Statues and Statutes

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Written July 2020

They’re coming down – here there and everywhere: a slave-trader in Bristol, a slave-owner in London, Confederate generals in Richmond, and even Churchill, Baden-Powell and once again Cecil Rhodes are under threat.  There could be others.

I grew up in Port Elizabeth in the 50s, where there’s a memorial to the thousands of horses, imported for the British forces in the Boer War and who died there. (No mention of the Boer Commandos saddled for years in their guerrilla tactics.) I passed it whichever bus we took from downtown to get home. It was vandalised, but survived, about five years ago during a surge of anti-colonial fever that focussed on the Rhodes Must Go movement. I passed that statue at the University of Cape Town almost daily while in residence at Smuts Hall. But he’s now stored somewhere safe, out of sight.
When we arrived at The Salvation Army’s International Training College in London we were greeted at its entrance by the statues of Catherine and William Booth. In his biography of Catherine, Roy Hattersley names them as among the greatest social reformers of the Victorian era. He might have mentioned their ‘Cab Horse Charter’, drawing attention to Britain’s ‘submerged tenth’ that he regarded as worse off than London’s horses. Hattersley might not have highlighted Booth’s collaboration with some arch-imperialists in developing his ideas of rescue and rehabilitation that ultimately led to assisting emigrants to find new lives in the colonies and dominions overseas.

Twelve years in Zambia shortly after independence gave us a glimpse into the sentiments behind the freedom movement, embodied not only in the national anthem but also symbolised in Lusaka’s Freedom Statue – an ordinary Zambian, chains still on his wrists, but at least they’re broken. It also brought us into close contact with at least some of those ‘ordinary’ Zambians some of whom became close friends and confidants. They’re not remembered in stone or bronze, but cherished even now as I think of them.  But speaking of slavery, I recall conversations about how the Matabele people from south of the Zambia had enslaved Tonga people north of it; how those memories lingered with sentiments that bordered on hatred; and how I was told: ‘once a slave family, always a slave family – they can never be leaders’.

The Indian years introduced us to another form of human exploitation in the institution of caste. We were to work with those at the bottom of society, so-called Dalits. They spoke openly of their reverence for Gandhi and Neru, founders of modern India. Their statues are everywhere – usually in the upper-caste areas of a village. The Dalit hero, however, is Dr Ambedkar, himself a Dalit, who worked for enshrining their rights in India’s constitution. His statue, on their side of the village, gets garlanded at least once a year. A visit to a Hindu temple, and you’re left in no doubt of the importance of the ‘statue’. During our stay we sensed a desire for Indian Salvationists to venerate their founder, Frederick Booth-Tucker. I’ve never seen the statue that resulted. It stands at the entrance to Stuartpuram, one of the criminal tribe rehabilitation settlements given to The Salvation Army by the colonial government.

Back in South Africa and a visit Cape Town’s Waterfront, and we stop at the statues of the country’s four Nobel Peace Prize laureates: ANC founder, Albert Luthuli; anti-apartheid activist, Archbishop Desmond Tutu – I could recount quite a few stories of our association; F W de Klerk and Nelson Mandela, who collaborated to establish the interim constitution of the ‘New South Africa’. Margaret would tell about her meeting with Mandela as part of a small group of church leaders invited to advise him on how best to deal with rising crime rates in the country. I have the feeling those statues are safe.  But you just don’t know.

The family name reveals my own Huguenot heritage. I have visited the memorial to our 17^th century ancestors at Fransch Hoek. The statue of Nelson Mandela as he left the Victor Verster Prison, is just a few miles away? It reminds us of his ‘long walk to freedom’. It didn’t end there.  But even that statue has had its critics. You just don’t know.

I’d love to visit the area in the south of France where the Huguenots survived the persecution which led to their exile. You never know; I might yet have the chance to do so. I wonder whether there’d be a statue there. I rather think not, given the rather anti-image plain and strongly reformed church style of their churches. And will I ever have the chance to get back to see any of those that have become part of my story? If I did,I’d want to read again the inscription on Port Elizabeth’s Horse Memorial:


June 2020