Removing monuments to racists is not racism

SHABAKA KAMBON

ON MAY 4 the Newsday published a letter to the editor by Fatima Mohammed under the title "Kambon vs Maharaj: Pot calling kettle black." Mohammed used the letter to endorse the irresponsible and now infamous race mythology attributed to Pundit Satyanand Maharaj that “Urban miscreants…with the same complexion, from the same ethnic group” are involved in co-ordinated or premeditated attacks on Indian citizens.

Despite admitting that her support for Maharaj’s statements were based “only on memory, experience and observations,” Mohammed proceeded to condemn the broad cross section of the national community who rightly took issue with his divisive pronouncements and singled me out for special attention:

“Kambon has accused Maharaj of incitement of racial hatred and violence but he himself has led mobs of people to rename Milner Hall at UWI to Freedom Hall in 2018. He campaigned for the removal of Christopher Columbus statues across the country. Isn’t this a calculated reckless, racial hatred against white people? The next step is for him to pull down Mahatma Gandhi’s statue in Port of Spain.”

The fact that Mohammed cannot see that something is wrong with Maharaj’s statements and that she confuses my efforts to end the glorification of racists with race hatred speaks volumes about our post-colonial education.

In our haste to create enlightened citizens that would be pillars of our emergent democracies, we in the Caribbean chose at independence to focus on issues of access and participation rather than content and organisation.

The tragic consequence of this is that we inadvertently amplified the reach of the socially corrosive values embedded in the colonial pedagogy ensuring that a white supremacist world view which accommodated genocide, slavery, indentureship and apartheid would cast a long and burdensome shadow over our present.

Reverential monuments to the likes of Alfred Milner, Thomas Picton, Ralph Woodford, Lady Young and Christopher Columbus are the tangible manifestations of this colonial pedagogy. According to the research of British social anthropologist Alfred Gell, “agency can inhere in [these] graven images,” they can be vectors of the values of those whom they glorify and those who erected them.

In other words we maintain with taxpayers' money vectors of the values that are at the core of our current nexus of problems. In the grip of this reality, poor Mohammed cannot see the contradiction between her concern for the memorialisation of Gandhi and that of Milner.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was an anti-colonial Indian nationalist who lead the successful non-violent campaign for India's independence from British rule.

Lord Viscount Alfred Milner was a self-proclaimed “British race supremacist” who championed aggressive military colonialism in Africa and India as the God-given right of the English. He played a pivotal role in the creation of racial apartheid in South Africa and the brutal Indian indentured servitude there and disparaged people like Gandhi as “dangerous subverters of empire.”

This is precisely why Gandhi’s independent India removed monuments to people like him. From King George V to Queen Victoria, Mary and a whole host of governors, viceroys, lords, ladies and military generals, statues were removed in mass starting in the 1950s.

In 1972, on a plinth from which the statue of the Earl of Auckland was removed, there was erected one of India’s iconic statues, that of Khudiram Bose. Among India’s youngest martyrs, he is hailed and loved for braving the colonial gallows with a smile on his face at the tender age of 19, after he was sentenced to death for opposing British rule.

His statue in Kolkata captures the dhoti-clad teenager proudly ready to pay the ultimate price for his people’s freedom. Would Fatima Mohammed want to see the earl return to his plinth? Would she describe the Indian government as anti-white racists for replacing the earl with Khudiram?

I see Mohammed also likes Christopher Columbus. Well, since the unprecedented global acknowledgement of the ravages of systemic racism and white supremacy that followed in the wake of the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, it is noteworthy that more monuments to him have come down than any other historical villain.

In an extraordinary development on March 30, the Vatican announced that it had “repudiated” the Doctrine of Discovery: the international legal principle and moral framework that it once promoted, which derived from a series of 15th and 16th century papal decrees, or bulls, which called for non-Christian peoples to be invaded, captured, vanquished, subdued, reduced to perpetual slavery, and have their possessions and property seized, all of which Columbus accomplished with style.

Pope Francis was quoted as saying, “Never again can the Christian community allow itself to be infected by the idea that one culture is superior to others.”

These two facts make the continuing glorification of Columbus in the Caribbean patently absurd, especially when we consider that as far back as the 1970s, Bob Marley and Peter Tosh understood that it was irresponsible to teach Caribbean children that a man who initiated the greatest genocide in known human history in the pursuit of personal riches was a hero.

Seemingly aware of the impact that colonial values would have over time, Bob and Peter said rather portentously, “You can't blame the youth when they get bad.”

Shabaka Kambon is the director of the Caribbean Freedom Project