The Cross Rhodes Free­dom Project will hand over a pe­ti­tion with 8, 000 sig­na­tures to Port-of-Spain May­or Joel Mar­tinez to­day at 11:00am call­ing for the city’s Colum­bus Mon­u­ment to be moved from its cur­rent place of pub­lic rev­er­ence to a mu­se­um where it can be prop­er­ly con­tex­tu­alised.

Ex­pres­sions of sup­port have come from in­dige­nous lead­ers, from lead­ing re­gion­al his­to­ri­ans in­clud­ing Pro­fes­sors Brins­ley Sama­roo, Brid­get Br­ere­ton, Claudius Fer­gus, Verene Shep­ard and the vice chan­cel­lor of the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, Sir. Hi­lary Beck­les as well as a broad cross sec­tion of civ­il so­ci­ety groups. Even the city cor­po­ra­tion’s own poll demon­strates over­whelm­ing sup­port for re­moval. Any­thing else would be a sub­ver­sion of jus­tice and the de­mo­c­ra­t­ic will of the peo­ple of this na­tion.

Be­yond Colum­bus, the CRFP is call­ing for the es­tab­lish­ment of a com­mis­sion to look in­to all the city’s land­marks sim­i­lar to the one launched by May­or Sadiq Khan in Lon­don last week which will re­view not on­ly stat­ues but al­so the names on pub­lic build­ings, streets, plazas and plaques.

Now 58 years af­ter In­de­pen­dence we can­not con­tin­ue this ca­su­al cel­e­bra­tion of colo­nial vi­o­lence. The coun­try’s mon­u­ments must now come to re­flect our di­ver­si­ty and em­body our high­est ideals, ex­press­ing some­thing about who we are and what we as­pire to be in the con­text of our Caribbean civil­i­sa­tion.

Mon­u­ments ded­i­cat­ed to the pub­lic rev­er­ence of peo­ple who com­mit­ted crimes against hu­man­i­ty, and all those who aid­ed and abet­ted them in their racist bar­bar­ic ad­ven­tures are not her­itage but hate.

Their pres­ence is a grotesque af­front to our in­de­pen­dence ideals and we have the right to de­cide what hap­pens to them.

Those who think that this is a rad­i­cal propo­si­tion must step back and see that it fits clear­ly with a long-stand­ing glob­al con­sen­sus. Ger­many for ex­am­ple, has sev­er­al stat­ues of Hitler by the renowned British sculp­tor Arnold Breck­er.

Ab­solute­ly no one in their right mind be­lieves that these should be put back on pub­lic dis­play be­cause Hitler was part of their his­to­ry. There is a clear un­der­stand­ing that he rep­re­sents some­thing that is moral­ly rep­re­hen­si­ble.

The prob­lem some of us are hav­ing in the Caribbean is that we are un­able to make the con­nec­tion be­tween fas­cist vi­o­lence against white lives and colo­nial vi­o­lence against black and brown lives. This, is not an ac­ci­dent. This is what Guyanese schol­ar Jan Carew warned us about when he said that false he­roes would, “bur­den not just our his­to­ry, but our char­ac­ter as well.”

His­to­ry was weaponised against the sub­ju­gat­ed peo­ples dur­ing the colo­nial pe­ri­od. The idea was for the vic­tims of geno­cide, slav­ery, in­den­ture­ship and apartheid to see the per­pe­tra­tors of these crimes as their he­roes too.

Stat­ues and mon­u­ments were part of this elab­o­rate process of con­di­tion­ing those who were sub­ject­ed to ac­cept the ex­ist­ing or­der with its in­her­it­ed struc­tures of wealth and priv­i­lege.

Tak­ing pub­lic spaces back to ho­n­our re­al he­roes will not fix all of our prob­lems but it will help to de­colonise the minds of up­com­ing gen­er­a­tions and sig­nal to the world that we have the ca­pac­i­ty to un­der­stand our past and the will and moral char­ac­ter to imag­ine and con­struct a bet­ter fu­ture.

Shaba­ka Kam­bon

Di­rec­tor

Cross Rhodes Free­dom Project