Why statues - good and bad - should be kept

Now that the dust has settled to some extent on Rhodes's empty plinth at the University of Cape Town, it may be safe to examine the question before it plagues us again.

Statues are, after all, inanimate lumps of metal or stone that we can choose to ignore completely. But they were erected for a purpose, to honour or remember someone or an event, so they were imbued with meaning. And if that meaning is forgotten in time, lost to history, it can be revived or given a new meaning.

Walk the streets and squares of London, and you are confronted by a statue at every turn: there are estimated to be thousands of them; yet, to most people, they may as well be garden gnomes - for those they honour are forgotten.

The most famous is the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus, but which tourist knows that it's a memorial to the Victorian Lord Shaftesbury , or who he was? You need to relate to a statue or monument: we may notice David Livingstone buried in the aisle of Westminster Abbey because he walked this land, and we feel pride at the sight of Mandela and maybe Smuts alongside Lincoln and Churchill in Parliament Square.

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Venezuelans must appreciate the statue of Simón Bolívar in Belgrave Square.

Some prefer the obscure: Paddington Bear in the station he was named after, or the Machine Gun Corps Memorial at Hyde Park Corner, also known as The Boy David and naughtily referred to as boasting the best ass in London.

We don't have much fun with our statues in South Africa; they are perhaps too fresh and, for some, re-loaded with meaning. Hence the fall of Rhodes. He fell because he was an imperialist or maybe a capitalist, but he could equally have fallen if others objected to him being an alleged misogynist or a closet homosexual.

And that is the problem: today we all fail to see people in the past within the social milieu they lived in.

Few of us, even historians, can really immerse ourselves in the social norms, beliefs and morals of the past that no individual could easily escape at the time.

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When discussing Wagner's now-notorious anti-Semitism with a music-loving friend, he pointed out that that was quite normal in 19th-century Europe, and that Wagner had Jewish friends and colleagues all his life. Should a German statue of Wagner now be torn down because of what happened in that country later?

You need to understand the past when looking at an ancient Egyptian statue of a pharaoh made to look like a god - or one of a Victorian politician dressed as a Roman senator.

Here we have fewer statues to ponder, and even less historical knowledge about the people they portray. This is because of our divided history, but mainly because history is so badly taught, if at all, at schools. A radio reporter recently referred to an "apartheid-era statue" of MT Steyn.

Her meaning was clear, but Steyn was the last president of the Orange Free State and led it into war against the British Empire. He never heard the word "apartheid".

Not everyone has been enamoured with the statues of Queen Victoria. These must have been mass-produced in a Birmingham factory and sent out all over the empire. She may not be safe even in her own kingdom: some students at Royal Holloway, University of London, last week campaigned against her statue because the plinth refers to "Empress of India", a title given to her in 1877.

Sadly, statues are seldom judged on artistic merit. The popular statue of Mandela in Sandton is not very good. The monument to Paul Kruger in Pretoria's Church Square is one of the best examples of public art in South Africa: forget the politics and look at the four burgers "guarding" it, all sculpted by Anton van Wouw. They look like defeated and broken men. They tell a tale and make it an ambiguous monument. There is no triumph here. It was sculpted in 1896 to commemorate a man seen by his people as a freedom fighter against imperialism and colonialism, about to be defeated. Do we see that now?

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Even the most bombastic of monuments - such as the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria - can be ambiguous.

Its undeniably magnificent marble frieze around the Hall of Heroes, carved by Italian sculptors, depicts its black subjects with surprising nobility.

Twenty years ago I took the then Gauteng premier Tokyo Sexwale to see it for the first time. He came prepared, as we inspected that frieze and the story it told. He honed in on the scene where Zulu king Dingane signed away half his kingdom to the Voortrekkers, and picked it apart as being inaccurate: a Zulu king could not give away land, he gave it for use. This whole monument is built around this central falsehood, and because of this, all this followed, he said - pointing to the later friezes showing the battles of Bloukrans and Blood River.

"As it stands," he said, "it is a demonstration of arrogance, but I am not offended. No, we don't demolish history. Stalin tried it, and others. It is part of history and will stand."

The Voortrekker Monument was erected as an answer to the imperial British symbol of the Union Buildings visible across the city; in a brilliant move it is now answered by the Freedom Park on the next hill. It's a three-way conversation that itself adds to the story.

We are not alone in our uncomfortable monuments.

Oriel College in Oxford recently refused to remove a statue of Rhodes. If the British started on that road, where would it end?

Perhaps the best way to treat a statue has been shown by the good Scottish people of Glasgow, who for decades have put a plastic traffic cone on the head of the equestrian statue of the Anglo-Irish Duke of Wellington. A yellow traffic cone on Rhodes's head in perpetuity would have been a far more lasting statement than removing it. It would simply say: "We don't take you seriously at all."