Pulling down statues of racists? Africa’s done it for years

JOHANNESBURG — Queen Victoria, Cecil Rhodes, King Leopold. Statues honoring these leaders of colonial rule have been pulled down over the years in Africa after countries won independence or newer generations said racist relics had to go.

New campaigns in the U.S. and Europe are now following Africa’s lead. Monuments to slave traders and colonial rulers have become the focus of protests around the world.

No protests have been spotted this week around the remaining statues in Africa, but several have faced furious demonstrations in the past.

A boisterous student-led campaign pressed the University of Cape Town to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes from the school’s entrance in April 2015. The statue had been defaced and covered in excrement by students protesting against the colonial leader who supported white minority rule in South Africa and the colonization of the southern African territories named for him, Northern and Southern Rhodesia, which later became Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Students celebrated as a crane lifted the statue off its base. Now the statue is covered by a tarpaulin at a local army base.

Another statue of Rhodes was toppled in Zimbabwe in July 1980, a few months after the country became independent. When the statue was downed in the capital — then known by its colonial name, Salisbury, now Harare — demonstrators cheered and pounded it with a hammer.

A statue of Britain’s Queen Victoria in Nairobi, Kenya, was knocked down and beheaded in 2015 by unknown vandals. The headless statue lies next to its plinth in a downtown square.

“This statue reminds me of the suffering our forefathers went through in the hands of colonialists and whenever we see them, the memories are fresh,” Nairobi resident Samuel Obiero said.