Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is right in declaring that Latin America has no reason to honour Christopher Columbus. Several Latin American nations and the United States celebrate Oct 12 - the day that Columbus landed in San Salvador in the Americas in 1492 - as Columbus Day.

It is indisputably true that the arrival of Columbus heralded the beginning of the greatest genocide that had ever taken place in human history. Even by conservative estimates the number of natives massacred by Spanish and Portuguese invaders and later by the British, French and other European conquerors of South, Central and North America, and the West Indies, was anywhere between 7 and 10 million. There are historians who would argue that if one considered the entire four centuries of colonial subjugation that followed that dark day in 1492, 30 million would be a more accurate figure.

There is increasing awareness in Latin America and the United States today of this horrendous crime against humanity. But it has not reached a point where Columbus is officially repudiated and Columbus Day is treated as a day of shame. Part of the reason for this is because a lot of Americans continue to believe in the 'myth of discovery' - the myth that Columbus discovered America!

How can one 'discover' a land that had been inhabited for thousands of years by a people with a long history and tradition?

The indigenous communities of the Americas not only had an illustrious history and hallowed traditions but they had also evolved values and relationships with nature and the human being which epitomised qualities of gentleness and tenderness - the hallmarks of true civilisation.

The Americas were not the only place on earth that the Europeans had 'discovered'. James Cook had also 'discovered' Australia - thus negating the existence of thousands of indigenous Australians who had endowed the land with its memory and its identity. Again, as in the case of the Americas, the 'discoverers' embarked upon the brutal and barbaric annihilation of 'the savages'.

One of the main reasons why both in Australia and the Americas the invaders had no compunctions about eliminating the people of the land was because they did not regard them as human beings. Because the coloured natives were not human, the European racists who occupied their land viewed their newly acquired territories as 'terra incognita' or empty, vacant space.

When it is terra incognita you can of course claim that you had 'discovered' it - since there were no human beings living there before you came!

It is significant in this regard that the late Israeli Prime Minister,Golda Meir, a European Jew, once remarked that the Jews, a people without a land, had come to live in a land without a people. Is the continuous Israeli expulsion of Palestinians from their land an attempt to establish that colonial myth - after all Israel is seen by a lot of Arabs as a project of European colonialism - that Palestine was terra incognita which European Jewry had 'discovered'?

The myth of 'discovery' is such a powerful dimension of colonial psychology that it persists to this day even in societies which have been freed from the colonial yoke for decades. The Malaysian Airlines (MAS), for instance, in a statement issued on Oct 10, 2003 about new direct flights between London and Penang waxes eloquent about "the long historical ties between Penang and Britain from the time of its discovery by Captain Francis Light..." ( The Star , Oct 11).

MAS should be reminded in no uncertain terms that Light did not 'discover' Penang. Penang had a population of about 10,000, mainly Malays, Chinese and Siamese when Light landed on the island in 1786. It had its own local administration and a range of economic activities and was an integral part of the independent Sultanate of Kedah - a sultanate with its own time-honoured history.

This is why when I was teaching a course called 'Third World Ideologies' at Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang in the late 70s I used to tell my students that it was not Light who 'discovered' Penang; rather it was the people of Penang who one fine morning discovered Light standing on their shore!