In the Wake of Colston: Wake Work after Woke Work
- Jacob Badcock and Jovan Owusu-Nepaul
- Jun 22, 2021
- 19 min read
Updated: Jun 27
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:
My career as Secretary of State for the Colonies is given yet to be made; but I will say that no one has ever been wafted into office with more favorable gales. I will venture to claim two qualifications for the great office which I hold, and which, to my mind, without making any invidious distinctions, is one of the most important that can be held by any Englishman. These qualifications are that, I believe in the British Empire and, in the second place, I believe the British race is the greatest of governing races that the world has ever seen. I say that not merely as an idle boast, but as proved and evidenced by the success which we have had in administering the vast dominions which are connected with these small island, and I believe accordingly that there are no limits to its future.[8]
Colston’s statue is now in the Bristol Museum. However, that it ‘swam with the fishes’ is testament to a growing, populist antiracist sentiment in Britain, and to the waning of imperial hagiographies instantiated by Chamberlain and others. Such hagiographies would sustain Frantz Fanon’s manicheistic ‘world of statues’, in which Colston, Robert Milligan, and Cecil Rhodes tower over us, elevated by seven feet of Portland stone. There is something like poetic justice in the rippling of the water as Colston sinks into the harbour. It can be watched and rewatched ad infinitum on the internet, as can the (unfortunately memetic) murder of George Floyd, which sparked the protests. Colston must have thought himself master of this harbour, and his RAC ships, water foaming in their wake, would have docked there. The poetry of Colston’s dememorialisation was only enriched by the fact that, as Saima Nasar has noted in her study of Colston and memory, Colston’s statue was drowned near Pero Bridge. The bridge was named after Pero Jones, a slave transported to Bristol from the Caribbean Island of Nevis by the merchant John Pinney (1740–1818).[9] The ghosts of Jones and slaves like him have not so much been exorcised by the fall of Colston as put to work again. This work is not the kind of work to which they were accustomed hundreds of years ago. It is not kind of work that turns bodies into flesh, it is not the kind of work that makes men and women inhuman, and it is not the kind of work valued only by yield. It is the work of the Black dead, it is the work of haunting which can only be done by spirits, it is the work of the children of slaves, it is the work of undoing the Whiteness of the world.
