Negotiating history: statues of past leaders bear the brunt of public anger

In his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s character, speaking of the “Ministry of Truth”, says: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

A deep sense of joy has been experienced throughout history by those officials who erected statues of their heroes, placed them in public spaces and put them on pedestals — a joy matched only by the protesters who in later eras unofficially tore them down from their lofty perches.Monumental sculptural heritage has always had a social, psychological and political motivation beyond art.

Statues and monuments are created and destroyed for the same reasons: to legitimise the ideology, values, authority, national identity and collective memory of the day. From a heritage practitioner’s perspective, and as someone who has commissioned well over 100 bronzes over the past decade, I am always pained by iconoclasm, however understandable it is.

My agony stems in part from an intimate knowledge of the lengthy consultations with sculptors regarding design, the posture and message to be conveyed, as well as an appreciation of the wondrous skill of the artists and foundries that create the works.It would have been preferable, in my opinion, if the tens of thousands of representative sculptures destroyed over the centuries had been removed and preserved elsewhere, when necessary, rather than destroyed.

Statues and monuments are created and destroyed for the same reasons: to legitimise the ideology, values, authority, national identity and collective memory of the day

I can only imagine how rich and educationally rewarding the international heritage landscape would be today.In the US and globally, a multiracial, anti-racist uprising is taking place among the young, forcing those in power to reflect upon, and in many cases remove, symbols of white supremacy, tyranny and oppression from public spaces, or risk them being unceremoniously and gleefully torn down and destroyed.

In ancient Rome, author and politician Pliny the Younger, recalling the destruction of statues of the emperor Domitian, wrote: “How delightful it was to smash to pieces those arrogant faces, to raise our swords against them, to cut them ferociously with our axes, as if blood and pain would follow our blows.”

In so saying he echoes the sentiments of the Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters as they topple statues put on pedestals because their subjects were revered by the dominant classes at the time of their creation and erection, but are today reviled.

Well-made bronzes have a natural shelf life (if properly maintained) of more than 300 years; few have achieved that maturity, their lives cut short by the wind of change in values. During the French revolution, not only sculptural representations of royalty were defaced and smashed, they even vanadalised Notre Dame and ravaged Christian symbols and sculptures of deities.

Iconoclasm is not so much the airbrushing of history as the generational collective re-evaluation of the person depicted and their deeds, and a reappraisal of the social values represented in the art works. As US novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen said: “Memory is a battlefield, and monuments are built on this contested ground.

They are fronts in political theatres of war; sites where vying factions negotiate history, a society’s identity, and consequently its political future.”Sculptures have always had power and immense symbolic social resonance, but perhaps never more so than today. It has become clear from protests in the US and elsewhere that depictions of Robert E Lee and other slave-owning white supremacist leaders will no longer be apotheosised and pedestalised in public spaces.

To place them above us places us beneath them, where we are culturally and morally dominated by their often obsolete values.The greatest number of erections of confederate monuments in the US coincided with the Jim Crow and civil rights eras as a reassertion of white supremacist resistance to the desegregation of US society. But a sculpture of Robert E Lee in the US, or Hendrik Verwoerd in SA, is not in itself a social problem.

How delightful to smash to pieces those arrogant faces, to raise our swords against them, to cut them ferociously with our axes, as if blood and pain would follow our blows

The real issue is location. If they were placed in museums, contextualised and appropriately themed as historical testimonies dedicated to slavery, apartheid, colonialism or fascism, they could, in dignified surroundings, become medians of historical education and heritage as well as of a generational reflection on humankind’s darkest eras. Who would complain?

The second, and more urgent, issue is the deep, cavernous void exemplified by the lack of new heritage since the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras. These were moments in time when sculptures in public forums of abolitionist slave rebellion leaders of high moral values, and human rights activists who fought against systemic racism in the US and Europe, could and should have been erected.If slavery was universally condemned as evil, where, pray thee, are the public statues of inspirational slave revolt leaders of the calibre of Gabriel Prosser, Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, John Horse, the Black Seminoles and so many others?

There are a smattering of statues of white abolitionist leaders, but there are few of black abolitionists. Where are the monuments to, and exalted statues of, African-American leaders and freedom trailblazers?If, from the 1920s through to the ’70s, new heritage representing democratic values had been created and displayed in grand public squares outside city halls, state legislatures and even black neighbourhoods, it would have signalled to Americans of all races that a new morning had broken. The failure of successive generations of American leaders to ensure an inclusive narrative and tell “the other side of the story” is telling.What makes a person worthy of being put on a pedestal?

Logic would dictate that it would be those black and white men and women who led the struggle that eventually turned the US into a democracy in 1968 with the Civil Rights Act. What deeds must a person perform, what ethics must a person adhere to and what enduring example must such a person have set, for them to be on a pedestal?

In 1992, the National Monuments Council (since replaced by the South African Heritage Resources Agency) reported that over 90% of SA’s heritage monuments and built heritage related to the white historical experience. Since 1994, that monumental void has needed to be filled — with the same vigour the colonial and apartheid regimes employed to reinforce their ideology of white supremacy. Rather than wait for statues of apartheid leaders to be defaced or destroyed, we should focus on their replacement with statues of liberty.

We need to unapologetically create a new heritage for public spaces that tells our side of the story, the story of liberation. Whether Cecil Rhodes or BJ Vorster stay or go, the point is to infuse public memory with sculptural representations of those who so bravely fought against them. Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist, said: “Whatever else I may forget, I shall never forget the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery.”

By remembering these South African giants and sculpturally depicting their human form, we will immortalise them and their freedom-loving values.For them, for us, and for generations to come.

• Tambo is CEO of the National Heritage Project Company