Destruction Of The Indies

A wheelchair for Ms Mena

ONE morning in 2000, Almena Nelson's life took a turn for the worse when she woke up to find that she could not move.

The inexplicable paralysis and weakness meant she had to be rushed to the University Hospital of the West Indies (UHWI), a short distance from her home in Mona Commons, St Andrew.

Nelson, accustomed to making a life for herself and her three children as a vendor selling in the nearby Papine Market for close to 30 years, ended up on her back in the hospital for three long months. Doctors could not diagnose her condition.

"When I was there all they did was come and draw blood every morning for test. 'Til one morning I just get bex and tell dem mi tired of the whole heap of blood test and if they going to drain me dry."

After her release from the institution, no better than when she went in, Nelson said she was forced to stay home for another year. She never returned to her old self.

In 2003, still unable to walk and tired of being dependent on others, Nelson decided to take money she had saved from her humble earnings to purchase a battery-operated wheelchair. The power chair cost her $50,000, but it made her life considerably easier.

She was once again able to move around her home, transport herself to the Papine market, about a quarter of a mile away, and get herself back home safely.

With no sign of any improvement in her condition over the ensuing years, Nelson resigned herself to her fate and made the best of what she had, keeping herself occupied and earning a meagre living by selling her produce in the market.

But, last month, four days before Mother's Day, things took another dramatic turn for the worse.

Nelson had just purchased some $60,000 worth of goods in preparation for the usual Mother's Day sale. She tied them up -- along with her wheelchair — under a piece of tarpaulin and left them at the front of the market.

But, as fate would have it, about 3:00 o'clock that Wednesday morning, police did a clean-up operation, removing all goods and debris left at the front of the market, including Nelson's goods -- wheelchair included — and put them in a truck headed for the city dump.

"That morning I couldn't do nothing but burst out in tears," the woman, known to her peers as Ms Mena told the Sunday Observer.

"When I see the condition and that the wheelchair and all my goods gone, I just cried.

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‘Oh, would that I could describe even one hundredth part of the afflictions and calamities wrought among these innocent people by the benighted Spanish!’

Bartolomé de Las Casas was the first and fiercest critic of Spanish colonialism in the New World. An early traveller to the Americas who sailed on one of Columbus’s voyages, Las Casas was so horrified by the wholesale massacre he witnessed that he dedicated his life to protecting the Indian community. He wrote A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies in 1542, a shocking catalogue of mass slaughter, torture and slavery, which showed that the evangelizing vision of Columbus had descended under later conquistadors into genocide. Dedicated to Philip II to alert the Castilian Crown to these atrocities and demand that the Indians be entitled to the basic rights of humankind, this passionate work of documentary vividness outraged Europe and contributed to the idea of the Spanish ‘Black Legend’ that would last for centuries.

Nigel Griffin’s powerful translation conveys the compelling immediacy of Las Casas’s writing. This edition also contains an introduction discussing his life, work and political legacy.