Statue of Queen Victoria

     An effort to raise public funds for a statue of Queen Victoria to be installed in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, was initiated in 1897, in honor of the Diamond Jubilee. In 1903, Edward Roscoe Mullins’s statue was unveiled by J.C. Kemsley, Mayor of the city, in a large ceremony on the site where the statue remains today, in front of the Public Library. In 1992 the statue was cleaned and restored, but in 2010 the monument was daubed with paint and graffitied with a phrase in Xhosa: “Goduka Europe” (“Go Home Europe”). Iconoclastic attacks such as this demonstrate the on-going political significance of Victorian imperial monuments.