The Myth of Colonial Discovery: Renaming, Indigenous Erasure, And the Manufacture of Imperial Legitimacy

Western colonial expansion has often been represented through narratives of exploration, discovery, and civilization in which European actors portrayed themselves as heroic discoverers of lands and peoples. However, these narratives frequently obscured the prior existence, knowledge systems, and historical agency of indigenous populations, transforming colonial expansion into an epistemic project of naming, renaming, and symbolic domination (Said, 1978). The Main Objective of this paper was to critically examine how Western colonial discovery and naming practices functioned as instruments of deception, indigenous erasure, and imperial legitimization through the appropriation and renaming of geo-political and cultural artifacts. By integrating historical, archival, discursive, comparative, ethnographic, and oral history methods, the study constructed a multi-layered analytical framework capable of interrogating colonialism as a complex system of epistemic domination and historical fabrication. It critically examines colonial discovery narratives as ideological constructs that manufactured imperial legitimacy and justified territorial occupation and cultural appropriation. It argues that through the renaming of geographical features, peoples, and cultural landscapes, colonial powers systematically erased indigenous identities and subordinated local systems of knowledge, memory, and spirituality to European epistemic authority (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 1986). The study further demonstrates how colonial historiography and education reinforced these distortions by glorifying imperial conquest while concealing violence, dispossession, and cultural destruction. These processes contributed to psychological colonization and cultural alienation, shaping how colonized societies understood their own histories and identities (Fanon, 1967; Rodney, 1972). Grounded in postcolonial and decolonial theory, the paper concludes that colonial discovery narratives were not neutral historical accounts but strategic instruments of domination. It calls for the restoration of indigenous names, histories, and epistemologies as a necessary step toward decolonial historical reconstruction and cultural reclamation.