Samson Kambalu’s Fourth Plinth sculpture takes a subversive approach to colonial history

John Chilembwe poses with a white friend in a 1914 photograph, his wide-brimmed hat worn jauntily sideways. A year later, the Baptist pastor led an uprising against British rule in Malawi that, while defeated, has gone down in history as a symbol of the African nation’s liberation struggle.

From later this autumn, that photograph will be restaged in bronze on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth in a work by Malawian artist Samson Kambalu. It will mark a figure who “can be described as the father of Malawian modernity”, Kambalu says, but will also encompass the complexity of the colonial past in art. The other three stone plinths in the central London square are filled with statues of British notables; the fourth was left empty and has been occupied by rotating artworks in a scheme run by the mayor of London since 2005.

Kambalu received the plinth commission last year. “I had the photograph of Chilembwe on my phone when the mayor’s office got in touch with me,” says Kambalu, an associate professor at Oxford university’s Ruskin School of Art. “There was something numinous about it.”

Chilembwe, who was killed as troops suppressed his rebellion in 1915, will appear larger than life on the plinth. But he will share the space with John Chorley, his missionary friend, in what Kambalu, speaking on Zoom from Oxford, calls a “tango for recognition” between two sides of the colonial encounter.

Britain is in the midst of a fierce debate about colonial legacies in the nation’s public art, with campaigns to take down statues that are seen as whitewashing imperial history versus government policy to keep them up. But Chilembwe’s story reflects that “colonialism was a series of negotiations, tricks and concessions on both sides”, says Kambalu. “It’s not just conquerors versus victims.”

Chilembwe worked with missionaries to study as a Baptist in an American seminary and to develop his own church, the Providence Industrial Mission, on his return. His rebellion was also focused on British exploitation of a farm labour system known as thangata, with the mission becoming a locus for the rebellion. In Malawi Chilembwe adorns banknotes and is honoured with an annual public holiday that often involves pilgrimages to Sanjika Rock, a place where he studied and meditated. His body was never found, though, and there is no designated burial site, nor a public memorial in Mkwaila, his home village, where his mother and sister are buried and his descendants live.

The Trafalgar Square sculpture is “great news — we welcome it warmly”, says Daniel Muwotcha, Chilembwe’s 77-year-old grand-nephew, when we meet in Mkwaila. “He did not fight for a family or a village, he fought for the whole nation. He deserves recognition.”

The plinth sculpture will combine Malawian tradition and modernity by reflecting Kambalu’s engagement over his career with the Nyau masked dances of the country’s Chewa culture, which have satirised chiefs, colonial administrators and the modern face of capitalism in one of the world’s poorest countries. Kambalu evokes the Nyau masquerade by calling the bronze “Antelope”, the animal that is a vital figure in the satirical art form — and which is also the meaning of Chilembwe’s name in Chichewa, Malawi’s most widely spoken language. “Old Africa, the new Africa, the west — these are the three worlds I have to contend with and that inspire me,” Kambalu says.

Kambalu believes that Chilembwe himself drew on Nyau traditions of subversion — such as donning his hat in the 1914 photograph alongside a European, in defiance of a colonial taboo. “I knew this sculpture had to have a focus on the hats [and] these two men had to be on the plinth,” Kambalu says. “I saw Chilembwe rise up, becoming bigger . . . It just looked right. There was a truth in it.”

The proportions will have particular resonance in the context of Trafalgar Square. While Chorley will be the same size as figures on the square’s other plinths, Chilembwe, at about five metres, will rival Nelson on his column. Trafalgar and the Napoleonic wars might seem a long way from Chilembwe’s liberation struggle, but Britain’s acquisition of the Cape Colony during those wars opened up southern Africa to colonisation over the next century. Malawi came under a British protectorate in the 1890s.

Even Chilembwe’s orientation on the plinth will play a visual pun on the square. The “antelope” will stare down Sir Edwin Landseer’s bronze lions and gaze on the figures of Sir Henry Havelock and Sir Charles Napier, Victorian commanders of the empire’s wars and occupants of other plinths in Trafalgar Square. “I wanted detail, rather than an anonymous, clever sculpture,” Kambalu says.

These subversive allusions and ambiguity go against the grain of many official attitudes to colonial monuments in the UK today. Faced with both campaigns to take statues down and “retain and explain” legislation by the Conservative government, many museums and other bodies are choosing to “recontextualise” works, such as by placing notes nearby that counter their version of the past, sometimes awkwardly.

Last year, Oxford university’s Oriel College placed a plaque by a statue of Cecil Rhodes, the mining magnate who dominated the British colonisation of South Africa, which had sparked years of protests. The statue has been Grade II listed by the government, blocking its removal. Rhodes, whose British South Africa Company sought to influence Britain’s protectorate in Malawi, will remain outside the college, albeit described as a “committed British colonialist” who benefited from “exploitation of minerals, land and peoples of southern Africa”.

But “if you have to prop up a sculpture with a note, it has already fallen”, Kambalu says. “I am not against monuments, so long as the artist is allowed to bring art to them. The art that is made for propaganda perishes with politics.”

london.gov.uk