What fate for monuments related to colonialism? An inclusive remembrance

In 1936, Robert Musil stated, “there is nothing in this invisible world like a monument.” And indeed, usually the throngs of statues that populate our squares go rather unnoticed. In recent days, however, social media, televisions and newspapers around the world are broadcasting many images of statues daubed with paint, covered in graffiti or pulled down from their pedestals during protests in support of the anti-racist Black Lives Matter movement. From the statue of Christopher Columbus in St. Paul, Minnesota, to that of Winston Churchill in front of Westminster, to that of Edward Colston in Bristol, to that of Victor Emmanuel II in Turin, to that of Indro Montanelli at the Via Palestro gardens in Milan. The phenomenon, abroad as much as in Italy, has been interpreted by many as an inappropriate attempt to rewrite history. Emmanuel Macron, for example, has declared that in France “we will not erase our history and we will not remove any statue.”

Reading the phenomenon as merely iconoclastic, in my opinion, is reductive and probably counterproductive. The disturbing images of violence against these statues, in fact, respond to a desire for inclusion and greater social justice that is not new but virtually unheard of, and therefore now rampant.

In the case of Bristol, for example, some protesters, resenting having a monument in the city dedicated to a very active slave trader, pulled down the statue of Edward Colston. One of the protesters, in a powerful and guessed gesture, lowered his knee to the bronze neck, symbolically reproducing the brutal murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The statue was then thrown into the waters of the harbor. The unintentional “plunge” of the statue into the harbor waters generated a wide wave of reaction. Priti Patel, U.K. Secretary of State for Home Affairs, interviewed by the BBC, called the protesters’ action “unacceptable” and “absolutely shameful.”

The tearing down of the Edward Colston monument: the moment the bronze statue is thrown into the waters of Bristol Harbor

Personally, I agree instead with those who recognized the action as a powerful political act. The prominent International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, for example, commented on how the incident was not an attempt to erase history so much as to make history. David Olusoga (University of Manchester), stated, “Statues are not tools through which to understand history. [...] Statues are about worship. They tell us ’this man was a great man, who did great things.’ This is not true. He [Colston] was a slave trader and a murderer.” Nicholas Draper, director of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership, commented, “There will be other cases. [...] The cultural world has questioned relatively little about the post-colonial moment, and this is a position that can no longer be maintained.” Going beyond institutional tones, O’Shea Jackson, better known as Ice Cube, famous American rapper (N.W.A.: ’Niggaz Wit Attitudes’), tweeted to his 5.2 million followers, “THEY WILL ALL FALL.” A most effective summary.

It would be curious to ask who is or is not part of these “they.” Even Columbus? Even Churchill? And Montanelli? And Vittorio Emanuele II? What about Queen Victoria, then? But beyond that, I wonder if it is really legitimate (indeed, perhaps necessary!) to knock down a statue every time the historical judgment about the person represented changes. And what to do with the void that eventually remains?

As a historian, it occurs to me to look at how the problem has been addressed in the past. The Greco-Roman world was crowded with statues as much and more than ours. It often had to deal with statues of figures who ceased to be considered worthy of the honor. One could then resort to damnatio memoriae, literally the “condemnation of the memory” of the character in question, enacted through a series of procedures against public monuments imbued with his or her memory. These ranged from chiseling the name from inscriptions, to the abrasion of frescoes in which the person was depicted, to the damage and/or removal from the public square of sculptures depicting him. Over the past two decades, historians and archaeologists have emphasized that the phenomenon met a creative rather than merely destructive need. Mere inscriptions and damaged statues were often left in public view. The preservation of certain elements of physiognomy and/or titling, such as victories achieved or offices held in life, ensured a maintained recognizability of the person once honored, and now affected by condemnation.

When monuments were physically removed, their absence was conspicuous. Caroline Vout (University of Cambridge) has elegantly called them “noisy absences.” For example, after the assassination of Emperor Domitian in 96 AD and his damnatio memoriae by the Senate, the large equestrian statue depicting him on horseback was removed from the Roman Forum. According to Cairoli Fulvio Giuliani’s (La Sapienza, Rome) reconstruction, the base of the statue, however, remained in place, unchanged and empty, until the reign of Septimius Severus (193 - 211 AD). For a hundred years, a large stone base towered, empty, in the heart of Rome. It is hard to imagine that this void served to erase the memory of Domitian. Instead, the one created, and monumentalized “by subtraction,” was a new memory, saying, “At one time this man was considered by some to be a great man. Then, it was decided that this was not true.” An attentive audience was being forced to wonder who Domitian had been and what actions might have led first to the erection of his statue and then to its removal. What was suggested was a historical reinterpretation of the character, imposed, in this case, by his own detractors.

The case of the Bristol statue reveals the activation of a partially similar but more complex process. As in the case of Domitian, the removal of the statue, with its strong media rebound, did not tend to erase a memory. Certainly, it has instead helped make Colston’s story universally known, not so much as a philanthropist, but as a slave trader. An attempt had already been made in 2018, when, on the occasion of the European Day Against Human Trafficking, an art installation appeared at the foot of the statue: one hundred human figures piled like goods inside the outline of a ship.

The work, suggestively named Here and Now, nailed Colston and his Bristol to their uncomfortable past, at the same time suggesting a reflection about slavery as a problem of the present. The edge of the concrete ship’s silhouette, in fact, was engraved with the professions at greatest risk of exploitation today: “domestic servant,” “car wash attendant,” “nail bar worker,” “kitchen worker,” “farm worker,” “sex worker,” “fruit picker,” etc. The installation had then been removed, and the statue had reverted to being without contextualization, a sign of ambiguous memory.

Now, in the aftermath of the bronze fellow citizen’s plunge, the mayor of Bristol, urged that the act of protest be “a legacy for the city’s future against racism and inequality.” The mayor also said he wanted to open a dialogue with the entire city community to decide what to do with the site where the statue stood, which is to be salvaged, restored, and musealized.As a first step, historians and professionals from academic circles were called together for the purpose of producing a solid information base on which to base such a dialogue. Moving with quite different agility and as a profound interpreter of public spaces, Banksy proposed relocating the statue to its original position, but adding a depiction of the #BLM protesters in the act of pulling it down. If realized, the work would certainly have great impact, going on to constitute a more inclusive lieu de mémoire of the city.

Commenting on the matter, Saviano clarified how the fear of a supposed attack on heritage-historical art is completely unjustified: “[...] Often the historical interest of a building or a statue is enough to make it lose its intrinsic symbolic value, leaving only the value of testimony and study. No one would tear down the Colosseum even knowing that people were being killed in its arena for entertainment. In the case of Colston’s statue, however, I think it was a possible and politically powerful gesture; it was a nasty statue from 1895 and it was unbearable to find a merchant of human beings being honored with bronze.” No one is trying to erase history, let alone art!

On the other hand, Saviano’s position presupposes the existence of historical interest as a discriminating criterion for the preservation of a monument. As rightly pointed out by Federico Giannini, the assessment of this interest is inevitably subject to a certain degree of subjectivity and, moreover, varies over time. Such an assessment may seem obvious in the case of a late 19th-century English “bad statue” (moreover, a listed monument of cultural interest in the United Kingdom). If the statue to be evaluated is located in Milan, however, the issue seems to reveal itself in all its complexity.

On Thursday, June 11, through a statement addressed to Mayor Giuseppe Sala and the City Council, the association “I Sentinelli di Milano” called for the removal of the Montanelli statue from the gardens. The debate, which has been ongoing for years, focuses on the “marriage,” contracted by Montanelli with a 12-year-old Eritrean girl during the fascist regime’s aggression against Ethiopia. Indeed, the journalist never disavowed his involvement in the affair, and indeed lingered on it repeatedly and in detail.

Indro Montanelli’s defaced statue

The exchange between Montanelli and Elvira Banotti is memorable. It was 1969, and in front of the cameras of Gianni Bisiach’s L’ora della verità program, Indro Montanelli was candidly recounting his youthful experience as a soldier in Abyssinia. A very young Elvira Banotti, a life of activism still all ahead asked then, “in Europe you would say that you raped a twelve-year-old girl, what differences do you think exist of a biological or psychological kind in an African girl?” Montanelli got away with: “this is how it works in Abyssinia.”

To the proposal of the “Sentinels,” politicians from different sides reacted with outrage, complaining of “attempts to moralize history and memory.” Predictable and discouraging were the headlines of some right-wing newspapers, sudden champions of freedom. In response, on June 13 the statue was daubed with four cans of red paint and black graffiti covering the original definition of “journalist” with those of “racist” and “rapist.”

But if the proposed idea of removing the statue does not seem acceptable (nor does keeping a vandalized and insult-covered statue on display), a clean sweep will not resolve the debate.

As repeatedly denounced by Somali-born Italian writer and activist Igiaba Scego, monuments associated with colonialism in Italy have too often been left to neglect and almost never properly contextualized. When removed from the urban landscape, however, such monuments have simply been forgotten. The case of Piazza di Porta Capena in Rome, where the Axum stele, spoils of fascist colonialism, stood, is emblematic. After decades of debate, the stele was returned to Ethiopia. The void, in this case, was filled by a different memory: a monument in memory of the September 11, 2001, attacks. The memory of colonial “exploits” in Ethiopia has not been enriched or rewritten, but simply forgotten.

In a selectively forgetful country such as ours, looking at constructive examples of sematic redetermination of memory spaces, such as the one that seems to be underway in Bristol, might be an opportunity not to be missed.

On Monday morning, conjured up by an inspired suggestion from Igiaba Scego, an image of Fatima-Destà actually appeared on a wall in Milan’s Via Torino. The work by street artist Ozmo depicts a modern-day Eritrean girl, about the same age as Fatima-Destà. As the artist explained, “we only see the eyes, which look at us ambiguously, some will see a smile, others a grimace of pain.” Here and now.

As long as they do not remain invisible and forgotten, monuments can be used as creative spaces to imagine a more inclusive society. The solutions proposed by the world of street art show how this is possible.

Monuments linked in one way or another to colonialism should not be forgotten. They might prompt us to remember that for many, the exploitation, including sexual and even of children, that took place during Italian colonialism was and remains acceptable because “that’s how it worked.” Remembering our country’s colonialist past would be an act of intellectual honesty. Montanelli himself would certainly appreciate it.

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