In December 2010 Cain Mathema, governor of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, called for the exhumation and repatriation to Britain of the remains of Cecil Rhodes, buried for more than a century in the Matopos Hills in southern Zimbabwe. He also called for the destruction of a statue at Victoria Falls erected in 1934 to commemorate the missionary and explorer David Livingstone. Protestant missionaries, being Protestants, disagreed with each other about many things, but as to the importance of Livingstone and his posthumous legacy they were unanimous. The only missionary society to which Livingstone became affiliated was the London Missionary Society (LMS), avowedly interdenominational. During 1913 Livingstone was celebrated as a missionary, as a humanitarian and as an explorer. He was celebrated in 'national' terms, as a Scot and a Briton. By 1973, 100 years after Livingstone's death, Britain's formal empire in Africa was extinct.
Legacies of colonial empire are present in the demarcations of state borders, in architecture, on the pedestals of monuments, in books, and in other forms. Heroic men have not been forgotten but at the same time erstwhile insurgents rebelling against the colonial order are now celebrated as freedom fighters. Even commodities of daily life, such as coffee or rubber, bear the deep imprint of their colonial histories. This book presents imperial history as a history of interwoven, overlapping, partly contradictory memories in which non-European outlooks are considered on a more equal footing, alongside the recollections of former colonial masters. These include imperial architecture in nineteenth-century Algeria, the Koregaon obelisk in India, the Hungarian monument commemorating the thirteen martyrs of Arad, and Japan's twentieth-century post-war repositories of memories of war, empire, suffering and heroism. The heroes and villains of the imperial era include the Dutch colonial governor Jan Pietersz Coen; Robert Clive, the victor of Plassey; and the explorer and missionary David Livingstone. Other manifestations of memory include Imam Shamil who resisted the troops of Tsarist Russia. The book looks at the fragility and precariousness of repositories of imperial memory. It traces the cycles of obliviousness and remembrance, of suppression and political instrumentalisation that have accompanied the history of Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. The history of Berlin's Botanical Garden is intimately intertwined with Germany's colonial endeavours but this important aspect of the institution's history has remained all but suppressed.