Sheep magazine archive 1: issues 3-9

24
thing” and remains “something to be proud
of”. Which might explain why – when some
Royal Holloway University students recently
posted a group-photo of themselves next to an
on-campus statue of the “Empress of India”,
with the question “How can we feel included
when there’s a statue that celebrates the
subordination of our people?” – they started an
online storm.
“I had some seriously nasty comments,” says
Grace Almond, vice-president of the Royal
Holloway Women of Colour Feminism Society.
“People trying to defend Queen Victoria, saying
that colonialism was the best thing to happen
to India.” She finds the sheer hypocrisy of her
attackers almost overwhelming. “People don’t
seem to have a problem with the fact that British
people were looting India and Nigeria and all
sorts of other colonised countries and bringing
it back over here. But, as soon as you suggest
knocking down a statue of someone who is
– in my opinion – one of the most evil men
to ever walk the planet, people get extremely
defensive.”
One soft option is to simply update the
monuments. In 2004, Italian artist Eleonora
Aguiari famously covered the equestrian statue
of another imperial figure – Lord Napier of
Magdala, who sits at the gates to Kensington
Gardens – entirely in red tape. “We have to
discern between what’s good about our past
and what is not – or no longer – good,” she
says. “I believe in transformation more than
destruction. It would be interesting to use
these statues as a base for a new message, to
transform them into something more in line with
the new moment and society.”
From a different perspective, Professor Mary
Beard, the TV historian, author and Cambridge
don, has consistently opposed the toppling of
Rhodes. “Wanting to preserve his statue is not
about saying that Rhodes was a good guy,” she
claims. “ But I think people have to see...what
we’re the beneficiaries of. I want to empower
[students] to put two fingers up to that statue
and say: ‘He was wrong.’ We’ve got to be able
to look these figures from the past in the eye;
otherwise we just push them underground, and
that doesn’t solve the problem.”
From across the quads, though, comes a
dissenting voice. Actually, says Dr Priyamvada
Gopal of Churchill College, Cambridge, tearing
down statues is an “interesting idea”. She
continues: “I would welcome any move that
actually began the process of undoing imperial
amnesia, a condition that afflicts large swathes
of Britain, not least élite institutions.” Britain, she
adds, needs to “look at itself in the mirror and
finally undertake a reckoning with a history that
is not beautified or sanitised”.
For her, Rhodes Must Fall campaign was, and
is, far more than a reductive debate about
masonry. “As the campaign has demanded,”
says Dr Gopal, “at a practical level, there needs
to be a totally honest accounting-for of Britain’s
imperial past, combined with a monumental
effort to acknowledge how the legacy of that
SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER 8