Observing Memories Issue 3 | Page 63

View of the room Rituals and Ceremonies, Musée royal de
l’Afrique centrale | © MRAC, Tervuren, photo Jo Van de Vijver
In these processes, the Afro community has
certainly played a key role and is now a political
subject in the construction of “transnational
memories” (Assmann, 2014), which also call for a
major review of the colonial past in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. One aspect made visible
by the controversial remarks made by a later
British Prime Minister, David Cameron, when he
called Nelson Mandela a “hero” on the day of his
death, is the omission of the Tory Party’s backing
for the apartheid regime and for the South African
leader’s labelling as a “terrorist” under Margaret
Thatcher. A petition demanding a public apology
was then signed by thousands of people, headed by
decolonial activists intent on showing this nationally
uncomfortable past to Europe. The decolonial trend
The city of Bristol, which still has a controversial statue in honour of the
slave trader Edward Colston, woke up one morning in 2017 to find unofficial
plaques calling attention to its past history with the slave trade | Sam
Saunders
of the twenty-first century, however, is not confined
to British soil: it is a global movement that is
becoming increasingly more vocal (Reyes, 2016).
In France, Emmanuel Macron, the President
of the Republic of égalité and fraternité, set off
a political firestorm when, in February 2017, he
declared that French colonisation had been a
overview
61