A bronze Christopher Columbus statue at Grand Park, downtown Los Angeles has been removed for good over the weekend after 45 years of exuding mental torture especially to the Indigenous People of America.

Columbus is wrongly tagged as the one who discovered America, a land inhabited by human beings before his arrival on an expedition to find gold and steal lands for the Spanish king.

“It’s a natural next step of eliminating the false narrative that Columbus was a benign discoverer who helped make this country what it is … His statue and his image is really representative of someone who committed atrocities and helped initiate the greatest genocide ever recorded in human history, so the fact that his statue is coming down is the next step in the natural progression,” says Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell before the statue fell.

The statue was completely covered in October during the maiden celebration of Indigenous Peoples Day which replaced Columbus Day, after over a decade of protest by the Los Angeles City/County Native American Indian Commission (LANAIC).

The L.A. County Arts Commission finally accepted the plea for the statue’s removal and the historic day was marked by hundreds of people who had gathered to witness the restoration of their dignity.

So many accounts prove that other people have travelled to the Americas years before Christopher Columbus did. Some sources say Abubakari II, Mansa (King) of the Mali Empire in the 14th century, led Malian sailors to the Americas, specifically present-day Brazil, almost 200 years before Columbus arrived. Abubakari II ruled what was arguably the richest and largest empire on earth – covering nearly all of West Africa.

Although not all historians agree that there was evidence of Abubakari II’s journey and landing in the Americas, many do agree that there may have been Black African presence in the Americas way before Columbus.

Tiemoko Konate, head of the project tracing Abubakari II’s journeys told BBC, that Columbus, himself, said he found black traders already present in the Americas. Moreover, chemical analyses of gold tips that Columbus found on spears in America show that the gold probably came from West Africa.

Archaeologists also found a number of artefacts that indicate that Africans had set foot and lived in South America as far back as 13,000 BC to the 600 AD, even before Abubakar II.

The evidence indicates that people from Axum, Meroe and Land of Punt began settling in South America between this time, according to the skulls found in excavation projects in Ecuador, Valdivia, Chile, and among the Ponuencho of Peru.

Scientists also believe that the similarity in religion between Africans and South Americans could be a link that the two had encountered each other.

Some of the artefacts discovered included a stone head of a man wearing a circular earring on his right ear, an artefact quite similar to the carving of Akhenaton. There has also been the discovery of pots and water jars that were used in the Land of Punt.