Until April of this year, Cecil Rhodes bestrode the University of Cape Town like, you guessed it, a colossus. A big bronze colossus, his chin cupped in one fist, staring out over a multi-ethnic campus he could never have imagined.
A group of students felt that it was time for Rhodes – the British-born South African politician and mining tycoon who believed in the superiority of one race over all others – to leave the campus that he had endowed with pots of cash upon his death. One of them threw a bucket of human excrement over his statue. They draped a banner saying, "Rhodes Must Go" over its base. The university's governing body took a vote, and shortly after, to the delighted shouts of activists, a crane removed Rhodes from his plinth and took him to some dark storeroom, out of public sight. His fate will be decided by a heritage committee, so he could be there a long time.
Some white South Africans objected to the removal of what they believe is a legitimate memorial to their heritage. Does this sound familiar? Rhodes, of course, lent his name to a state that was once racially segregated, Rhodesia – now Zimbabwe. The man who recently committed mass murder in Charleston, S.C., posted pictures of himself wearing Rhodesian symbols. His disgusting, racist crime inspired renewed revulsion toward the Confederate flag (which he also wrapped around himself) and led the politicians of Alabama to take down the rebel standard at their state capitol grounds and those of South Carolina to vote on the removal of its flag.
The focus is on monuments and memorials, but really what we're talking about is whose history gets remembered – and how. Around the world, these questions are pitting one community against another. History is fluid, and today's bronze colossus, treated reverently by crowds, is tomorrow's headless statue lying in the dust and being beaten by an angry mob. This isn't about bits of metal and concrete, but about how the story of victory and defeat gets repeated on a country's streets and in its parks – which is why so many people are willing to spend so much money to have their symbols permanently stuck in place.
In Moscow, there will soon be a referendum on whether to return a statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police, to a prominent place in the centre of the city. The old guard is trying to reassert its power, and what better way to intimidate dissidents of the present than with a reminder of the horrors of the past?
That's recent bitterness compared with what's going on between Macedonia and Greece, whose ancient feud over which country can lay claim to Alexander the Great was recently reignited when a huge (and hideous) sculpture of the conqueror was raised in the Macedonian capital, Skopje. Perhaps there's a word in Greek for "holding a grudge for millenniums."
Of course, we're seeing a similar struggle in Ottawa over the Memorial to the Victims of Communism, which is either a heart-tugging monument to freedom or a dismal eyesore that has nothing to do with the political history of our country, depending on your point of view. What is beyond dispute is that the Conservative government sees the monument as a winner, a vote-getter, a way of winning the loyalty of a group of Canadians by offering them a prime piece of Ottawa real estate to cement their story of the past.
Over the protests of architects, the mayor of Ottawa and people with eyes, the monument is scheduled to be built on a prominent bit of property next to the Supreme Court of Canada (though its design will be somewhat scaled back, according to drawings presented last week at a meeting of the National Capital Commission). A version of history will be set in stone – literally.
Symbols aren't inanimate, but are as alive as people's memories. As a seller of Confederate merchandise, angered about the flag's disappearance, told The New York Times last week, "There's nothing racial about it. This is history to us." His words would not have surprised another son of the South, William Faulkner, who famously said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." It continues to live in cloth and stone and metal.