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African Saga is in copyright. © Author Nina S. de Friedemann. Translation by Ron Duncan Hart.  
Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may be done without the written permission of Institute for Tolerance Studies (admin@tolerancestudies.org).

African Saga
Nina S. de Friedemann

African Saga is a must read book on the African Diaspora in the Americas. Friedemann writes with definitive ethnographic and ethnohistorical detail about the cultural origins in Africa, forced labor in the Americas, and the contemporary role of African descent peoples. Although she wrote seventeen other books, this is her most comprehensive statement about the African experience in Latin America. Nina S. de Friedemann was one of the creators of the field of Afro-Colombian studies and arguably the most important researcher of her time on the subject. In recognition of her scholarship and writing, she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship and nominated for the International Gabriela Mistral Prize, established by the Organization of American States. She was Latin American Coordinator for the UNESCO Project on the Slave Route and worked throughout the Americas and Africa on issues of the African Diaspora. She was founding editor of the journal America Negra and Co-Director of the Program for Afro-Colombian Development. She was a founding member of the Colombian Anthropological Society and President of the National Writers' Guild. Internationally she held positions as Research Associate in social change at Emory University and Visiting Professorships at Georgia State University, University of Alabama, and the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research.

"Comprehensive review of Afro-Colombian history. At the same time, powerful tool to combat racism due to the way it highlights the contributions made by African captives and their descendants to the building of their nation. A book committed to the future of Africanness in the Americas, due to the political and ethical framework which also guided the life of its author, Nina S. de Friedemann."
-- Jaime Arocha, Professor of Anthropology National University of Colombia

"The late Nina Friedemann introduced a radical but reasonable afrocentrism into the literature on Afro-Colombian people by drawing on her extensive and impressive ethnography synergized with painstaking history, ethnohistory, narrative historicity and even archaeology of Africa and the Americas. Her short work, African Saga,-controversial though it was in Spanish, and controversial though it will be in English - bears testimony not only to her scholarship, but to the endurance and creativity of African-American peoples in lands of violence. Required reading for all students and scholars of the African Diaspora." 

-- Norman Whitten Professor of Anthropology University of Illinois Author of Black Frontiersmen and others

"Nina S. de Friedemann is an inevitable reference in Afro-Colombian studies."
-- Manuel Zapata Olivella Author of Chango, el gran putas and Chambacu, Black Slum among others

African Saga Cultural Heritage and Resistance in the Diaspora
Published by the Institute for Tolerance Studies . Through this collection women are heard as insightful contemporary voices in the worlds of academia, religion, activism, the arts and beyond. Nina S. de Friedemann, African Saga Cultural Heritage and Resistance in the Diaspora English Translation Ron Duncan Hart Gaon Books Santa Fe, NM www.gaonbooks.com Copyright © 2008 By Gaon Books All rights reserved. This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may be done without the written permission of World Arts Press/Gaon Books (gaonbooks@gmail.com). Manufactured in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2007930676 Friedemann, Nina S. de African Saga: Cultural Heritage and Resistance in the Diapsora/ Nina S. de Friedemann Includes bibliography and index ISBN: 978-0-9777514-4-0 (cloth) 1. Social Science 2. Cultural Anthropology 3. African-American Studies 4. Latin American Studies Texts by Nina S. de Friedemann and Nicolás Del Castillo Mathieu were translated from La Saga del Negro. Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. 1993. ISBN: 9589176097 by permission of the heirs of Nina S. de Friedemann, who authorized their inclusion in the present publication. Tío conejoooo por dónde andarás soy esclavoooo, quiero libertad. Uncle raaaabit where are you? I am a slaaaave. I want to be freeee. Tulio Guillermo Diuza Yory

Contents
Introduction Ron Duncan Hart
Acknowledgements Nina S. de Friedemann
Prologue Nicolas del Castillo Mathieu
1. Africa and America: An Introduction 
2. Africans, Slaves, and Historians of the Indies 
3. The African Diaspora and the Pendulum of Numbers
4. From Sunrise to Sundown: Africans and the Codes
5. Creating Afro-Colombian Culture
6. Contributions to National Culture
Bibliography
Index

Dr. Nina S. de Friedemann’s eighteen books and dozens of articles played a major role in creating the field of Afro-Colombian studies. Few anthropologists have matched her unstinting passion for social justice, the thoroughness of her research, and the beauty of her written language. One phase of her work culminated with the national commitment to the rights and recognition of the African descent populations of Colombia in the Ley 70 of 1993, and another phase culminated with the founding of the academic journal, America Negra, and her work with UNESCO on the Ruta del Esclavo (The Slave Route). Her family heritage of social justice and secular humanism ran strong. True to these roots, she struggled for human rights in Colombia, as she sought justice for Africans in the Diaspora. She was an important advocate for tolerance and understanding across ethnic lines in Colombia. As an anthropologist, who was an actor in the local communities and societies in which she lived and worked, Dr. Friedemann understood anthropological research to be interactive with the needs of the people. Working in Afro-Colombian communities, she heard the voices yearning for equitable access to education, jobs, and respect. She saw the intelligent and skilled people who would die poor and far too soon because they did not have opportunities within the caste system of the country. She breathed in those voices and wrote with elegant passion for their cause. She strode beyond academic altercations and wrote in a language of the truths she had witnessed. Her ground-breaking research and the power of her social commitment made her a key anthropologist in Colombia and one of international projection. With this book, we remember the intellectual, social, and personal commitment of Nina S. de Friedemann. Her work and spirit make her a continuing presence in the study of the African Diaspora.

I met Dr. Friedemann in July, 1968 in Atlanta where she was a Visiting Researcher with the Social Science Research Center of Emory University. It was just months after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and there were riots and deep tensions throughout the big cities in the United States. She was studying the African-American experience, and I was working with Black university students in the city. We talked long that summer about African-American traditions, and she told me about her work in the Pacific Littoral. The next summer she was back at Emory, and we continued the discussions. Later, we worked together on ethnographic photography and film projects in communities in the Pacific Littoral, Cauca Valley, and the Atlantic Coast of Colombia exploring the use of visual imagery as narrative to give voice to the people who were unheard and unseen.

This work explored the effectiveness of anthropological narrative in analyzing and portraying human experience back to the same people of study. Her intellectual curiosity and her openness to experimentation were boundless. Her interests had roots in childhood experiences, and one of her most vivid early memories was taking the paddle-wheel river boat down the Magdalena River to Cartagena with her family. Her father gave her a journal and instructed her on making observations and writing down what she saw about the river, nature, and the people. He insisted and demanded, teaching her a discipline of observation that she would latter hone to a professional skill, rarely matched. To her that was the beginning of anthropology. She might have been a botanist or geologist, but she was intrigued by the peoples she saw. That started a lifetime of trips to Cartagena, the Chocó, Güelmambi, Palenque, Providencia, and beyond to Africa where she never ceased being fascinated by people and the lives they created. The flow of words from her pen welled up from a deep reservoir accumulated from watching and listening. Although she would go on to study anthropology abroad and learn from the masters in the field, she already had it inside, the discipline to observe, question, analyze, and communicate what she saw and heard. She had an energy and intensity of vision that few could match.
The power of her persona was a force that pulled and pushed within the profession. Like a magnet she generated electricity and made things happen. From those early youthful experiences with Afro-Colombians in Cartagena to her African trips in later life, she was an architect building a field of study. A true visionary, she envisioned what others were yet to see. She listened to the music of the Coast and later the Chocoano songs and delighted in the driving African rhythms where images of this life and the other could be interchanged, as in the poem:
Una vez en un letargo Once upon a time in a lethargy
Soñando que estaba muerto Dreaming that I was dead
me subí a los elementos I ascended into the elements
y anduve un rato paseando And for a while went around looking
Yo conversé con la luna I talked with the moon
Que se hallaba en su aposento Who was in her place
Hablé con todos los muertos I talked with the dead
Sin dificultad ninguna With no difficulty
Conversé con San Alberto I talked with Saint Albert
Y la Virgen del Consuelo And with the Virgin of Consuelo
Llegué a la puerta del cielo I arrived to the door of Heaven
Soñando que estaba muerto. Dreaming that I was dead.
Una vez en un letargo Once upon a time in a lethargy
Soñando que estaba muerto Dreaming that I was dead
me subí a los elementos I ascended into the elements
y anduve un rato paseando And for a while went around looking
Yo conversé con la luna I talked with the moon
Que se hallaba en su aposento Who was in her place
Hablé con todos los muertos I talked with the dead
Sin dificultad ninguna With no difficulty
Conversé con San Alberto I talked with Saint Albert
Y la Virgen del Consuelo And with the Virgin of Consuelo
Llegué a la puerta del cielo I arrived to the door of Heaven
Soñando que estaba muerto. Dreaming that I was dead.

From dugout canoes up the rapids of the Güelmambi to mosquito filled nights in Tumaco, from long nights of drumming and singing before altars in Cartagena to the evangelical hymns of Villarica, from sugar cane towering above sweating workers to the coolness of the tropical night, Nina Friedemann lived Colombia. And there were so many more that inspired her and drew her into the special language of Africa. She loved Colombia and pulled it around her like a cloak and gained nourishment from it. A restless mind titillated, And a presence burned A reality into being Making Black visible. Ron Duncan Hart Santa Fe, New Mexico
Acknowledgements Nina S. de Friedemann The first chapters of this book were written in 1991 when the Constituent Assembly created a judicial category for Indian groups and also began to consider the possibility of studying the rights of Afro-Colombians along the Pacific Littoral in Article 55 of Law 70. This article permitted the preparation of a law (within two years of the approval of the new Constitution) to recognize Afro-Colombian rights to lands that they have occupied historically. It also provided for the creation of mechanisms for the protection of cultural traditions and rights of economic and social development. Two years later after a difficult struggle on the part of African descent communities and their representatives, the Congress approved a law on June 18, 1993, that gave legal recognition to the existence of African ethnicity in Colombia. The islands of San Andrés, Providencia, and Santa Catalina were given the status of a Department (i.e. state) with an African-based ethnicity (Arocha 1992, Friedemann 1993, Gallardo Archbold 1993). The purpose of this book is to celebrate the Law 70 of 1993 signed by the President of the Republic in Quibdó on August 27, 1993. The law legitimizes the historic and socioeconomic identity of the descendents of the Africans that arrived to Colombia five hundred years ago. This legal fact is as important as the abolition of slavery in 1851, and it enhances the visibility of AfroAfrican Saga 17 Colombian communities to themselves and to the rest of the nation. This also recognizes the contribution of a third ethnic root from Africa in the formation of Colombia as a nation. With this law the Congress has modified the century old national ideology that has focused on the country as an American democracy based on Indians and Europeans to the exclusion of African influences. In this process Afro-Colombians had been categorized with Mestizos, which denied their historical and cultural ethnicity. This law, which recognizes Colombia as a multicultural country, opens new social and cultural perspectives for the country without ethnic discrimination. The purpose of this book is to communicate information about the history of Africa and the Africans who have helped build this country. It is also about the slavery that overwhelmed them socially and has continued to negatively affect their daily lives. The dynamic alternatives referred to in the last chapter of this book were made possible for Afro-Colombian communities by Article 55 of Law 70 although not enough time has passed to know the full impact of this clause. The formal recognition of African ethnicity, not only in anthropology but to the entire country, means that both individuals and communities will not have to abandon their unique identity to participate in the events of the country. The spread of knowledge about Afro-Colombians, including their culture and African influences will help the nation understand their contribution to the economy, literature, music, performing and visual arts, sports, as well as their protection of the biodiversity of the tropical rain forest of the Pacific Littoral. We will be able to better understand the fantasy and legends of the magical realism of this American world. An initial version of this work was published by the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (National Council for Art and Culture), CONACULTA, and the Direccion General de Culturas Populares in Mexico (National Council on Folk Cultures) for the celebration of the 500 years of the so called encounter of two worlds. That program called for essays on African culture in Latin American nations, and it organized a meeting in Mexico City of scholars from the Americas to discuss the development of the African Diaspora in the New World. For several years the Expedición Humana (Human Expedition) of the Pontifica Universidad Javeriana has supported a program of research and publications on Afro-Colombian communities, including the journal America Negra and the publication of La Saga del Negro, as a contribution to the teaching programs resulting from Law 70. I would like to thank Dr. Jaime Bernal Villegas, Director of the Institute of Human Genetics and the Human Expedition, and the administration of the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana for their generous support and trust of my work. In 1991 when we presented the first volume of America Negra, I spoke of the “Unbelievable Chapter” of the journal which had not been included because I wanted to tell it myself. Toward the end of 1990 I was reading an editorial written by the Director, Dr. Bernal, in the Bulletin of the Human Expedition, and I began to think that I was hallucinating when I read: To dream is the daily experience...but more than a sleep experience which is a physiological need, to dream is the imagination of things that ought to be or what one would like to be. To dream is an experience for which one does not need to be sleeping... The times through which our country is living now require the dreams of every Colombian. We need to dream about what we could be and what we should be. Each one should see clearly what is necessary to convert this dream into reality. My immediate reaction was to go and learn about this factory of realities made from dreams. The Human Expedition opened its doors to my proposals for research and publication on Afro-America, and it permitted me to establish an interdisciplinary dialogue with other ways of thinking. This book is a product of that same factory. My colleague Jaime Arocha Rodriguez, who is an untiring reader and critic of my manuscripts, encouraged me to propose the publication in Colombia of this book, which has also benefited from his suggestions, friendship, and wisdom. The Mexican anthropologist, Luz Maria Martinez Montiel, the General Director of the program Our Third Root in CONACULTA in Mexico, also encouraged me to develop this manuscript. The writer and linguist, Nicolas del Castillo, has known my work since 1974, when I went to his office as Governor of the Department of Bolivar to inform him about my research in Palenque de San Basilio. He very kindly read both drafts of this manuscript, giving me suggestions and writing the Prologue. Diogenes Fajardo Valenzuela, the literary analyst and critic, read this manuscript and kindly corrected the imperfections in my writing...Dr. Luis Felipe Delgado, Director of the Department of Publications of the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and his capable team of collaborators gave excellent attention to this project. The most important acknowledgement is my love for the people that I have known in the Afro- Colombian communities throughout twenty-five years of research, beginning with my first fieldwork in the Caribbean islands of San Andrés, Providencia, and Santa Catalina. The encouragement that I received from each and every one of them in my life and my scholarship goes beyond my possibility of paying them back. Many thanks to everyone, Nina S. de Friedemann Santa Fe de Bogotá October 12, 1993 Prologue Without the profound and delightful writings of the anthropologist, Nina S. de Friedemann, we would know very little about our Afro-Colombian communities of the Pacific Coast, and we would not know the majority of their cultural contributions. We would know almost nothing of their patterns of behavior, thought, and living. More than anything else, we would love them less. The humid and abandoned rain forests of Pacific Coast of Colombia shelter a large, basically unassimilated African-American population. This isolation has permitted it to preserve its spiritual heritage with jealous pride and admirable tenacity up to the present day. Slaves arrived to that Coast primarily after 1700 and mined gold along the many streams of the region. Later, they worked in the sugar mills and cattle ranches of the Cauca Valley. Since 1851 their free descendents have continued doing the same up to the present. Almost all arrived through Cartagena and came up the Magdalena River to arrive to the Chocó and the Coasts of the Departments of Valle, Cauca and Nariño. A smaller number went up the Atrato River from Cartagena where they were taken almost always fraudulently to the bays and estuaries of the Pacific Coast. The remainder were sent to Jamaica or Panamá. The largest number of Africans entered Colombia in the eighteenth century, starting at the beginning of the century when gold mining experienced an unusual surge in the Chocó and other places along the Pacific Coast. A plentiful supply of Bantu slaves had been entering the country, especially along the Atlantic Coast, since the period of 1580 and 1640 (the unification of the crowns of Spain and Portugal). By the mid-seventeenth century that supply began to diminish, and by the second half of the century the Bantus were increasingly replaced by Ewe and Fon peoples in agriculture and by the Akan tribes in mining. These latter tribes dominated the eighteenth century although they shared that role with the Carabalis (Efik and Igbo). Together these tribes outnumbered the Bantus but never replaced them in cultural importance. As Robert C. West points out in his excellent, classic monograph The Pacific Lowlands of Colombia, the Cape of Currents divides our Pacific Coast like a powerful marker. To the north are the cliffs of the Baudo Mountains (and the Sapo Mountains in Panama) interspersed with beautiful beaches of fine sand and interrupted by promontories jutting into the sea called longos. To the south the manglars border the coasts of central Chocó, Cauca, and Nariño, and they extend into Ecuador beyond Esmeraldas. Between the manglar and the sea there are also beaches. The manglar has been described in its incredible beauty by Professor Von Prahl. Although manglar trees seem to be of one single botanical family, they actually constitute four or five different ones that have adapted their leaves, branches, and roots to the saltwater environment in which they flourish. One of these manglar families is a cousin of the camelia that grows in the highlands of Bogotá, and since we learned about this, it does seem that the leaves of the camelia do have a strange similarity to the leaves of the manglar. In the Chocó, the water from the strong rains drains primarily into two great river systems: the Atrato River that flows to the Atlantic and the San Juan River that flows to the Pacific. In contrast, to the south of Buenaventura medium sized rivers dominate with the exception of the Patia. Between the Atrato and a tributary of the San Juan there is a short stretch of land that today is connected by bus. In the Colonial Period goods and people crossed this distance by the arrastradero de San Pablo, a phrase referring to Indian laborers pushing the canoes loaded with trade goods to be transferred to other canoes, and in this way they passed from one river basin to the other. To the south of Buenaventura people sailed in the open sea or through long canals of seawater parallel to the coast, escorted by the immense jungles of manglar. So, it should not be strange to us that it took four years to completely explore the Pacific Coasts of Colombia and Ecuador whereas the Atlantic Coast of Colombia required only four months. To crown this huge achievement, Pizarro and Almagro agreed to divide the work between them. Almagro took the task of returning to Panama to recruit more people to replace those who died and to get more food for the living. In the meantime, Pizarro stayed to await the indispensable help in some inhospitable place along the Pacific Coast. His camp could have been on the coast of Chocó, the mouth of the San Juan de Micay River, the island of Gallo, or the island of Gorgona. It was not possible anywhere along the coast or the islands to found a town to act as a supply center and a base for further explorations to the south. Between Panama and Peru there was no place that an expedition could equip or supply itself. Nothing similar happened anywhere else in the Americas, neither Hernando de Soto’s trip into the United States, nor the hard trip of Quesada from Santa Marta to Bogotá. None of them lasted four years. With the exception of Nabugá, Bahía Solano, Tribugá, Nuquí, Buenaventura, Timbiquí, Guapi and Tumaco, Nina de Friedemann has worked mostly with populations to the interior from the coasts and even in intermontane valley communities, such as Quibdó, Istamina, Tadó, Yuto, Lloró, Bagadó, Chambaré, Muchichí, Cuajandó, Engrivadó, Cértegui, Tutunendó, Neguá, Beté and Tagachí in the Department of Chocó, Bajo Calima and Jamundí in the Department of Valle del Cauca; Coteje, Santa María, Mechengue, Villarica, Miranda, Corinto, Coloto y Puerto Tejada en the Department of Cauca; Barbacoas, Zapote, Los Brazos, El Venero, Gertrudis in the Department of Nariño. In a very general way, these are the places where Afro- Colombian miners were active during the early years of the Republic. After the slaves were liberated in 1851 up to 1920 African descent people had to move to the Pacific coast to find employment. It is difficult for me to imagine Nina de Friedemann, a small woman who is sweet and feminine, traveling through those humid jungles, sleeping in hammocks or on the ground, and moving from place to place in canoes or dug-outs through the formidable system of rivers and tributaries, which is the only means of travel in most of the Pacific Littoral. Nina has crisscrossed most of these rivers: Anchicayá, Napi, Mechengue, Bubuey, Saija, Timbiquí, Guapi, Satinga, Sanquianga, Güelmambí, Telembí, Ispí, Yaguapí, Patía, Maguí, Nansalbí, and Sumbiambí. She has also covered the Atrato and its tributaries: Comingodó, Opogodó, Napipí, Bojayá, Buchadó, Tagachí, Bebará, Beté, Neguá, Munguidó, Quito, Tanadó, Capá, Yuto, Andágueda and Cértegui. But, Nina has not limited her activities to the Pacific Littoral. She has also done studies in San Andrés and Providencia, Palenque de San Basilio, Cartagena, Barranquilla, and many other sites along the Atlantic Coast. Several articles have resulted from these trips and her many lectures on the African descent speakers of Creole and English in San Andrés and Providencia, on the cattlemen of Palenque and the funerary rites (lumbalú) from the same place. She also has written about the Slave Councils in Cartagena and the Carnival in Barranquilla, whose dance groups have so much projection. All of these subjects and more are covered in this book, which is a prodigious synthesis of the African experience in Colombia. It includes much of what has been written about Afro-Colombians and the most recent publications by African descent authors about their continent of origin. This book confirms the facility with which Nina de Friedemann weaves together the experience of Afro- Colombians in the gold mines of the Pacific Coast, their social organization (cuadrillas and troncos), their work methods, daily life, desires, and needs. She covers many other subjects such as the African cultural contributions to Colombia in music, art, and institutions. This book will become a must read for students of anthropology and sociology and a necessary reference for professors and scholars of these subjects. Nicolas del Castillo Mathieu Books by Nina S. de Friedemann • 1974. Minería, descendencia y orfebrería artesanal. Litoral Pacífico (Colombia). Bogotá: Universidad Nacional. • 1975. Indigenismo y aniquilamiento de indios en Colombia. With Juan Friede and Dario Fajardo. Bogotá: Universidad Nacional. • 1976. Tierra, tradición y poder en Colombia. Editor. Bogotá: Biblioteca Básica Colombiana, Colombian Institute of Culture. No. 12. • 1979. Ma Ngombe. Guerreros y Ganaderos en Palenque. With Richard Cross. Bogotá: Carlos Valencia Editores . • 1982. Herederos del jaguar y la anaconda. With Jaime Arocha. Bogotá: Carlos Valencia Editores. • 1983. Lengua y sociedad en el Palenque de San Basilio. With Carlos Patiño. Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo . • 1984. Un siglo de investigación social: antropología en Colombia. edited by Jaime Arocha and Nina S. de Friedemann. Bogotá: Etno. • 1985. Carnaval en Barranquilla. Bogotá: Editorial La Rosa. • 1986. De sol a sol: genesis, transformación y presencia de los negros en Colombia. With Jaime Arocha. Bogotá: Planeta Colombiana Editorial, S.A. • 1989. Criele, Criele son. Del Pacífico negro: Arte, religión y culura en el litoral Pacífico. Bogotá: Editorial Planeta . • 1990. Perfiles etnomédicos y genéticos en el litoral Pacífico colombiano. With Ignacio Briceño. Instituto de Genética Humana. Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana . • 1991. El Chocó: magia y leyenda. Bogotá: Eternit Colombiana. • 1992. La mujer negra en la historia de Colombia. Las mujeres en la historia de Colombia. Bogotá: Consejería presidencial para la juventud, la mujer y la familia. • 1993. La saga del negro: presencia africana en Colombia. Instituto de Genética Humana. Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. • 1995. Entre la tierra y cielo: magia y leyendas del Chocó. With Alfredo Vanin. Bogotá: Planeta . • 1995. Fiestas: Celebrations and Rituals of Colombia. Bogotá: Villegas Editores. • 1997. Etnopoesía del agua: Amazonia y litoral Pacífico. Instituto de Genética Humana. Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. 1 Africa in America: An Introduction

On May 21, 1851 the Law of Abolition in Colombia declared that all slaves would be free as of January 1, 1852. The judicial and philosophical controversy that resulted from this law lasted as long as the War of Independence from Spain, which was fed by the conflict between social classes and castes. Just as the royal supporters in the plains of Venezuela and Colombia stirred up the mulattos and Indians with the cry of “War against the Whites”, and the Spaniard Boves traveled from town to town declaring the liberation of slaves, the American-born white Creole leaders dreamed of ways to capture the potential of the masses for their own political ends (González 1976:217-340). Blacks and mulattos were active participants in the War of Independence, allying themselves first with the Spanish and then with the When “Creole” is used for a social group, it refers to people born in the Americas. Iberian-born people considered their own children born in the Americas not to be Spanish because of their exposure to Indian and African cultures. When the word “creole” is used to refer to language, it refers to a mixture of Spanish, African, and Indian elements. The chips that Blacks played in this drama had a single value: their freedom. The resistance of Blacks during slavery was a constant aspect of their relationship with owners, and it took on renewed force when they used the tactic of escaping and then challenging their old masters (Carrera Damas 1977, Friedemann 1979). These tactics were used throughout the colonial period in the Slave Wars, which lasted three hundred years in New Granada. In the Republican Period after Independence that resistance was reinvented as Blacks took up the “integration” proposed by the dominant society. The road to freedom during the post-abolition period was narrow. The only way to real emancipation and access to the civil rights guaranteed by law, but denied in social practice, seemed to be the social or even genetic “whitening” of the group. However, this goal of legitimate emancipation within the social and cultural framework of Colombia has not been realized even at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Africans are still not recognized as being one of the three races that founded this nation and its identity, which should include Afro-Colombians along with indigenous peoples and Europeans. Africa and America Although Afro-Colombian intellectuals have tried to make research and education on Africa and Afro- Colombian history, society, and culture more visible, Present day Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador. Their continued invisibility in the country has been a solid but subtle means of discrimination imposed by European-Colombians. The melting pot (mestizaje), as an ideology of social action, has been one such means of making them invisible, and it is still used to ignore social and racial diversity and the claim of ethnic identity. The different interpretations of the history of Afro- Colombians is one aspect of the African Diaspora that has only recently begun to be discussed. Roger Bastide (1967) pointed out that studies of the African Diaspora were inconceivable before the abolition of slavery because European social theory considered Africans only as laborers and never as bearers of culture. A 1984 review of the research on Afro-Colombians demonstrates that it was in the late 1940’s and 1950’s, one hundred years after abolition, before the first ethnographic research was done on these communities (Friedemann 1993). The pioneering works of Rogerio Velásquez (1948), José Rafael Arboleda (1952), Aquiles Escalante (1954), and Gregorio Hernández de Alba (1956) are the most important. Starting in 1963 the work of the historian Jaime Jaramillo Uribe on the relations between masters and slaves in seventeenth century Colombia stimulated the research of others on accurate interpretations of the participation of Afro-Colombians in the economy, society, and culture of our country. Studies of Afro-Colombian communities came a decade later in the field of linguistics. The research by Germán de Granda (1968, 1971) and Dereck Bickerton with Aquiles Escalante (1970) followed 34 Africa and America by Nicolás del Castillo (1982, 1984) and Carlos Patiño Rosselli (1983) showed that in Palenque of San Basilio, there was a residual community of people who had been fugitives from colonial slavery, whose speech preserved African elements. In the same way, research by Jay Edwards in the Colombian archipelago of San Andrés and Providence in the Caribbean showed the presence of African elements in the local creole dialects. This documentation of African cultural elements has been profoundly important for these island communities, Palenque, and for the remainder of Afro-Colombian people. Earlier the unique languages of these groups were brandished as evidence of their inability to speak correctly in either English or Spanish. Knowledge of this rich phenomenon of linguistic creativity has contributed to the awareness of the cultural contributions of Afro-Colombians and opened new areas of anthropological and historical research. It has also led to new directions for research in various fields: social organization, esthetics, literature, and oral history. More recently, human genetics has provided additional information to help clarify the origins of African descent groups (Keyeux 1993). The commemoration of 1492 in 1992 presented the opportunity to understand that there were not just two worlds in that encounter but three or four, and it has permitted the discussion of Africa and Africans in the construction of the Americas. In Colombia, an environment of discussion occurred after claims were made for diversity rights in June, 1993 in response to African Saga 35 the Law 70 of the new constitution, which defined the nation as multicultural and ethnically plural. Afro-Colombians, like Indians, were recognized as a unique ethnic group, and they were guaranteed cultural and territorial rights. The new judicial position of Afro-Colombians will help combat those ideas that have eliminated their communities as subjects of study in anthropology and in the social and cultural history of Colombia. These ideas have made Africa invisible as an ancestral continent to the people of African origin in this country. Of course, similar cases of denying history have been part of African experience in other countries. The Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop succinctly stated this phenomenon when he said, “…erase, destroy the historical consciousness has always formed part of the techniques of colonization, submission, and brutalization of people.” (1983:60) However, that process did not erase the memory of African history because, as Yoro Fall says, “…the Europeans did not have the necessary force to conquer the mind and soul of all Africans.” (1992:19) The same thing happened in Africa in the seventeenth century during the creation of the Ashanti Empire, which conquered many neighboring groups. Among the defeated peoples, there were traditional historians or troubadours, called griots. They were specialists in music, genealogies, and diplomatic missions. Since they were communication specialists, they were prohibited from recounting their traditional histories to the people. Any violation was punished by death. The griots had to learn the official version of history, which had to be told to cover up the original truths of the subordinated groups. This was to achieve unity and harmony under the new empire. In Colombia the history of the indigenous people was also treated with these same techniques, but the history of Africa and the African Diaspora in the Americas was suppressed even more dramatically. Starting in the late 1950’s in Africa, people began to be aware of the effects of the destruction of knowledge of the past and the importance of restoring it. Currently, African intellectuals who are trained in European research techniques, as well as their own, are trying to establish their own approach to African history and the terms to communicate it to Europeans (Fage 1982:60, Curtin 1982:78, Fall 1992:17-37). Their research has contributed to the erosion of pseudoscientific racial myths that declared, “Africa does not have a past”. These myths were based on sociocultural values that reflected a pyramid of pigmentation with Afro-Colombians located at the bottom as non-civilized people. The story of Africans and their descendents in the New World was of no importance and to talk about their contributions to the societies where they lived was a contradiction in terms. The process of decolonization of Africa led to a reaffirmation of the identity of the people and nations. The sociopolitical and economic commotion in the postcolonial period affected both education and science. In the fight to destroy racial prejudice, the awareness of teaching a postcolonial view of history was adopted as a strategic technique. In the twenty years following 1960 during the process of decolonization, more than five hundred African historians were educated with doctoral degrees or the equivalent, and they have initiated research, publications, and teaching of their research and analyses (Curtin 1982:86). Their gathering of European, Arab, Hindu, and Chinese written sources, both before and after the fifteenth century (H. Djait 1982, I. Hrbek 1982) give evidence of African contracts with other worlds long before 1492. Elikia M’Bokolo is one of these new historians. Currently he is the director of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, and his research has focused on the early relationships between East Asia and the African continent. He has traced Africa’s role in a chain of time, space, and sociopolitical events, which nullify the claims that 1492 marked the shift from a pluralistic world to a unified world system. M’Bokolo (1992:4) and many other African scholars consider 1492 to be the beginning of a series of events in which Africa was always present. Along with this thought come questions about the possibility of contact between Africa and the Americas in the pre- Columbian period. Although this hypothesis that has been considered sacrilegious in Western science, there are renewed efforts to research the subject. A conversation was collected by Ibn Fadl Allal Al Omari that is an example. In 1324 Kankou Mousa, the emperor of Mali, was on a pilgrimage to the Holy Lands, and had a conversation with the governor of Cairo in which he describes the exploration of the Atlantic Ocean by his predecessor, Mansa Aboubakar II (M’Bokolo 1992, Friedemann and Arocha 1986, Diaw 1983). Although this remains one of the subjects less known in the new historiography of the continent, when documents such as this one are made public, they stimulate research on the ancient techniques of navigation in Africa. The fact that African navigation of the Atlantic is little known does not mean that it did not exist, as the experiences of Thor Heyerdahl demonstrate to the contrary. With his raft Ra I, which was built using techniques from the Buduma from Chad, Heyerdahl sailed 4,345 kilometers, leaving Safi on May 25 and arriving to the Antilles on July 18, 1969 (M’Bokolo 1992). Like some of the studies mentioned above, Donald Lathrap’s (1977) hypothesis about the domestication of plants in the Old World has been labeled sacrilegious in Colombia. He suggested that this process of plant domestication was derived from a special pattern of Neolithic experimentation developed in Africa 40,000 years ago by people of the Sangoana and Lupembana cultures. In agreement with one part of Lathrap’s proposal, 12,000 years ago a group of African fishermen were taken far from the coasts of West Africa by ocean currents to Brazil, landing somewhere between Recife and the mouth of the Amazon. Did they travel in rafts or canoes? Were they swept away with fish nets and the seeds of the bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceraria), which was domesticated in Africa and could not reproduce itself without the help of humans? By chance were these seeds used by people on the American coasts? Although this hypothesis was disdained for more than a decade, in recent years the number and antiquity of the dates suggest the early peopling of the American continent, such as the one by Pedra Furada that puts human habitation at 32,000 years in northeastern Brazil. These dates, added to other corroborating data, puts Lathrap’s proposal back in debate (Guidon and Delibrias 1986, Bruhn 1988). They also highlight the questions that stimulate the new historiography of Africa. On the other hand, if we talk about the encounter of worlds, this hypothesis would suggest an early one (Friedemann 1992, Friedemann and Arocha 1985). Continuing the work of reflection and restoration of African history started by the scholars mentioned above, the works of A. Hampaté Ba (1982), which are immersed in oral history, should be mentioned. The living tradition, as he calls it, is a grand history of life, which includes the history of the earth, water, plants, the deposits within the earth, the stars, and of course, the history of humans, which is a symbiosis of all of the histories and an expression of everything that previously existed. The recollection and evaluation of oral histories and traditions continues in Africa as a source for reconstructing the past. One example of the importance of this history can be seen in the narratives of the chronicler Cavazzi (1687) from the seventeenth century. On the one hand, epic stories, literary narratives, and cosmological data from field research (1970) on local traditions continues to grow. All of this has helped create the line of dynasties and sociopolitical changes in the region of Alto Kwango in Angola (Vansina 1985:182). This has also brought to light the heroic character of the fight against the slave trade that was on-going in this region, as in others, from the seventeenth century until the end of the nineteenth. The subject of the Atlantic slave trade continues to be a troublesome issue in the reflections and practice of the new historiography in Africa. For Africans this is the most visible event, the longest lasting, and the worst expression of the encounter between Africans, Europeans, and Americans. It is an issue that provokes strong reactions and needles sensitivities and feelings of blame. Europeans did not invent slavery, which was an ancient practice in Africa, but the African version was small scale, and it functioned to socially reintegrate people who had lost families in wars or other catastrophes. The European version had a different character, and its dimensions were monstrous (Gueye 1981:186). So much so, that the profound disruption it created in the African society of that time continues to project itself into the present. The demographic bleeding of millions of human beings that went on for three centuries is interpreted by African intellectuals as an industry of sociocultural eradication commanded by an alliance between the elite classes of both civilizations of the time, European and African (Selassie 1992). Many scholars also see in that process the factors that weakened the sociopolitical resistance to the European colonialism in the nineteenth century. The paradox is that the internal wars and the brutal, forced intercontinental migration laid down the framework for the African Diaspora, which became an integral part of the formation of the Americas. Although most of this information is known, the degree of African resistance in Africa to the slave trade is not, and much less the importance of the traces of African heritage in the American phenomenon of runaway slaves who planted their ideology of liberation in palenques, kilombos, mambises, cumbes, or mocambos. The new works of African history, such as those of Oruno D. Lara (1981:130) bring to light testimonies of this resistance in Guinea with the Bijagos and in the Congo with the Jagas. Between 1568 and 1587 a movement that opposed the slave trade was known as The Long March of the Jaga, which refers to guerilla units well organized politically, religiously, and militarily. They operated across wide regions, working from fortified camps called kilombos, the same name used in Brazil for camps or towns of runaway slaves. Men and women fought side by side. They invaded the Congo bringing devastation to the country with the purpose of disorganizing the Portuguese slave trading apparatus. According to Lara, the purpose was to conquer and destroy the kingdoms allied with the Europeans in the slave trade business. Lara (1981:130) goes on to say that Cavazzi describes the African kilombo in his narratives, including data on the social and religious organization. Nevertheless, the historiography of Afro-Colombians in the Diaspora has never included this information about the history of Independent towns of fugitive slaves. Resistance to the slave trade in Africa. This is important information for the analysis of the fugitive slave experience and more broadly for the study of Afro- Colombian groups. This is an example that teaches us about the strength of the invisibility of African history, which affects not only the historiography of these groups but all of Colombia. On the other hand, this shows the urgency of active academic communication between African and African-American research and scholars. Moreover, it is necessary in our country that we stimulate the formation of groups of scientists who are culturally part of the Diaspora. The Invisibility of African Influences The invisibility of Africa cultural influences on Afro-Colombian communities can be seen in studies of the family. Using concepts of monogamy and the nuclear family has skewed many ethnocentric studies on these families, leading to errors and incorrect interpretations. At the national level in Colombia, as in other Latin American countries, the nuclear, monogamous, and Christian family dominates as the paradigm for contemporary and historical analysis of social organization. Because of this, it has been impossible to think about traces of the Afro-Colombian extended family without thinking about the African roots of that family system. Instead, polygynous family forms have been used to stereotype the roles of women and men, as much in the realm of socioeconomic activity as in love and caring (Friedemann y Espinosa 1992). This stereotype crops up in the social sciences, literature, religious thought, and philosophy. The proposal is to start the analysis of the woman and the African family outside of the ethnocentric concept of the nuclear family. The classic model of the extended family suggested by Murdock (1949) consisting of two or more nuclear families does not define the reality of Africa nor of African-America. In the extended African family, consanguineal ties are more important than the conjugal ones, as suggested by the studies of Niara Sudarkasa (1980:43). The conjugal cycle consists of a monogamous phase followed by a polygamous one with both being considered equal. If a man had or has one wife and children, two wives and children, or many wives and children, his family was and is one family. Of course, when the monogamous phase of the family is defined, even though it may seem repetitive to say it, but it is necessary to go beyond the ideology of the monogamous nuclear family of Western society. In the African extended family, the monogamous phase is not self-contained institutionally, neither in its formation, nor in its functioning (Ibid., 43). Africanists say that this point has been ignored or distorted in the theoretical discussions on the subject that have suggested that such families were multiple families with one husband/father in common (Sudarkasa 1980:43). It is overlooked that the stability of the family does not depend on the conjugal union, neither in the monogamous or polygamous phases, but on the exercise of rights in the consanguineal family, which generally does have a polygamous organization. When I refer to the traces of African heritage or chains of iconic associations, I am placing myself in the context of the theories of Gregory Bateson (1972) about language and icons to approach the problems of the evolution of Afro-American cultures. These are ideas that can be linked to the concept of cognitive orientations by Mintz and Price (1976). Following this train of thought, Niara Sudarkasa (1980), an Africanist anthropologist, thinks that the most important African legacy in the American Diaspora is the one that comes from the extended family. This form of family is based on ethical principles, forms of behavior, and structural and cognitive orientations in the new kinship languages that have permitted Africans to survive biologically and culturally in the Americas. This is a homage to Afro-Colombians and their saga of five hundred years in the Americas, to their vitality and creativity, and to the capacity of the African Diaspora to live and survive in so many worlds. 2 Africans, Slaves, and Historians of the Indies Almost five centuries have passed since the first Africans began arriving in Colombia, and not exactly as captives in the slave trade. There were Africans traveling with the Spanish in the adventure of the Discovery, but they were lost to the histories of the Conquest. A testimony to this is the finding of some names, such as that of Ñuflo de Olano who climbed to the summit of the Quareguá with Vasco Núñez de Balboa and also saw for the first time the immensity of the Southern Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, on September 25, 1513. Fortunately in this case, the scribe Andrés de Valderrábano, who was a member of Balboa’s expedition made note of the presence of Olano, and his written report later came into the hands of the historian Gonzálo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés. Ñuflo de Olano must have been one of the Africans known as Ladino Blacks, Castilian Blacks, or Portuguese Blacks, called these names because they were familiar with the language and idiosyncrasies of the Spaniards and Portuguese. They came from those who had arrived to the Iberian Peninsula even before 1445 on board the boats of Henry the Navigator, which were marauding 46 Africans, Slaves, and Historians the coasts of Guinea catching and transporting captives back to Portugal. By 1552, 10,000 of the 100,000 inhabitants of Lisbon were African slaves. It was similar in Spain. Near the end of the sixteenth century, 2.5 percent of the nine million people in that country were of African origin (Alvarez Nazario 1974:24). The first document in American history that seems to authorize the entrance of Africans to the overseas colonies (Días Soler 1974:20) was the Instruction of September 16, 1501 given by the kings to Don Nicolás de Ovando, Governor of the Indies. That Instruction specified that it was not permitted to bring …Moors, nor Jews, nor heretics, nor reconciled people (i.e. those tried by the Inquisition and reconciled with the Church), nor persons who have been newly converted to Our Faith, except if they were black slaves or other slaves that were born in the power of Christians, our natural subjects... (Ibid). The proportion of the population of African slaves that lived in the Iberian Peninsula made it easy to comply with this Instruction. In the expedition of Juan Vadillo in 1538 that left Cartagena in a brigantine going to Sebastián de Urabá (Del Castillo 1990:137), and later continuing by land, had …a large number of black men and women, more than one hundred, according to the historian Fray Pedro Simón (Ed. 1981:T.IV:188). The question is how many of the Africans in Spain were slaves and how many free residents who voluntarily joined the adventure of the Conquest? These are questions that still cannot be answered. It is reasonable to assume that both categories of Africans must have arrived with the Conquistadors, slaves and freemen, both coming from Spain in the beginning. This can be assumed based on historical research on the experience of Africans in the Iberian Peninsula, beginning in the middle of the fifteenth century. In the early sixteenth century (1509 to 1559) many of the residents of color with an African background registered their place of origin in the Catálogo de pasajeros a Indias (Catalogue of Passengers to the Indies) as the Iberian Peninsula when they embarked in Seville for the Americas (Alvarez Nazario 1974:25). The chronicle about the Vadillo expedition to the south in 1538 included the participation of some three hundred and fifty persons, including Indian men and women as laborers. The list of participants included nobles, lieutenants, infantry captains, officials, priests, soldiers, and common people. In the group was Pedro Cieza de León, who years later became one of the most important historians of the Indies. At this point he was a young man eighteen years old, who had been in the Americas since he was fourteen. In 1534 he arrived to Cartagena from Seville in one of the three ships of the Comptroller of the Government of Cartagena of the Indies, Rodrigo Durán (Del Castillo 1990:137). His experience of being in the region of Antioquia for eight years allowed him to include it in the first part of his Cronica del Perú (Chronicle of Peru). This Vadillo expedition lasted fourteen months and was plagued by incidents, ranging from muddy marches, to Indian attacks, wounds, deaths, horses killed for food, falling down steep mountain sides, stealing from the Indians, and robbing Indian graves with all the horror that was a constant feature of the brutal episode of the entrance of Europeans in American territory. According to the chronicle of Fray Pedro Símon (Ed. 1981, T.V:224), in Cali they divided up the gold that had been pillaged between those who survived after having lost ninety-two Spaniards, one hundred and nine horses and …many Indian men and women and many black slaves. Even though the names of the Indians and Africans were not recorded in this chronicle, nor the number of their deaths, the very mention of their presence is an important record. At one point in the expedition ten Africans were sent into the fields of Indians to steal their corn and other food crops, and two of them were killed when they were discovered. This narrative also mentions that in the heat of battle, on occasion, Africans fled from the expedition and surely must have become free fugitives. The chronicle tells that some of the wounded Africans hid from the others, probably to die in peace. What is not indicated is whether those who survived to arrive to Cali received something from the dividing up of the booty, which gave five gold pesos to each soldier. In the same time period (1540) the expedition of the lawyer Alonso Luis de Lugo left the Peninsula. After arriving to Cape Vela, he started by land with skilled workmen and people who had been on other expeditions, accompanied by two hundred soldiers, an equal number of horses and beasts of burden, and thirty-five cows and their bulls. (Simón, Ed. 1981. T. IV:140) Although the historian did not mention Africans in the beginning, as the narrative continues the slaves are mentioned as burden carriers. There is a moment of crisis when the provisions were running out, and people were losing hope, even the leader Don Alonso. At that point the slave Gasparillo is mentioned. He had been on an earlier expedition with Gerónimo de Lebrón, and he knew the trails and mountains of the region. He said that he could go to the city of Vélez to get help, but he would do it …if our lordship would be so kind as to give me a document of liberation. Don Alonso answered that he would give not only one document but fifty if necessary, written in letters of gold, if he could obtain help (Ibid., 50). But this was not the only incident when one of the Africans solved a crisis. Some days before this event Juan de Castellanos, an experienced soldier, who apparently had been on the original expedition with Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, had suggested to the leader Alonso that he would go ahead of the group to Vélez to obtain help. The chronicle then mentions an African man, Manga Lengua, perhaps manga luango. Because the expedition had so many problems and was suffering from hunger Manga refers to a handle, and Luango is an area along the northern coast of the Congo region. he decided to go to an Indian village that they had seen to ask for help. He had no success because as soon as the Indians saw him, they started to chase him, and it was a miracle that he was saved. Juan de Castellanos had the same lack of success. Later he went on to become a historian of the Conquest, priest, Patron of Tunja, and owner of haciendas and African slaves (Cortés 1966). The Canto I of his Elegías de Varones Ilustres de Indias (Elegies to the Important Men of the Indies) tells of his adventure. According to Fray Pedro Simón, he did not mention the hunger, the weakness, and the plantain stalks that he and his companions had to eat day after day to stave off death ( Ed. 1981, T. IV:144). El don Alonso, pues con buenos guías Don Alonso with the good guidance de los antiguos hombres convocados Of older men called together Por el de la ciudad de Santa Marta By the City of Santa Marta en continuación de su viaje In continuation of his trip fue caminando por aquellos llanos Traveled through those plains por do fueron a dar a los dos ojos Where they arrived to the place de cristalinas aguas, aunque gruesas, Of two large crystalline pools, desde donde se ve la serranía Where the mountains could be seen frontera de los indios Coronados, The border of the Coronado Indians, cuyas faldas se dicen las acequias Whose foothills are called the streams de que tenían uso los vecinos Which the neighbors used Confines al enhiesto y empinado Surrounded by steep slopes Cerregión de los negros fugitivos Closed area of black fugitives Que en tiempo les sirvió de fortaleza Which for a time was a fortress desde donde comienzan las llamadas a armas, From which came the calls to arms del gran Valle de Upar, From the great Valley of Upar Juan de Castellanos In Castro Trespalacios 1977:28) Later, the history of Simón does not refer again to the slave Gasparillo, nor to the luck of the African man, Manga Lengua. When the leader Alonso Luis de Lugo arrived to Vélez in 1543 he only had seventy-five companions of the almost three hundred who had started the expedition. Of the three hundred horses and other animals that he had only twenty-nine arrived (Simón Ed. 1981 T. IV: 157). By the end of the account the hope of knowing how many Africans, if any, arrived to Vélez is lost. For his part, Juan de Castellanos in his Historia de Cartagena (History of Cartagena) mentioned that Pedro de Heredia took African people on his expedition to the Sinú. That information seems to be confirmed in his residency trial in 1537 when he was accused of … permitting the fifty Blacks that he had brought to work in the tombs…to steal the food of the Indians in the vicinity (Borrego Pla 1983:54). It is known that some of those Africans ran away and were found in 1540 in the vicinity of San Sebastián de Buenavista. It is interesting that a palenque was discovered in 1545 near the town of Tofeme in the jurisdiction of Tolú, and it was documented to have existed since 1525. An extermination corps was sent to Tolú and on its return reported finding and killing three hundred fugitive Africans (Ibid., 430). Having a fugitive group this size raises the question whether these Africans came from Spain and Portugal through the licenses issued by the Crown to private individuals. If so, how did so many manage to escape and create a rebel group of that size? Borrego Pla (1985:431) suggests that these were African fugitives who had arrived from Panamá and other parts of the mainland. However it happened, this information backs up the assumption that a substantial number of assimilated Africans, or as some authors have said, “Hispanicized Blacks”, came with the conquistadors to the lands of the New World. As a result of this, one of the histories referred to by Juan Friede in his Documentos inéditos para la historia de Colombia (Unpublished Documents on the History of Colombia) (1955-1960) tells that in Acla (present day Panamá) African musicians and dancers entertained the Indian chiefs of the Darién in 1520. 3 The African Diaspora and the Pendulum of Numbers Afro-Colombians are descended from both those individuals who arrived with the first conquistadors and from the thousands of Africans who officially disembarked in Cartagena of the Indies, as a part of the slave trade. Others arrived as contraband in places such as Buenaventura, Chirambirá, Gorgona, and Barbacoas in the Pacific Littoral and in Riohacha, Santa Marta, Tolú, and the Darién along the Atlantic Coast. Currently, we find groups of African descendents in the coastal regions of the Atlantic and the Pacific and in intermontane Andean valleys, such as: • Region of the Caribbean: the Departments of the Guajira, Magdalena, Atlántico, Bolívar, Córdoba, Cesar, Sucre and Antioquia • Pacific Coast: Department of the Chocó and the coastal regions of the Departments of Cauca, Valle del Cauca, and Nariño. • Intermontane Valleys of the Rivers Cauca and Magdalena, including some tributaries and the valley of the River Patía in the Pacific Littoral. • Department of San Andrés, Providencia, and Santa Catalina in the Caribbean. Much has been written about the shamefulness of the slave trade and the huge economic profits that it produced for the European nations that participated in it and the huge human, cultural, and economic losses for Africa and the Americas. The history and demography of the Atlantic slave trade are subjects that have generated polemics whose frameworks about the sociopolitical facts of slavery have been not only factual but also ideological (Tannenbaum 1968, Elkins 1971, Winks 1972, Lane 1971, Genovese 1967). Of course, there is sufficient literature that describes the circumstances of the victims from cultural devastation to prison, overly crowded slave ships, arrival to a hostile world, and forced labor. These are some of the conditions faced by those who survived and reached the Americas. It is estimated that between 15 and 25 percent of the Africans who left their homeland, never reached the New World, either dying in the struggle or committing suicide. They began to die in the slave factories on the African coasts, and others died in the Atlantic crossing. Some became ill with an unending melancholy (Triana and Antorveza 1989). Sitting in a crouched position with chin on their knees and arms around their legs, they refused food until they died. It is known that with nothing in their hand, the bidyogos or bijagos who were warriors, could fold the point of the tongue backwards down the throat and push the glottis against the trachea, blocking the flow of air in and out of the lungs. The frequency of suicide that occurred in the Atlantic crossing continued after arrival when the captives were finally located in their places of slave labor. The history of physical suffering that the Africans experienced in the cargo holes of the slave ships is moving. They lacked medical care. Illnesses such as scurvy, eye infections, smallpox, and dysentery were recorded in documents in the ports of arrival as physical defects. For the slave traders this meant an impediment to present the captive as desirable merchandise in the market where workers were bought and sold (Triana and Antorveza 1989:39-66). The physical agony of incurable diseases such as Loanda, which was named after one of the ports of origin in Angola, was dreadful. The bodies of the victims of this disease were swollen, their gums rotted, and they generally died. The history tells how landscape of the ocean was populated with people who writhed with strong fevers and other sufferings, such as smallpox, sunstroke, and chicken pox (Valtierra 1980: T. II:56). In this terrible history the victims had to resort to their own knowledge, decisions, and actions to relieve or cure their physical ailments. What gods or protective forces could they appeal to? What prayers could they send up? To uncover what happened in this nightmare would allow us to sketch out the construction of the foundations that gave origin to the African Diaspora in countries like Colombia and its fleshing out in the culture of the descendents of those Africans. It would also allow us to see how this culture was grafted into the larger one in racially diverse societies. Although there are various studies on the forced transportation of Africans to America, it has never been clarified how many people were torn from their homelands, nor how many arrived. Their exact precedence is similarly not known. Among the demographic studies of the slave trade, the controversy over the numerical magnitude of the trade range from nine million up to one hundred million with intermediate estimates of twenty-five million, and low ones of three million (Friedemann and Arocha 1986:33). Germán Colmenares (1979) calculates more than nine million, but Edward Dunbar (see Curtin 1969) estimates fourteen million in the slave trade to America. His estimate compares favorably with those by Herbert S. Klein (1986:93) that vary between ten and fifteen million. Klein also noted that four-fifths of the total of the African slaves that arrived to the Americas did so in a one hundred and fifty year time period between the seventeenth century and the nineteenth. As for Colombia, Curtin (1969:46) estimates 200,000 slaves imported during the total period of the slave trade, including Venezuela and Ecuador. Later, the re-examination of this figure in the quantitative analysis of Germán Colmenares (1979) and the careful accounts of Nicolás del Castillo (1981) have confirmed the estimates of Curtin. On one hand, Colmenares concludes that of the 200,000 slaves that Curtin assigned to New Granada (i.e. Colombia and Venezuela) along with Panamá and the Audience of Quito, more than half were in the present territory of Colombia. To this number he adds the contraband figures which he estimates less than 50 percent of the legal trade based on records about transportation and food. Colmenares’ calculations give a total of 120,000 slaves brought into Colombia. On the other hand, Nicolás del Castillo has shown that in the sixty years between 1580 and 1640, a total of 169,371 slaves were brought in through Cartagena. To this number he adds those who arrived through the contraband trade of the Dutch from Curaçao and the English from Jamaica, a trade that started in the middle of the seventeenth century (1981:245-253). If this information is examined in light of Klein’s suggestion (1986:94) that the majority of the slaves arrived to the Americas during the eighteenth century and up to the middle of the nineteenth, we would have a larger number. According to Curtin (1969:46) in 1810 the total unmixed population of African origin in New Grenada was 72,270, but the proportion of mulattos in the larger population was already 50 percent. This suggests that by this date the population of African origin had a high proportion of Creoles , which suggests there was a natural growth in the Creole group. That raises the question about how many African descent people were included in that 50 percent of the “mulatto” population. On the other hand, T.L. Smith (1966:215) supports the concept of Curtin, noting that the Black population of Colombia has maintained the same percentage in relation to the total population since the eighteenth century. At any rate, the census of 1964 (Atlas de economía colombiana or Atlas of Colombian “Creole” refers to people born in the Americas, and it may be used for people of either African or European origin. Mixed European and African genes. African Diaspora Economy includes the fact that 30 percent of the Colombian population is Black or mulatto. According to the current projections, 10 percent of this number could be currently considered as Black and the other 20 percent as impregnated genetically or culturally by African sources. So, we are confronted with a pendulum of numbers, some of which belong to demographic and political interests associated with the Black Legend of the Spanish, dating from the Conquest and relating to the annihilation of Indians (Friedemann 1975, Friedemann and Arocha 1986). The growing numbers of Blacks in Colombia today has an importance that goes beyond the narrow 1.2 percent of Indians, whose recuperation in numbers continues to be slow. The Origins and Predominant Ethnicity If the numbers of the slave trade are elusive, the ethnic composition of the victims is no less so. For a long time the explanations of ethnicity were the exclusive preserve of Europeans, and work by African scholars has begun only recently. There are not enough documents about the loading or debarkation of Africans to know definitively to which group they belonged. The compilation of catalogues of tribal groups based on the few documents that do exist has been an important source that has helped initiate the rescue of this ethnic history. New forms of research are being developed with the help of other sciences. In Colombia, the development of biogenetic studies has presented the possibility of tracing the origins of Black populations. Knowledge of elements of the chromosome structure of groups in the study of DNA markers in traditional populations that are demographically concentrated can offer valuable elements to confirm documental or linguistic information about the precedence of these African immigrants (Friedemann and Briceño 1990, Keyeux 1993). This preoccupation about the origins of the Africans that arrived to America has one reason: to discover the influences of the distinct African groups on the new American cultures and societies with the purpose of delineating the process and profile of the African Diaspora. For a long time the academic discussion of the slave trade made emphasis on the strategy of separation of the people from the same region to breakdown language communication, religious identity, and tribal solidarity. The deculturating consequences of this fracturing of groups became an argument in support of a breakdown of African culture in America. However, the total loss of culture is impossible, and in keeping with that Moreno Fraginals (1977:14) notes that in an exploitative system the dominant class actually encourages the continuance of some cultural values of the dominated class with the purpose of re-enforcing the established unequal structure. This happened during the colonial period with the creation of Black Councils (cabildos negros), sometimes referred to as Slave Councils, like the ones that existed in Cartagena along the seashore. In the beginning they were clinics that gathered people from the same tribes or nations, as a tactic of social service used by the authorities to erode the solidarity between tribal groups that might lead to rebellion. They also tried to continue intertribal hostilities, which in parts of Africa had actually been the conduit for the sale of men and women to the slave traffickers. In Cartagena this tactic strengthened the Councils, and the Council Houses (i.e. Casas de Cabildo) became the refuge for African cultural traditions (Friedemann 1988). With time the African heritage was transformed and re-developed and achieved a penetration and influence across a broad area in matters of daily life and holidays, in the sacred and the profane, and in funerals. Throughout the various centuries of the slave trade, it is important to be aware of the process of ethnic reintegration by Africans and their descendents in the Americas (Friedemann and Arocha 1986:37). It is certain that the tactic of grouping the captured workers in a pattern of tribal and regional heterogeneity had the purpose of establishing a more effective control through the cultural isolation of each person. Without a doubt the technique was effective. However, a moment must have arrived when the possibility of maintaining this heterogeneity was overwhelmed by the sheer number of slaves from the similar cultural backgrounds. This situation probably developed for various reasons. The most obvious being that slaves came from the same African regions, or even the same slave factory, where they were held, frequently for long periods, awaiting the slave ships. The grouping of people from the same region in the African stage of captivity certainly must have resulted in some form of ethnic blending, at least for the more passive people, while others developed more active forms of resistance (i.e. cimarronaje) (Friedemann 1988). Another path for the passive re-integration of ethnicity was probably facilitated by the selective capture of slaves from certain groups preferred in the American markets for their work abilities or other qualities of education that would have made them attractive to buyers (Escalante 1964:105-110). In regard to the capture itself, it is important to mention that according to research on the slave trade (Klein 1986:97), the information demonstrates that it was Africans who dominated the supply of slaves in their own continent. Those who supplied the slaves were local chiefs (Meillassoux 1990:79) or members of certain classes of local societies, and others were mulattos also from Africa. In the Guinea Coast these generations of mulattos, children of Portuguese men and African women, that were one of the results of the trade with Europe, were known as children of the earth (hijos de la tierra). Among these were the hunters of people (lançados) who were already living among the Africans in Guinea by 1508. The same phenomenon was found in Angola, where the mulatto slave hunters were known as pombeiros. Their job was to capture prisoners along the rivers and creeks to be loaded into the ships anchored offshore, and then be taken to markets in Lisbon or later to America (Rodney 1970). The pillaging of slaves for Europe became more widespread between African groups when they were spurred on by European merchants with commercial incentives, and after some tribes began to acquire firearms, which gave them power over others in their area. Intertribal conflicts, personal vengeance, and the status differences between the governing and humble classes stimulated aggressiveness and fed conflicts. For example, the Beafadas, Pepeles, and Bijagos attacked the Nalus while the Balantas supported the pillaging of the Beafadas and the Pepeles, and the Yolas suffered attacks from the Mandingas. Rodney (1970:113) affirmed that between 1562 and 1640 the large slave hunting tribes from the Guinea Coast to the north were the Manes, Mandingas, Casangas, Cocolis, and to a less degree the Susus and Fulas. The terror extended throughout the territory of today Senegal and Gambia. Later, it spread among the groups of Central Africa reaching as far as Mozambique. Starting in 1483 when the first Portuguese caravels reached the Congo, the relations between the Kingdom of Portugal were focused on the commerce in African slaves who were sent to Lisbon and Saint Tomé. The commerce in slaves was fed by people like the Tekes and Mpumbus in the northeast and by the Mbundus within the Congo itself. The historians of West Africa state that by the end of the slave trade, the social, economic, and political life of the region was regulated to produce a continual flow of slaves that filled the ships anchored one after another up and down the coast and that made the tragic consequences possible that played out within their hulls. During the slave trade the powerful European nations got involved and contested Portugal’s rights on the west coasts of the African continent, starting as early as the sixteenth century. The contested zone started in Senegal and stretched to Angola. Little by little the sociopolitical and economic developments pulled the European powers into the scheme of commerce in African people and the exploitation of the resources and promise of the New World. Although the management of trafficking in slaves passed from the hands of the Portuguese to the Dutch, English, and French in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Iberians started the slave trade, and they were the last to abandon it. Regions and Origins The origins of the Africans who arrived to the present day territory of Colombia has been disputed, especially when people have tried to assign cultural attributes to particular groups of people in certain regions (Escalante 1964, Arboleda 1952). According to one of the historians of the slave trade in Colombia, Jorge Palacios Preciado (1982:231) the conclusions about tribal origins are both general and vague. Palacios points out that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the places from which slaves were taken were established by licenses, which used the so-called Islands of Cape Verde and the rivers of Guinea as points of reference. But in the end, Palacios admits that according to the documentation of buyers, and notary records among others, slaves arrived to New Granada from all the African regions of the slave trade from the rivers of…Guinea, Sierra Leona, Arará, Mina, Carabalí, Congo y Angola. On the other hand, Germán Colmenares has another solution to this issue, based on the system of regionalization developed by Curtin (1969). Using patents and wholesale bills of sale for three thousand slaves brought during the first half of the eighteenth century (1979:46-49), he has created a pattern of tribal origin. A warrant of sale was given to the buyer by the factory of a particular site or to someone who had a license, and it was used as a pass in Mompox and Honda, port towns through which slaves were taken. When the slave was sold, for example in Popayán, the court clerk recorded the information of each individual, including sex, age, the group, and tribal scarification. Colmenares points out the importance of these warrants for the study of origins in Africa. Based on this documentation and on a 1759 accounting of slave gangs in the Chocó, Colmenares made the following synthesis: African Groups in Colombia African Region Groups (1705-1749 Warrants Chocó Account Senegal Gambia Mandingas (Malinke), Bambara, Mambara 14 20 Ivory Coast Pepper Coast Cetres (Kru) Canga 76 23 Gold Coast Minas, Caramanti (Coromanti) 622 139 Gulf of Benin Araras Fon Juda Ouida Lucumies Popo Aya (Oyo) Chamba Cotoli 330 62 90 14 66 48 19 25 Gulf of Biafra Carabalí Ibo Bibi (Ibibio) 407 9 46 Central Africa Congos Luangos 704 9 79 Other places 449 85 Totals 2,852 484 68 When one makes a cultural analysis of the Diaspora, this data must be understood in light of the dominance of some tribes over others in the various areas of interaction, such as the mines, the haciendas, domestic service, urban work, and the status of the individual African whether he or she was slave or free, urban or rural. Taking advantage of such an extensive bibliography on the slave economy, the history of the Conquest, and linguistic studies, including dictionaries of African languages, Nicolás del Castillo (1982) shows the dominance by period of certain groups among those arriving to Cartagena during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 1. 1533-1580 Yolofos 2. 1580-1640 Angola and Congo 3. 1640-1703 Arará and Mina 4. 1703-1740 Arará and Carabalí 5. 1740-1811 Carabalí, Angola, Congo, and Mozambique In the periods of 1640-1703 and 1703-1740, Castillo’s data agrees with that of Colmenares. This information by period takes on more importance when it is compared with the cultural re-integration that occurred in the Black Councils (cabildos de negros) from the Arará and Mina nations who were in Cartagena in 1693 (Borrego Pla 1973:97). In these Councils the beliefs, music, customs, and rituals of the different African homelands were assimilated among the participants, and they learned the new speech and manners of their dealers and owners. The groups listed above coincide with the dominant groups in the Councils for the same time periods. The linguistic research by Germán de Granda (1971), Nicolás del Castillo (1982, 1984), Carlos Patiño Roselli (1983), and finally Armin Schwegler (1989) confirm the influence of the Ki-Congo and Ki- Mbundo languages on the language of Palenque of San Basilio located near Cartagena. Those two languages were spoken by Bantu groups in the region of the Congo and Angola. Palenque, which is a survival of the fugitive slave movement during the colonial period, provides evidence of the cultural re-integration in which the Congo-Angolese cultures were predominant. Examples of this influence can be seen in the symbolism of funerary rituals, notably in the song and dance to the dead person (Friedemann 1991, Schwegler 1990). In the Pacific Littoral the studies of Germán de Granda have also permitted the formulation of hypotheses about slave origins. His study (1971a) on the proper names of slaves in the mines of Popoyán in the eighteenth century indicates the existence of a naming code for Africans. One of the variables in that code was the family name which made reference to the place of origin, for example Julio Arará and Antonio Popo, who were slaves in the Chuare mines. Studying the number of registered slaves in the colonial provinces of El Raposo, Santa Bárbara, and Barbacoas, located today in the Departments of Valle, Cauca, and Nariño and comparing them with information from the same century in the Chocó (De Granda 1988:65-80) a list of regions and the origins of groups can be assembled. Table 2 Tribal Groups by African Region Region Groups Senegal/Gambia Mandina, Casaca (Mixed between Mandinga and Fula), Bran, Bambara, Guagui, Canga/Canca, Tembo, Taui, Mani Pepper Coast Setre (Kru)* Gold Coast Mina (Akan)*, Fandi (Akan)*, Nango (Akan)*, Ati (Akan)*, Aguamu (Akan)*, Coto (Gá- Andangme)*, Ocara (Gá- Andangme)*, Asante, Ashanti (Akan)* Gulf of Benin Arará (Ewe)*, Chala (Ewe)* Popo (Ewe)*, Lucumí (Yoruba)*, Bomba (Ewe)* Ayobi (Yoruba)*, Betre (Ewe)* Gulf of Biafra Carabalí, Viví (Ijo, Igbo), Cuco (Ibibio and Efik)* Central Africa Congo, Luango, Matamba (Matambae), Mondongo (Ndongo), Pango (Mpangu) Bamba (Mbamba), Manyoma, Bato (Mbata) West Africa, inland Chamba * Makes reference to African languages This comparison does not cover three of the time periods in Del Castillo’s system, and of course, many of the groups that contributed to the Diaspora in the Americas are not mentioned. In the first period from 1533 to 1580, which was dominated by the Wolof or Yolof, it is important to mention those groups from the region of Senegal and Gambia that appear in the original classification by Curtin (1969). They came primarily from the area that was formerly known as Upper Guinea, including the groups Diolas, Bañol or Banhuns, Casangas, Pepels, Mandingas, Susus, Nalus, Cocolis, Bagas and Temnes, Balantas, Biáfaras (Beafadas), and Biohós (Rodney 1970:6). How many of these arrived to Colombia? De Granda emphasizes the predominance of the people who speak Ewe, Akan, Yoruba, and Efik. At this point it is important to mention the work of Rogerio Velásquez (1962) on family names among Black groups in the Pacific Littoral. He found the following names among eighty-eight mostly African people, Bañol, Bañon and Banón, Balanta, Biáfara, Biojó, Casanga or Casaga, Mandinga, and Mani. The origins of the Caribbean population in the islands of San Andrés and Providence is shared with other islands, such as Jamaica, and it results from the domination of English slave traders along the African Gold Coast. Linguistic studies indicate the predominance of Fanti-Ashanti ethnicity, particularly apparent in the creole language, which is shared with Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, and other islands in the Caribbean. 4 From Sunrise to Sundown: Africans and the Codes Arriving to Colombia, the destiny of an African was to work under the sun. In the initial years many, mostly Hispanicized, Africans participated in the search for El Dorado. After the start of the colonial period, the economic basis of the society was mining, and the nature of the process required the use of African labor. Around 1543 the conquistador Sebastián de Belalcázar requested permission from the Spanish Crown to bring one hundred African slaves to work in the mines. Colmenares (1973:187) writes that his purpose for importing the slaves was to continue the Conquest, which by 1580 was going forward with giant steps and contributing to the loss of population among Indians. Although social economists and colonial demographers suggest that mineral extraction and the overall colonial economic life depended on the use of Indian labor, Palacios Preciador (1982), a historian of the slave trade, points out the important role of Africans. He argues that Africans were brought to replace Indian labor and to put a brake on the demographic annihilation they were suffering, and from which they never have recovered. This meant that in New Granada between 1590 and 1640, already 75 percent of the 74 From Sunrise to Sundown workers were of African descent with only 25 percent Indian (Colmenares 1973:240). In 1552 the African population of Cartagena of the Indies was so numerous that it led to measures of control, such as the one ordered by the mayor with the date of August 8: Because there are many Blacks in this city, who are out at night after the curfew at unlawful hours, and they commit many thefts…it is ordered that after the curfew no Black can be in the streets of this city unless going to a specific house accompanied by a Christian. It goes on to say that if the order is not obeyed, the slave will receive fifty lashes of the whip, and the owner will pay a one peso fine (Urueta 1887). After 1580 the enticement of mining led to territorial expansion, which required a labor force to replace the Indians who were more and more recalcitrant. In 1592 the ex-soldier Francisco de Anuncibay made a request to the King to bring two thousand African slaves for the mines in Cauca with the explanation that the state was “very rich in gold if there were workers to mine it. But the Indians continue dying off…” The slaves who disembarked in Cartagena and were ready to be put on the market were taken in small groups up the Cauca and Magdalena Rivers to their destination: Santa Fe, Antioquia, Cali, Popayán, Chocó, and other places of economic activity. Those that arrived sick were taken to houses of the Black Councils or to clinics along the seashore in Cartagena, where they were cared for by other convalescents until they were sent to their work places. Germán Colmenares (1973:188) shows how the geographical frontiers of the colony were expanded as each period of mineral exploitation ended. He points out that the mining districts of Cáceres and Zaragoza had their peak in 1580, in 1590 those of Nechí and Remedios in Antioquia, in 1630 Barbacoas in the Pacific Littoral, and in 1668 Nóvita in the Chocó. This busy history allows us to trace the routes where African people moved along the rivers and roads of the country. Although most of the labor force was concentrated in mining, many slaves also worked in cattle ranching, agriculture, rowing keel boats and canoes, and doing domestic and craft work. Those who came from African communities with more advanced development were desired for activities other than mining. So, many of them worked in bricklaying, carpentry, ironsmithing and metallurgy and in sugar cane mills and other mechanical endeavors. Looking at the cultures of the original groups that arrived during the early periods of the slave trade from Senegal, Dahomey, and Niger, as well as those of the ancient kingdoms of the Congo and Angola, shows that the work skills of these people were well adapted to the European technologies. So, in comparison with Indians, the Spanish preferred Africans. In the Guajira in the middle of the sixteenth century, people began to open grazing lands after Africans arrived to the Peninsula, and cattle ranching spread throughout the rest of the coastal plains. Thanks to the work of the African slaves, cattle lands were developed around Tolú for cattle brought by Alonso Luis de Lugo in 1540 (Reyes Posada 1978:28). By the eighteenth century, economy activities in New Granada were inconceivable without the assistance of Africans. On their shoulders rested the development of mining, agriculture, cattle ranching, crafts, commerce, domestic work, and diving for pearls in the Caribbean (Jaramillo Uribe 1963). For 350 years they gave life to commerce, rowing the keel boats up the great Magdalena River and other tributaries (Friedemann and Arocha 1986:177). In contrast to Indians, Africans as a human group were completely unprotected by the colonial judicial process, even though they played a key part in economic development. The royal decree signed in Aranjuez on May 31, 1789 with the purpose of “protecting” Africans is actually only a pale reflection of the earlier law codes protecting the work of African slaves that had been issued in Portugal, France, Holland, and England (Friedemann and Arocha 1986:15). This 1789 decree was also based on the colonial set of instructions, orders, and rules from Spain about the social and work behavior of Africans. These Black Law Codes, as they were called, combined with the 1789 decree made up a body of law that supported slavery as a social and economic system. This body of law was called the Sun Codes (Ibid.). From early on, all these codes segregated Africans as slaves in agriculture and other field chores. Regulations, such as the one from October 12, 1528 on the island of Santo Domingo, said that, It is prohibited under the most severe penalties that a Black or almost Black person exercise any trade or mechanical profession. These should be reserved for White persons (Quiroz 1943). As if this exclusion were not sufficient, later it is further stated that Blacks and almost Black persons are prohibited from the sciences for five generations. People of color should follow the occupation of their parents…agriculture, retail sale of common fruits, and the practice of carrying or hauling goods, commonly known as donkey tenders (Quiroz 1943:484). An iron-handed discipline administered by owners and overseers and re-enforced with the infamous corporeal punishments were the rails along which the economic order of the colony ran. Stocks, the humiliation of the pillory, lashings, and the martyrdom of mutilation were applied by slave owners, including cutting off the nose or ears, castration, and being branded in different parts of the body. The owners were not satisfied with anything less than teaching a lesson to wayward slaves by painful punishments. There was only one exception. Mutilations were prohibited if they prevented the slave from fulfilling the workday, which began at dawn and ended at sunset (Friedemann and Arocha 1986:16). For three centuries the transgression that caused the most violent punishment was running away. This was a subversive form of resistance that began with the first slaves who arrived with the Conquistadors. It provoked the issuing of a Royal Decree on September 7, 1540 that ordered to not do anything against runaways if they gave up voluntarily, which did not happen (Arrázola 1970:12). In the decade of 1570 the Council of Cartagena of the Indies initiated legislation on the Black runaways in the badlands, and it clearly spelled out the repressive measures to be taken: It is agreed and ordered that no Black man or woman dare desert or abandon the service of their owners under the penalty of…receiving one hundred lashes which should be administered in the following manner: be taken to the pillory of the city in the morning and be placed in it and tied up, with a leather breastplate of jingles tied to the body and in this manner be given the complete one hundred lashes and afterwards leave that Black the entire day tied up…so that the Blacks see him… Of course this legislation was adjusted to that which came from Spain, which during the same time period defined penalties for runaways in the following manner: if a Black man or woman is absent from the service of his owner for four days, they will be placed in the stocks and given fifty lashes, staying there from the time of the lashing until the setting of the sun. If they are more than a league outside the city for more than eight days, they will be given one hundred lashes and placed in leg irons weighing at least twelve pounds with a pole which must be worn uncovered for two months. The leg irons must not be taken off under penalty of two hundred lashes for the first offense and for the second another two hundred lashes and wear the leg irons for four months. If the owner takes off the leg irons, he will incur a penalty of fifty pesos. (Laws of Phillip II: February 11, 1571) The focus of the Crown was on slavery as the primary colonial, economic institution in the seventeenth century. The zeal to control its subversion led to legislation that gave monetary rewards to those who denounced the plans or leaders of any fugitive slave movement. It was punishable to have any commercial relationship with free Africans or to supply agricultural goods to them. The repressive measures arrived to the point of prohibiting free Africans in Cartagena, their working for Whites, carrying arms, wearing sumptuous clothing, or walking in the streets at night. Many slave owners considered the Decree of Aranjuez of 1789 as an attack on their economic interests. In spite of the punitive tone, the “protective” clauses limiting Africans to field labor and excluding them from urban occupations were rarely obeyed and had little effect. Neither could you say that the motivation of these measures had a humanitarian vision appropriate for Africans. A little earlier in 1772 the English had prohibited slaves in England, and in France anti-slavery movements were advocating the abolition of slavery. At the same time, the first winds of the social hurricanes that would create turmoil in Spain and America in the nineteenth century were beginning to be felt. Castes, Intermarriage, and the Process of Whitening Looking for a framework to interpret colonial society using the historic social and economic periods of mining, agriculture, and commerce, Germán Colmenares (1982) points out the origin of social differentiation. Two pillars seem to have supported the order of colonial society. On one hand was the Conquest enterprise that linked Europe, Africa, and the Americas in a commercial network centered around the Atlantic and the Mediterranean basin (1982:229). On the other were the institutionalized privileges of the colonial period that assigned each person a status. Colmenares goes on to say that stratification went out of control when the encomienda went into decline and professional competence in economic activities became important. The claim for a place of honor under this new social arrangement determined the profile of social placement. Once the descendents of the Conquistadors had lost their pre-eminent status, the top of the colonial ladder was shared by miners, large landowners, and merchants, all allied with descendants of the imperial bureaucrats. Under these in a vertically descending order of different degrees were Indians in encomienda, African slaves, and poorly paid peons. This vertical division of a society based on racial origins reflects the ethnic and cultural duality that existed throughout the colonial period and became the foundation of a social order of castes. From the first moment, the confrontation between Europeans, Indians, and African slaves created a polarity. With the circumstances of the eighteenth century, those people born from various genetic mixtures produced a range of varied phenotypes and colors, which were designated as separate castes. At the beginning of the colonial period, the term “caste” was used to identify the tribe or place of origin of the African slaves. So, they were either from the Congo caste, Biafra caste, Lucumí caste, etc., or they could be called bozales if they had recently arrived from Africa and still spoke their native language or languages. They could also be called negros de nación, or Africans by birth. If they were baptized and had some European experience, they were ladinos. Of course, in the early years of the seventeenth century in Cartagena, it was possible to see Africans who had recently arrived, ladinos or bozales, who knew the creole language, African-Portuguese, in addition to their native African languages (Megenny 1982). African descent people A genre of painting, known as casta paintings, developed in various parts of Latin America to portray the various castes born in the Caribbean were called Creoles along with a series of other terms that referred to their physical attributes or defects, as well as the gradation of color in their skin. With time the word caste began to be used in a disrespectful manner to indicate those who were not White, specifically those of genetically mixed origin. Later in the eighteenth century the term was used by the same people of mixed origin to claim their socioeconomic position in that world dominated by Whiteness and Spanishness. Caste terminology gave rise to the terms mulatos, zambos, tercerones, cuarterones, and even quinterones, who were considered White. If a person genetically in the quinterón range had children with a cuarterón, they were called tentenelaire, or with a mulato, they were called saltatrás. To identify a zambo or a free mulato, the word pardo came into use. In Cartagena and in all of New Granada, the chapetónes, or Spaniards, and their children, were given the highest status, as “White” Creoles. In this taxonomy the phenotype was more important than social, economic, or religious conditions. The racial question was of such importance that the degree of mixing between Europeans and the descendents of those who were descendents of Africans with Europeans, or Africans and Indians with Europeans, ran a gamut of terms, and included as well, drawings Mixed European and African. Mixed African and Indian. One-third African. One-fourth African. One-fifth African. Genre paintings registered the outlines of the society of that time (Friedemann and Arocha, 1986). Castes were the social groupings of people categorized by gradations of skin color. They were not White, but most aspired to that status. The reference to “Whiteness” in the classifications of tercerones, cuarterones, or quinterones and the absence of it in the case of the zambo, indio, or negro is explicit. This castebased society was constructed by the process of mixing between groups, and the ideal was to be White or to be transformed into White. An ideology of becoming White (i.e. blanqueamiento) that was implicit in this society was a socio-genetic process. Passing from one caste to another required several generations with the concomitant bad experiences. In Santa Fé de Bogotá in 1787, for example, Don Ignacio de Salazar who “came from honorable people, clean of any trace of Guinea” (i.e. Africa) made a legal complaint against his own son, Juan Antonio, for having secretly married a young woman, Salvadora Espinosa, who was a mulata. The father understood that this marriage would be socially damaging to himself and to the social future of his daughters who “were afraid that they would not be able to find a husband of their own social level” (AHNC, Misc.). The process of racial mixing was not homogeneous in the colonial period or in the years following the abolition of slavery. Moreover, the pull of economic activities in different regions resulted in an unequal geographic distribution of Indians, Africans, and Europeans, which was consolidated in processes of ethnic territoriality. The anthropologist Peter Wade (1991:41-68) refers to this process in terms of a “racial regionalization”. Essentially following the model proposed by Colmenares (1982), it can be observed that the waves of gold discoveries pulled crews of African slaves to different regions in Antioquia and later to the Pacific Littoral. Early on, the number of Europeans in relation to Africans and the style of colonization (Parsons 1979) facilitated an active fusion between the groups. That resulted in phenotypes and social definitions that submerged the identity of Africans and Indians into regional identities in the new nation. Regional identities, such as “Antioquianess” , are the political expressions of ethnicity based on regionalism. In the Pacific Littoral, the scarcity of Whites and the demographic collapse of the Indians and the subsequent migration of the Indian survivors out of the Littoral into the headwaters of the rivers created a vacuum that was filled by African populations. Gradually, the Indian face of the Pacific Littoral changed as the population of the region shifted to predominantly African descent. In the valley of the Cauca River in the seventeenth century, the haciendas of sugar cane and cattle raising demanded large numbers of slaves as manual labor. This demand was frequently met by slave crews coming from the mines in the Pacific Littoral. After abolition the descendents of these workers settled in family farms along the borders of the haciendas, and later some grew into towns, such as Villarica, that have maintained their African ethnicity up to the present. People from this region are known for ingenuity and entrepreneurial skills. The present day migration into the cities of Cali and Popayán is coming from these family farms and the sugar cane proletariat that grew out of this past. In the lands of the Atlantic Coast, the evolution of an economy of grand estates or haciendas with cattle raising and agriculture (Fals Borda 1984:69) existed with a diversity of poor White workers, ranging from settlers and contract workers to tenant farmers. Their presence along with African slaves, freemen, and escaped slaves, who were primarily responsible for the creation of cattle ranching, facilitated an easy mixing of the races. Although there are concentrated pockets of Afro-Colombian population, it can be argued that the mixing of races on the Atlantic Coast has come closest to the ideal of a tri-ethnic racial mixture with Africans, Indians, and Europeans having lost their specific coloring and facial features as they have evolved into a unique local mixture, called costeño. Of course, as Peter Wade (1991) says, racial mixing in Colombia is always mitigated by the hierarchy of race and color, which has been strongly influenced by the social class pyramid with Africans and Indians at the bottom and Whites at the top. During the colonial period, Whites vigorously claimed and took advantage of the social and economic privileges granted to them by their status in the towns and cities where racial mixing was occurring. To be a mulatto had advantages in comparison to being African because it showed some mixture with a European. But, to be called mulato or zambo was denigrating and offensive. So, those who thought that they had made some progress toward being White claimed recognition of it. Numerous suits were filed in which a person, who considered himself White, defended himself from the accusation of another that he was mulatto or zambo. As an example, some were able to prove the cleanness of their bloodline (i.e. limpieza de sangre) through testimonies that they were neither impregnated with African or Indian blood. In this social order of castes, privileges and obligations were established. Those who had clean bloodlines did the work of nobles, such as judicial practice, public offices, and the Church. In other words, the bureaucracy was work of nobles. All manual work was ignoble labor appropriate for dark skinned people, mixed bloods, and other castes (Jaramillo Uribe 1969). In the government of Popayán in the eighteenth century, the darker skinned peoples were known with the name of plebeians. They were the merchants who came to the corrals of the large estates to buy cattle to be made into salted beef and sold to supply the mines. They were called mountain-men, hunters, or mixed bloods, and they dressed with woolen trousers or with a cotton suit, which consisted of a jacket and trousers of yellow or blue. In this context, the form of dressing, the form of greeting, and the place of sitting for prayers in the Church were clear social markers of caste. The landowner and boss, for example, used loose silk cassocks with short sleeves that came out over the shoulders, a large loose fitting chintz shirt of fine cotton. On the hacienda men slaves dressed in wide, short-legged pants made of canvas that came from Quito, a coarse woolen cloak or poncho, and a straw hat with no shirt. The women were wrapped from the waist down with a piece of flannel from Pasto and the same cloth draped across one shoulder for a blouse. They covered their head with cloth cap of wool or flannel made of various colors (Friedemann and Arocha 1986:186-253). Nevertheless, the overwhelming number of unions between people of different castes led to a mixing of races that emphasized the culture of Whiteness, which was understood as the ideal path to obtain places of honor within that society dominated by creole Whites. With time the process of “whitening” would become stronger. During the Republican period groups of Afro-Colombians turned away from things African and toward Whiteness with the purpose of having a more significant participation in the life of Colombia. The mixing of races had been praised as a democratic means of reaching equality, but it was transformed into a useful mechanism to ignore diversity and the rights associated with historical and cultural identity. Palenques or The Early Period of Liberty The rebels or runaway slaves in Colombia that rose up against slavery and set up palenques. Palenque means a palisaded town, and these were the communities runaway slaves built. In the earliest period of resistance, the bozales, or recently arrived Africans, were the first to form small bands and flee into the wilderness, and they were called Black zapacos (Arrázola 1970:21). They fled from jails, worked in mines, haciendas or estates, and domestic service and took provisions, spears, and arrows from Indians that they encountered on the way. They kidnapped Indian women and occasionally White women, to solve the imbalance of sexes caused by the slave trade rule of shipping three men for every woman. In 1603 Gerónimo de Suazo, Governor of Cartagena, facing an imminent attack by the Palenque of La Matuna led by Benkos Bioho, signed a peace agreement to what he called the “War of the Runaway Slaves”. The historian Donaldo Bossa Herazo called the period the century of terror in Cartagena de Indias (1971). In that period the subversion became so serious that in 1691 the King of Spain issued a decree on August 23 in which he annulled an earlier one from May 3, 1688 that ordered the conquest of the palenques of Montes de María where people had taken up arms. This cancellation of the earlier decree plus the request of the King to the slave owners to give up their claims as a way of solving the problem was nothing more than an armistice and a granting of freedom to the palenques. In addition to granting them freedom, the decree confirmed their ownership of the lands they occupied. The word zapar is to mine, a common occupation of African slaves. In 1970 the historian Roberto Arrázola wrote about the actions of the counter-insurgency and the persecution of the Black rebels by the Spanish authorities. The title of his book could not have expressed better the essence of this uprising: Palenque: primer pueblo libre de América (Palenque: The First Free Town in America). Documents show that palenques existed in the areas of Cartagena, Santa Marta, Riohacha, and the peninsula of the Guajira from very early in the colonial period. There is also evidence that they took refuge among the Guajiro Indians, leaving an imprint on their culture of elements that can be considered African (Wilbert 1976). Maps showing the locations of these palenques between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries indicate a large number of them in the territory of present day Colombia. However, few were able to maintain control over their land permanently (Friedemann y Patiño 1983). This impermanence is explained by the continuous siege of their communities by the Spanish militias, and by their own practice of repeatedly escaping to other more remote areas when attacked. Some people who escaped capture when palenques were attacked sought refuge with other palisaded communities. So, it is possible that many of these rebels lived in various palenques during their lifetime. Also, there must have been others, who lived for years as free people but were captured, never to be able to return to that freedom again. Unfortunately, the current state of research on the environment of the palenques in Colombia cannot give an estimate about the number of people in them, neither at any given moment nor in the three centuries that they existed. It is possible to track the overall movement of African populations from region to region in this period. This list of palenques known today only includes those that were documented because they had conflict with the Spanish militias or information was given about them by owners of haciendas or mines. Still to be identified are those that were not documented and those whose documentation has yet to be discovered in the files and folders of the archives. Many of the known names of the palenques are of Spanish origin. That indicates that we do not know the names that the palenqueros (members of the palenques) used to identify them. This situation points out the problem of invisibility that the historiography of Blacks in Colombia has suffered. There is a profound lack of data about the daily life of the people, not only in the palenques, which is understandable, but also about the life of the slaves in the mines, haciendas, and domestic service. The chroniclers and writers of that time period recorded little other than economic data about values and production. The same did not happen with the Indians, whose work patterns, rituals, and even social organization were recorded in detail. Fortunately, some aspects of the daily life of these palenques can be reconstructed. For an attempt at historical reconstruction of the palenque and its social organization, as well as some of its cultural traits, one has to turn to the anthropological research on the Palenque of San Basilio, the community located near Cartagena. Its people are descended from old palenques, and previously they must have been members of other such towns in the region. The first documented reference to San Basilio appears in 1713 (Escalante 1954, Arrásola 1970, Friedemann 1979). The Catholic name was given to the village by the Archbishop of Cartagena, named Casiani, who served as an intermediary between the Chief of the Palenques and the Governor of Cartagena in 1713 when a peace treaty was signed with the rebels. They were granted the land where they were living and permission to set up their own government. In recent linguistic research, the name of the palenque before the Archbishop arrived seems to have been Guarumá (Schwegler 1990). The area of the original settlement is also different although it is located nearby the present day settlement. All of this points out the necessity of using archaeological research, which still has not even begun in the case of the African Diaspora. The study of the social organization of the Palenque of San Basilio (Friedemann 1979, 1983) made it possible to describe the basic outline of how the town functioned as a guerilla organization in colonial times. The cuagro, an age group that is half male and half female, continues to exist in the community that also has two halves, and it seems to come from the old palenque. The cuagro became the keystone to the puzzle. It must have originated as a response to the situation of constant struggle faced by these towns, which required assiduous training, availability, and disciplined order. This was an organization similar to that of other societies where war is a principal preoccupation for survival (Stewart 1977, Kuper 1964, Gulliver 1953). The comparison of some of the current aspects of the economic, social, and ritual organization in Palenque of San Basilio combined with accessible historical data allows us to reconstruct some evolution of this town. The history of rebellions in the palenques, and in particular that of San Basilio, where members of other scattered towns took refuge at the beginning of the nineteenth century, kept them relatively isolated from the currents of sociocultural whitening. This gave the community the character of an ethnic and cultural sanctuary where traces of African life could be maintained. In speech, for example, linguistic research demonstrates that the language in the Palenque of San Basilio is not only clearly distinct from Spanish, but it has continued the use of a large number of African terms clearly drawn from Bantu speaking groups, especially the Kikongo and Kimbundu, the languages with the most clear influence on Palenque (Del Castillo 1984, Schwegler 1990, De Granda 1968, 1973, Patiño Roselli 1983). More than that, in this creole language based on Spanish, there are also Portuguese elements (Megenney 1982), testimony to the slave trade by the Portuguese and who were shipping slaves even before the discovery of America. The location of the community behind the María Mountains protected its people from relentless discrimination, but it also permitted the survival not only of language but other important rituals such as funerals and initiation practices for the cuagros. In 1974 the initiation practices were still celebrated in what could be considered war games or rituals and permitted the study of the reflection of guerilla society in the colonial period. The cuagro was the elaboration of a social system that free Africans developed against the slave system. It is also a testimony to the African Diaspora in Colombia and of the resistance and creativity of Africans as new inhabitants of the Americas. 5 Creating Afro-Colombian Culture A study of daily life is required to understand the development of African-derived cultures in the various environments where they were obligated to begin their American history. As Colmenares points out (1979:60), the commerce in slaves did not depend completely on the large traders. Many were sold in Cartagena one or two at a time, and they were employed in domestic service, as load bearers along overland trade routes, in haciendas, and rowing along the Magdalena and Cauca Rivers. In the canoes they rowed were slaves on their way to the markets in Popayán, destined to work in the Pacific Littoral. As a beginning to understand their lives, we can follow the traces of the crews of miners since these work groups are the ones that have left more documentary material for historical analysis. Mines, Family Trees, and Rivers of Gold In 1620 Indians and Africans under the command of conquistadores or “pacifiers”, who were still looking for El Dorado, cleared trails into the Telembí, Patía, and Güelmambí Rivers in the Pacific Littoral. They were looking for promising places for mining in these gold-bearing jungles (Friedemann and Arocha 1986:273). In the Chocó region of the Littoral, the documents show that in 1670 independent prospectors began arriving with small crews of African miners. Even though the region had been described as an abyss and a horror of mountains, rivers, and quagmires, the Spanish were attracted by the possibility of food from fish, mollusks, and manatees that lived in the rivers. Also, deer, tapir, and wild boar fed near these waters (Sharp 1976:13). The miners’ camps were set up along these rivers: Santa María del Puerto that later became Barbacoas along the Telembí, Quibdó (Citará) and Lloró on the banks of the Atrato, and Nóvita and Tadó along the San Juan River. The routes of these expeditions came from the north along the Atrato River, then by land through Antioquia and the Urrao Valley. From the south they came from Buenaventura looking for the San Juan River. Inland they came from Cartagena to Popayán, Cali, and Cartago and then through the passes in the western cordillera to the Littoral (Friedemann and Arocha 1986). A mining crew had to consist of at least five slaves so that the person who aspired to be the mine owner and crew chief could receive the concession of one or more mines and the source of water needed in the mining process (Colmenares 1979:73). In 1711 the crews in the Chocó ranged in size from five workers to one hundred, and by 1759 they could have as many as five hundred slaves (Jaramillo Uribe 1963:18, Colmenares 1979:74). The first work crews were composed only of men, but as the mining settlements became more established, women began to arrive, yet for decades women continued to be scarce in these settlements. In the chain of command from the master to the slave, the mine owner and crew captain or chief could live as a rich absentee landlord in one of the principal cities, such as Popayán or Cali. He employed a mine administrator, either a White of low circumstances or a mulatto, who lived in the mining settlement and was the most important person in the community. Under him was the crew captain, who was Black and in charge of crew discipline. He also distributed the food and collected the gold that the workers found, which he turned over to the Administrator. The crew captain generally arrived to the mining settlement accompanied by a woman slave, frequently his mistress or concubine. Over time the status of this woman gained additional bonds as she became the mother of children of different workers in the crew. The study by Mario Diego Romero (1991) examines the role of the first women who joined these work crews as cooks and administrators of supplies. He follows their evolution in the social fabric until they became the core of matrifocal families. The work crew that began as an economic unit for the mine owner took on another meaning for the slave miners who created a social and genetic kinship system in their own terms. The “mines” along the rivers of the Pacific Littoral were actually placer mining operations in which the slave miners panned for gold in water that was directed through terraces along the rivers. Along the same line, Colmenares (1979) points out that in its historical development the work crew was made of several generations in some instances. These groups do not seem to have been broken up or dismembered to the point to have caused a loss of identity with one owner or a series of owners from the same family. Even though daily life was sometimes interrupted by the sale of a person or division of a crew, the members of a work crew maintained more or less continuous ties with each other in this economic complex of mines and haciendas. The supplying of food for the workers in the production of metal at the mines led to a continual movement of slaves between the mines on the coast and the agricultural areas in the interior. The mine workers were called “mine pieces” (piezas de minas) and the inland farm workers were called “clearing pieces” (piezas de roza). There were interchanges and even loans of workers between the two areas. Although interchanges and loans occurred, eventually the owners made sure that their workers came back to their original work crew. Women were important, and there were cases of women who were mine captains. According to Romero (1990:106), the family groups in this region usually traced their origins to a woman, either a mother or grandmother, and this is in keeping with contemporary family structure described above. The gold that was produced by the work crews was turned into the administrator and ultimately to the owner of the mine. After the mining of the slaves was completed, Indians and free Blacks were permitted to rework their debris (mazamora or crumbs) . Whatever they could recover was their property, and they were known as mazamorreros (literally the crumbers). It is possible that some of the free Blacks may have stopped following the itinerant work crews of colonial mining and stayed in one place to practice placer mining, creating the social system that has arrived to the present with the name of troncos or trunks (Friedemann 1974, 1985a). On the other hand, there was economic mobility on the work crews where the crew captain, given his overseer position, could accumulate some gold, and it was also permitted for him to work on his own on holidays. In the areas of rich deposits this probably meant that he could buy his freedom more quickly (West 1952:89-90). When a person brought their freedom, that created a position for a new slave in the work crew, and for his part he could establish himself as a free itinerant mazamorrero, or he could settle in one place to become part of the developing trunk line of a family. The trunk lines of families that formed around the work crews must have been a model for an alternate lifestyle for those Africans who found themselves free after the abolition of the laws of slavery in 1851. Many refused to stay as peons working for others on the haciendas or in the mines, and they started an exodus In Colombia mazamora is a thick soup made of crumbled corn kernels, and its texture is akin to the mushy earth left over from panning for gold that was done in this region. This refers to the lines of descent as stems or trunks of the family forming trunk lines of families along the rivers. This is how anthropological research in the decade of the 1970’s revealed trunk lines of family units among the gold miners in the area of Barbacoas and judging from the data of other research, they also exist in other areas of the gold-bearing forests along the coasts of Cauca and the Chocó (Friedemann 1989, Villa 1985, Friedemann and Briceño 1990). These family trunk lines are called ramages in the anthropological literature. They are cognate groups of consanguineal kin who can trace their lineage through maternal and paternal lines to an ancestor, man or woman, who founded the family group. Whoever belongs to one of these trunk lines, or ramages, in the Pacific Littoral has work and inheritance rights to the lands of the mine and the cultivated gardens that were originally claimed as property by the founder of the line (Friedemann 1974, 1985a). Each trunk line is composed of a group of relatives who have latent or active rights to work and inheritance of the mine, either through their mother or father. So, a man would prefer to not marry a woman from his own ramage because the couple would have the right to work the lands of only one family trunk line and making it impossible for them to move along the rivers and work other lands. The family trunk lines function as social and economic units called “mines”. The mine is made up of the dispersed village where the miners live, the gardens or cultivated areas, the mine cut (i.e. in the river terraces) of each individual nuclear family, and the communal mine cut of the entire descent group, where the panning for gold occurs. The members of each family live and work in the mining unit of their ramage or trunk line. The men clean the land, cut wood to built houses and canoes, and do the heavy work in the mine cut. The women and children go to the gardens and cut bananas and sugar cane from which they extract brown sugar using hand-powered presses. They also help in the family mines and the communal mines where they continue to work under the direction of a Captain, who is responsible for dividing up what is produced in each day’s work. The family trunk line has shaped the livelihood of Afro-Colombian groups both socially and culturally. It also affects whether people will leave the jungle, the river, and the kin group when the gold runs out, the river floods, or other emergencies arise. Although the trunk organization of the family has its roots in the slave work crews and the old groups of mazamorreros, it continues to provide a solution for contemporary African descent groups, even at the end of the twentieth century, to the conditions of social, ethnic, and economic discrimination, as well as the environmental uncertainty of the Pacific Littoral (Arocha 1991). The working conditions in the Pacific Littoral during the centuries of colonial rule are comparable to the recent period, as we enter a new century. Generation after generation of men and women have been working in this tropical rain forest environment where the wheel as a mechanical element, as technology, or as transportation has not found a place. As the earth is dug out of the river terrace in the slice mining process, the heavy stones are moved away along chains of men and women who pass them hand to hand. Accidents are constant, and the pain experienced by the people who stand for long hours in the water or bent over with legs and knees straight could be compared to the emotions registered in the inventories of slaves in the mines. Norman Whitten (1974) has called the Black inhabitants of the Littoral as pioneers who settled in four social and cultural niches: the dispersed rural settlements, compact villages, towns and cities. Their livelihood continues to be one of a fluctuating economy with boom and bust cycles, based on the extraction of gold, wood, mangrove, bananas, fish, rubber, ivory nut, coconut, and medicinal plants for both foreign and national speculators. Their rural, tropical rain forest life barely permits a subsistence level life based on mining, cultivation of fruits, sugar cane, and rice, hunting, and fishing in the rivers and mangrove swamps. The other possibility is to take the peonage route of being a worker with one of the national or international companies cutting and dragging trunks of trees to the sawmills. They can also be “independent” fishermen supplying the seafood industry or working in the fish packing lines on the docks. It must be repeated that all have been socialized from childhood to work in the rain forest or as peons and eventually proletarians either in the ports or in the cities. Among groups of African descent people in the Littoral, historically and in the present, kinship has been managed as an effective social resource. If a miner from the rain forest is far from his own village and needs help in a port town, he looks for someone from the trunk line of his family, and in this way activates the reciprocal relationship due to a family member. Whitten (1969:235) shows how mobility in towns and cities along the Littoral occurs through the network of a family organization that he defines as “broken ramages”. When this is combined with the finding of family trunk lines or ramages in the gold-bearing areas of the tropical rain forest, it suggests a process of social evolution. This interplay between genealogy and kinship plays an important role in managing the interactions between urban and rural groups in a society of Afro-Colombians and mixed-bloods, called mestizos or in today’s polite terminology “the brown ones”. The dominant society continues to point out those who are “Black”, as well as those who have any visual trace of African origin. Haciendas and Lineages in New Lands In 1617 Jacinto de Arboleda arrived to Colombia after first disembarking in Portobelo. He was a businessman, and he founded a family that would amass an enormous fortune in mines, slaves, lands, cattle, and social power. Arboleda started gold mining with a crew of Black slaves, first in Anserma and later in Caloto in the Cauca River valley. Seventy years later in 1688, the Arboleda family owned among other properties, the Hacienda La Bolsa in the agriculturally rich Cauca Valley and mines in the headwaters of the Timbiquí and the Micay Rivers in the Cauca and Chocó sections of the Pacific Littoral (Colmenares 1979:81). In 1777 Francisco Antonio Arboleda purchased another hacienda, called the Japio, in the same region as La Bolsa, and the slaves on these two haciendas supplied foodstuffs and labor for the mines in the Chocó and the Pacific Littoral. Mateo Mina (1979) called this a “mining empire” because it simultaneously owned mines and the haciendas that supplied them and provided slaves for both. After a few generations, the Arboleda, as well as the Mosquera, Bonilla, Hurtado, and Prieto had formed lineages, all with similar social and economic histories. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the members of these lineages had formed a mining elite of Gentlemen through intermarriage, each with interests in Caloto and the Chocó (Colmenares 1979:152). The Mosquera family, which was formed through the encomienda system, and from the sixteenth century remained on the social stage throughout various social venues and colonial economies over the centuries. Colmenares (1979:146) says that “they exemplify the continuity between the businesses of encomiendas to big land owners and mining”. The hacienda system that developed out of these grants of land to the favored few like the Mosqueras began in an older system known as the “field hacienda”, The encomienda system consisted of large land grants made by the Spanish Crown to a few individuals who were responsible for defeating the Indian occupants and then collecting tribute for the Crown from them. The people who received these grants had virtually uncontrolled power over the Indians and their territory, and some used that power to accumulate enormous fortunes and used the labor of Indians to produce corn and wheat. By the eighteenth century when gold production increased, the mine owners bought large extensions of land that they dedicated to raising cattle brought from the Patía River valley and Neiva. Holdings like these were known as frontier landed estates (Colmenares 1979:201). Cattle were free ranging, and the number of workers was as limited as their tools. As mining grew in intensity, more workers were required in the mines, which in turn required an increase in agricultural production. This led to the development of the sugar cane haciendas where the planting of sugar cane was combined with rice and beans. Molasses was prepared from sugar cane, and cattle were raised for the meat supply. On this type of hacienda, Black slave labor did everything, and they were moved, as necessary, back and forward between the mines and the haciendas. The emergence of the sugar cane hacienda did not imply the disappearance of the two other types of haciendas. On the contrary, these three types of haciendas existed until the nineteenth century (Colmenares 1979:202). Of course, it does not need to be emphasized that throughout this long colonial period, mining was the economic mainstay that sustained both agricultural and commercial activities, and African slave labor was the dominant feature of the entire economic complex. In the Cauca River Valley, as in other places, Afro- Colombians rarely had land of their own. When it was possible, those who had purchased their freedom occupied unused land and began to cultivate it. Palisaded towns, such as El Castigo in the lands to the west of the Patía, was another way to own land. The laws abolishing slavery in 1851 did not give land or tools to the ex-slaves. On the contrary, they authorized the state purchase of slaves from the owners of the landed estates, haciendas and mines to indemnify them. That made the slaves unlanded peons, forcing them back into work on the haciendas and mines of their old owners (Friedemann 1976). In reaction to the abolition of slavery, there were mechanisms to control the labor of Afro-Colombians. This is where we find Sergio Arboleda, who in 1853 enrolled the ex-slaves to work in a sharecropping system in which they paid the hacienda in crops and money (Mina 1975:54). Arboleda permitted them to settle in the wooded boundary areas of the hacienda where they were to convert forests into agricultural lands. They were also required to work ten days each month in the cultivation of sugar cane, bananas, and cacao for the Hacienda La Bolsa. In the small plots permitted to these Afro-Colombian families, they planted yucca, arracacha, corn, sugar cane, cacao, and bananas. After they had planted the hacienda with 15,000 cacao trees, twenty banana groves and fifty lots of sugar cane, there was less need for them. Arboleda decided to charge them cash for each fanegada an ex-slave family occupied (Mina 1975:55). So, the old barricades of slavery only changed form. To leave the hacienda the workers had to ask permission, A fanegada is approximately 1.59 acres. They had to give an account to the hacienda of how they used their money, and they were permitted very few celebrations even in their own community. Because of those controls, many left the hacienda and settled in the unoccupied lands along the Palo River where a palenque had previously existed, and they cleared and cultivated the land (Friedemann and Arocha 1986:206). When shortages of labor began to occur and the old owners complained, mechanisms were created to coerce the ex-slaves back into the labor force. The chiefs of police had the legal power to force any of the so-called “unemployed” persons to work on the haciendas. The law went even further to permit the hacienda owner to whip a rebellious worker and to deny him food. This was still happening in 1875, twenty-five years after the abolition of slavery. By the end of the nineteenth century, land ownership in the Cauca Valley was a tangle of litigation, purchases, transfers and de facto occupation of “unoccupied” lands according to Rolf Knight (l972). At the beginning of the sugar cane mills in 1890, La Manuelita mill had one hundred Afro-Colombian families working in the cane fields. They were poor workers, descended from slaves on the old haciendas who had lived there for many generations. As the growth in capital investment, mechanization of the sugar cane mills and the expansion of land holdings transformed the mills into plantations (Friedemann 1976:155), the workers became a proletariat. Only a few managed to own a plot of land, even though all were originally from that region. By the decade of the 1970’s, the mills had become an agricultural industry characterized by monopolizing the land, owning even the plots formerly owned by the descendants of the slaves around the borders of the old haciendas. Thousands of acres of land were planted in sugar cane in the Cauca Valley (Mina 1975). Other alternatives for the Afro-Colombian peasant farmer, who had lost his or her traditional farm of cacao, coffee, banana, fruit trees, and tomatoes, was to become a part of the programs of rural development for the people without land (Friedemann 1976:164). Some started craft industries, such as making roof tiles, excavating the clay from deposits around their settlements, but many eventually migrated to join the urban poor in cities in the Cauca Valley and neighboring areas (Friedemann and Arocha 1986). 6 Contributions to National Culture The Catholic Church arrived to America along with a legislative system and a military that formed a solid mechanism for social and political domination and cultural change. This system covered all the territories of New Granada, or what today is Colombia. Nevertheless, the social, natural, and supernatural world-views in the villages, towns and cities inhabited by Africans and their descendents were not Western, nor were they homogeneous. African Roots and Cultural Visions In certain regions of Colombia, there are clusters of people who are phenotypically African and who are known for activities derived from African cultures. Yet, there are other non-Black regional groups that were also influenced by African cultural traditions. So, when reference is made to African cultural influences, recognition is being given to the African roots that helped shape both Black and non-Black societies. So, how can this mixture of a third root, as the African cultural component has been called, be explained in American societies? The existence of traces of African culture have been mentioned in earlier writings. The first two roots being Indian and Spanish. They were evidenced in memories, feelings, smells, esthetic forms, colors, harmony, the primary materials for the ethnogenesis of African culture (Friedemann 1988, 1989). The complex dynamic of creativity and transformation within African traditions must be emphasized, along with the survival and syncretism of European and Indian elements (Friedemann and Arocha 1986:36). Referring to African roots, it is necessary to recognize the ethnic reintegration that occurred with the slaves from the sixteenth century onwards during the slave trade when people of the same or similar origins met each other in places different from their normal life in Africa (Friedemann and Patiño 1983, Friedemann and Arocha 1986). These processes of ethnic reintegration are marked by the beginning of new Afro-American cultural systems that probably began as soon as the first victims were assembled in the slave factories along the coasts of Africa. The interethnic dynamic of these beginnings has been discussed by Mintz and Price (1976) in relation to the African Diaspora. Similar processes have been studied by Bonfil Batalla (1987) among African cultures, and he formulated a theoretical explanation about cultural control over the formation of ethnic group differentiation. He has named this process of interethnic relations as ethnogenesis. The tactic of breaking down the prisoners socially and culturally began in the factories using a pattern of tribal and regional heterogeneity for the purpose of establishing commercial dominance by isolating the slaves as individuals. To what extent they were successful in this is questionable, given the homogeneity of conditions shared among slaves that must have elicited similar reactions. With their lives threatened, families destroyed, land lost, and submerged in the uncertainty between life and death, the first gesture of shared compassion between slaves would have become a thread of communication from which they wove the fabric of the new shared society and culture (Mintz and Price 1976:27). The importance of these moments of ethnogenesis should be understood in reference to the cultural condition of the group. Africans caught in the slave trade arrived naked of their traditional dress, weapons and tools, and they were dispossessed of their musical instruments and earthly goods. Through their mental efforts they retained the images of their deities, the memories of the stories of their grandparents, rhythms of the songs and poetry, and their ethical, social, and technological knowledge. The idea that the cultural baggage of the Africans was destroyed can be discarded. What we have to explore is how the icons and symbolic representations, called traces of Africa here, came to exist in the new systems of Black cultures in the Americas (Torres 1989, Arocha 1989, Ascensio 1990). The proposal would be to understand the process of cultural control (Bonfil Batalla 1987), grammatical and cognitive elements in terms of Mintz and Price (1976), and iconography referencing of the African cultures (Bateson 1972). To what extent did these remain in the consciousness or unconsciousness of those who carried the new African cultures across the geographical expanses of the Americas to reappear in expressions, gestures, or religious/social theater, such as festivals for saints, Carnivals, wakes, funeral rituals, or aquatic dances in honor of sacred figures? The historical information indicates how the Black Councils in Cartagena of the Indies were initially clinics, but they were transformed into circles of resistance to the dominant society and refuges of Africanness. They were humid and muddy barracks located at the edge of the sea, and they served as asylum for those Africans who got off the slave ships unable to walk and sometimes in the throes of death. There, whoever recovered began to care for the newly sick ones who arrived. The relief of these unfortunate souls was not only physical because the tragedy was also cultural, and the discovery of a way of communicating must have been of paramount importance. In addition to iconography, the drum became the first lingua franca in these Councils. First, it announced death. Later, it was used to bring together both slaves and free Blacks for diverse activities, including running away. These Councils were the early stages for the genesis of the African cultural system in mainland Colombia. It was not the same on the islands of San Andres and Providence in the Caribbean, which were under English control. As in other Caribbean islands, the drum was prohibited because it was considered to be an instrument that called up the power of spirits (Perea Escobar 1989:58). When the Councils stopped serving as clinics for recuperation, two hospitals in Cartagena began to receive the sick slaves, namely San Lázaro and San Sebastian. New “nations” Councils began to appear in various parts of Cartagena, and they functioned like fraternal orders, similar to the ones that since the twelfth century in Spain had protected African “nations” and other groups. Although various Catholic saints were incorporated into their rituals, their function as a cultural refuge always continued. Both the clinic Councils and the nations Councils were centers of reclamation and reaffirmation of linguistic values and motor behaviors, as well as images, music and food (Friedemann 1988). Traces of Africanness and Emblems of Nationality The importance of the Black Councils as refuges of Africanness in Colombia is clearly obvious when musical expression, dance and the linguistics of Black culture are studied. In the search for traces of Africa, the areas of music, dance, and speech are the most reliable, as may be expected. The study of the contemporary Carnival in Barranquilla, Santa Marta and Ciénaga, cities along the Caribbean coast, as well as riverine ports along the Magdalena River, has permitted the identification in that ritual of a history that goes back to the time of the Councils (Friedemann 1985). The old African tribal rivalries, which were encouraged by the colonial slave society, were reconstructed in the identity of Councils in Cartagena reflecting African memory, Carabalí, Mina, Mandinga, Congo, Arará (Escalante 1954:223). These various identities were also established in Barranquilla where they are manifest in the Congos, the men’s dance in the Carnival. The dance has come down to the present day as a ritual of warriors decked out in resplendent colors, enormous headdresses with streamers covered with symbolic forms. The dance of each group is marked by the defiance of swords that challenge the dominant rhythm of the drumming. The memory of the jungle and grassland environments of Africa is fused with the tropical environment of South America and expressed in swarms of dancers in animal masks, tigers, monkeys, birds, dogs, bulls and insects. They define the Congos, the dance of allegorical battles in which dancers defend the territories of their neighborhoods, acted out as street theater in parades through the center of the city. With the passage of years and the importance of defining regional identities in the country, the Carnival has become to represent not only the African influence in the Caribbean coast of Colombia, but it has been also adopted as one of the symbols of Colombian national culture. Another esthetic expression from the Black cultures of the Caribbean coast of Colombia that have traces of African influence can be seen in costeño (or coastal) music (González Henríquez 1989:3). This music can be found in different social contexts as a manifestation of Colombian culture and personality. Some of these musical styles are the cumbia, bullerengue, chandé, Amapalé, abozado, gaita, porro tapao, vallenato, cantos de zafra, vaquería and cantos del Lumbalú (Abadía Morales 1977). The cumbia is a dance between men and women and one of the regional symbols of Black culture that has been adopted as an icon of national culture. It made its first appearance in the context of slavery in Cartagena (D. Zapata 1962:187-204). For the Spanish religious festival of the Candelaria, Hombres y mujeres en gran ruedo, pareados, Men and women paired in a grand circle Pero sueltos, sin darles las manos, dando But separate, not holding hands, Vueltas alrededor de los tamborileros, las Making turns around the drummers, Mujeres enflorada la cabeza con profusion, The women with profusely flowered heads Lustroso el pelo a fuerza de sebo y empapadas Hair gleaming with grease and soaked En agua de azahar, balanceándose en In orange blossom water, balancing herself with Cadencia muy erguidas, mientras el hombre ya A proud cadence while the man is already Haciendo piruetas dando brincos, ya luciendo Making pirouettes and leaps, showing off Su destreza en la cabriola, todo al compas… His skill with the nimble leap, all to the beat… Bailaban a cielo descubierto al son del They danced under the open sky to the sound, Atronador tambor africano… The thunder of the African drum… (Posada Gutiérrez 1929) Posada gives another description of the dances from the Atlantic Coast region. Los indios también tomaban parte en las The Indians also took part in the Fiestas bailando al son de sus gaitas, especie de Fiestas dancing to the sound of their pipes, a kind of Flauta a manera de zampoña, los hombres y Flute like a rustic flute, the men and Mujeres de dos en dos se daban las manos en la Women, two by two, holding hands in the Rueda, teniendo a los gaiteros en el centro, y ya Circle with the pipers in the center and now Se enfrentaban las parejas, ya se soltaban y The couples turned face to face, now turned loose and Volvían a asirse, golpeando al compas el suelo Again held hands, feet hitting the ground Con los pies…sin broncos ni cabriolas… With the beat…without jumps or leaps… (Posada Gutiérrez, Ibid.) With the passage of time, the features of the cumbia were defined. The musicians sat to play on raised stages, and the Blacks, mestizos and mulattos all enjoyed the fiestas. For many years in Barranquilla before the popular dances were integrated into the Carnival, dance groups used to get together in traditional neighborhoods like Rebolo to dance in places called cumbiambas. According to Abadía Morales (1977:205), this term shortens down to cumbia which is also related to the term cumbancha whose root kumba comes from Mandinga tribe in West Africa, and it is also used in the Congo where the king was called King of the Cumba. Among the people of the Congos the word cumba means shouting, joy, or commotion, and the related term nkumbi means drum (Ortiz 1985:184). Controversy about the meaning of cumbia has not been lacking, especially since it has become the national symbol of esthetic identity. The Indian tradition is reclaimed in the flutes and the Spanish tradition in the dress. Aquiles Escalante (1964:148) says that the authentic cumbia is not sung, and the authentic instrumentation consists of a bass drum, two congastyle drums, a guache, maraca, and flute. The drums and the guache are of African origin. The latter instrument is a tin cylinder with holes and filled with seeds. The maracas are of Caribbean origin, and the flutes are from Indian traditions. Abadía Morales (1977) describes the cumbia as predominantly African and mulatto, saying that although the melody is from the traditional Indian wooden flutes, it is dominated by the rhythm from the African drums. The vallenato is a song of African origins with its roots in the work songs from the cattle haciendas and rowboats of the colonial period (Quiroz 1983). Cowboy songs are probably as old as cattle herding itself, and these narrate the work of the slaves who had to herd them and care for them from the beginning of Spanish presence in Colombia. Ciro Quiroz (Ibid.) has collected old songs, nostalgic of cattle herding, as we see next: Cuando yo tenía ganado When I had cattle Cantaba mi vaqueria My cowboy life sang Ahora que no lo tengo Now that I have none Canto la vida mía. I sing my own life. He has also found remnants of texts in the lyrics of vallenato songs, which are currently the pride and pillar of oral literature on the Atlantic Coast. The vallenato sings and narrates, and it is morbid with humor and grace. It is critical of politics, religion, and work. It groans about love and cries when love is gone. Its narratives travel from town to town, and they register the legends, myths, and histories of the extensive cattle regions that are populated by the descendants of runaway slaves, free Blacks, and of course the others who arrived later. As happened with the cumbia, African traces can be found in the complexity of the evolution of the vallenato. A controversy about the cultural origins of the vallenato has arisen over the influence of the Spanish oral traditions in the literary texts. Consuelo Posada (1986:42) finds themes and forms, which according to her, demonstrate that the majority of the verses forming part of the popular music in Colombia today had their origins in Spanish couplets, which arrived from Santo Domingo during the colonial period. She places the vallenato in this category. Nonetheless, it is important to point out that the narrative essence of the vallenato, the expressive gestures of the singers, and most importantly, the intention of the song is the delivery of a message. As the singer frowns deeply and gestures dramatically, he communicates profound emotion. The accordion player can stop playing to gesture with his hands. The vallenato musician evokes the figure of the griot from Western Africa. In ancient Mali in the sixteenth century the griot was costumed with masks of birds and recited the history, legends, genealogy, and the wisdom of religion and the arts. This was a caste of jugglers, who were also poets, musicians, and witches charged with preserving the traditions. Among the traditional instruments of the vallenato is the guacharaca, which is an instrument based on friction. It is made from a stalk of sugar cane into which horizontal lines are carved. The guacharaca was rubbed with the rib bone of a cow or a carving knife. Quiroz (1983:192) says that the guacharaca was the first instrument, and it was combined with the human voice, which took on the quality of a wild turkey announcing the rain. The cowboy songs were added to that, making the vallenato of today. The accordion is an instrument found in many ports of the world, and it seems to have arrived to Colombia and to the vallenato at the end of the nineteenth century. With the box drum, which is clearly an African legacy, the basic trilogy of instruments is completed. Similar to the conga, the box drum was originally covered with a piece of baby caiman skin cured by ash and dried in the sun. Later, it was replaced by the skin of deer, goat, or sheep (Quiroz, Ibid.). With time, other instruments have come into the vallenato along with other rhythms, which have converted it into a well of creativity. The puyas, meringues, sones, paseos, or tamboras make up an intricate musical genealogy. This creative quality has contributed to the vallenato becoming another symbol of Colombian national identity. The undeniable footprint of African legacy is clear in ethnohistory, visual arts, and music. The vallenato is only one of the important genre of oral literature from the Atlantic coast, but its expression covers a wide range of narration, poetry, and fiction. The most important of all, the work of Gabriel García Márquez, has created a reality of a fantasy world called Macondo. According to Germán de Granda, Macondo is a Bantu plant classification term referring to the plantain, and it includes magical and religious meanings. He goes on to say that Macondo is a symbol of the diverse society that is multiracial and mulatto that García Márquez describes. It corresponds completely to the physiognomy of a land where Indians, Europeans, and especially Africans have lived together for various centuries (De Granda 1978:234). It is a land of intense cultivation of the plantain, and according to García Márquez, the name is a memory of his years as a child and young man in the vicinity of Aracataca where a hacienda of that name existed. In reference to makondo, a Bantu word, it is worth noting that runaway, free, and creole descent Africans have lived for centuries in these lands of plantains and cattle. Moreover, the only surviving palenque in the country is in the same region, and the inhabitants continue to show African social and cultural traces in their present day lives. The town in question is Palenque of San Basilio, which retains its own unique creole language, thought to be a linguistic relic in America (Patiño Rosselli 1983). It contains Bantu words from the Ki-Kongo and Kimbundu languages. This evidence combined with that of the word makondo and the characters and events of One Hundred Years of Solitude permits the inclusion of Colombia in the novelistic iconography of the African world of Latin America. According to De Granda (1978:271), African languages have a significant linguistic influence in Colombia, most noticeably along the Caribbean coast and Pacific Littoral where the African descendents are clustered. The Bantu accent is dominant in many places, and it occurs in every day speech, as well as in place names of Congolese and Angolese origin. Matamba, Masinga, Malemba, Angola, Songo, Miangoma, Nanguma, Quilembe, and Lamba are names of creeks, wooded areas, and villages in the vicinity of Cartagena. All of these areas were formerly controlled by fugitive slave groups. In the Pacific Littoral Matamba and Mungarrá are examples of place names of Bantu origin although the town of Beté on the Arato River is the name of an ethnic group on the Ivory Coast. In everyday language usage the influence is enormous. In cuisine, the guandú, another Bantu reference (KiKongo language), refers to a dish from the Atlantic coast, but another Bantu word fufú, or mfufu, a way of preparing the plantain, belongs to the gastronomic terms on the Pacific side. 124 Contributions to National Culture In the secular rituals such as the currulao or cununao on the Pacific coast, the words cununo drum and marimba have Ki-mbundu roots, just like the words cachimba, which is a flute, and chimbo, which is a coin (Del Castillo 1984). In the sacred rituals of Palenque de San Basilio, which was dominated by ethnic Bantus, the funeral songs give testimony to the African origins of the people and their cosmic vision of the supernatural world in the mortuary ritual known as lumbalú (Schwegler 1990). The current state of research on Afro-Colombian groups makes it possible to compare cultural elements between communities in various regions of the country, not only in linguistics, but also religious expression and other areas of behavior. The influence they have had on national cultural life can be seen clearly. The water images that are evoked by the voice of the drum and the songs of the lumbalú in the wake for the dead in Palenque can also be observed in wakes among miners in the tropical rain forest of the Pacific Littoral as much as in towns in the process of urban growth. These are remembrances of the ways of people from the Congo where Calunga, the world of water below the earth, is the place for the spirits of the dead. The word Calunga also appears in the funerary songs of the lumbalú (MacGaffey 1986, Friedemann 1991:77). The watery world of the Pacific Littoral is an excellent stage for the poetics of the supernatural world, the drama, enchantment, and personages who emerge from the seas to enter into the world of humans. Protagonists, such as the enormous serpents that cause floods or the tiny worms that live in the water and enter the human body causing disease, are the widely spread patrimony of African cultural influences. This shows contributions of the African Diaspora to Colombian national culture and more specifically to the regional cultures on the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts. It does not begin to touch on the many subtle details of the poetic vision, the intricacies of the social creations, or the material culture that reflects these ancient iconographies, all of which have been transformed by the historical process. To the student of African- American cultures, these facts are evidence of the strategies of cultural resistance. After five hundred years the traces of Mother Africa that came with the slaves are alive not only among her descendents but also in the new cultural construction of Colombia itself. Entering the Twenty-First Century A reflection of the challenges that the twenty-first century presents to the existence of Afro-Colombians as a unique group in the national panorama is the lack of attention to their issues in the deliberations of the recently completed Constitutional Congress, which produced a new constitution for the nation for the new century. An article by Jaime Arocha (1991) gives an indication of the paths that communities of the African Diaspora will have to follow. It makes reference to many of the same strategies that have permitted them to carry out an important role in Colombia historically. Arocha refers to the continuation of African culture as the centerpiece for the survival for Afro-Colombians as a group along with innovation to address the uncertainties of the social, economic, and physical environments. Social and cultural creativity will be required to confront the conditions of continual change. In the predominantly African demography of the Pacific Littoral, the national legal system has not been able to establish itself as the law of the land. As the capital and technology of multinational companies permit the expansion of mining, shrimp farming, and the plantations of African palm, it leads to the cutting down of tropical forests and mangroves and the expulsion of Afro-Colombians from their lands. The new constitution that clearly defined the legal status of Indians only barely mentions Afro-Colombians and their unique ethnic expression. The legitimacy of their identity, land use patterns, and ancestral uniqueness was not recognized. Nevertheless, beyond that constitutional process, different cultural and political groups among Afro-Colombians have adopted critical policy positions based on their analysis of the situation. They have been discussing the vicissitudes of their role in the national panorama, the contributions that they have made from the colonial period to the present, and the marginality that they have suffered. Some have been debating the consequences that the social and political strategy of “whitening” has had on them as individuals and as a group (Arocha and Friedemann 1984). This debate addresses the non-critical character of the concept of mestizage (melting pot), an ideology of discrimination that has resulted in their invisibility and lack of rights, both historically and in the present. Although this marginality of Afro-Colombians is reenforced by Colombian society at many levels, we will certainly see vibrant alternatives in the new century, as in the past, that will contribute to the strengthening and permanence of the African Diaspora. Visual Essay on the Afro-Colombian Experience b Ron Duncan Hart Palenque de San Basilio Palenque de San Basilio, known as the first free town in the Americas, was founded by African fugitives in the seventeenth century. Today, it is the only remaining palenque (originally a palisaded town made up of escaped slaves) in Colombia. It has been declared “Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity” by UNESCO. The language spoken here is palenquero, the only creole language in the Americas to combine Spanish with the syntactic structure of African Bantu languages. Although they are culturally important because of the African traditions they represent, Palenqueros are commonly discriminated in the region. Palenque is located in the northern coastal plain, a hour or so from Cartagena. This residential street in Palenque is lined with thatched roof houses with walls made of split bamboo and adobe. Some of the more well-to-do families have corrugated metal or composition roofs and masonry walls. The social organization of the town is based on complex family networks and ma-cuagros, which are age-grade sets. The child’s play group evolves into a cuagro, and these groups of friends stay together throughout the life cycle. The cuagro establishes rights and duties on everything from daily work to life passage events. The influence of the outside world, from American soft drinks to television, cars, and computers, has been increasingly seen in Palenque since the 1970’s. Although the global economy is clearly evident, traditional architecture and cultural patterns remain strong. In recent years even the conflicts between Colombian paramilitary and guerrilla groups have affected Palenque. Women play a central role in continuing African musical traditions performing funerary songs, such as lumbalú, work songs, and playful songs. The bullerenge sentado, son palenquero, or son de negro are performed for baptisms, weddings, and other religious celebrations. Or, as shown here, a group of friends may gather during the afternoon in the patio of a house to sing with a drummer, who is usually a man. The small river that runs near the town was the traditional source of water, but it ran dry during the summer months partly because large landowners upstream pumped it dry irrigating their fields. As it dried out each year, women excavated holes to find the remaining water below the surface. Women gathered the water for the family, and mothers frequently assigned this task to adolescent daughters. This young woman is filling pails of water from one of the holes in the riverbed. This was an important social gathering place for women to meet and exchange stories. Young men also knew that they could find young women there and talk with them away from the vigilance of their mothers. Although women can do this, the job of triturating food in the African style mortar is frequently given to young men. Rice can be dehusked or corn pulverized. Cattle raising is an honored occupation in Palenque, and young men are given cows for which they are responsible. They name them, visit them daily, and compose songs for them. Photo by Richard Cross. Cauca Valley The Cauca Valley is the breadbasket of Colombia, a well-watered valley with rich agricultural land. Villarica, Cauca is a town of two thousand people located in the southern part of the valley. It is across the road from the Hacienda La Bolsa where the ancestors of the current inhabitants worked as slaves. Following the abolition of slavery, the new freedmen set up this town. Historically, the people of Villarica have worked as day laborers in the large commercial farms in the region. In recent decades the sugar cane industry has grown enormously and acquired much of the land. It is now the largest single employer for men from the town. Some people in the town have their own small farms, and others have small businesses, such as making roof tiles. Board games are popular among young people, and men continue playing throughout life. Here three guys are playing and absorbing the attention of others. Villarica is warm all year round, and most of social life is in the street in front of the houses where any special event is enough to attract a group of on-lookers. This calm environment belies the fact that guerilla groups, drug traffickers, paramilitary groups, and the Colombian army have been in conflict in the region in recent decades. The young men of the town have been frequently recruited by one or the other of these groups. Omaira Carabali, the daughter of the evangelical pastor, in Villarica. Like many young people, she married and continues to live in town. Her husband is a sugar cane worker. She is sitting in front of a wall of split bamboo filled with adobe. In more finished houses, the wall is plastered with adobe and whitewashed. Roofs overhang the walls to protect them from rain damage. Adding Stalks to Pile Cane Higher. Bengala Mill, Cauca. Sugar cane cutters taking a break in the shade of the cane. Men may bring water or some food, but for lunch they eat a full hot meal. Men say that they need a big meal to give them strength for the hard work. Women cook the meals as a business and bring them to the fields. Lunch in the cane field. Two cane cutters at the end of a work day. They will be driven back to their town in a large company truck, standing in the back and holding on to the sideboards. Dozens of men may be packed into these trucks. They are picked up at 6:00 am and returned home between 4:00 and 5:00 pm. 146 Visual Essay At the mill sugar is refined and bagged for sale. AWomen doing the laundry under a bridge. Workers returning to town with firewood. Immediately around Villarica there are medium sized farms, some for dairy and others for commercial crops such as sorghum. People from Villarica care for the cattle, plant and harvest the grains, and do any other work that is needed. Cattle ranching in Villarica. Adobe bread oven behind a house. A few people who have ovens bake bread and sell to the others. AWoman of the family making bread. Most people from Villarica make small purchases of food, usually on a daily basis, in typical grocery stories like this one. Rice is the staple of the diet, and it may be mixed with beans, which may also be bought here, or plantains, which can be gathered locally. Although animal protein is limited, special meals during the week may include an egg on the usual rice. Men may have meat in the lunches they buy on the job because it is assumed that protein is needed for the heavy work they do. An open-air market in the neighboring town of Santander de Quilichao where the people of Villarica do weekly shopping. Everything can be found here from food to clothes, working materials and more. There is always music, and people meet friends, so it has a festive atmosphere. Making roof tiles by hand. This is one of the few small industries controlled by the people of Villarica. Dancing is one of the favorite pastimes in Villarica. This is “El Campin” (The Stadium), and it is filled on the week-ends with people dancing until the early hours of the morning. It is the most important social event of the week. Pacific Littoral This is Barbacoas, Nariño in the southwestern corner of Colombia near Ecuador. This is the Pacific Littoral, one of the wettest tropical rain forests in the world where it can average one inch of rain per day. In this religious procession school children parade down the main street honoring the Niño de Atocha (the Christ Child of Atocha), the patron of the town. Buildings in this hot, wet climate are usually made of wood and built to permit the open circulation of air. This is the central patio of the school in Barbacoas with women students in white uniforms. The patio doubles as an open-air basketball court. In Barbacoas and in smaller communities on the surrounding rivers, houses are built on stilts so that the main floor is at the level of the second story. This gives room to store things under the house, and it prevents the problem of flooding from the daily heavy rains. Barbacoas is a rivertown, and the concrete steps leading down to the landing are the scene of constant movement throughout the day. People are continually arriving and departing in canoes to smaller towns up and down the river. They bring merchandise to sell, and they load up their canoes taking home what they need. Roads through this dense tropical rain forest are rare, and the rivers are the common means of transportation. Along the river landing, a young woman is gathering water while another family in the background is loading their dugout canoe for the trip back home. The river is the heart of commerce in the Pacific Littoral. Here logs are being floated downriver to the lumber mill. The unusually large house is also the center of business operations for this family, which is considered wealthy because of the large outboard motor boat beached by the house. Many families travel by paddling dugout canoes. Boys working with logs in Barbacoas. In this settlement along the Güelmambi River there are three houses, one for the parents and one each for the son and his family and the daughter with her family. An the houses along the river the front window is literally the window onto the world for the family. Here a grandfather and two of his grandsons entertain themselves at the window. As people go up and down the river in their canoes, the neighbors see who is traveling with whom and what they are taking to sell or bringing back from the market. The grandfather is lighting a smoke with a smoldering piece of wood from the kitchen fire. People come to the river to bathe, swim, play, wash clothes, get water, and travel. These girls are washing some clothes which are kept in the dugout wooden container set among the rocks. Along the Güelmambi River people do placer mining for gold in the river terraces. Earth is dug out of the bank, and water is directed through the sluice. Photo by Nina S. de Friedemann. Woman panning for gold. 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