EVERY JANUARY, and this one’s no exception, witnesses a ritual of defacing or bringing down of statues of James Cook in Australia in well-planned interventions by those who protest against linking Australia Day to his arrival on the continent in January 1788 and the genocide of native people that followed. 

Nearly 20 years earlier, in 2006, British artist Hew Locke mercilessly ridiculed slaver Edward Colston by adorning his statue in Bristol with glittering, ersatz-gold regalia and trinkets as part of his Restoration series.

Locke’s intention to expose Colston’s involvement in corruption and enrichment through slavery was abundantly clear but, at the time, the message remained largely within the realm of contemporary art. 

It was not until the toppling of the very same statue 14 years later, in 2020, that Colston and his deeds were brought sharply into wider public awareness and a critical re-examination ensued of the extraordinary wealth slavery had brought to Britain, the individuals behind it, and consequently, their statues littering urban spaces. 

No longer could these masquerade as tributes to “nobile” benefactors. 

“History is written by the winners,” wrote Titus Livius (59 BC–AD 17) the historian of ancient Rome, while Napoleon Bonaparte would call it bluntly “a fable agreed upon.” 

While Colston and his cohort have been knocked, physically and metaphorically, off their pedestals, many other statues continue to firmly anchor other nations’ preferred narratives that are often immune to critical reappraisal. 

One such case is pope John Paul II who has been immortalised with a staggering 800 statues up and down his native Poland. This is despite the revelations in Ekke Overbeek’s book, Maxima Culpa - John Paul Knew, that as bishop metropolitan of Krakow he knew of pedophile priests’ activities and actually shielded them, an attitude he took later into his papacy.

A straw poll, conducted at the time by Gazeta PL, of the administrations of 70 towns with statues of the pontiff confirmed that no re-evaluation of the suitability of these monuments in the light of Wojtyla’s transgressions was to be expected.

Sinead O'Connor’s iconic tearing of his picture will have to suffice for the time being.

However, in 2019 a statue of the controversial Gdansk prelate Henryk Jankowski was torn down after a press article accused him of being a paedophile. The perpetrators were subsequently deemed to have acted in public interest and cleared of all charges - the statue was quietly removed.

Meanwhile statues of the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera abound in western Ukraine — 40 at the last count. Bandera advocated, in the 1920-40s, the ethnic cleansing of Ukraine and the military wing of his Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) — the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), aided by the German Nazi troops — unleashed in the 1940s an orgy of sadistic murder of Poles, Russians Jews, Gypsies and the Ukrainian opposition. Well over a million would be slaughtered. 

In December 2018 Ukraine’s parliament declared January 1 a national day of commemoration of Bandera. The odious cult is now enshrined in law.

In recent months a number of Polish MPs made it clear that Ukraine would not be allowed into the EU or Nato until it came clean on the massacres and allowed the exhumation the victims. Not surprisingly, two weeks ago Kiev expeditiously agreed to talks stalled since 2017.

In December 2021 the administration of Zedelgem, Belgium, removed from its town square a 2018 sculpture honouring Latvian Nazi collaborators instantly eliciting a furious response from Latvia’s foreign minister. Back in Riga, the annual parade by Latvia’s SS Legion veterans resumed on March 16 2022 in blatant disregard of world opinion. 

Beyond Europe, in December 2018 a statue of Mahatma Gandhi was removed from the University of Ghana’s campus in response to protests from students and staff. Similar initiatives took place in Malawi, Carleton University Ottawa, Leicester and Manchester. His statues were also attacked in Johannesburg, Melbourne and New York.

In each of the cases the protesters alluded to Gandhi’s speech in Mumbai in 1896, in which he said that the Europeans in Natal (South Africa) wished “to degrade us [Hindus] to the level of the raw kaffir [Blacks] 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.” The remark has been construed as profoundly racist.

Perhaps no individual is more contentious than the leader of Reformation, Martin Luther (1483–1546). His visceral anti-semitism, spelled out in On The Jews And Their Lies (1543), certainly informed — not to say inspired — the Nazi racist ideology of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and their followers. 

However, numerous Luther statues (38) remain peppered, and untouched, around German cities including the spectacular Luther Monument in Worms, Rhineland-Palatinate designed by Ernst Rietschel and unveiled on June 28 1868.

In 2022 anti-fascists painted the word “shame” on the statue of Karl Lueger, the anti-semitic mayor of Vienna in the 1920s. Rather unusually the city administration has declined to remove both the statue and the graffiti, seeing it as testimony to a tortured period of Vienna’s history.

A similarly unexpected compromise was found in Ghana where the original, modest bronze statue of the socialist president Kwame Nkrumah, brought down during a coup against him in 1966, was restituted in 1992, behind his modern mausoleum, if still ambiguously armless and beheaded.

Africa remains convulsed as the postcolonial removal of statues of oppressors was followed by their restoration to underpin the arrival of neocolonialism, and it remains today a contested area as Western aid is often tied to the preservation these monuments. 

On occasion this touches the absurd. Last week the comprador elites of Lima, Peru, restituted to the city’s main square, 20 years after its removal to a minor park, the statue of the genocidal conquistador Francisco Pizzarro. Why absurd? Well, because it’s not Pizzarro but an anonymous European soldier of a different historical period which was first offered to Mexico as “conquistador Hernan Cortez” by the family of its US creator, Ramsey MacDonald, after his death. Mexico had the good sense to turn it down.

It is imperative that the relevance of all these public representations — historic as well as contemporary — is continually interrogated as their presence offers an invaluable opportunity to debate important questions about public art, the purpose it serves and whether such choices are arrived at through a democratic and transparent debate.

Their removal, or “cancelling,” however well intentioned, risks “out of sight out of mind” outcomes that could potentially compromise, in the future, an erudite grasp of history which will only be shaped by dialogue, not monologues. 

It is worth keeping in mind writer William Faulkner’s wise observation: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”