Jamaica’s colonial monuments: neglect as iconoclasm
Colonial monuments, and other problematic, propagandist statues such as the Confederate monuments, have been in the public’s eye recently, as several have been taken down in various parts of the world, sometimes impulsively and violently and on other occasions in a more formalized manner. The removal of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol, for instance, which was demonstratively dumped in the harbour, was a signal event in the Black Lives Matter and Decolonial campaigns last year and involved persons of Caribbean descent. In the Caribbean itself, the destruction of the statue of Josephine the Beauharnais in Fort de France, Martinique, and the formal removal to the Barbados Museum of the Nelson statue in Bridgetown, Barbados, happened around the same time. One of the shared assertions behind these iconoclastic interventions is that these monuments retain their colonial symbolic and propagandist power and that this must be removed or neutralized as part of the decolonization process.
Despite the country’s well-known history of decolonial radicalism, in comparison, it has been surprisingly quiet around Jamaica’s colonial statues. There have been some calls for their removal, but none have gained any significant traction. If anything, the default response to colonial sites and monuments in Jamaica is one of neglect. This tells its own story, I believe, as it may suggest that these monuments are deemed inconsequential in modern Jamaica and therefore fail to inspire any significant passions. The neglect, I suggest, represents a passive form of iconoclasm that may be just as effective in disempowering colonial propaganda, as its active counterparts. This three-part series of articles looks at the questions that surround three of Jamaica’s colonial monuments.
The first monument under discussion, the Queen Victoria statue in Kingston dates from 1897 and is a replica of a statue that was erected in 1889 in Singapore, made by the Polish-English artist Emanuel Edward Geflowski (1834-1898). It is one of many Victoria statues and memorials that were erected throughout the British Empire in response to her Diamond Jubilee in 1887, with some 50 statues in India alone. The Kingston statue was originally located in the centre of what is now the St William Grant Park in downtown Kingston. Its unveiling was a spectacular, brazenly propagandist affair, to which large numbers of well-dressed Black Jamaican men and women were invited, to suggest that Jamaicans were willing and well-behaved colonial subjects who benefited from the civilizational influence of British Imperial rule.
The statue was affected by the devastating earthquake that levelled the city in 1907 and turned around nearly 360 degrees on its base, although the statue itself was undamaged. There is a photograph of three Black Jamaicans, a man and two young women, posing by the dislodged statue. The demonstrative self-confidence of their poses suggests that the “colonial subjects” were perhaps not so compliant with the expected reverence towards this supposedly benevolent symbol of Empire and colonial power, as there is more than a hint of defiance, insubordination, and schadenfreude in their body language.
The park, which was originally a military parade-ground and which is still today popularly known as Parade, was the site of nationalist, anticolonial gatherings in the 1930s and has its own symbolic potency in Jamaica’s cultural and political history. It was renamed in the early 1970s, after one of the nationalist leaders, St William Grant. The Victoria statue was, around the same time, relocated to a corner of the park, to make way for the statues of the nationalist Jamaican leaders and national hero, Norman Manley and Alexander Bustamante that were erected in central locations in the park. It was a demotion but not a removal.
The demoted Victoria statue still stands in the corner of the park today, largely unperturbed and generally ignored in what is a heavily trafficked part of the city. There is, however, an intriguing twist to the story. Part of the left arm, which was holding the orb, is missing and I previously assumed that this was due to erosion caused by the tropical elements. My friend and colleague, Paul Hamilton, recently told me, however, that the statue was vandalized in the mid-1970s, after Jamaica’s then prime minister, Michael Manley, gave a particularly fiery anti-imperialist speech. I have thus far found no corroborating evidence of this incident but intend to research it further as it may represent an isolated but significant departure from the dominant approach of neglect and it tellingly occurred during a moment of political radicalism. I would love to hear from readers who may have more information on this incident.
Next week, in part II, we will look at the Columbus statue in St Ann’s Bay.
Dr Veerle Poupeye is an art historian specialized in art from the Caribbean. She lectures at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica, and works as an independent curator, writer, researcher, and cultural consultant. Her personal blog can be found at veerlepoupeye.com.
