The statue of the 18th-century plantation owner William Beckford, which stands in Guildhall in London, will be recontextualised rather than permanently removed, says the City of London Corporation. A plaque will be placed alongside the statue explaining its connection to the transatlantic chattel slave trade. To me – a descendant of the people he enslaved – the decision feels like a moral failure.
Last year, I was involved in some of the discussions with the Ironmonger’s Company and other stakeholders in the statue. It became apparent that after the decision in 2021 that the figure would remain in the Great Hall, there was not as much resistance as I would have expected. But as a Jamaican-British man and a descendant of those whom Beckford exploited and murdered, I believe that leaving the statue in a prestigious place, even with a note of explanation, is morally reprehensible. Or, in the words of my Jamaican grandparents, it is “devilish”. The decision, which I am sure was the culmination of serious deliberations, underplays the radical evil of slavery’s racial capitalism and its continuing destructive consequences for people racialised as Black.
William Beckford is implicated in mass murder and immense cruelty in colonial Jamaica. The son of violent settler colonialists, in 1737 he inherited over a dozen slave plantations and 3,000 enslaved Africans in Jamaica. Beckford made his fortune by ruthlessly exploiting their labour, with what Beckford’s Tower and Museum calls “tyrannical strength”.
West Indian slavery was a crime against humanity. In 2001, at the third UN World Conference Against Racism, European nations acknowledged this fact. Beckford’s wealth enabled him to obtain power and status in Britain, including twice becoming lord mayor of London. He was a vicious slave owner. In Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave, the historian Vincent Brown tells how, after a failed insurrection in 1760, 400 enslaved people were killed for their part in the rebellion, and its leader was burned alive.
So why was someone connected to mass murder venerated with a statue in 1772? Ironically, he had gained great favour in the City two years prior, due to his apparent support of freedom. He gave a sympathetic speech against King George III, in defence of the City’s liberties and rights. Back then, as now, the City’s admiration of Beckford’s selective outrage obfuscated his brutality.
Two blind spots about slavery enabled the corporation’s decision to leave the statue in place.
First, the depth and horror of slavery remain unknown. We have institutionalised ignorance of the slave past in secondary education. I know from more than two decades of university teaching the deficiency in the understanding of racial terror in the West Indies. Rastafari-inspired reggae music has been the most consistent transmitter of slavery’s bestiality. Bob Marley’s classic song Babylon System uses the metaphor of cannibalism to signify slavery as an utter devouring. Similarly, in her book Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies, the anthropologist Mimi Sheller describes different ways that Europeans devoured Black flesh in Caribbean history. In A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery and Resistance, the activist Stella Dadzie demonstrates how enslaved women were “consumed” by everyone. They were the most vulnerable to sexual violence, physical mutilation and premature death on slave plantations. Slavery as cannibalism is an example of what Christian theology terms “radical evil” – a descent into a toxic mixture of hubris, moral corruption and deprivation.
Second, Black suffering still does not register as fully human suffering in society. The false assessment of the suffering of Black bodies has a long history in western thought and practice. Imagined animalistically in slavery as beasts of burden, Black people were expected to bear more physical pain than their captors because apparently Black pain was not real human pain. The legacy of this racism lives on in contemporary medicine, too. For example, research has shown a failure by medical professionals to administer adequate pain relief to Black patients, including Black women in labour. Equally, Black people’s past suffering is also devalued. The decades-long fight for a national monument to recognise the suffering of people enslaved by the British reflects a lack of cultural intelligence inside government to mourn the historical suffering of Black people. Animals fare better. A war memorial in London to mark the suffering of animals during the first world war was erected in London in 2004.
There may be some artefacts (pottery, ornaments, metalwork) connected to the slave trade that are less problematic than Beckford’s statue, and that can be explained in situ. But a plaque is not sufficient to recontextualise the acts of a West Indian mass murderer. I would prefer that this statue be removed and placed in a London museum. My suggestion for the museum description is that it read:
“William Beckford inherited 3,000 enslaved Africans in Jamaica, whom he mercilessly exploited to accumulate great wealth in Britain. His enslaved Africans were victims of routine sexual violence, torture, bodily mutilation and mass murder. Today, we recognise slavery as a crime against humanity and an unresolved stain on the national consciousness. We display this statue not because we wish to honour Beckford, but as a reminder of how we as a nation have sanitised, obscured and neglected racial capitalism and racial terror as foundational narratives of our modern history.”
Robert Beckford is a lecturer and broadcaster based in Birmingham
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