Remember the 1492 etching by artist Jan van der Staert which had ‘Columbus discovering America’? Here the body of primeval America is offered up as a body to be possessed, sprawled on a hammock before conquistador Columbus, manfully dressed head to foot . The man widely credited as having discovered America never foot on it, but claimed Bahamas for the Spanish crown on a loot trip funded by Spain’s Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain.

Empire, loot and pillage followed wherever intrepid foragers like Columbus and holier than thou missionaries went on a civilizing mission. October 11, 2010 is being celebrated as Christopher Columbus Day all over the United States, and factoids for Columbus are hot property online, but Columbus flagged off a sordid history of colonialism.

Ask the Amerindian population who were wiped out to make way for the whites , or the Hernan Cortez team in South America that decimated the Aztecs. Be it the slave trade, roping in forced laborers to do wageless toil in gold mines in South America by the Spaniards, to disembowel the bounty of the earth and ransack the land, this is a history steeped in native blood.

Colonization meant that entire tribes were wiped out by diseases by the explorers and white man burden gang, that they were not immune to. Caliban eloquently tells Prospero in The Tempest, that the useless gift of language that Prospero claimed to have given him, had taught him nothing but “learning to curse”. This linguistic colonization, says New Historicist Stephen Greenblatt, mean that rich native languages, were wiped out to make way for the language of the colonizers. Any more takers for Columbus?
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