue into Bristol Harbour were choosing a symbol that really crystallized these continuities between past and present.

The fact that Colston was a slave trader who trafficked 30,000 people, um, when he was deputy director of the African, Royal African Company, that he'd been at least partly responsible for 19,000 deaths in the holds of those trafficking ships, and yet he was still venerated, still on a statue in Bristol when I think to my mind, quite obviously, had he been any other, you know, white figure who had killed white people, 19,000 white people, they would have taken that statue down a long time ago.

So it brought to light these ongoing racial disparities.

It was really the Colston statue, the Edward Colston statue in Bristol that was pulled down.

A lot of people will remember kind of during the pandemic that was pulled down and thrown into Bristol Harbour.

And I'd been thinking about statues and writing about them for much longer than that.

I'd written about the Cecil Rhodes statue in 2016 when that was challenged in Oxford.