This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on July 20, 2020 - July 26, 2020

The first half of the 21st century may very well be known in future as the age of fallen heroes. Perhaps the most well-known case with a global reach is the Rhodes Must Fall post-apartheid protest movement that began on March 9, 2015, in Cape Town, South Africa.

The movement was originally directed against the statue of Cecil John Rhodes, the British mining magnate and coloniser of Africa, and symbol of colonial oppression and racism. On that day, a student, Chumani Maxwele, flung faeces at the statue, located at the upper campus of the University of Cape Town (UCT), Africa’s highest ranked university.

By the first quarter of 2015, the Rhodes Must Fall movement was dominating discussions at the UCT. Finally, on April 9, 2015, after a prolonged protest by students and a UCT Council vote the previous night, the statue was pulled down from its plinth. This movement, however, was not merely about a decades-old statue. It has to be seen in the context of the continuing critique of the legacies of apartheid and the related question of the decolonisation of education.

More recently, protesters in Oxford had called for the removal of a Rhodes statue at Oxford University. Chanting “take it down”, they held a silent protest for eight minutes and 46 seconds in memory of George Floyd — the same period of time a white police officer was seen to kneel on his neck. The protest coincided with Floyd’s funeral in Houston, Texas.

The funeral came two weeks after Floyd was killed while in the custody of the Minneapolis police. His death resulted in people coming together to further the cause of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement against anti-black and anti-colour racism throughout the US and the world.

Some days before the Oxford protests, Bristol saw the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston by BLM demonstrators. Colston was a 17th-century English merchant and slave trader. He was, at one time, deputy governor of the Royal African Company and oversaw the transport into slavery of some 84,000 Africans.

Also recently in the UK, a statue of Sir Winston Churchill, erected in Parliament Square, Westminster, was sprayed with graffiti during a BLM protest.

Days before that, on June 4, people gathered around the Robert E Lee statue in Richmond, Virginia, during protests over the death of George Floyd. Virginia Governor Ralph Northam announced that the statue would be removed.

Even before the death of George Floyd, there had been calls for the removal of the statue of Thomas McKie Meriwether, a white man honoured in North Augusta, South Carolina, for being killed in an 1876 riot. Seven black men were also killed in that riot but were not similarly honoured.

A statue of King Leopold II of Belgium was taken down in Antwerp on June 9 after it was vandalised by protesters because of his brutal rule over the Congo, which he held as his personal property from 1885 to 1908. During that time, he subjected its people to forced labour, which led to genocide involving millions of deaths. Like the other fallen statues, Leopold’s was a symbol of racism targeted by BLM protestors following the death of George Floyd.

Anti-colonial sentiments that emerged in the late colonial period, and then expressed since political independence by activists, scholars and statesmen throughout the 20th century, are now continuing with renewed efforts and a “new” decolonial politics, aimed at overthrowing the coloniser who is still featured as dominant, standing proud as he does on his pedestal, stylised as a plinth.

No doubt this has a lot to do with the growing discontent of marginalised and oppressed peoples along racist lines, which began in the colonial period and seems to be reaching its climax in the series of BLM protests around the world. The growing anti-racism has also taken the form of the politics of toppling — literally or figuratively.

Closer to home, Sir Stamford Raffles is, to this day, a canonised figure. In post-colonial Singapore, his name lives on in a variety of forms. First and foremost are the two statues. The first is a 19th-century bronze statue that now stands in front of the Victoria Theatre and Concert Hall. The second was cast in the 1970s and can be found on the south bank of the Singapore River.

Several landmark buildings, businesses, highly ranked educational institutions, prestigious clubs, and transport facilities have been named after Raffles. The world’s largest flower, the Rafflesia, a genus of parasitic flowering plants, is also named after him.

Raffles had been presented by the independent Singapore state as a hero of sorts, one of the rare instances in history of a colonial administrator serving as a national icon, in a world where most post-colonial nations adopt an extremely critical approach towards colonialism and the colonial figures who ruled over them.

Colonial administrators and imperialists like those whose statues remain on their plinths, such as Raffles in Singapore and Francis Light in Penang, should make us think about the meaning of colonialism. Colonialism was not only about political-economic domination and control. Colonialism did not only take the political economic destiny of whole peoples out of their own hands but was also responsible for both the physical and cultural destruction of peoples’ lives.

Furthermore, the colonial image of the native was founded on colonial racism. Various deficiencies and incapacities associated with the natives were explained in racist terms. British colonial officers such as Raffles and John Crawfurd regarded the Malays as being rude and uncivilised in character, of feeble intellect, and at a low stage of intellectual development, indolent, submissive, and prone to piracy. Also, the backwardness of the natives and their various negative traits were blamed on their religion, Islam.

Syed Hussein Alatas’ Thomas Stamford Raffles: Schemer or Reformer?, first published in 1971 and then re-issued in 2020 (Singapore, NUS Press), presented a critique of the philosophy of Raffles at a time in Singapore scholarship when there was hardly any critical assessment of the man. Alatas’ task was to present a critical and balanced, not Euro-centric or Anglo-centric, account of the thought and deeds of Raffles.

There was a need for this because of the ethnic bias of British historians and biographers in their treatment of Raffles. In their bid to present Raffles as a progressive statesman and humanitarian reformer, there is a virtual absence of a critical treatment of Raffles’ ethnically prejudiced views of the different Asian communities, his involvement in the Massacre of Palembang, the corruption case known as the Banjarmasin Affair, and other questionable acts, all of which should be put in the proper context of British imperialism and the ideology of colonial capitalism.

With respect to the Massacre of Palembang, Alatas leaned towards the view that Raffles was complicit in the events that led up to the murders of 24 Europeans and 63 Javanese at the Dutch fort in Palembang, comprising soldiers and civilians. On the Banjarmasin Affair or Banjarmasin Enormity, Alatas suggested that Raffles engaged in a suspicious acquisition of a territory along the Borneo coast by his friend, Alexander Hare, which involved corruption and forced labour.

Raffles had also supported the opium trade and was concerned about how licensing would affect the East India Company’s revenues. Viewing Singapore’s function as an outlet for the distribution of opium throughout the region, he made every effort to ensure that the company’s opium trade be “protected and offered every facility”. Raffles took for himself a 5% commission on each opium licence. The British opium trade out of Singapore that Raffles sanctioned constituted Singapore’s largest single source of revenue from 1824 until 1910.

To note that Raffles was a product of his time and was informed by the dominant ideology of his age, that is, imperialism, is to state the obvious. In our assessment of him today, though, that recognition cannot be an excuse to allow the embarrassing facts of the colonial adventure to disappear.

Syed Farid Alatas is professor of sociology at the National University of Singapore

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