Education needed - not eradication or misinformation
YOUR letter-writer Mark Steeds of the Abolition Shed Collective, and no doubt his comrades in Countering Colston and Bristol Radical History Group, would like to reassure us that their campaigns are not aimed at denying history and are merely about who is honoured (Post Letters, December 3).
Unfortunately, the evidence shows how wrong this is – I say they are seeking to change how Bristol’s history is remembered, indeed they aim to ‘ decolonise’ Bristol (you can have hours of fun researching what that means!) and I say they are using misinformation to do so.
The obvious example is Edward Colston (1636-1721) the Bristolborn merchant, philanthropist, slave trader, and Member of Parliament, who is their first target.
Edward Colston is commemorated in Bristol for his great philanthropy, though since the 1920s it has been known that he made some of his money from the slave trade. They have seized on this one aspect of this important figure in the history of Bristol to characterise him as the evil slave trader Colston, while downplaying or sometimes not even mentioning (as in Mark’s letter) his great contributions to Bristol in setting up and supporting schools, almshouses, and hospitals for the poor.
They also ignore, or are ignorant of, the times that Colston lived in, when slave trading was not illegal and was condoned by royalty (Charles II and James, Duke of York, helped set up the company that Colston was involved with), churchmen, intellectuals and the educated classes; when slavery was widespread, including Barbary Pirates from North Africa enslaving Europeans, a long-established Arab slave trade in Africa, and many African kingdoms also involved in slavery; in a time before the ‘Enlightenment’ period in Europe and the Abolition movement in England; and at a time when life was very hard for most people, with the majority of people still toiling on the land.
The Victorians celebrated Colston the philanthropist as a great example of a ‘wise and virtuous’ man, and rather underhandedly forgot to mention the slave trade connection. Mark and his