Tatalo Alamu
Finally, the tsunami of statue-toppling has reached the city of Baltimore and the statue of the man who started it all: Christopher Columbus. With its huge Black and largely disaffected population, its teeming mass of alienated, unemployed youth and with a storied inner city brimming with human fiascos, drug freaks and slobbering junkies, Baltimore often feels like a secular hell. Despite all this, the visitor cannot but fail to notice a fundamental goodness about the denizens.
Last week, the man who started it all and who can be regarded as the greatest iconoclast of all time got his own historic comeuppance. The statue of Columbus in Baltimore was taken down by an angry crowd and carted to the harbour for a watery finale. Out of water thee cometh and into water thee goeth.
Although he was not the first person to discover the Americas— the Vikings having preceded him by almost six centuries- – Columbus was the first to weaponize the encounter with the native people thus setting the stage for the large scale conquest, expropriation and extermination of the indigenous people by European prospectors and speculators.
So long, Christopher?
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