Which nonwhite country is still putting up statues of its dead white colonizers?

Yeah, you guessed it, it's the most ...

… successful country in the Global South, Singapore, which is one degree north of the equator.

From the New York Times news section:

A New Statue of a British Colonialist Exposes a Divide in Singapore

The tribute to Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, who is considered the founder of Singapore, has raised questions about how the wealthy city-state perceives its history.

By Sui-Lee Wee

Reporting from Singapore

Aug. 31, 2024, 12:01 a.m. ET

Singapore’s prosperity has long set it apart from many other former British colonies.

There is another difference, too: Singapore has clung to honoring its former colonial ruler — and it wants to keep doing so.

Special accolade has gone to Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, who is considered to have founded modern Singapore in the early 1800s. For decades, Singapore’s textbooks credited Raffles with transforming the island from a “sleepy fishing village” into a thriving seaport. He has been the central character in a larger official narrative that says imperial Britain had set up Singapore for success as an independent nation.

Dedications to Raffles dot the landscape of Singapore. …

But a new statue of Raffles, installed in a park in May, has revived a debate about the legacy of colonialism in Singapore. On one side is the broader establishment, which has held up British colonial rule positively. On the other are those who want a closer inspection of the empire that Raffles represented and the racial inequity he left behind, even as Singapore became wealthy.

… Now, the new statue has set off a fresh debate, with critics pointing out that other countries have for years been taking down monuments to historical figures associated with slavery or imperialism, or both….

The new statue of Raffles stands next to one of his friend Nathaniel Wallich, a Danish botanist, at Fort Canning Park. Tan Kee Wee, an economist who pooled $330,000 with his siblings to commission the statues, said he wanted to commemorate the pair’s role in founding Singapore’s first botanic gardens, which were his frequent childhood haunt. …

The plaque for the Raffles statue explains how Singapore’s first botanic gardens “cultivated plants of economic importance, particularly spices.” That, critics said, was a euphemism for their actual purpose: cash crops for the British Empire.

Of course, there’s nothing modern Singapore hates more than cash.

Mr. Tan defended the legacy of British colonialists in Singapore, saying they “didn’t come and kill Singaporeans.”

He added: “Singapore was treated well by the British. So why all this bitterness?”

But colonial Britain was far from benign. For instance, it treated nonwhite residents of Singapore as second-class citizens. Raffles created a town plan for Singapore that segregated people into different racial enclaves. And he did not interact with the locals, said Kwa Chong Guan, a historian.

To some historians and intellectuals, such gestures are merely symbolic and ignore the reckoning Singapore needs to have with its colonial past.

If you can’t trust your intellectuals when they call for a Racial Reckoning, whom can you trust?

British rule introduced racist stereotypes about nonwhites, such as that of the “lazy” Malay, the Indigenous group in Singapore, that has had a lasting effect on public attitudes. Colonialism led to racial divisions that, in many ways, persist to this day in the city-state that is now dominated by ethnic Chinese.

And would totally have never ever happened without the British just making up out of thin air completely arbitrary assertions about ethnic differences in average behavior. The Chinese, for example, never notice human differences.

Race relations played a role in Raffles’s ascension in Singaporean lore. Soon after Singapore became independent, the governing People’s Action Party — which remains in power decades later — decided to officially declare Raffles the founder of Singapore. Years later, S. Rajaratnam, who was then the foreign minister, said that anointing a Malay, Chinese or Indian as its founder would have been fraught.

“So we put up an Englishman — a neutral, so there will be no dissension,” Mr. Rajaratnam said.

It’s almost as if Singapore in the Lee Kwan Yew era had a particularly level-headed and pragmatic group of ruling politicians.

The decision was also meant to indicate that Singapore remained open to the West and free markets.

How’d that work out for Singapore?