A larger-than-life sculpture of an anticolonial hero has been unveiled as the newest artwork on Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth.
Antelope by Samson Kambalu depicts John Chilembwe, a Baptist preacher who was killed in an uprising in Nyasaland, now Malawi, in 1915, and John Chorley, a European missionary.
Chilembwe is wearing a hat in defiance of a colonial rule forbidding Africans from wearing hats in front of white people.
The five-metre statue is the first of an African in Trafalgar Square.
Kambalu said he had made Chilembwe almost twice the size of Chorley as a way of elevating his story.
“Many people may not know who John Chilembwe is. And that is the whole point,” said Kambalu, an associate professor of fine art at the University of Oxford.
The statue was unveiled on Wednesday morning and is the fourteenth contemporary artwork to be commissioned for display in the historic location.
It comes after calls for a statue of the Queen on the fourth plinth were met with cries of support in the House of Commons.
Conservative former minister Sir John Hayes said it would be a “fitting national memorial” for Elizabeth II following her death on September 8, aged 96.
The other three plinths house permanent artworks - including a bronze statue of King George IV.
