Heroes from past had flaws but erasure is not the answer

Divisive: Cecil Rhodes statues at Oxford University
Courtesy of Oxford Mail
Arjun Neil Alim5 November 2019

“There is no sin so great as ignorance. Remember this,” advises Colonel Creighton to an English orphan in Rudyard Kipling’s majestic novel Kim.

On university campuses all over Britain, key sites of the banishment of ignorance, Kipling has been dragged into a wider, uglier debate on history and remembrance. This debate is easily and often caricatured. One side dismisses students as “snowflakes” and performative social justice warriors, the other attacks an entrenched imperialist mentality of British institutions. Yet at the heart of the matter lies a simple question: how do we recognise the achievements of past generations of Britons, while acknowledging their faults and flaws?

The student-led movement to decolonialise public spaces and institutions began in South Africa against the fervent colonialist and racist Cecil Rhodes, who served as prime minister of the Cape Colony. It spread to the UK via Oxford University in 2015, where Rhodes is represented by a statue and an institute. Since then, more historical figures have fallen into the sights of academic idealists. Last year, students from SOAS protested against a Winston Churchill-themed café on the basis he was a war criminal and a racist. At Manchester, a mural with Kipling’s poem If was painted over: “If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken / Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools”.

Sections of the media pay far too much attention to fringe student groups, and it is with apprehension that I broach this subject. But I was a student at the LSE only last year and I am all too familiar with these discourses. Campuses are not, from my experience, overrun by swivel-eyed loons. Yet there is a minority, often in positions of responsibility that few bother voting for, who express radical or purist views.

The snowball effect of the Rhodes Must Fall campaign — moving from criticising the legacy of a racist leader whose policies led to the disenfranchisement of black populations, to demanding the erasure of a problematic Nobel Laureate poet and a former British prime minister from public memory — is an example of this.

Kipling’s poetry has been labelled as white supremacist, while Churchillian policy contributed to the Bengal famine that killed more than three million people. Nevertheless these figures remain crucial parts of Britain’s story. Their contributions are ambiguous, but eradication is no response to that. Real history is messy and imperfect and we are all at fault for building false idols.

Grand statues of Winston Churchill in London and Paris watch over the vibrant, multi-ethnic democracies he helped to safeguard. The Rhodes scholarship now finances the studies of many black African students at Oxford. Rather than erase the memory of them from the public sphere, our best option is to employ their ambiguous legacies for good. Don’t tear them down, instead build a better society around them.