Protests in the wake of African American George Floyd's
killing by a white police officer in the US have led to the unceremonious
toppling and vandalism of statues of controversial historical and political
figures.
Here are five symbolic examples:
Bristol: slave trader Edward Colston
On Sunday, in England's southwestern port of Bristol,
protesters pulled down a bronze statue of 17th century slave trader Edward
Colston and dumped it in the local harbour.
Colston was a leading figure in a royal slave trading
company that sold 100,000 west Africans in the Caribbean and the Americas after
first branding its initials on their chests.
But his name remains attached to streets and buildings in
honour of his funding of local hospitals and schools for the poor, and
officials fished the statue out.
US: Christopher Columbus
Overnight on Tuesday, in Boston, a statue of Christopher
Columbus was beheaded, in the park named after him.
A Columbus statue was also vandalised in downtown Miami
with red paint, and another was dragged into a lake earlier in the week in
Richmond, Virginia.
The Italian explorer, long hailed as the so-called
discoverer of "The New World," is considered by many to have spurred
years of genocide against indigenous groups in the Americas.
He is regularly denounced in a similar way to Civil War
generals of the pro-slavery South.
US: Jefferson Davis
On Wednesday, a statue of Jefferson Davis, president of the
Confederate States of America during the 1861-1865 Civil War, which opposed the
pro-slavery South and the abolitionist North, was toppled in Richmond,
Virginia.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the same day for removal
of 11 Confederate statues from the US Capitol, part of a nationwide push to
dismantle such memorials after the Floyd killing.
According to a 2016 report from the Southern Poverty Law
Center (SLC), which is specialised in extremist movements and civil rights,
more than 1,500 confederate symbols are still on show in public places in the
US, most in the South.
Belgium: Leopold II
The Belgian port city of Antwerp took down a statue of late
King of the Belgians Leopold II on Tuesday, days after it was daubed with red
paint by anti-racism protesters.
Statues of Leopold have long been a target of activists
because of his record of brutal colonial rule in Belgium's former central
African colonies, notably the then "Congo Free State", now the
independent Democratic Republic of Congo
It has been removed by officials from its public pedestal
next to an Antwerp church and taken for restoration to a museum where it will
be examined before deciding what steps to take next.
Churchill: graffitied in Prague, London
In Prague a statue to Britain's World War II leader Winston
Churchill was covered in graffiti early on Thursday, daubed with the words
"Black Lives Matter" in solidarity with the anti-racist movement in
the US.
A central London statue of Churchill was also defaced, with
the words "was a racist" with protesters blaming his policies for the
death of millions during famine in the Indian state of Bengal in 1943.
0 comments:
Post a Comment