‘Who are monuments for?’ asks Lubaina Himid, and answers: ‘The living/ The dead/ The ancestors/ The descendants/ The disciples/ The friends/ The winners/ The losers/ The city/ The economy/ The cultural historians/ The artists/ The future/ The past’. Over the decades, she has debated and dramatised the form and function of art-making to create paintings, drawings and mixed-media installations which operate not only as works of art but also as commemorative monuments and revolutionary memorials to the millions of untold and unseen lives as lived across the African diaspora. ‘The ideas around memorials and monuments I have concentrated upon have been about how the wasting of other people's lives always includes the wasting of creative people's lives’, she explains. Warring against a white racist ‘wasting’ of Black people's social and political realities no less than their cultural narratives, histories, memories and imaginations, she is under no illusion that ‘if you damage or destroy the creative life you destroy more than just one life. You destroy the potential for positive change, for hope, for continuity and for any kind of understanding about the pricelessness of human life’. For Himid, the construction of a civic monument that not only has the ‘potential for positive change, for hope, for continuity’ but that will also do justice to the ‘pricelessness of human life’ is only possible if its creators acknowledge that the foundations of all western cities are built on the contributions made by Black diasporic peoples, enslaved and free.

Issuing a warning to would-be architects and designers working in the western world – ‘You may also have to take into account a narrow, exclusive idea of whose city it actually is’ – Himid encourages these future memorialists to ask, ‘Who else has claim to a memorial in this city and where are their memorials?’ She is insistent that in the construction of any monument in which there is a real rather than a superficial determination ‘to honour the dead who have been ignored, suppressed or denied when in peril in the past’, there must be an equal commitment to social justice.