Freya Sackville-West on 'Fallism' and challenging the narrative of public monuments.
Public monuments and statues have the potential to create a sense of identity, social cohesion and belonging; however, statues of individuals can perpetuate the discriminatory and exclusionary structures of the time they were erected. Historic England (2020) have defined ‘contested heritage’ as ‘historic objects, structures, buildings or places where the associated stories or meanings have become challenged’ and that represent moments in our past which are ‘distinctly at odds’ with contemporary values. Statues and monuments have long been targets of social and political discontent. After Indian Independence in 1947, Coronation Park in Delhi became a ‘graveyard’ for all the statues of British monarchs and colonial officials of the British Raj that were dismantled across India. In 2004, a statue of Christopher Columbus, venerated for his ‘discovery’ and conquest of the Americas, was pulled down in Caracas, Venezuela on the Day of Indigenous Resistance, a counter-celebration to ‘Columbus Day’.
More recently, this movement has become known as ‘Fallism’. ‘Fallism’ is a concept and framework that developed among student activist movements in South Africa, primarily associated with the #RhodesMustFall campaign, calling for the ‘decolonisation’ of universities and the move towards Black liberation. Cecil John Rhodes (1853–1902) was a colonial politician known for his brutal imperial expansion through his exploitative mining practices: his company, the British South Africa Company, ‘founded’ Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Fallism captured the media’s attention when, in March 2015, South African activist Chumani Maxwele threw human excrement over a statue of Cecil Rhodes at the centre of the University of Cape Town (UCT) campus in response to the preservation of colonial symbols of oppression and domination in South African institutions. After extensive discussions, the statue was removed by the UCT council on 9 April 2015. The #RhodesMustFall movement propelled ‘Fallism’ into mainstream media, sparking the removal of statues of Confederate leaders in the United States, as well as individuals associated with the trafficking of enslaved people and imperial expansion in the UK.
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