Thinking of statues of racists reminds me of Namibia. Let’s talk about the Reiterdenkmal (Equestrian Monument) or Südwester Reiter (South West Rider) that used to be up in #Windhoek.
The statue went up on January 27, 1912 on the 53rd birthday of #Kaiser_Wilhelm_II, the last Kaiser and the leader who oversaw Germany’s colonial run in Africa and the Pacific, including the settlement of German South West Africa.
The monument honors the German soldiers and civilians who died during the 1904-07 Herero Wars, the —and I can’t stress this enough — genocidal military campaign waged against the Herero & Nama. This is what the inscription on the monument said:
Considering statue-making as a propaganda tool, historian Andres Vogt wrote in The Namibian “the representation of persons in the form of an equestrian monument was a privilege reserved for highest nobility like emperors, kings and princes only.”
▻https://www.namibian.com.na/44210/archive-read/To-move-or-not-to-move---On-the-relocation-of
We don’t have to reach far to understand the level of insult that is invading people’s land AND THEN monumentalizing your conquest. German historian Joachim Zeller (his work is good) wrote in the same paper that it was “an unequivocal monument of victory.”
▻https://www.namibian.com.na/49115/archive-read/The-German-Rider---An-Apolitical-Soldiers-Memorial
After some years of protest, the monument was removed from its plinth on Christmas day 2013. It now sits inside Alta Feste, the fortress-cum-museum that used to be the HQ of the imperial German army.
I mention Andres Vogt because after the removal he was very angry: saying that the Namibian government was being “insensitive” about the country’s heritage.
▻https://www.namibian.com.na/index.php?id=118130&page=archive-read
“Heritage” does a lot of heavy lifting, and when it comes to public monuments it is almost always invoked by those who are fearful about symbols of conquest (which is why neo-Confederates make me laugh, y’all lost lol) + colonial domination disappearing from public memory.
But those monuments will never disappear anywhere people are living in the eternal shadow of the material violences they represent. Public space is a contested arena for memory: those monuments seek to represent the eternality of European violence and the people are saying no.
Tear them all down, reconceptualize the multivalence + evolution of things like “history” and “heritage,” and if you’re being precious about the monuments perhaps consider why idolatrous statues to white supremacy are sacred to you lol
Currently, folks in Namibia are fighting to take down this statue in Henties Bay. A few days ago, Lebbeus Hashikutuva started an online petition for its removal. It went up 42 years ago, during apartheid (it’s only 12 years older than the state itself)
▻https://neweralive.na/amp/gallows-make-mockery-of-black-pain-petition-seeks-to-remove-offensive-lan
A good piece about the noose within the context of the genocide; Hashikutuva also describes how it functions as a racial warning, that it isn’t at all just a reminder to keep the beach clean.
▻https://www.guernicamag.com/will-mcgrath-the-noose-in-hentiesbaai
“Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.”We are, with statues and in all places, fighting a war over memory and knowledge and recognition; white supremacy cannot win.
#mémoire #statues #toponymie_politique #Namibie #colonialisme #colonisation #monument #Allemagne #monument #racisme #espace_public
ping @neotoponymie @reka