A monumental dilemma: why old statues are causing new debates

ACROSS the world, like in South Africa, fierce debates are raging over statues and monuments honouring figures from colonial and apartheid eras.

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From the toppling of a slave trader’s statue in Bristol, England, to the #RhodesMustFall protests and parliamentary debates in South Africa, communities and politicians are questioning why figures who caused immense suffering are still celebrated in public arenas.

This conflict is not simply about erasing the past, as some suggest. Instead, it is a profound, modern-day reckoning with the painful and persistent legacies of colonialism. To understand the arguments, we must look at the deep-seated ideas that these bronze and stone figures represent.

From gaining independence to undoing a mindset

To grasp the core of the debate, it’s useful to understand two key ideas: decolonisation and decoloniality.

Decolonisation is the historical process most of us learnt about in school: it’s when a colony gains political independence from its ruling empire and becomes a new, self-governing country. This was often an incomplete achievement. New nations inherited colonial laws, borders, and educational and economic systems, meaning that the structures of colonial power often remained even after the colonisers themselves had departed.

Decoloniality, on the other hand, is the ongoing struggle to dismantle these structures left behind by colonialism. It’s a deeper project aimed at freeing societies from the colonial mindset - the enduring belief that Western knowledge, culture, and ways of life are superior — white superiority and black inferiority. This lingering system, which scholars call the “colonial matrix of power”, continues to fuel global inequality by perpetuating the same racial and economic hierarchies established centuries ago. The fight over statues is a visible expression of this deeper struggle for decoloniality.

The hidden violence of colonialism