He was a harbinger of misery, genocide

THE EDITOR: Statues and the making of statues go back to pre-historic times. The oldest known statue to have been found, so far, is dated to be over 30,000 years. Statues over that time leading up to modern times were religious artefacts and were generally used as objects of worship and adoration.

In Europe, coming out of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, statues were secularised. They were no longer to be used as gods to be worshipped and appeased but were now to be used by people and nations to memorialise their “heroes,” whether they be conquerors, founders or rulers. However, to paraphrase, “one person’s hero is another person’s murderer.”

This bring me to the issue of the statue of Christopher Columbus. Maybe to the Spanish and by extension the Europeans, Columbus was a hero but to the First Peoples and by extension all the freedom-loving, independent people of this nation today, he was an imperialist, a usurper, an enslaver, a murderer and a racist.

Columbus was not and has never been our hero; he was really only a harbinger of misery and genocide to our people.

So as a nation whose people have been on the receiving end and the victims of Columbus’s “heroism,” there is no logical reason whatsoever that he should be memorialised by having a statue of him in our capital city. Therefore I agree with the call for the removal of this statue.

And by so doing I believe we are not rewriting history but removing a historical wrong that has been foisted upon this nation by our former colonial masters (the real beneficiaries of Columbus’s heroism).

ALISTER ANDREWS

via e-mail