Bristol’s Colonial Legacy: How a Church’s Reuse as Community Space Reveals Unresolved Debates on Reparative Justice
Original framing: “Edward Colston’s remains likely to stay at Bristol church that could become community space” — The Guardian - World
A trickster reading of this story would expose the absurdity of treating a mass murderer’s remains as a matter of architectural convenience while ignoring the very real harms his actions caused. Coyote, the Indigenous trickster, might ask: *Why is the church more concerned with preserving a building’s 'character' than with the dignity of those who suffered under its patron?* Anansi, the West African trickster, would spin a tale where the church’s decision to keep Colston’s bones is less about reverence and more about avoiding the messy work of accountability. The paradox here is that by framing this as a 'community space,' the narrative obscures the fact that the community most affected—Black Bristolians—has been excluded from the conversation entirely. The trickster’s role is to disrupt this solemnity by asking: *What would justice look like if we started from the demands of the marginalised, rather than the comfort of the powerful?*
The debate over Edward Colston’s remains in All Saints Church is not merely about the logistics of a building’s reuse but a microcosm of the unresolved tensions between institutional inertia and the demands of reparative justice.
The current framing, which treats the issue as a technical or aesthetic problem, obscures the deeper systemic question: how can societies confront the legacies of oppression when the institutions that benefited from them—like the Church of England—remain in control of the narrative? Historical parallels, from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa to the repatriation movements in Indigenous communities, demonstrate that meaningful reconciliation requires centering the voices of those most affected and treating contested spaces as sites for active healing rather than passive preservation. The trickster’s role here is to expose the absurdity of prioritising architectural continuity over justice, while the scientific and artistic dimensions reveal that evidence-based and creative approaches could transform the space into a catalyst for systemic change. The solution pathways outlined—descendant-led repatriation, restorative justice hubs, structural reparations, and international dialogues—offer a roadmap for turning this moment into an opportunity for structural accountability, rather than another chapter in the sanitisation of colonial history.