The slave trader’s statue is back on show in Bristol. There’s something electric about seeing it supine in a museum
Last week, for the first time in months, the burning eye of the outrage industry pivoted westwards and came to rest upon the city of Bristol. On Friday, the statue of the 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston, toppled last June during a Black Lives Matter protest, was put on display. To the fury of some, it was not returned triumphantly to its pedestal in the centre of the city, but exhibited in Bristol’s M Shed museum.
The debate around Colston in the summer of 2020 was largely conducted in a fact-free zone. So it is surely disconcerting for those determined to defend the memorialisation of a mass murderer that in this new setting Colston’s bronze effigy is surrounded by displays that give a detailed history of the slave trader’s grim career and the strange story that explains why, in the 19th century, a cult was created around him and the statue erected.
