In my review for History Reclaimed, I hailed Dr Marie Daouda who, in this passionately personal book, explains how ‘our obsession with race entraps us and divides us’. Moroccan-born, French-educated but now professionally and emotionally British of a decidedly Oxonian caste, she ‘courageously and intelligently… refuses to toe the political line expected of a person of café au lait colour’. Here, I will focus on parts of the book particularly relevant to PSSA members and website visitors, where Daouda addresses the ‘statue wars’.

One of her chapters, ‘Places with no statues’, looks at Daouda’s native country: ‘…there are almost no figurative representations of the past in the public space of Morocco’. This is because it is a Sunni Malikite country which, though it applies Sharia law in a way that many Middle Eastern countries shun as too liberal, ‘abides by the aniconic principles which Muhammed established … according to which figurative statues and paintings are prohibited’. This ‘does not mean that the past is not present’ in Morocco, where the old quarters of Fez, Marrakesh and Essaouira enchantingly immerse you in ‘the winding maze of time’. Morocco was once a major imperial power ­– Daouda mischievously suggests that her ancestors owned white slaves ­– but its lack of statues makes ‘oblivion and denial’ of its sometimes brutal history much simpler. Precisely because European countries celebrated, carved and cast the rulers, perceived heroes and glories of the past in a very public way, it is far easier to accuse them ‘of all the evil in the world’, particularly in the Anglosphere of Britain and America. This a novel and astute observation. Yet a Britain or an Oxford shorn of such creations, with no Martyrs’ Memorial, no Shelley and no emperors’ heads on the Sheldonian, would be a culturally impoverished place. Fortunately, nobody seems to have taken Gary Younge’s Guardian exhortation, ‘Why Every Statue Should Come Down’ (2021), remotely seriously.

But things can change with a terrifying and unforeseen suddenness. The killing of George Floyd, the impact of Black Lives Matter and the toppling of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol would have all been unthinkable in January 2020. These events demolished any illusions that Daouda might have cherished on her recent arrival in Oxford of British imperturbability and indeed liberalism. She notes how Floyd’s death ‘set in motion a very familiar mechanism of scapegoating. Yet the most notorious scapegoats of 2020 were not people of flesh and bone but statues, monuments of the past standing in public spaces as witnesses of times gone by’. Topplers tend to deny the historicity of statues, but ironically their own activities are ‘not about the past, but about present political and social issues. The death of George Floyd rekindled the outrage about the connection between police violence and racism’. No doubt comparable, even understandable anger about the high COVID-19 death rates of non-white health workers (as well as mindless copycat behaviour), meant that Colston’s days in The Centre were numbered in turn.

We scapegoat; we deny; and we grossly simplify, and do so in a vulgarly performative way: ‘Take the knee, pull down a statue, and you will be safe’. The place for an even-handed approach to history is threatened accordingly. Daouda observes: ‘We could not accept… that Floyd may have been a criminal and also the victim of police violence, or that Colston may have been a benefactor and also a slave trader.’ This reviewer concurs: a litmus test for woke politics is when someone describes Colston as a ‘slave trader’ tout court. We don’t even know how much Colston personally profited from the slave trade. Consider what the main historian in the area, Professor Kenneth Morgan, has to say in Edward Colston and Bristol (1999): ‘To what extent Colston received money from the sale of slaves in the New World is unknown. He was undoubtedly remunerated for his work on the committees of the Royal African Company, but whether this money was the basis of his fortune remains conjectural’.  More likely it was founded on sherry, textiles and usury.

Daouda is a stipendiary lecturer affiliated to Oriel College, Oxford, and therefore had a ringside seat while the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ controversy raged. Henry Alfred Pegram’s limestone statue of Cecil Rhodes (taller than the four feet that she claims it to be), is a focal point on the High Street facade of the so-called Rhodes Building, a splendid piece of Jacobean Revivalism with a Historic England Grade II* (‘particularly important’) listing. The role of the statuary – portraying Rhodes and other Oriel worthies – is integral to the architecture, which was expressly built to house it at a time when the New Sculpture movement was still in its heyday. Daouda could make more of its heritage value, and the legal complexities and costs that any attempted de-listing would face. She is inevitably more concerned, however, with the motives of the ‘must fall’ brigade. She diagnoses its standpoint as ‘iconoclasm’, which is ‘nothing but the inverted image of a latent idolatry projecting issues onto objects without any care for factual accuracy, or the architectural meaning of what is targeted’. Quite so; and she is still more devastating about the anti-Rhodes campaigners using fabricated quotations by the great man, notably ‘I prefer land to n*****s…. the natives are like children. They are emerging from barbarism… one should kill as many n****s as possible’. This highly offensive bluster has its origins in a (former Rhodes Scholar’s!) review of Paul Maylam’s The Cult of Rhodes (2005) – only it is not in the book. Nigel Biggar has revealed it as a composite of three different quotations drawn from three different sources, one an Olive Schreiner novel and another ‘a mixture of distortion and fabrication’.

This reviewer has one caveat about Daouda’s admittedly cursory coverage of Rhodes himself. However much one can put down to context and contingency, I find him a repellent figure. Even if attempts to link Rhodes to Apartheid can be too simplistic and glib, he deliberately restricted and diminished the voting rights of Black and Coloured voters as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony. Daouda doesn’t mention this, nor does she use the phrases ‘Anglo-supremacist’ or ‘Cape to Cairo’, which were so central to understanding Rhodes’s obsessive ideology. Her sources on Rhodes are a mixture of earlier, more apologetic ones, while there is conspicuously no William Beinart to counter Nigel Biggar. Notwithstanding the above, both Daouda and this reviewer are passionate ‘retainers and explainers’ of the Rhodes statue. We have a powerful ally in one Nelson Mandela who said of the memorial tablets of the South African empire builders Rhodes and Alfred Milner in Westminster Abbey: ‘Memorials like this must remain because we need to see history in the round. People must remember what was thought to be good at the time even if later on we take a different view. Only then can we learn lessons by taking the mistakes with us’. QED.

Often overlooked is the second Oxford memorial to Rhodes, the bronze relief portrait plaque by Onslow Whiting, on another Oriel building, 6 King Edward Street. The gift of Alfred Mosely, a Jewish philanthropist and admirer of Rhodes, and installed in 1906, it was only listed in 2022 through the intervention of the minister, Nadine Dorries. This represented one of her few political acts that the reviewer applauds! Daouda claims ‘feet were dragged and excuses found’, blaming Historic England for being ‘frozen in the headlights of the new cultural consensus, too terrified of being on the wrong side of history’. She is pretty much spot-on. An obviously confidential source has informed the reviewer the following:

Historic England initially recommended the plaque for listing but [the report] got mired in internal politics as the organisation tried to find a position on the new issue of contested heritage. Listing asks one question and one question only: is special architectural or historic interest present? If it is, then listing has to happen, and there is no room for politically convenient wriggling. In the end, it was a decision from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport itself to list the item in 2022 which broke the log-jam. This put into practice the ‘retain and explain’ position which is still official government policy. Listing has always been the decision of the minister, not of their advisers, so this wasn’t so very strange.

For all its blemishes ­– and I can see Douada and the reviewer coming to blows over her negative verdict on the Enlightenment, washed down by Oriel port ­– Not Your Victim delivers the promise of its sub-title. It is a short, cultured, readable and very necessary book.

 

 

 

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