302 - Columbus Should Have Stayed Home

            If Columbus had stayed home instead of venturing across the forbidding Atlantic Ocean to discover the Indies, millions of indigenous lives would have been spared. Smallpox and syphilis would not have entered the Western Hemisphere until later, perhaps much later; the inhabitants of the Bahamas and Santo Domingo (now northern Haiti) would not have been enslaved and worked to death; and the Spanish Empire would not have flourished in Mexico and up and down South America, destroying what then remained of Aztec, Incan, Mayan, and Olmec civilization.

            President Javier Milei of Argentina, a right-wing, libertarian contrarian, said this weekend that Columbus brought real civilization to the Western Hemisphere, and we should all be thankful that he arrived when he did. He brought "enlightenment" to South America, Milei said. President Claudia Sheinbaum, the new Mexican head of state, countered with the reverse -- that Columbus' arrival and the Spaniards that followed destroyed too many thriving cultures and retarded for centuries the strengthening and modernization of what were powerful and authentic, and advancing, civilizations. "For many years, they told us that they came from over there to civilize us. No! There were already great cultures here," said Sheinbaum.

            Rewriting history is a non-starter. What ifs are mostly speculative. What we can be sure of, at least in the Latin American and sub-Saharan African contexts, is that the arrival of foreigners who had Latin writing and language, the Bible, modern (for the time)  methods of thinking and problem solving, advanced weaponry, and elevated notions of superiority altered the trajectory of indigenous life up and down the contours of the Western Hemisphere, particularly because of all of the negative baggage that they brought along with their self-confidence and hubris. The spread of Europe into the Western Hemisphere clearly was calamitous for local populations even though doing so dragged unwilling and protesting peoples willy nilly into the maw of modernization.

            Africa in most senses avoided the tumult and decimation that Latin America and North America experienced for several centuries more, largely because of its ability to hold off the penetration of Europeans for much longer, and the manner in which the outsiders learned about the continent. African peoples also avoided the invasions that Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and the rest experienced because the kingdoms and city-states of coastal Africa were -- as it transpired -- stops on the way to India, much richer and much more enticing because of spices and gold than the peoples and places along the littoral of Africa. The rulers of Africa were also able for centuries to resist most of the attempts by Europeans to establish themselves in Africa, even during the heyday of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.  Maintaining commercial control of the slave supply was fundamental to African economic dominance at least until the nineteenth century.

            Columbus sailed far to the west in 1492.  But from 1415, Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal had propelled his own sea-captains in tiny caravels to launch themselves into the tempestuous waters of the mid-Atlantic Ocean (possibly following long ago voyaging by intrepid Galician and Basque, and likely Viking, seafarers to North America).  Very gradually, for they rightly feared the unknown, Henry's captains reached Madeira, then the Canary Islands, and finally the Azores.  Then they gingerly began rounding the coast of what is now Morocco and, after 1434, slipping past the desert shores of modern Mauritania, in 1445 finally attaining the mouth of the Senegal River.  It was slow going, but the first gold dust and the first few Africans -- the origins the African slave trade -- were brought back to Lisbon (mostly to satisfy Henry's curiosity) from the mid-1440s. 

            Africans along the western coast of Africa remained in charge throughout this period. The Portuguese visitors were never allowed by Africans to penetrate very far up-country into the interior.  They were never permitted to go inland to examine the major kingdoms of western Africa -- Ghana, Mali, and Songhai -- that Arabs coming overland from Morocco and Libya had visited and written about from the eighth century and increasingly knew in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Despite the spread of Muslim Almoravid hegemony throughout much of the Iberian peninsula from the eighth through the fifteenth centuries, and its rule over Morocco and the northern ends of the fabled trade route from Ghana to Morocco, Henry and Portugal knew little about Africa's interior when they began to circumnavigate Africa.

            It took until 1481 for Portugal to establish a small fort on the Gold Coast (modern Ghana) and to create what became a colony on the island of Sao Tome, off the coast of Nigeria. We can consider Sao Tome an early European African colony, but it was on an island, offshore, for a reason. African controlled their coastlines and all trade.

            That was especially true when in 1482 Portuguese caravels finally reached the mouth of the Congo River and found a thriving Kongo kingdom. The king of the Kongo even dispatched a handful of retainers to Lisbon to learn about the European intruders. And from then on, until the late nineteenth century, the kingdom of the Kongo advanced because of its involvement with Portugal but remained effectively unconquered.

            It is instructive, too, that the celebrated voyage of Vasco da Gama in 1497-1499 that extended Portugal's explorations up the eastern coast of Africa and on to Calicut in modern Kerala, India, led to thriving trade with the twenty-seven city-states of Tanzania, Kenya, and Somalia that Ibn Battuta, a vigorous Arab traveler, had visited in the fourtenth century. Neither conquest nor foreign occupation resulted for scores of years.

             Inhabitants of tiny Mozambique Island (off the northern coast of modern Mozambique) resisted da Gama's initial arrival and sent him on his way. Mombasa did the same. On his ships' first passage north along the East African coast, only wealthy Malindi (in modern Kenya) welcomed the possibility of rich commercial exchanges with da Gama's expedition. In Malindi, too, da Gama found a local guide who knew about monsoons and willingly showed the caravels how to use monsoon winds to glide along the Indian Ocean toward southern India.

            Returning much more laboriously from India in 1499, da Gama passed by impressive Mogadishu, stopped again to exchange goods in Malindi, glimpsed and then engaged in commerce with the great city state of Kilwa in what is now Tanzania, and returned home triumphantly to Lisbon.

            Only in Mozambique, fairly gently and intermittently, and then amid the Kongo kingdom, did Portugal's interests gradually in the sixteenth century become somewhat colonial. Notably, too, only in the seventeenth century were Portuguese priests and settlers allowed by local rulers to venture up-country to the outskirts of the fabled Zimbabwe empire in what is now southern modern Zimbabwe and along the shores of the Zambezi River.

            Africa was not occupied by intruders in any significant sense until decades after David Livingstone completed his daring transcontinental trek in 1856. Thus, Africa was spared until relatively recent times the kinds of devastation that accompanied Spanish conquistadors from the years after Columbus sailed the ocean blue.  For us, today, celebrating Indigenous People's Day instead of Columbus Day makes enormous sense.  It reminds us of every possibility that was forfeited, of civilizations (whatever Milei says) whose development were sundered -- even of the North American Native American confederations who were prevented from adapting and growing by the avarice and prejudice of our forefathers (and foremothers).  Much of Africa benefited by being despoiled much later than Latin America and North America, but still the damage came, and we should all recognize how unenlightened and destructive were the invasions on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.