The Span­ish en­voy to T&T had the un­mit­i­gat­ed gall to say to Trin­bag­o­ni­ans to ‘think twice’ be­fore re­mov­ing the stat­ue of the pre­mier em­bod­i­ment of geno­cide over the last 500 years (ri­val­ing Hitler, Stal­in and Mao com­bined) —in Christo­pher Colum­bus.

The re­al­i­ty is that Trin­bag­o­ni­ans all-round should be even more mo­ti­vat­ed to re­move this rel­ic of racism and op­pres­sion af­ter such com­ments.

The Am­bas­sador should spend some of his time re-think­ing his na­tion’s his­to­ry of colo­nial­ism and how best he and his Eu­ro­pean co­horts can do jus­tice to the de­scen­dants of their for­mer “sub­jects” in right­ing the wrongs of the past.

The re­moval of this Christo­pher Colum­bus stat­ue ought to be one of the eas­i­est con­sid­er­a­tions for our gov­ern­ment and the wider so­ci­ety to make in some time.

The re­cent events glob­al­ly have re­mind­ed us all of the his­to­ry of racism and op­pres­sion which many of our so­ci­eties’ im­plic­it­ly ac­cept by al­low­ing mon­u­ments to stand in ho­n­our of bla­tant and un­re­pen­tant racists.

I would ad­vo­cate that we re­place the Colum­bus stat­ue in Port -of-Spain with one that rep­re­sents the Amerindi­ans who were wiped away by the ad­ven­tur­er’s mur­der­ous vis­it to the New World.

It can be called the Name­less Amerindi­an—a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of all of those Amerindi­an geno­cide vic­tims, with clear an­no­ta­tion of who the per­pe­tra­tors of this mur­der­ous crime were. This is not a new con­cept.

The Mon­u­ment of the Un­known Hero stands in the south-east Eu­ro­pean cap­i­tal of Bel­grade as a tes­ta­ment to the many lives lost in WW1.

The Span­ish Am­bas­sador has very lit­tle to fear, we will re­mem­ber our his­to­ry but, in an hon­est and truth­ful way, com­mem­o­rat­ing those who’ve suf­fered through­out the past of this na­tive land of ours.

Mikhail ED Byng

via email