A ROW is raging around a marble statue of Queen Victoria, pitting a white community that feels under siege against a council that wants the colonial relic to be removed.

The imperial ruler has looked out over Port Elizabeth on the Eastern Cape for 100 years, but a city councillor from the ruling African National Congress wants the statue to be torn down. “If I had the legal power, I would have brought it down already, in the same way the Americans brought down the statue of Saddam Hussein,” Mike Xego said. “She looks right into my office.”

The 101-year-old Sicilian marble statue stands isolated on Govan Mbeki Avenue, named after the father of President Mbeki, next to the offices of the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Council.

Mr Xego acknowledged that his onslaught had been a deliberate attempt to provoke the English-speaking community of Eastern Cape province, whose English place-names and monuments have survived largely untouched during ten years of black majority rule. Many Afrikaner names and icons have been renamed or removed.

English-speaking residents were outraged, prompting accusations that the councillor had become “deranged and unhinged”.

“This kind of thing is just stupid,” Ed Richardson, an English-speaking resident of Port Elizabeth, said. “It undermines all our attempts to promote cultural tourism in the province. People want to come here to see our heritage. If we have to take down all the statues that some members of the ANC don’t like, then there would be no reason for British, Dutch or German tourists to come here.”

Thousands of streets, towns, regions and provinces across the country have been stripped of their Afrikaner and English names since the end of apartheid ten years ago, to be replaced with their original African names. This is the first time that there has been such a bitter public row over the fate of a colonial-era statue.

Ren Werth, acting Chief Executive Officer of Nelson Mandela Bay, Port Elizabeth’s tourist authority, said that the dispute has highlighted the extent to which South Africa’s white communities had been successful in preserving their own heritage, at the expense of black cultural heritage.

“We have managed to preserve colonial and apartheid-era statues and buildings, but little has been done to promote black attractions,” Mr Werth said. “We need to package the other perspectives as well, including the lives of the liberation struggle heroes; the foreign tourists want to see that as well.”

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Should colonial relics be removed?

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