Lose the explorer?
Town votes on statue of their man in Africa
A TOWN is staging a public vote over whether to keep a bronze statue of their most famous son.
Debates over the tribute to Africa explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley – known for the line: “Dr Livingstone, I presume?” – has intensified in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.
A public vote will be held today and tomorrow over the fate of the statue, which was erected a decade ago in Denbigh in North Wales.
He is a controversial figure because of his links with Belgian King Leopold II, who committed atrocities in the Congo Free State – now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
But his supporters say he was not working for the despot at the time of the appalling acts.
A petition last year gathered 7,000 signatures demanding the statue be removed. The Bishop of St Asaph also called last summer for its removal, saying the explorer had “little respect for the natives of Africa”.
Stanley found the Scottish explorer Livingstone at Lake Tanganyika where he had been lost in central Africa.
He was born fatherless in 1841 and emigrated to the US as a teenager.
Stanley fought in the American Civil War before becoming a journalist and explorer who found the source of the Nile and mapped central Africa’s Great Lakes. He died in 1904 at the age of 63.
Chairman of Denbigh town council Rhys Thomas said: “I need to keep neutral. It is something a few people are quite interested in on either side.”
Cllr Glen Swingler said: “Those coming out against it have got a bit more vociferous.” The statue has been criticised since it was announced, when the poet Benjamin Zephaniah called for
the plan to be dropped.