Today it has become popular to talk about decolonization, colonialist thinking.
For example, there is talk of freeing television, education, schools, music, universities, science, consumption, knowledge, economy, country, mind, way of life from colonialism.
But what are we going to understand by decolonization, decolonization. The first thing that occurs to us is to associate it, to reject it, to separate it, to remove it, to separate it, to banish it, to expel it, to exclude it, to withdraw it, to separate it, to separate it, to exile , to think of as a synonym for forbidding, forbidding, challenging. To free, to free, to liberate, to liberate.
Using the prefix des means the negation of the accompanying word, for example: decolonization (reject, reject the colony), de-dollarization (reject, reject the dollar).
Philosopher, historian and researcher Vladimir Acosta recently published a new book: “Salir de la Colonia”, a powerful title that, in our perception, allows us to think about not so distant times and achievable objectives. There is no doubt the desire together.
Decolonization, decolonization, forces us to think and feel in a gerund, i.e. it gives the sense of a permanent action, which requires an imperative will. I insist that it is about perceptions.
And with the permission of Miguel Tinker Salas, we quote part of the title of his book to confirm: The Colony “A Heritage That Endures”.
Whichever path we choose, the objective remains the same: we must dismantle the colonial scaffolding in all its dimensions until we reach the foundation of the entire colonial system, the legacy that it endures.
where do we come from
A story we all know in its most rudimentary form: the invasion and colonization by Spain and later by many European countries of what is now known as the Americas and taught to us in school, shaped our childish minds and our attitudes into adolescence. Planted. Europeans: “Discovery, Conquest and Colonization” would help us share another vision, another perspective.
The first European invasion led by Christopher Columbus came to these lands in 1492 and upon seeing its population they regarded them as “something” strange, “the other”, at once erasing any ancestral history of humans that dates back thousands of years. and that they were called “Indians” because they believed they had reached “the Indies”.
European contact with the Venezuelan region occurred in 1498 during the third voyage of Christopher Columbus.
History tells us that a few years passed and an Italian named Americo Vespucci discovered that they were not “the Indies”, but a new continent other than Asia, and more than 43,000,000 km² were baptized “America” in his honor. Was. And with Europe came “dots and lines”, that is, borders.
This is the same Italian merchant, explorer, “nationalized” Castilian Vespucci, who, inspired by Venice, a city in his native country, named Venezuela, it must be said that it was also called “Tierra Firma”, ” Tierra di Gracia”. ”, “Virgin Islands”, “Coquibacoa Island”.
Many researchers save the original origin of the name Venezuela and “cite the book of the Spanish geographer and law graduate Martín Fernández de Anciso, who is said to have accompanied Ojeda and Vespuccio on their travels in 1499. The book was published in 1519 and is called Geographia Yoga. In that book Fernández de Anciso wrote “And at the end of it the land has a large rock that is flat on top of it. and above it is a place or house of the Indians called Venequiela.
But it was certainly Pope Clement VII who consecrated, baptized the creature when on June 21, 1571 he created the bishopric of Coro in those “Venezuelan lands”.
We’ve put off talking about discovery for a simple reason: the diversity of Aboriginal peoples who lived in this area of the world did so for thousands of years, with varying degrees or levels of “development”, it’s true. “Especially in Venezuela, the presence of man dates back to about 15,000 years ago. In the state of Falcón, the remains of animals that had already disappeared, such as mastodons, megatherians and glyptodonts, were found. About 6,000 years ago, the sea Collectors of shells appeared in the West, who later moved to the East.
When one speaks of the “discovery of America” one tries to make invisible, to erase the ancestral history, of a region, the social organization, the social relations of human groups, their knowledge, in short, of their existence long ago. To erase the arrival of the Spaniards and the irony that Spain was born in 1492.
Although this is not the subject, it is worth remembering that Al-Andalus (the Iberian Peninsula) was under Muslim rule for 800 years, so the areas that currently belong to Spain since the Middle Ages were Moorish, until he was expelled in 1492, which for many historians marks the day Spain was born.
To end and let us take in memory a very important fact about the colonial settlement in Venezuela.
In the year 1500, after the third voyage of Christopher Columbus, the first city in Venezuela and the first Spanish city in South America was founded and named Nueva Cádiz on the coast of the island of Cubagua.
The looting, plundering, exploitation of these towns and territories in Cuba began, pearls being their inspiration, leading to the establishment of Nueva Cádiz.
and to make the most of the pearl treasure “a 1503 law allowed the enslaving of Carib Indians, under the pretext that they were cannibals.”
