During my undergraduate days at the University of Ibadan, I came across a copy of Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography — My Experiments with Truth. In one enrapturing page after the other, the autobiography affirmed Gandhi’s deity in my mind. Gandhi vaunted his notorious self-discipline and wrote about how he came to develop his philosophy of non-violence.  For me, he embodied all my noble aspirations.  His ideas of non-violence resistance were central to India’s independence movement, they were also deployed in the US civil rights marches led by Martin Luther King Jnr, and have since been co-opted by hundreds of peace brigades around the world in conflict situations. Without doubt, Mahatma Gandhi was one of the most influential figures of the 20th century.

But Gandhi was a much more complicated figure than I had initially been aware of. Gandhi’s canonisation as a saint in the court of public opinion has since been undermined by revelations that he was a racist who believed in the brotherhood of the Aryan race, and was willing to concede the inferiority of Indians to the white race as long as it established the superiority of Indians over blacks. Gandhi, the saint, was a man who often used racial slurs against Black South Africans, and on one occasion was more incensed by the fact that he was jailed with blacks than that he was arrested in the first place.  So, how then should Gandhi be seen or be remembered? Was he even deserving of the veneration he received?

The passing of Queen Elizabeth II has generated questions about how she should be remembered, and whether she is truly worthy of the unrelenting adorations that have attended her death. Since her passing, there has been a great global outpouring of grief so much so that it has sparked renewed conversations about her legacy, the legacy of colonialism, the complicity of the British Monarchy in some of the colonial abuses, and her role in all of these. A Nigerian professor, in the United States, Uju Anya, led the chorus of criticisms. Her tweets excoriated the monarch for her complicity in the genocide of the Ibos and wished her an excruciating death. In Ireland, in countries across the Caribbean Islands, Africa, and the Middle East, people have insisted that they would not mourn her death.

At the heart of all these debates, for me, is how societies judge. How we determine who is worthy of canonisation and who must be crucified. There are only few individuals in history without any redeeming qualities and fewer without blemish. Hitler belongs to the former, and Jesus, the latter. The rest are neither fully deserving of their canonisation or judged too harshly by history. The Irish poet, Oscar Wilde puts it rather appropriately—every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

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Queen Elizabeth was neither a saint nor a sinner. She should be rightly criticised for never acknowledging and apologising for the horrors of slavery. Yet, Uju Anya’s criticism went too far. The Queen was not directly responsible for the genocide of the Ibos, Nigerians were. We killed ourselves in a senseless and, frankly, mindless war. The British government’s decision to support the Nigerian army was a legitimate decision that considered its own national interest, and the politics of the Cold War. In the same way it would be naïve to argue that France’s decision to support Biafra was out of altruistic concerns or for the humanitarian situation in Biafra controlled territories.

What is closer to the truth is that France wanted to undermine British influence in a region where both former colonial powers dominated. If Nigeria fractured, it would be to France’s benefit. Access to oil reserves was also a compelling factor. It would be a fundamental misunderstanding of history to begrudge Britain or adulate France. But more importantly, Uju Anya failed to acknowledge that Queen rarely interfered in the affairs of the state. The United Kingdom now operates a constitutional monarchy, and indeed, it is this adaptation to modern sensibilities about the role of the monarchy in a democratic society that has ensured the survival of the institution until now. Even though the government is constituted in her name, it is grossly inaccurate to insist that that she oversaw the genocide of the Ibos.

If I can go back to my earlier arguments, how should public figures be remembered? I am convinced that there is a need to adopt a more circumspect approach to how we judge individuals. In an increasingly virulent cancel culture, we must learn to temper criticisms, and in an age where we actively construct superheroes we must be clear eyed about the failings of public figures.

Following the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, there has been a global movement to highlight the failings of public figures who were previously venerated. Edward Colston’s statue was defaced and pulled down in Bristol for his involvement in the slave trade, but the statue of Efusetan Aniwura, the second Iyalode of Ibadan who notoriously captured and sold people of her kind into slavery adorns the city of Ibadan till this day. The statue of Robert Lee, the confederate general, was removed in Richmond Virginia in 2021, but there are at least fourteen American presidents, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who held slaves and whose monuments still adorn public spaces. George Orwell’s ancestor benefited from the slave trade as well as former prime minister, David Cameron. Winston Churchill, perhaps Britain’s greatest prime minister, was a racist white supremacist who said Indians “breed like rabbits” and blamed them for the Bengal famine that killed three million of them.  Jimmy Savile was knighted by the Queen in 1990 but a year after his death, the extent of his paedophilic abuse became known. He had sexually abused more than 72 people and raped an eight-year-old boy.

What lessons can we draw from these examples? It is that human beings are fundamentally flawed and this should make us more circumspect in venerating public figures. Afterall, every saint has a past.

• Dr Adediran is an Assistant professor in International Relations at Liverpool Hope University. He can be contacted on: bolaadediran2020@yahoo.com