Columbus: hero or villain? - 16 October 1992

The 12th of October is/was always one of the more engaging of American festivals as an historical event to celebrate it had the luck to fall at the most benign in New England and the north-east the most beautiful time of the year when the landscape blazes with scarlet and gold foaming around the inky evergreens when as Anthony Trollope's mother said, and she was no great admirer of things American, "the whole country goes to glory".

Allowing for the difference between his calibre and ours, we decided long ago that shortly before dawn on our 12 October 1492, was the magical time when Cristóbal Colón as the Spaniards insist on calling a son of Genoa – our Christopher Columbus – sailed through a gleaming green sea and landed on a tropical white beach on what he believed to be the distant rim of the orient and which we know to be an island of the Bahamas that Columbus named San Salvador.

In most previous years I'd say, I believe even up to last year, the famous day has been celebrated from the tip of Chile to the peak of Labrador. In this country, the date was proposed as an annual commemoration by a group of new patriots 200 years ago, after the peace treaty had been signed finally ending what Americans call the Revolutionary War and Britain calls the War of American Independence. This society took as its patron saint an Indian chieftain of the Delaware tribe, Tammany, the society of Saint Tammany, which formed the nucleus of what was to become the Democrats political machine in New York City, a chapter of American history we're not going to delve into now.

So, in this country since 1792, Columbus Day has been celebrated every 12 October in Catholic churches throughout South, Central and North America and out on the streets everywhere with, as John Adams prescribed as the pattern for the fourth of solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty, with pomp and parade and guns, bells and illuminations.

It has never been in this country as boisterous a celebration as Independence Day, but at once devout and proud with peoples of every immigrant strain trooping, usually out of a church service, and heading with flowers and wreaths towards the nearest statute of Columbus. There must be thousands of them throughout the Americas. I said paraders, marchers of every immigrant strain, how about the native strain the Indian or as we are now required to say, the Native American? Aye there's the rub and this year, rub was rough and hurtful.

If you'd asked me 10, even five years ago, what sort of show the American cities would put on for this year, the 500th anniversary of the landing on San Salvador, I should have guessed that most places would have staged something on a grand, scarcely imaginable scale. It was not to be. So, long ago as last winter in some cities in South America, all provisional plans for grandeur and public show were either cancelled or discreetly modified, why?

The answer can only be that the prospect of 1992 sharpened the focus and intensified the feeling of a movement which has been gathering force slowly but irresistibly among all the the native peoples, the innumerable tribes, the descendants of the many civilisations that Columbus and the following Spanish colonists came upon. The movement, as I called it, was one of revolution against the standard view of Columbus as discoverer of the Americas. The Indians and very many white supporters now prefer to slap on Columbus the stigma "enslaver".

In Mexico City, last Monday, thousands of Indians came together to celebrate not Columbus but the cultures of pre-Columbian America, they came from the furthest reaches of this continent, Eskimos from Alaska, Quechua indians from the Peruvian city that was the capital of the Inca empire and from those two extremes 5,000 miles apart, 500 or more Indians went on foot to Mexico. The Peruvians left in August, the ones from Alaska last May, they all came to rest at last at the Aztec pyramids outside Mexico City, they chanted they prayed, they smoked peace pipes.

Elsewhere – and one look at the map you'll see means hundreds of miles apart and thousands of miles apart –demonstrations took other forms. In Ecuador and Bolivia, tens of thousands marched against the idea of the mission of Columbus and his followers as 'Conquistadores' – conquerors. Great stretches, as much as 20 miles here and there of the Pan-American Highway were closed or stalled by roadblocks of Indians playing flutes and drums. Two people were killed in Ecuador and many wounded. The Spanish embassy in Santiago, Chile was bombed and damaged and so was the Spanish Bank in Peru and statues of Columbus in Bolivia, Mexico and El Salvador. In Buenos Aires, Indians chose to limp into the Central Square to mark 12 October as the last day of their five-day hunger strike.

Now quite apart from the justice or falsity of recreating Christopher Columbus as a villain, what do you suppose can have been what I called the driving force of this continental rebellion? Well, as always, especially in Latin countries, students and young historians have brought this movement into focus, but the ground swell, the cause of the movement itself is the eruption of a sore that has festered over the past 30 years or so – resentment against the firm hold on the political and economic life by the dominant European strain. Guatemala has been what the doctors call the primary site, 60% of its population is Indian. In a word, two words, the cause, dear Brutus, is grinding poverty. But haven't most of these native populations been poverty stricken for years and years for centuries they have, why should they have waited so long to zoom-in on a representative, a symbolic villain? I use the word zoom-in instinctively but it points I believe to the answer and the answer is a camera it is television.

I first noticed this television as a stimulant or goad to violence long ago in 1963 in the black Los Angeles suburb of Watts, which boiled over as the rumour spread what a policeman was said to have done to a young black. It was as bad a race riot as we've known in this country since the blow up in Detroit during the Second War. Once the rioters had taken their fill of liquor and groceries and television sets and furniture and cameras and motorcars, they turn to the people who as far as the blacks are concerned flaunt these goodies: the white owners or rather their properties. And a sociologist at the time made the interesting point that what was as black suburbs go a comparatively prosperous one, small bungalows mostly with bathrooms and bedrooms and many with little lawns and garages. Said this sociologist "the history of revolution shows that when conditions get better, people become more openly dissatisfied". The disparity between their lot and that of others becomes more evident. And what then and today throws an insistent bright light on that disparity, well I wrote from what's then.

There is one cause of chaos here which no sociologist would dare to bring up, I believe it is the poor blacks envy not of the white man's vote or his education, but of his fancied wealth and the baubles it buys. Whatever Watts lacks, it does not lack television aerials and many mothers sit all day and the men all night with a litter of listless children and watch the svelte girls in the gleaming automobile ads and the young white Apollos and the glowing families with the new washing machine and the house in the pines just secured by a loan from the silvery head saint in the friendly bank. That it must seem to them is the way whites live night and day.

Well, in the Americas, not least in South and Central America, in the very poorest shanty villages, there is at least one television set – it is the great tormentor of your own miserable life. The last image I saw on television last Monday that had to do with Columbus and the 12th was a teacher and an American, a North American school, she was plainly Latino. She was talking in English to her class and then she turned to the camera and said "we must at last tell these children the truth". Of course, what she truly meant was, we must substitute the old picture of Columbus as discover and hero with the new picture of Columbus as enslaving villain.

How about Columbus, was he either was he both? He was, I think, no different from the sea-dogs of his time and later times from Drake and Hawkins for example who were freewheeling pirates. There is indeed less to say for Francis Drake who didn't stay and colonise, but just sailed into and ransacked the coastal churches and the cities of South America of all their precious treasure.

As for Columbus, I will simply say again what I wrote 20 years ago, he was an obsessive ego maniac, a passionate Christian who combined in curiosity, romantic stubbornness and sense of mission something of Galileo, Don Quixote and John the Baptist. He was also a very great sailor.

True, he and his men were ruthless colonisers and actual destroyers of native societies and religions and the Spanish have had to bear for centuries with considerable ire the weight of this shameful story, but we ought to remind ourselves that while they combined great physical courage, endurance and intense religious zeal with devastating cruelty they behaved no worse than any other European would have done who got there first. They were in fact, men of their own time and place and this is a truth always difficult for us to remember when we compare such men with our sainted selves – so enlightened, so compassionate, so – well, in a word – decent.

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