It was Mr Hemraj Muniram who responded in our Tuesday edition, saying that while the writer’s anti-imperialist sentiment was “praiseworthy... beating up on lifeless statues that cannot fight back will not help his cause.” Among other things he argued that we may not like parts of our history, “but we must acknowledge and respect them.”

That is true of all societies; in fact there would be very few historical monuments standing anywhere in the world, if the only ones which were preserved were those relating to liberty or equality, for example. In fact, the best-known monuments internationally are probably the Egyptian pyramids and the Great Wall of China - both of them, at different stages in their history, erected by either slave or conscript labour of one sort or another. And what about the slave forts of West Africa, those painful symbols of a most terrible past? The African nations which have preserved them have done so because they believe that however distressing the history associated with them might be, it is important that it be remembered, and not erased.

And as Mr Muniram pointed out, if one starts sanitizing the material relics of one’s past, just where does one stop? In the case of the city of Georgetown, for example, there are innumerable structures associated with the colonial era. Aside from public buildings there are also a substantial number of private homes which owe their existence and their forms to architectural notions which were popular in pre-independence times.

And as for statues per se, it might be observed that Europe’s avenues and plazas are littered with the likenesses of knaves, bounders, incompetents and worse. As the children of London gaze up at the statue of the “Grand Old Duke of York,” for example, the only thing that will come immediately to their minds will be the nursery rhyme in which his lack of military expertise is recorded. (He marched an army to the top of the hill and then marched it down again.) The not-so-praiseworthy are there along with the praiseworthy because however unsavoury their role in the scheme of things, they are part of the panoply of history.

Mr Muniram gave readers the benefit of the recent history of Victoria’s statue. While the older generation will remember the monument lying in ‘unstately’ splendour at the back of the Botanical Gardens in the 1970s, not so many people will know about the two dynamite explosions in 1954 which blew off its head and damaged the left arm, among other parts. It was apparently shipped to the United Kingdom for repairs.

William Russell’s bust was rescued from oblivion too in more recent times. He does not grace the compound of City Hall because he was a prominent planter who was possessed of attitudes typical of his class; he graces the compound because he was the one who solved the problem of how to bring running water to the city of Georgetown. It was a problem which had defeated the worthies of the day up to that point, and had resulted in some expensive experiments which came to naught.

Leaving colonial statues where they are does not mean that we accept “the oppression” of imperialism; it just means that we accept that imperialism and oppression were part of our history.