When Columbus discovered America

More than a decade or so ago, I met my cousin's son for the first time. (The only time too--our paths have not crossed since.)

He might have been about eight or nine years old back then.  He hesitantly walked up to me and asked, in English, "you live in America?"

"Yes. I have been there for a long, long time now."

The kid was now feeling a tad more confident. "We learnt in school that Columbus discovered America."

I could not let go off the teacher within me.  "Oh, really! Terrific!" And then I added, "so, Columbus discovered America?"

"Yes. That is what the teacher told us."

That's how I, too, was told when I was a school kid his age.

"So, before Columbus discovered America, there were no people there? He was the first person to go to America?" I asked him.

"No. Our teacher said there were people there."

"So, if there were people there already, then it means that somebody discovered America before Columbus did, right?"

The kid was stunned. He hadn't thought about it.  Here he was trying to impress his uncle, and little did he know that I am Captain Killjoy Major Buzzkill General Malaise ;)

Thanks to Columbus, who originally set sail to India, we have ended up referring to as Indians a whole bunch of different peoples with different cultures and traditions in an entirely different part of the world! I joke with students that "I am an Indian from India, and not an Indian from here" whenever I want to highlight this insane historical accident.

Columbus Day is a federal holiday and in some of the states.  No holiday for us here in Oregon.  (We memorialize Columbus Day in our own strange ways!)

Seriously, why are we celebrating Columbus?  I don't have anything against Columbus per se.  He was merely an explorer, who was a product of the times.  But, it is not as if he accomplished something spectacular.  Magellan or Vasco da Gama were far better explorers.  And then the baggage related to Columbus.  So, why honor him with a special day?

Yes, there is the history behind the origin of Columbus Day.  But, the question is how this day has come to mean to us in these contemporary times.  In these tRumpian times, are we really confident that "Columbus Day is for all Americans"?

I like how some of the progressive cities mark that day as Indigenous People's Day.  Perhaps can be observed in many, many countries around the world too.  India, Australia, New Zealand, all the countries in North and South America, ... it is a long list of countries where the original inhabitants have been pushed aside--to say the least--to make space for the newcomers.

Wikipedia says so too.

ps: Given that "America" is derived from Amerigo Vespucci, shouldn't we celebrate Vespucci Day instead of Columbus Day? ;)

Yelling for freedom, while killing and enslaving!

Barely into a tenth of the book, one truth emerges--the hypocritical and contradictory beliefs of the Europeans who settled in the new world.  On the one hand, they claim to be fleeing persecution, and are in search of freedom.  On the other hand, they annihilate Native Americans and bring in humans from Africa as slaves.  All these well before the Declaration of Independence!

Jill Lepore compels us to think about a number of questions, which she then proceeds to discuss.  Questions such as:

In December 1511, on the fourth Sunday of Advent, Antonio de Montesinos, a Dominican priest, delivered a sermon in a church on Hispaniola. Disagreeing with the king's ministers, he said the conquistadors were committing unspeakable crimes. "Tell me, by what right or justice do you hold these Indians in such cruel and horrible slavery? By what right do yo wage such detestable wars on these people who lived mildly and peacefully in their own lands, where you consumed infinite numbers of them with unheard of murders and desolations?  And then he  asked, "Are they not men?"

That was less than 20 years since Columbus discovered America!

When Columbus landed on the shores of Hispaniola--his "India"--"there were about three million people on that island."  A mere fifty years later, "there were only five hundred; everyone else had died, their songs unsung."

Columbus couldn't care. The King of Spain couldn't care.  The Pope couldn't care.

Five hundred years later, trump couldn't care either--Haiti was his primary target when he specifically referred to a few countries as "shitholes."

"Are they not men?"

That was perhaps the first of the questions, to which there was no end.

As European invaders raped women, or even fell in love with them and stayed with them, the land now had "mixed-race children of Spanish men and Indian women,"  Soon, these outnumbered Indians, whose population sharply decreased.  "An intricate caste system marked gradations of skin color." Awful, "as if skin color were like dyes made of plants, the yellow of sassafras, the red of beets, the black of carob."

And, therefore, "pressed upon the brows of every person of the least curiosity the question of common humanity: Are all peoples one?"

In the contemporary US, trump and his 63 million toadies have clearly stated, over and over, that all people are not equal. 

The guy who co-chaired trump's campaign in Iowa, who had been spewing white supremacist and white nationalist talk for ever, recently said:

what matters more than race is “the culture of America” based on values brought to the United States by whites from Europe.
“White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” Mr. King said. “Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?”

Oh, and what was the response to Montesinos' question?  The conquistadors were required to read aloud to anyone they proposed to conquer and enslave a document called the Requiremento.  If the natives accepted the story of Genesis the Church as the Ruler and Superior of the whole world, and the high priest called Pope, and in his name the King and Queen, then their lives were spared.

The Evangelicals' support for trump is a mere echo of this 500-year old beginning!

The Chinese and the Mayans didn't care. Europeans did. We now have trump!

One of the factoids that I share with students is how India and China were the richest countries on the planet for the longest time.  Not only rich, but advanced in scientific and literary fields also.  Math, astronomy, metallurgy, whatever it was, well, they had it all.

Yet, they didn't seem to have had a great deal of interest in exploring the rest of the world in order to colonize them.

Trevor Noah joked about this in one of his bits, where he asks the audience to imagine Jamaicans, living in the paradise that the Caribbean is, going to cold Europe to colonize the people and the land.

The world changed in 1492.  Jill Lepore writes that "it is a little surprising that it was western Europeans in 1492, and not some other group of people, some other year, who crossed an ocean to discover a lost world."

Lepore gives us an idea of some of the other groups of people:

The Maya, whose territory stretched from what is now Mexico to Costa Rica, knew enough astronomy to navigate across the ocean as early as AD 300.

(A quick comment/question: Why is Lepore using the "AD" instead of "CE"?)

Lepore adds:

The Chinese had invented the compass in the eleventh century, and had excellent boats. Before his death in 1433, Zheng He, a Chinese Muslim, had explored the coast of much of Asia and eastern Africa, leading two hundred ships and twenty-seven thousand sailors. But China was the richest country in the world, and by the late fifteenth century no longer allowed travel beyond the Indian Ocean, on the theory that the rest of the world was unworthy and uninteresting.

Similarly, the Middle East and North African Muslims couldn't care about the rest of the world because they already dominated trade--Mediterranean and continental.

Trevor Noah's Jamaicans serve as wonderful metaphors.  The world outside of Europe was happy and content.

Europeans, on the other hand, were not.

It was somewhat out of desperation, then, that the poorest and weakest Christian monarchs on the very western edge of Europe, fighting with Muslims, jealous of the Islamic world's monopoly on trade, and keen to spread their religion, began looking for routes to Africa and Asia that wouldn't require sailing across the Mediterranean.

Columbus discovered America!

Between 1500 and 1800 roughly two and a half million Europeans moved to the Americas; they carried twelve million Africans by force; and as many as fifty million Native Americans died, chiefly of disease.

The genocide, the rape of cultures, and more that they don't always teach in school!

I suppose white supremacy was also born!

By the end of the 19th century, China and India had been reduced to lands of beggars by white colonialists and imperialists, and the material and cultural riches of Central and South America had been wiped out by Europeans.  Two decades into the 20th century, the Middle East was carved into prizes for Europeans.  And Africa was raped and plundered--even by the tiny Belgians.

These truths are setting up the book well.  Looks like it might be a depressing read.  After all, all these truths have given us trump and his 63 million.  I hope Jill Lepore will give me plenty to be cheerful about too.

Columbus discovered America. Confusing all of us Indians.

Almost six years ago, I spent a couple of days at Sengottai with my uncle and aunt, whose home is across from grandma's home, which was sold a few years after grandma died.

My cousin, who lived a couple of hours away, had also come over with her two children.  Her son, who might have been about eight or nine years old, hesitantly walked up to me and asked, in English, "you live in America?"

"Yes. I have been there for a long, long time now."

The kid was now feeling a tad more confident.  "We learnt in school that Columbus discovered America."

I could not let go off the teacher within me.  "Oh, really!  Terrific!"  And then I added, "so, Columbus discovered America?"

"Yes. That is what the teacher told us."

"So, before Columbus discovered America, there were no people there?  He was the first person to go to America?"

"No.  Our teacher said there were people there."

"So, if there were people there already, then it means that somebody discovered America before Columbus did, right?"

The kid was stunned.  He hadn't thought about it.  His teacher hadn't told him that somebody else had known about America before Columbus.

Thanks to Columbus, who originally set sail to India, we have ended up referring to as Indians a whole bunch of different peoples with different cultures and traditions in an entirely different part of the world!  I joke with students that "I am an Indian from India, and not an Indian from here" whenever I want to highlight this insane historical accident.

In a matter of a few years after Columbus, the lives of the original peoples of the Americas changed. Forever. Dramatically. For the worse.

Observing the Andeans, even the mestizos, I was always left to wonder how chaotic the disruptions would have been when the Spaniards came into their lives.

It seemed as if this older woman at Plaza Grande carried in her, and in her face, all those old stories.  One wrinkle was about Columbus. Another was about Pizarro. A lot of lines, recalling a whole lot of people who messed them all up.

Even what she was selling at the plaza made it easy for me to relate to her and her culture: plantain chips, along with a spiced up mix of onions, tomatoes, chilies and lime and beans.  Reminded me of a similar concoction that is a hot favorite in India, especially at beaches and carnivals.

As I sat watching her, I wondered about the stories that might have been handed to her down the generations.  Or, was she, too, taught at school that Columbus discovered America?

My final day in Quito, I went to Museo Guayasamin.  I admit to being clueless about art. It is always a humbling and educational experience whenever I go to an art museum, especially in foreign lands.  A wonderful reminder about how little I know and how much I don't even know that I don't know!

I walked slowly by the exhibits. I was the only one in the museum, and was in no hurry. Some of the pieces reminded me of the village gods back in Pattamadai and Sengottai--the "maadans" who are not in the spectrum of the Hindu deities.  Perhaps the Indians, on either side of the planet, were praying to the same gods.

 I sat outside in the courtyard for a little while.  It was yet another lovely day in Quito, with a blue sky, and scattered white clouds. Ample Sun and a light breeze.

It was in such a paradise that the peoples lived until "Columbus discovered America."

For Tanzania, foreign aid part of global connections

For The Register-Guard

Appeared in print: Monday, Jan 4, 2010

DAR ES SALAAM, Tanznia — In 1498 a new connection was made between India and Africa when the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama rounded Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, paused for a while in Mozambique and finally reached the land of pepper, which was the original “black gold.” When he landed in Kozhikode in India’s state of Kerala, da Gama one-upped Christopher Columbus, who had mistakenly claimed to have reached India.

The spices that drew the European explorers quickly transformed into political and military conquests. Thus, when da Gama undertook a second expedition in 1502, it was with cannons aboard a large fleet. What followed, as they say, was history. Five centuries later, “globalization,” which has its origins in those European maritime explorations, has become a household world.

The economic and cultural interconnections between peoples and countries present themselves every day. In my trip to Tanzania, these connections were evident right from the start at Dar es Salaam airport, where I was picked up by a couple from India, who came to Tanzania four years ago because of professional banking opportunities. I suppose people of Indian origin are everywhere on this planet!

They joked that the celebrations outside the airport were in my honor, and quickly followed up with the explanation that I had landed on Tanzania’s independence day. It is certainly an extraordinary achievement for Tanzania to have experienced 48 years of self-rule, without the ethnic strife that unfortunately characterizes many of its neighboring countries — Rwanda and the Congo, in particular.

Tanzania’s connections to the global economy are all around, especially with Japanese cars on the roads, and people driving and walking around with Swedish- and Korean-made cell phones. It was quite mind-boggling to read the news item that “Kuwait-based Zain Group has awarded Nokia Siemens Networks a five-year outsourcing contract to manage and upgrade its mobile networks in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.” What fascinating complexities: A Kuwait-based corporation responsible for the mobile phone operations in Tanzania, awarding the contract for day-to-day management to a company whose global headquarters are in Finland!

As if such a web of global economic interconnections were not enough, it turns out that the CEO of Nokia Siemens is, you guessed it, from India!

But this is also where Tanzania’s disconnect is obvious — the absence of Tanzania-made products. As students in my introductory course find out through their assignments, we consumers in the United States rarely come across products manufactured in Tanzania or any of the other African countries.

The Tanzanian government, not unlike other countries whose policies were heavily influenced by socialist ideals, is maneuvering in many ways to reverse the old policies and integrate the country into the global economy, and has done so with moderate success. Until the Great Recession hit, Tanzania had one of the best economic growth rates in all of sub-Saharan Africa.

However, Tanzania is also plugged into the economic world in a very different way — through foreign aid. According to the Development Partners Group, which comprises 16 bilateral aid groups and five international bodies including the United Nations, “Tanzania is one of the largest recipient countries of foreign aid in sub-Sahara Africa. Approximately 35 percent of government spending is dependent on foreign aid.” Last year, official development assistance from the U.S. government alone was more than $360 million — roughly $1 million in U.S. aid per day.

A lot of the aid is theoretically aimed at reducing poverty and economic development, which is also what I hope to understand during this trip. I will be spending an overwhelming majority of my time in the southern highlands. As the commercial capital of Tanzania, Dar es Salaam projects an image that is not quite reflective of the country where more than a third of the country subsists at below poverty levels as defined by the Tanzanian government. Neither are the shiny new multistoried buildings in the city’s center representative of the about 80 percent of the population that lives in rural areas.

But it is a long, long way to the highlands from the Mozambique shores where Vasco da Gama landed more than 500 years ago. If I will be able to get chicken tikka masala out in the villages in those highlands, I will need no further evidence of globalization!

Indians :-)

Who else but Stephen Colbert can do this? His guest was way awesome too.