It seems as though there is a small group of cit­i­zens ad­vo­cat­ing for the re­moval of the stat­ue of Christo­pher Colum­bus from the cap­i­tal city, Port-of-Spain. While the views of this group is high­ly re­spect­ed for voic­ing their con­cerns, there are some oth­er salient facts which the rest of the pop­u­la­tion may have some is­sues with.

To be­gin with, this group is com­prised of ap­prox­i­mate­ly 5,000 in­di­vid­u­als (this is the amount of sig­na­tures re­port­ed to be on the pe­ti­tion). This is but a very small frac­tion of the pop­u­la­tion and as such can­not ad­e­quate­ly re­flect the views of the na­tion at large.

If the pop­u­la­tion of T&T is ap­prox­i­mate­ly 1.4 mil­lion peo­ple and we sub­tract the num­ber who are un­der school age ie one to five-year-olds then the 5,000 sig­na­tures rep­re­sents on­ly 0.38 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion. The num­ber sub­tract­ed is 100,000 since we have a pop­u­la­tion growth rate of ap­prox­i­mate­ly 20,000 births each year, judg­ing from the num­ber writ­ing SEA each year. It means that the 99.62 per cent are the peo­ple who are now learn­ing or have learnt be­fore or em­bed­ded in their every­day ex­is­tence that in­deed Christo­pher Colum­bus was re­spon­si­ble for “re­dis­cov­er­ing” our is­land on his third voy­age to the West In­dies in 1498.

And that he land­ed here and claimed this part of the “new world” in the name of the King and Queen of Spain. This is why we still have Span­ish in­flu­ences such as food, mu­sic, dress, lan­guage and place names. This is very rich his­to­ry.

It is un­rea­son­able to say that as a re­sult of Colum­bus’ dis­cov­ery and sub­se­quent claim in the name of Eu­rope we are now suf­fer­ing from the mis­deeds of those who fol­lowed.

Colum­bus is hailed in his­to­ry as one of the 10 great­est ex­plor­ers of all time. Among such names as Mar­co Po­lo, Vas­co da Gama, Ameri­go Vespuc­ci and Charles Dar­win. We should con­sid­er our­selves lucky to be in the an­nals of his­to­ry of such greats. Now, if we are ad­vo­cat­ing that Colum­bus’ great feat in trav­el­ling all the way from the East to the West in poor­ly fit­ted ves­sels with prim­i­tive equip­ment be thrown aside then are the feats of all these great ex­plor­ers fol­low same?

Then what about all the great works of the Gov­er­nors who came af­ter to colonise the is­land. What about names such as An­to­nio Sede­no, An­to­nio de Berrio and in­deed Don Jose Maria Cha­con. Are we go­ing to nul­li­fy their achieve­ments? Then we may have to change the name of the na­tion­al flower too.

As was said be­fore, these men were great ex­plor­ers and the recog­ni­tion they get is well de­served. They did what they need­ed to do and in the process they showed courage and for­ti­tude to ac­com­plish their tasks. What fol­lowed could have gone ei­ther way. At least we the new set­tlers on these is­lands should count our lucky stars that we are not liv­ing un­der sub­stan­dard con­di­tions like over­pop­u­lat­ed cities, im­pov­er­ished rur­al com­mu­ni­ties and war torn coun­tries. At least most of us.

We should say thanks to the ex­plor­ers who opened up a new world with tremen­dous op­por­tu­ni­ties if we are will­ing and ad­ven­tur­ous enough to grasp them. Please leave the stat­ue alone, it is part of our his­to­ry.

WKS Ho­sein

Ch­agua­nas