LONDON, U.K. -- Edward Colston has a new resting place: Sleeping with the fishes at the bottom of Bristol Harbor.
It was a turbulent journey for the former deputy-governor of the Royal African Company. Oh, the disgrace of it.
To be bound up like a slave, ropes looped around your torso, and then ripped from the glorious plinth where you’ve stood for 125 years.
Alas, there was more indignity. Dragged through the streets of Bristol like a common criminal. Mocked and jeered as you were dumped into the very waters where your slave ships once moored.
And the height of dishonour—to have a bended knee pressed against your throat.
It is said that ships under your control transported 84,000 slaves across the Atlantic to the plantations of the new world. And of that number, 19,000 perished.
Some of those who pulled down your bronze statue over the weekend were descendants of the very African “cargo” your men shackled into the bellies of your ships.
We know that you did good things with all the money you amassed. Slave trading must have been lucrative. Bristol is full of Colston reminders. Colston School. Colston Hill. There’s even a pastry called the Colston bun.
Okay, it was an ugly way to go, but your statue was despised by a lot of people for a long time. Maybe it was better this way—to be swept away in a movement as just and proper as Black Lives Matter.
The police decided—wisely perhaps—not to intervene.
Ah, but there was an outcry on your bronze behalf by some very important people.
Raise your sanitized hands if you know who said the anti-racism protests were “subverted by thuggery?”
That would be Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
And who decried the statue’s demise as “utterly disgraceful?”
That would be Priti Patel, the very powerful U.K. Home Secretary.
The mayor of Bristol, Marvin Rees, calmly suggested none of that was very helpful. As a Black man, he more than understood why so many people found the statue offensive.
“I can’t pretend, as the son of a Jamaican migrant myself, that the presence of that statue…in the middle of the city was anything other than a personal affront to me and people like me.”
So what’s to become of poor old Edward Colston now?
The mayor says he will likely be retrieved from the harbour at some point and probably stuck in a local museum. He’s quite philosophical about it.
What happened is now part of the city’s history, he says, “and part of that statue’s story.”
A little alone time, sleeping with the fishes.
