Removal of confederate statues

[Morrigu]

Will anything change or be resolved by removing them?

[HAL]

What happened to small school in the Matopos Hills called the Cecil Rhodes school for children - it provides the chance for local kids to get an education free of charge it costs in Zimbabwe to send your kids to school and this school was and is funded free of charge by Rhodes and his descendants Mugabe refused to visit the school unless they changed their name - they had no choice and the funders thankfully understood that ?

[thesoretoothsayer]

I know it's off topic but I can't help myself.
Apparently, Gandhi is the latest racist that needs his statue pulled down.
As stated previously, once you start down this road.....

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/09/g ... 41652.html

[David]

Seems like a pretty fair call, doesn't it? Again, a real instance of something differing in context depending on where it's placed: Gandhi represents one thing in India, one thing in Africa and something else in the rest of the world. Of course many in Africa might still admire him for the example he set as a resistance leader, but if his legacy on the continent is a mostly negative one then I can see why this would be a controversial monument.

[thesoretoothsayer]

Who decides what a statue "represents"?

[David]

Society as a whole?

Sure, these things are at least somewhat subjective, but all language is just symbols. A statue will have an intended meaning and a generally perceived meaning which are often more or less the same (to put it simply, "this is a great person who is worthy of honour"). Sometimes intended meaning and received meaning are totally different, and you can run into problems like the subjectivity of offence. But as a communication form, public statues seem pretty clear-cut as meaning goes.

[Mugwump]

When we've torn them all down, we can put up a statue of the Wiggles. They might be inoffensive enough for people who do not wish to understand history.

[David]

[stui magpie]

Seems like a pretty fair call, doesn't it? Again, a real instance of something differing in context depending on where it's placed: Gandhi represents one thing in India, one thing in Africa and something else in the rest of the world. Of course many in Africa might still admire him for the example he set as a resistance leader, but if his legacy on the continent is a mostly negative one then I can see why this would be a controversial monument.

Again, context of the times. We're talking about the turn of last century. Christ, the Zulu wars were in 1879 and barely 15 years before that, Africans were still being captured and sold as Slaves, basically 2 legged cattle.

His argument, at the time, was that the Indian society was at a higher level than the black African, and they clearly were.

Seen through the lens of the present, his comments are racist. Seen through the lens of the time, they were factual. He wasn't trying to promote the cause of the black African, but the Indian .

I quite like this quote:

One of Gandhi's writings cited in the petition reads: "Ours is one continual struggle against a degradation sought to be inflicted upon us by the Europeans, who desire to degrade us to the level of the raw Kaffir whose occupation is hunting, and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with and, then, pass his life in indolence and nakedness.

Credit where it's due, nothing really wrong with that ambition.

[Mugwump]

[David]

I don't necessarily disagree. Even on this discussion, I had to pick the "unsure/don't know" option.

On Gandhi: look, I don't want to harp on about one thing he said (and possibly later retracted) in a lifetime of anti-colonial activism, but what he said was pretty clearly racist. Claiming that an equivalence between Indians and Africans is a 'degradation' of the former (not to mention that Africans are primitive and lazy) is ... well, what else can that statement possibly be?

[thesoretoothsayer]

[David]

No more than Rolf Harris deserves one for contributions to Australian music, arguably.

[thesoretoothsayer]

No more than Rolf Harris deserves one for contributions to Australian music, arguably.

Looks like I descended to trolling. Unfair. Removed.

[stui magpie]

I don't necessarily disagree. Even on this discussion, I had to pick the "unsure/don't know" option.

On Gandhi: look, I don't want to harp on about one thing he said (and possibly later retracted) in a lifetime of anti-colonial activism, but what he said was pretty clearly racist. Claiming that an equivalence between Indians and Africans is a 'degradation' of the former (not to mention that Africans are primitive and lazy) is ... well, what else can that statement possibly be?

Accurate at the time? Certainly the primitive part compared to the Indians.

http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/histo ... e1654-2008