Kambon: Petition wasn’t pushing to remove Columbus statue

ANDREW GIOANETTI

Activist Shabaka Kambon says the petition delivered to mayor Joel Martinez last week was not intended to form the basis of the removal of the statue of Christopher Columbus from southeast Port of Spain.

Instead, he said, the petition was simply intended to add another voice to the mounting calls locally and internationally to have such monuments removed.

He did not clarify this distinction.

Kambon, director of the Cross Rhodes Freedom Project, started the petition about two weeks ago and in under a week it amassed 8,000 signatures in support of the statue’s removal.

Martinez, as promised, addressed the petition at the Port of Spain city council’s weekly statutory meeting on Wednesday, but only to announce that the council had decided to redirect the issue to central government.

He also said the petition was improperly structured and addressed.

Since going to hand over the petition last week, queen of the Warao Nation of First Peoples Donna Bermudez Burke said she would speak no further until after yesterday’s meeting.

Kambon – an honorary Warao member – said the CRFP and the Warao Nation would issue a joint-statement on Thursday.

In a phone interview late on Wednesday, Kambon said the petition was created “simply to add another expression to the will of the people already expressed in poll after poll on radio and TV and even on the city corporation's own Facebook page that came back overwhelmingly in favour of removal."

He said there is a "growing consensus among the region's leading luminaries," citing support for the statue's removal by renowned historian and UWI Vice-Chancellor Prof Sir Hilary Beckles.

Kambon said the growing international consensus features "a new generation that has decided that heroic statues of the most brutal racist criminals who enriched themselves at the cost of the lives of millions of innocent people are incompatible with their ambitions for a better future."

The statue, put up in 1881, stands in a small square behind the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception on Independence Square.