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LONDON – Deej Malik-Johnson, an elected representative of the Manchester University Students' Union, entered his office Friday to find a painted poem on a wall in front of him.
The poem, Rudyard Kipling "Is well liked in Britain – he has been voted the nation's favorite repeatedly – and is almost a pioneer of self-help writing. (" Keep when you are / you lose theirs and blame you, "he advises.) He was painted by the staff who manages the union building as part of a renovation.
Malik- Johnson and his fellow students were not happy.In a phone interview, he said that Kipling, an English journalist, author and poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907 and wrote "The Jungle Book", supported "colonialism and had racist attitudes." Mr. Malik-Johnson pointed out works like Kipling's poem "The White Man's Burden."
About 40 percent of students in the US University come from outside of Britain, said Malik-Johnson.He said that points of view e like Kipling's did not fit with a diversified body
. Mr. Malik-Johnson and his colleagues have painted it with another poem by the African American poet Maya Angelou. "We were not trying to erase Kipling – we did it deliberately so you could always see his words," Malik-Johnson said. "It was to start a conversation."
They finished painting on Monday, then posted a picture on Facebook. The reaction, said Mr. Malik-Johnson, was as expected: The students received a lot of messages to support, but also a flood of complaints.
Some of the women involved in the mural received death and rape threats, "Malik-Johnson added.
The conflict is only the latest that British students have faced the country's colonial heritage. In 2015, Oxford University students requested the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes, the mogul that many view as laying the foundation for apartheid, politics and politics. racial segregation of South Africa from 1948 until the early 1990s. The university rejected their complaint.
Students from Liverpool and Bristol campaigned against buildings with links to the slave trade.
This is part of a larger phenomenon and we are only at the beginning of the process, " said Nick Draper, director of the Center for the Study of the Legacy of British Slavery at University College London. "It's like moving tectonic plates, where there is so much tension between the present and the past and how it is commemorated." Something must give. "
The staff who commissioned the Work without consulting students has been excused. "We understand that we made a mistake in our approach by not collecting the opinion of students at the beginning of a new project," they said in a statement. "We accept that the result was inappropriate."
Some British universities take the initiative to examine their own links with colonialism and slavery. The University of Glasgow in Scotland set up last year a project to find out if the institution benefited financially from the slave trade, such as receiving donations from businessmen. .
Kipling was born in India, and some of his poems are there. "Compromise is the right word for him," said Rana Mitter, a professor at Oxford University's China Center, in a phone interview. "He was somebody who displayed some of the worst aspects of his time," he added, "but there are many places in his writings where his racial attitudes are very different from those typically British in l & # 39; era. "
Malik-Johnson stated that he had acknowledged that Kipling had enlightened ideas about his time, but added, "If you say that someone was less racist than the other 19th century Britons, it is not a very high bar to reach. "
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