On October 12 this year, the United States observed Columbus Day, a federal holiday commemorating Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas in 1492. For some Americans, the occasion celebrates exploration and Italian-American heritage. For others, it recalls conquest, enslavement and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Many communities instead observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
Behind these different observances lies a question that extends well beyond America: How should a nation remember an event that opened a new chapter for some people while bringing catastrophe to others?
For readers in Rwanda and elsewhere in Africa, the debate offers an opportunity to understand an American institution and examine the language through which colonial history has been presented. Words such as "discovery” can appear innocent while carrying a powerful assumption: that a land enters meaningful history only when an outsider reaches it.
Columbus was a navigator from Genoa, in present-day Italy, who secured the support of Spain’s monarchs for an attempt to reach Asia by sailing west across the Atlantic. His objective was to find a new route to the wealth and commerce of Asia. What he encountered was a world whose geography he misunderstood.
On October 12, 1492, he reached an island in the Bahamas known to its inhabitants as Guanahani, which he named San Salvador. He encountered the Taíno, whose communities inhabited much of the Caribbean. His voyage therefore brought him into contact with existing societies rather than an empty territory awaiting recognition.
Columbus continued to believe that he had reached Asia and undertook three further voyages. The significance of his first crossing nevertheless exceeded his understanding of it. It became a turning point in sustained European expansion into the Americas, with consequences for peoples on both sides of the Atlantic.
Precision matters here. Columbus did not land in the territory of the present-day United States during his celebrated 1492 voyage. The holiday connects the United States to a broader narrative of the Americas and European exploration. It should not be mistaken for the anniversary of the country’s founding.
Nor did Columbus create the history of the hemisphere. Indigenous peoples had inhabited it for thousands of years, developing distinct languages, systems of government, agricultural practices, trade networks and spiritual traditions. Their histories were already unfolding long before European ships appeared.
Calling his arrival the "discovery of America” places the European observer at the centre of the story. A more accurate account identifies who arrived, where they arrived and whom they encountered. This change in language restores the people already there to their rightful place as historical actors.
The voyage and the holiday also belong to different historical periods. The United States developed its commemorations centuries after Columbus’s death. As the country constructed its national identity, he became a symbol through which it could tell a story of beginnings, ambition and continental possibility.
The holiday acquired particular importance for Italian Americans. Communities facing prejudice could point to a figure associated with their ancestral homeland who occupied a prominent place in the American public imagination. Honouring Columbus became, for many, a way of asserting belonging.
That background deserves serious attention. The Library of Congress documents anti-Italian discrimination and violence, including the notorious 1891 lynching of eleven Italians in New Orleans. The desire of immigrant communities for dignity helps explain why criticism of the holiday can be experienced as criticism of their identity.
Yet the dignity of one community need not depend on another community accepting a celebratory account of its suffering. Italian-American contributions to the United States are extensive enough to be honoured on their own merits. Understanding the holiday’s social meaning should deepen historical discussion rather than close it.
National recognition developed over time. In 1934, Congress requested an annual presidential proclamation, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued the first proclamation designating October 12 as Columbus Day. Legislation enacted in 1968 established the second Monday in October as a federal legal holiday, taking effect in 1971. That schedule remains in place.
The distinction is useful because public commemoration, federal holiday status and local observance are not identical. Columbus Day remains the federal name, while states and communities make different choices about how to mark the occasion. America consequently has several conversations taking place on the same date.
The sharpest disagreement concerns what followed European arrival. Indigenous communities experienced warfare, enslavement, the seizure of resources and land, forced displacement and devastating disease. These processes differed across places and centuries, but together they transformed the hemisphere and inflicted enormous losses.
A responsible account must distinguish Columbus’s conduct from policies pursued by later colonial authorities and governments. Centuries of conquest cannot be reduced to one individual. Equally, the scale of the later history cannot justify excluding the coercion and exploitation associated with the earliest encounters from the story.
Disease requires particular care. Epidemics were a major cause of Indigenous population decline. Explaining their role is essential, but it does not remove human responsibility for enslavement, warfare or dispossession. Historical accuracy requires attention to several interacting causes rather than reliance on a convenient single explanation.
The aftermath also connected the Americas to Africa through the expansion of Atlantic slavery. European colonial economies increasingly drew on the forced labour of Africans. African history is therefore part of the wider world shaped by the encounters and imperial expansion associated with 1492.
There were other far-reaching changes. Plants, animals and foods moved between continents in what historians call the Columbian Exchange. Crops originating in the Americas, including maize and cassava, eventually became central to diets and agriculture in many African societies. The transformation was global.
These connections make the subject relevant to African readers without requiring us to treat every colonial experience as identical. The histories of Caribbean communities, African societies and European immigrant communities differ. Their particular circumstances should be preserved even when broader patterns of power become visible.
Indigenous Peoples’ Day changes the focus of commemoration. It recognises the peoples whose presence was obscured by the familiar discovery narrative and honours their cultures, survival and contributions. Its advocates seek a place in public memory from which Indigenous communities were too often excluded.
They also challenge the tendency to speak of Indigenous peoples only in the past tense. These are living communities with contemporary institutions, aspirations and claims. Their place in the story cannot be confined to what happened when Europeans arrived.
The Taíno illustrate the importance of that distinction. Despite the devastation of early colonisation, Indigenous heritage and identity persist in the Caribbean. The Smithsonian has examined this continuity, challenging simplified accounts in which the Taíno disappear entirely after the European encounter.
Remembering survival requires more than adding a sympathetic paragraph to an old narrative. It means allowing Indigenous voices to help determine how the encounter is described, what evidence receives attention and which consequences are considered important.
For Africa, the parallel lies especially in the authority to name. Colonial narratives repeatedly described inhabited places as "discovered” and represented conquest through the language of civilisation. Such descriptions made external intervention appear to mark the beginning of progress while diminishing existing political and social life.
African scholarship has ample grounds to question those assumptions. The task is to reconstruct history through evidence, including African sources and perspectives, and to examine inherited categories critically. Confidence in African agency should produce greater precision about the past.
The American debate also offers a lesson about public commemoration. Studying an event and celebrating it are different acts. A society can recognise the importance of a voyage, teach its consequences thoroughly and still reconsider whether a national holiday should present its leading figure principally as a hero.
Changing a holiday’s name, however, is only one step. The deeper work belongs in schools, museums, archives and public discussion. A revised calendar has limited value if textbooks continue to describe inhabited lands as empty or omit the voices of the people who lived there.
A fuller account can hold several truths together: Columbus’s crossing had immense historical consequences; Italian Americans have legitimate reasons to value recognition; Indigenous peoples endured profound injustice; and their descendants remain active participants in the present.
Columbus Day thus raises a question about the maturity of national memory. Can a country examine a familiar symbol closely enough to acknowledge both what it has meant to those who celebrate it and what it conceals from those who challenge it?
For readers far from the Americas, that question is worth considering. Every nation makes choices about whose experiences enter its public story. The strongest historical memory is one that can withstand evidence, include neglected voices and recognise that the people encountered by an explorer already possessed histories of their own.