certification

Tuesday 12.7.2016

Today we took a giant walking tour of downtown Lima, which provides some excellent material to relate to my points about Kwasi Wiredu in Day 37 with some examples in our modern world.

To start, Lima isn’t really named Lima.  Lima was originally spelled “Limak”, and was the name of the settlement around a holy site in the Limak River under the Incan Empire, but the name was changed because it is difficult to pronounce a “k” sound in Spanish.  The Lima River is now a dried, pitiful, disgusting flow of little more than human waste and plastic bottles.  But at the time of “settlement” by Pizzaro in the late 1500s, The Limak River was an essential source of water for the Incan Empire’s irrigation system, which was at the time larger than any system of man-made irrigation on the planet (meaning the Incans had a larger irrigation system than the Europeans or the Chinese, which is insane to think about).

Lima is not a good place to build a city.  The Spanish had conquered Cusco but needed a location that was much more accessible for transporting goods, meaning they needed a place near a coast.  Because of this the Spanish established their wooden huts in the wake of the plague-eviscerated Limak River community, immediately damned the water supply (cutting off water to that irrigation system), and began bringing more and more people to the site.

The site was not so much a holy site as it was an unholy site, however; the Incans did not settle in the area because of a history of what we now call earthquakes, and it took less than twenty years for the “Lima” community to be destroyed by an earthquake, following which the former-royal-priests-turned-slaves committed a mass suicide in what could be viewed as an escape from their bondage.

Relentlessly, the Spanish brought over more slaves, went to work placing churches at the top of terraced pyramids, and supplanting the significance of the Incan sun-centric religion with the religion of Christ.  This supplantation was only sporadically broken up by slave revolts, plagues, and more earthquakes, but the Spanish did not listen to the Incan religious leaders and decided to focus their settlement in Lima despite what the Incans must have viewed as the divine warnings of a very upset deity.

So imagine how the first “Peruvians” post-colonization would have tried to understand their world. Those living in Lima would have been living in a city that in almost every way was opposite to the lifestyles of the Incans 100 years prior.  Traditional understandings about the sacred would have been passed down by elders but hidden from public discourse due to threat, meaning that early Peruvians would have to be living in a space that Christians analogously may be able to associate with Gomorrah.  Technology invented by ancestors – terraced farming, bead-based economics, remarkably extensive irrigation – would have been taken over by conquerors, forcing Peruvians to watch their cultural heritage be overturned and mismanaged.

Reality for early post-colonial Peruvians would have lacked the material, social, or spiritual stability their culture had maintained for centuries.  Such an origin is the basis for a mindset that Wiredu could only describe as colonial, and which must be undestood in the context of imperialism.