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https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/europe-africa-colonial-era-lasting-effects-by-stelios-michalopoulos-and-elias-papaioannou-2021-07>
"PROVIDENCE/LONDON – Last year, as the Black Lives Matter movement was
intensifying across the United States following Minneapolis police officer
Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd, Europe was facing its own battles over
racial justice. And, as in the US, public symbols and monuments were at the
center of the fray.
In Bristol, demonstrators tore down (and threw into the harbor) a statue of
Edward Colston, a seventeenth-century parliamentarian whose company transported
more than 80,000 slaves from West Africa to the Americas. In Oxford, students
demanded (not for the first time) that a statue of Cecil Rhodes – the
personification of European imperialism’s brutal extraction of African riches –
be removed from Oriel College’s façade.
Meanwhile, in Belgium, protesters forced the removal of statues of King Leopold
II, who ruled the Congo ruthlessly as his private fiefdom until images of his
atrocities provoked an outcry and forced him to cede control of the territory,
which became a Belgian colony. And in France, activists attacked the statue of
Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the author of the Code Noir that institutionalized
slavery and forced labor across French colonies.
Of course, removing statues doesn’t solve much in itself. But that doesn’t mean
removing them is without justification. Dozens of recent empirical works,
narratives, and case studies that we have reviewed in “Historical Legacies and
African Development” suggest that the legacy of the slave trade and colonialism
is still very much alive. To paraphrase William Faulkner, the European past in
Africa is never dead. It is not even past. And it continues to shape the
continent."
Via Tess.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
