Slave statue defaced with white paint

This photograph taken yesterday in Bordeaux shows a statue depicting Modeste Testas, a slave who was bought by two brothers from Bordeaux in the 18th century, then manumitted.

A bronze statue of a black female slave in the French city of Bordeaux, a former slave-trading hub, has been defaced with white paint in an apparent racist attack, the city said yesterday. The life-size statue is of Modeste Testas, an African slave who was bought by a family in Bordeaux in the 18th century and deported to the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean to work on a sugar plantation. She was later freed after her French owner’s death in the US, and returned to settle in the western part of Hispaniola now known as Haiti, where she lived until her death. Yesterday morning her statue, which stands on the banks of the Garonne river, was found smeared with white paint from the head to the waist. Bordeaux city hall, which had it cleaned by midday, said it would file a complaint over the incident, saying it was “probably racist” in nature. The western city of Bordeaux was one of France’s biggest hubs for trading slaves arriving from Africa, who were then shipped across the Atlantic to the Americas. The statue, which depicts Testas in a long skirt, clutching a shawl draped around her shoulders, was inaugurated in May 2019 – one of a series of gestures by France’s wine-making capital towards addressing its colonial past.