Encuentro Iberoamericano Agenda Afrodescendiente en las Américas
Iberoamerican Conference
Afro-Descendant Agenda of the Americas
Cartagena de Indias - October 16-18 of 2008
M E M O I R S
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Encuentro Iberoamericano Agenda Afrodescendiente en las Américas
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Encuentro Iberoamericano Agenda Afrodescendiente en las Américas
Iberoamerican Afrodescendant Conference
Afrodescendant Agenda in the Americas
Memoirs
Table of Contents Page
Presentation........................................................................... 7
Cartagena Declaration.......................................................... 10
General Objectives/Methodology........................................ 13
Topics Discussed in the Work Tables.................................... 14
Inaugural Session.................................................................. 18
Interventions
Paula Marcela Moreno Z., Minister of Culture of Colombia.
Alvaro Marchesi. Secretary General, Organization of Iberoamerican States-OEI-.
Zulu Araujo. Director Palmares Foundation.
Forum I: Global Tendencies: African Diaspora and the need
of inclusion.......................................................................... 23
Interventions
Nidore Ndiaye. Deputy Director, International Organization for Migrations.
Agustín Lao Montes. Profesor University of Massachussetts.
Silvia García. Adviser, Iberoamerican General Secretariat
(SEGIB).
Message
President of the Interamerican Development Bank Sr. Luis
Alberto Moreno.
Message
Iberoamerican General Secretariat (SEGIB) President. Mr.
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Encuentro Iberoamericano Agenda Afrodescendiente en las Américas
Enrique Iglesias.
Forum II: Culture as the basis of encounter and recreation of
the ethnical global agenda................................................... 62
• Intervention Doudou Diene. Lawyer and Special Rapporteur against contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and other forms of intolerance.
• Edouard Matoko. Director UNESCO Regional Office in Quito, Representation for Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela.
• Alberto Abello. Director Masters in Development and Culture, Tecnological University of Bolivar
• Rafael Palacios. Dancer and choreographer
Discussion and conclusions, Forums I and II......................... 95
Table I: The contribution of the afrodescendant to the construction of the Ameritas: rewriting history........................ 136
Interventions
Howard Dodson. Director Schomburg Center .
Alfonso Múnera. Historian.
Waguemati Wabgou. GEACES, Nation University in Colombia.
Discussion and Conclusions Table I.
Table II: Exchange of experiencias of child and youth afrodescendants............................................................................. 138
Interventions
Axel Rojas. Proffesor, Cauca University.
Miguel Pereira. Every Child, Peru.
Discussion and Conclusions Table 2.
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Table III: Migration: ethnical and cultural diversity............ 217
Discusion y Conclusions Table III
Table IV: Cultural Afrodescendant Entrepeurnship............ 217
Discusion y Conclusions Table IV.
Table V: Political Representation ....................................... 218
Intervention. Giancarlo Salazar. Historian
Discussion y conclusions Table V
Table VI: The power of media and the positioning
of diversity. ........................................................................ 220
Interventions
Emma Kamau. Journalist
Pedro Viveros. Social Communicator and Journalist
Discusion y Conclusions Table VI
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Presentation
The I Iberoamerican Conference on “Afro-Descendants Agenda of
the Americas” offered a valuable opportunity to institute a collective position, of the States and particularly from the region’s
Ministries of Culture, on the unquestionable Afro-Descendant
contribution in building Pan-American societies and their respective advancement. Achieving the Millennium Development
Goals and eradicating poverty face a great challenge in terms
of building inclusive and diverse societies; full cultural expression and recognition constitute an important development goal.
These commitments were recorded in the Declaration of Cartagena, Afro-Descendants’ agenda of the Americas, signed in San
Basilio de Palenque, on October 18th /2008 by the Ministries of
Culture of Angola, Bahamas, Barbados, Brasil, Colombia, Guatemala, Guinea Ecuatorial, Jamaica, Mexico, Panamá, Paraguay
and Dominican Republic, with the support of the Organization of
Iberoamerican States.
In the framework of a multilateral cooperation scheme, the
Iberoamerican countries have defined cultural diversity as an axis
of their common integration project. One of the columns of the
region’s cultural diversity policy is the existing pluri-ethnicity and
multicultural expressions, and it is in this framework where the
differential approach for a representative Afro-Descendant community becomes vitally important.
Among the commitments that governments that signed the
Cartagena Declaration, is to promote the formulation of specific
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guidelines for public policy on culture for ethnic populations in
Latin America and the Caribbean, and to help strengthen ties
between Afrodescendant communities, indigenous and native
people of the Americas.
The forced migratory process from Africa to the Americas has
been the largest massive flow of people in the history of humankind. More than 11 million men, women, boys and girls had to
recreate their destiny despite adversity. Today, Latin America and
the Caribbean have a population of approximately 150 million
Afro-Descendants. The African Diaspora in the region represents
around a 30% of the total population. The largest concentration is
located especially in the Dominican Republic (90%), Brazil (50%),
Cuba (30%), Colombia (20%) and Venezuela (10%) (CEPAL 2001).
For many it is clear today that during decades the old and established logic of the “mixing of races”, as the unique sign of
the Iberoamerican “identity”, has prevented us from seeing this
overwhelming reality, obliterating the enormity of the contributions of Afro-Descendants in all the aspects of public life. In fact,
in Latin America’s case, there has been a generalized lack of attention, which is evidenced in a consequent naturalized cultural
stigmatization and overshadowing. With some important exceptions, several centuries of Afro-Descendant material and immaterial cultural contribution have been omitted or underestimated in
the cultural maps of the different Iberoamerican States, placing
this population outside of what is known as history and culture.
Hence, the urgent need to define an agenda that rescues and
spreads the historic-cultural heritage, that determines a critical
review of history and its massive dissemination within educational systems, that generates a process of identity strengthening
and living memory through the new information technologies
and that integrates ethnical cultural expressions, beyond the framework of the exotic.
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On the other hand, the Afro-Descendant community totally integrated in building inclusive and diverse societies will set a step towards itself in the historic perspective, preparing and educating
itself with excellence to build a cultural recognition in the framework of social globalization whose common denominator is the
convening of differences and richness. This construction gives the
region’s children and young people a fundamental role. They will
have to be educated with full awareness of their ethnic condition
as transversal axis of many knowledge fields. Culture can perform
as a power vehicle in forming artistic, political, economic and social leadership.
Today, as we face a global multicultural society, the goal of this
Conference was to define an agenda that contributes to valuing
and taking over ethnic-cultural heritage, not with an obsessive
and self-pitting look towards the past but rather with a critical
view for the sake of building a history with future.
Now, the political challenge is to cultivate the rich cultural expressions in each country (Promotion of cultural policies in a globalizing world, 2002), building roads to strengthen the importance
of our cultural diversity and the ability of each country to ensure
that their stories and experiences are available to its own citizens
and the world that can lead to concerted action and, ultimately,
a number of tools to address some of the issues within the broad
field of cultural diversity, among which could include measures to
promote cultural diversity as a source of value for human development, social cohesion and prosperity of societies.
Una segunda versión de este Encuentro se realizará en febrero de
2010 en Salvador de Bahía – Brasil y su Comité ad-hoc se reunirá
en Washington DC en febrero de 2009.
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Cartagena Declaration
Afrodescendant Agenda in the Americas
The Ministries of Culture of the Bahamas, Barbados, Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Guatemala,
Jamaica, and representatives of Angola, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, the Organization of Ibero-American States (OIS), the International Organization for Migration (OIM), the Regional Office in
Quito of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO), the International Development Bank
(IDB), the Inter-American Foundation and the Alliance of Regional
Support for Afro-descendant Rural Populations in Latin America
(ACUA Alliance) gathered in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, October 16-17, 2008, with the goal of examining the situation of the
Afro-descendent population in different national contexts, share
experiences of management in the area of culture. We have arrived at the following Declaration of Cartagena, Afro-descendent
Agenda of the Americas 2009-2019.
Considering that:
1. Culture and diversity, in all of their manifestations, constitute
fundamental elements of identity, development and the well
being of nations.
2. There is an Afro-descendent population present in all countries, a force and common sense of unity and solidarity that
nurtures the collective memory of the Diaspora and the rich
African heritage, which is expressed and reproduced in the
diversity of its cultural and spiritual manifestations.
3. Economic and cultural globalization can potentially bring with
them opportunities within the economic plan and the circulation of cultural goods, but it can also generate risk, threats,
and undesirable changes that could translate into the irreversible loss of culture and processes that homogenize culture. It
is the government’s duty to prevent such risks by valuing, supporting and making visible the cultural manifestations of Afro-
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descendants as a vital force in the development process and
for the wellbeing of our nations.
4. Situations of poverty and social exclusion affect broad sectors of the Afrodescendant population, and thus, cultural
policies should address this within the framework of public
policies aimed at achieving the Millennium Development
Goals (MDGs) approved by the United Nations.
5. The phenomenon of migration in the Americas presents important social, economic, demographic and cultural changes.
Afro-descendants have developed two-way cultural flows
that have promoted intercultural dialogue, multiculturalism,
and the establishment of links of solidarity and social cohesion with other communities in the world.
6. In many countries there are large gaps in terms of historical,
demographic and socioeconomic information related to the
Afro-descendant population which makes self-recognition
among this population and the formulation of inclusive cultural policies difficult.
7. There is a need to move toward consolidating a favorable institutional environment for the adoption of mechanisms that
contribute to the strengthening of intercultural dialogue in
order to implement public policies for social inclusion.
8. The information and communication media should playa fundamental role as a vehicle for and expression of the cultural
values of Afro-descendants as well as contribute to the prevention of discrimination and social exclusion.
9. The richness of the artistic and spiritual expressions of the
cultural patrimony of Afrodescendants is factor in development that should be protected, fomented, and taken advantage of in order to assure the wellbeing of communities.
10. Cultural cooperation between the countries of the Americas
and countries in Africa should contribute to the consolidation of permanent and sustainable links of unity.
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We commit to including the following progressively into our
respective cultural policies and actions:
1. Guarantee that the majority of the Afro-descendent population has access to quality cultural goods and services, with a
special emphasis in new technologies.
2. Support and strengthen the creation and dissemination of
studies and information systems regarding the situation of
Afro-descendent communities, their cultural and spiritual
patrimony, as well as their artistic and intellectual creations
in order develop cultural policies.
3. Promote the re-valuing and re-establishment of the historical memory related to the contributions by Afro-descendants
to the construction of our nations within our education systems. Likewise, advance in the revision of educational texts
and materials on the history of countries in order to make
visible the contributions of Afro-descendants to the development of nations.
4. Facilitate the access of Afro-descendants, and researchers of
the topic, to all document sources such as the General Histories of UNESCO and pertinent historical archives such as the
Archive of the Indies, so that each country, through a process
of training and technical assistance, has or strengthens at
least one network or center for documentation.
5. Create centers and programs for the study, documentation
and support of native and Creole languages, their rich variation and for preserving the oral and literary traditions of Afro-descendants.
6. Support making visible the contributions of the Afro-descendent population to the construction and development of
countries, regions, and localities through national and community museums.
7. Officially commemorate the abolition of slavery.
8. Within the framework of the present Declaration, promote
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a consciousness raising campaign in different countries that
aims at increasing self-recognition among Afrodescendants
and the affirmation of Afrodescendant values as well as spiritual and cultural patrimony. Recommend that governments
include an ethnic variable, based on self-classification, into
the census and other national surveys.
9. Establish scholarships, cultural exchanges and internship programs for researchers of culture, artists, teachers and technical specialists in culture in order to advance knowledge about
Afro-descendant communities.
10. Adopt mechanisms for the support of cultural industries and
cultural entrepreneurship for Afro-descendants such as the
creation of portfolios and cultural initiatives that promote
circulation, while also protecting their collective and individual rights.
11. Stimulate communication processes using different media in
order to combat social exclusion through the production of
media content that Afro-descendants themselves produce
media content and urge that the mass media industry adopt
forms of representation of Afro-descendants that are appropriate and coherent, and which include their culture and aspirations.
12. Promote and contribute to the development of programs to
improve the living conditions of the most vulnerable sectors
of the Afro-descendant population through cultural policy.
Approved in the plenary session of the Iberoamerican Conference - Afrodescendant
Agenda of the Americas in Palenque de San Basilio, Colombia.
Conference’s General Goals
1. To generate an arena for reflecting on the importance of
the Afro-Descendant culture in the Iberoamerican and Ca-
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ribbean countries, which yields input in building public policies geared at recognizing cultural diversity.
2. To share experiences that are vital from the cultural, political, economic and historic standpoint of the American countries, the Greater Caribbean and Africa, developing strategies and actions to achieve mutual recognition of identities,
dignity and a sense of a joint community.
3. To encourage the development of a cultural cooperation
agenda within the framework of searching for alternatives
to improve the living conditions of the Afro-Descendant
population.
Methodology
The First Iberoamerican Conference Afrodescendant Agenda of
the Americas, established spaces and forums for debate and exchange of experiences between countries in order to facilitate
the formulation of recommendations for developing an agenda
for cooperation towards the recognition of cultural diversity in
the framework of better alternatives to improve the living conditions of Afrodescendant people.
It was developed through a participatory methodology, providing
a discussion open group to different participants.
During the Conference, there were forums and various sessions
organized, allowing attendees to present and express their concerns, criticisms and suggestions.
Topics Discussed in the Working Tables
The tables collected conclusions, which are set out in the final
declaration of the event with recommendations to the Ministers
for their subsequent monitoring.
Table I: The Afrodescendant contribution to the construction of
the Americas: re-writing history.
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Identify strategies for the preservation and reproduction of the
historical contribution of Afrodescendants in the building of democratic societies, in its social and economic development, from
its roots and identity, values, practices and symbols such as ethnic group, generating social cohesion and identity as an expression of freedom and human development.
Axes of discussion:
•
•
•
•
Mechanisms for preserving the memory
Different historical forms of slavery in the Americas
Mechanisms of reproduction from memory
Simplification of the history and contribution of Afrodescendants
• Access to technology by Afrodescendant people
Table II: Exchange of Childhood and Youth Experiences
It was an opportunity to reflect on the inclusion and participation
of the youth population in the social, political and cultural socialization and by sharing local views and ideas that identify related
problems and situations (progress, opportunities and strengths)
which are expressed in the cultural field in the Iberoamerican
countries.
Axes of discussion:
• Problems and situations that require priority attention in
terms of product offerings and services in our countries.
• Projects and activities related to building the capacities and
talents in young people: sociocultural research, artistic, craft
production, artistic creation, cultural dissemination, appropriation of traditional artistic practices, and emerging artistic
practices.
• Intercultural relations between the Afrodescendant Communities and other ethnic groups.
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• Developments of issues that are identified in the item related
to products cultural field
Table III: Migration and ethnic and cultural diversity
In this table, we allowed people to analyze the migration phenomenon in Latin America and the Caribbean to identify possible
strategies for how to prosecute effectively reduction on the impact and effect on Afrodescendant people towards the preservation of identity, diversity and culture.
Axes of discussion:
• Transnational migration
• Demographic tendencies
• Economic inequalities between developed and developing
countries
• Internationalization of the economy and globalization of
trade
• Mobility of workforce
• World communication networks
Table IV: Afrodescendant cultural Entrepreneurship
Some mechanisms were discussed and proposed as well as patterns of cooperation among countries to develop strategies for
promoting cultural entrepreneurship and access to the economic
dynamics, generating income, employment and strengthening
business in a free-trade expanded and diversified. Identify actions to strengthen the linkages and synergies of the economy
with specific Afrodescendants’ culture.
Axes of discussion:
• Options for the cultural industry (music, dance, literature,
audiovisual production, culinary, tourism and others)
• Culture as a tool for development of other sectors of the
economy
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• Access to tertiary education and vocational training with
technical and ethical effective leadership and entrepreneurship among young people.
Table V: Political representation
Meet the achievements, opportunities, and challenges and define the critical elements of a common agenda for democratic
participation and representation and effective leadership of Afrodescendant people in the Americas in the areas of political, economic and administrative.
Axes of discussion:
• The status of the political representation of Afrodescendant and its significance for the history / national memory.
• The regulatory aspects and constitutional and legal developments related to ethnic diversity and cultures of Afrodescendants.
• The relationship between political representation, electoral
systems, and building institutions to implement policies of
social inclusion for Afrodescendant people.
• Participation and political Afrodescendant representation in
institutions and processes of the private sector, the international community and its relationship to support the recognition and exercise of the ethnic and racial diversity.
• Critical aspects of political leadership of Afrodescendants
Table VI: The power of media and the positioning of diversity.
This table generated recommendations for strengthening the role of media in the reaffirmation of cultural identity and collective
imagination of Afrodescendant people in Latin America and the
Caribbean and overcoming discrimination.
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Axes of discussion:
• The influence of the media in building the social imaginary
on Afrodescendants in Iberoamerica.
• Need to review the content in the media and rethinking accesses.
• Promotion of cultural diversity in the media, including advertising.
• Analysis of the contributions of the contradictory and review
media formats, genres and styles.
• Analysis of contradictory input from the media and review
formats, genres and styles.
• Legislation media (sustainable development of our societies
and the protection of cultural diversity).
• Afrodescendants as producers in the media.
OCTOBER 16
OPENING SESSION
Paula Marcela Moreno Zapata
(Colombia’s Minister of Culture).
Profile
Industrial Engineer specialized in the areas of project and research management with conceptual clarity and skills to structure and to lead, organize, execute and evaluate projects. She is
a team worker who has good interpersonal relations and she is
experienced in community work, research for international organizations and schools. She speaks English, Italian and French.
Welcoming words
The social movement of the African Diaspora is going through a
historical period that responds to the discussion and visualization processes that many world leaders have unleashed. Culture
has been the basis of the Diaspora conference today. Rightly so
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because in spite of the great amount of suffering experienced
by our enslaved ancestors, their culture survived and remained.
What is the strength of a culture that remains and recreates itself
despite denial of its human essence? That is the historic strength of the Afro-descendant people, that remember today to dialogue and to build a future, to generate awareness, as well as
to recognize that the presents poses different challenges whose
profound reflection implies a priority for religions and continents
of the world. As Manuel Zapata Olivella stated it, Latin America
is a mixture of races. We all are a mixture that is captured in the
cultural biography that marks our life project. For Latin America
and the Caribbean the estimate is a population of around 150
million people of Africa descent whose historic memory and heritage is yet to be identified, documented, systematized and preserved. Considering the commemoration of two hundred years
of independence, it is important to remember that this mixing
of races is the value that we have denied for a long time and
that plural ethnicity brings us together in the difference. Therefore, discussing the Afro-Descendant’s Agenda in the Americas
means thinking in terms of a history with future, recognizing the
progress achieved by so many social, academic movements and
governments although at the same time the greatest challenges
ahead of us in terms of integral development. Even more so if this
discussion is extended to the realm of an Iberoamerican agenda;
it will acquire all the relevance of a historical recognition. The
Iberoamerican Ministries of Culture should be the Ministries of
Memory and Difference that recognize the past but forge the future in a collective awareness and sub consciousness of nations.
Social globalization demands from us cross the board culture and
demands emphasizing the elements of understanding differences, which enable building fairer societies and searching for higher competitiveness valuing what is ours. I would like to thank
all the people who have believed in this conference, who have
attended with their entire conviction of a variegated Latin Ame-
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rica that acknowledges diversity as its greatest wealth and that
define common roads for its profound incisiveness in the social
and sector basis. I hope this will be the first of many conferences
that enable us to establish an agenda to exchange experiences
and to reduce the gaps in our Iberoamerican cultural realm.
Finally, I want to express my profound gratitude to the Governments of Spain and Brazil who have been the co-promoters of
this conference, to the (Organization of Iberoamerican States)
who from the first instant and unconditionally supported this
Iberoamerican reflection and facilitated all the technical and economic elements for its development, to Colpatria and Seguros
Bolívar that show a private sector open to discussing the importance of the ethnic topic in the world and in our region today, to
the IOM, who helped us open a spectrum and to UNESCO who
through their Participation Program 2008-2009 and the Regional
Office in Quito have been partners in this task. And of course the
Ministry of Culture’s team and particularly to this Conference’s
coordinator, Mónica Fernández of Soto, who from the beginning
understood and dedicated all her effort to this great task. Thank
you all and you will always be welcomed in Colombia.
Álvaro Marchesi (OEI)
Profile
Born in Madrid, Spain. Professor of Evolutionary Educational Psychology at the Psychology Faculty of the Complutense University
of Madrid. He has worked as Executive Advisor of the Instituto
de Evaluación y Asesoramiento Educativo (IDEA) reporting to the
Fundación Santa María and International Director of the Instituto
de Evaluación IDEA with offices in Brazil, Chile and Mexico. Currently, he is Secretary General of the Organization of Iberoamerican States - OEI.
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Lecture
There is a hidden culture that has not been recognized. In the
past years there has been a raising power: there is a need to
make cultural expressions visible.
The Iberoamerican society is profoundly unequal. The most unequal in the world that records nearly 213 million poor people. In
this situation, the Afro communities are the ones who suffer the
most. Women stand out in this group and specially those who live
in rural areas. It is difficult to be a citizen who fully exercises his/
her rights if there is no recognition of cultural identity. Education
and culture can help us transform the situation. Freedom is not
possible without education and culture.
This Conference’s task is historic because it is about recovering
citizenship and working on historical injustices. One of OEI´s projects is to involve education and culture and to encourage their
offer through:
1. Scholarships
2. Artistic education, culture and citizenship. Experiences where
the artistic areas are integrated into formal education.
3. Support to Afro women associations in order to achieve more
power in their task and representation.
Zulu Araujo
(Palmares Foundation - Brazil)
Profile
Born in the province of Bahía, Edvaldo Mendes Araujo, known as
Zulu Araujo studied architecture He is a cultural producer and a
well known militant of the Black Brazilian Movement. In March
7th/2007 he joined the Palamares Cultural Foundation as Director, this is a public foundation with offices in Brasilia, Distrito
Federal, attached to the Ministry of Culture, it has the mission
of formulating, promoting and executing programs and projects
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at national level to recognize, preserve and promote values and
practices that enable participation of African cultures in the education of Brazilian society, favoring inclusion with equal rights and
opportunities of Afro-Descendants (of Brazil) in an environment
of cultural diversity and ensuring implementation of other policies of the Ministry of Culture. Zulu Araujo has ample experience in the management of cultural policies directed at the black
population. He has been cultural administrator and coordinator
of Praça Reggae, Advisor of Grupo Culturel Malê, Consultant of
Olodum and special advisor of Bahía´s Secretariat of Culture.
Lecture
Palmares Cultural Foundation, an organization of the Ministry of
Culture of Brazil was created in the centennial anniversary of abolition of slavery. He works for cultural promotion and exchange, ethno-development, protection of the Afro-Brazilian cultural heritage
and cultural Exchange with African countries. The work with the
African Unity has been intensive since 2006, second conference of
intellectuals from Africa and the Diaspora.
It is necessary to highlight the black presence in Brazil, which corresponds to a 50% of the population and to identify the reasons
why their contribution has not been recognized, It would not be
absurd to state that there is a history of black people in Brazil.
It is important to clearly establish the consequences of slavery. It is
necessary to clarify more precisely the folclorization role of the African culture, which is a way of relegating our values, and even the
black and the Indian are considered just as a part of the past.
I have never seen in books, something that alludes to the contribution of the Brazilian black people.
It is necessary to recognize that our contribution is the result of
the dialogue and the conferences with other cultures, not only
the African one.
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The samba, for example, dialogues with a set of rhythms that are
not only African, but also Caribbean. These contacts should be
precise for them to be suitable.
It is not sufficient to recognize and identify the Afro-Descendant
contributions that we have contributed to the different nations,
however it is important that public policies are adopted which
should enable recognizing the expressions and their projection
in a way that they achieve full inclusion of Afro-Descendants in
each one of the countries. And this way, one would build empowerment, one would overcome racial discrimination and segregation, which at the same time should enable reaching full
participation in civil society.
There is a spiritual distance between Brazil and Latin America.
We are the only Portuguese speaking country in Latin America,
which hosts nearly 60% of the Afro population of the region.
The new proposals are relevant to broaden the Afro-Latin exchange. In this context, the new Project called Afro-Latin Laboratory is
established. National black awareness day.
Forum I: Global trends: African Diaspora and
the need for inclusion
The forum generated an arena to reflect on the current situation of
the African Diaspora and its interrelation with cultural development,
to guide and to project national and/or regional public agendas.
African Diaspora world movement: power, solidarity and
conference
African Diaspora: Trends, current situation
Africa’s role in the world, as seen and projected. In this arena,
there was a reflection on how globalization has affected the socioeconomic and cultural state of the Afro-Descendant popula-
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tions in the Iberoamerican countries, the collaboration and Exchange possibilities of the African Diaspora with the original continent, the possibility of building bridges between Africa and its
Diaspora and of presenting the characteristics, of evaluating the
actions of the different countries on the Afro-Descendant issue.
Nidioro Ndiaye
(Deputy Director IOM).
Profile
Born in Bignona (Senegal) on November 6th/1946. She studied in
France, and later medicine at the Universities of (Senegal), Bordeaux and Paris VII Garancière (France). In 1988 she was appointed by the President of the Republic of Senegal as Minister
of Social Development. During the crisis between Senegal and
Mauritania she coordinated the humanitarian activities. In 1990,
UNICEF invited her to be part of the organization of the World
Summit for Children. There, she proposed that rich countries
considered the reinvestment of the debts they had with poor
countries in children’s programs. As President of the Fifth Africa
Regional Conference on Women, she contributed to the presentation of the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing, China in 1995. As founding member of the
Scientific Committee for Women and Development, she created
in the nineties the NGO “African Women Empowerment for Peace and Development Network”, whose she coordinated until her
election at the IOM.
Lecture
Excellencies,
Distinguished Participants,
Ladies and gentleman,
First of all, allow me to deeply thank the Government of Colombia, for the excellent initiative of organizing an Afro-Colombian
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Conference. I also want to thank Colombia’s Minister of Culture,
Paula Moreno for being a great host of this Conference and for
her capable and dynamic organizational arrangements.
Latin America is the synthesis of various peoples, races and cultures merged together into one, after a painful and inhumane
process brought about by the slave trade with the transportation
and enslavement of African peoples.
The slave trade was the largest forced migration in the world. It
created permanent ties between Africa and the Americas. African
slavery was called by a historian “the greatest tragedy in human
history, because of its extent and the time it lasted”. Free Africans
were forcedly transported centuries ago from many regions in
Africa, to Cartagena. This forced migration included contingents
of millions of Africans mainly from what is now Congo, Liberia
and from the Gorée Islands, in my homeland Senegal. Gorée was
one of the centers from which Africans were taken to the Americas. Cartagena was a trans-shipment port for African-born slaves. Today Gorée Islandnd and Cartagena have been selected by
UNESCO as World Heritage and many sites in both places remind
us of slavery’s shame in universal history.
Cartagena was the principal Caribbean port of the transatlantic
slave trade from the 16th century to the beginning of the 19th
century. But to its honor, the resistance to slavery in Cartagena
was permanent. Next to Cartagena there is a testimony of this
fight for freedom. Slaves that managed to escape Cartagena were
called ‘cimarrones’ (maroons), as the Indians that fought against
the colonialist, were called. The history of these rebellions in Colombia has been called the ‘Cimarron’ Wars. When the ‘cimarrones’ escaped, they grouped in camps, where they set up fences to
protect themselves from prosecution. Such human settlements
were known as Palenques. The fight of these slaves led to a peace
accord at the end of the XVII century, and liberty was granted to
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the palenqueros. Today I want to remember and pay homage to
the Palenque de San Basillio, a community that still preserves its
roots, traditions and values. San Basilio provides us with a sense
of the courage and fortitude of its ancestors.
That struggle and others that followed had led to the final abolition
of the slavery in Colombia in mid nineteenth century. Today African
traditions continue to influence life in the Americas.
In this regard, the African Diaspora is the living reminder of the
way Africans, though scattered and dispersed, managed to retain
their traditions in a new world. Throughout the Americas, wherever Africans were brought, aspects of their language, religion,
artistic sensibilities, and other elements of culture survived. Africa’s influence is ever present in the cultural make up of Latin
America and has undoubtedly played an important, vital, but often overlooked and forgotten role.
African descendants in Latin America
There are an estimated 150 million African descendants in Latin
America, in 2006 according to the World Bank, but the international attention for African descendants is much more recent; it
only really began to take off in this decade, with the preparations for the World Conference against Racism in 2001. There is a
strong need for commitment from the international community
to address the development needs of African descendants.
Although Latin America has made solid economic strides over
the past two decades in terms of sustained economic growth,
increasing average income levels and decreasing average infant
mortality rates, the region still confronts certain levels of racial
inequality and discrimination that impacts aspects of economic
and social life.
To further eliminate racial gaps, it is necessary to develop projects targeting the African descendant community to address in-
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equalities in education, health care and job creation. Women in
particular are cruelly affected by those inequalities.
Indeed women from the Afro-descendant communities are discriminated against in the labor market due to a sum of different
factors: gender, ethnicity and poverty. They also have little access
to higher education.
African Descendants and Millennium Development Goals
A good starting point for addressing African descendants’ needs
are the areas outlined in the Millennium Development Goals
(MDGs) established in 2000 and unanimously adopted by 189
world leaders through the Millennium Declaration.
Despite a lack of accurate information on African descendant
populations’ needs in most places, governments are increasingly
collecting and analyzing data on the situation of Afro-Iberoamericans. Countries like Colombia have begun policy and legal measures to respond to these challenges. Also in Colombia, the National Department of Statistics (DANE by its acronym in Spanish)
includes in the national census an ethnic component based on
self-identification that helps to initiate the quantification of AfroColombians and other ethnic groups.
The international community must support these efforts by investing institutional and human resources to improve data collection in order to better understand the problem and track policy
solutions.
It is also encouraging that a growing number of Afro Iberoamericans are winning elective office and gaining government appointments, which should translate into increased policy attention and opportunities to pursue new development projects to
address pervasive inequality gaps.
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The appointment of Paula Moreno as Minister of Culture of Colombia constitutes another proof of this growing presence of
Afro descendants in relevant political positions.
We are confident that the growing political representation of
Afro Iberoamericans and Afro Iberoamerican women in particular in the continent will contribute to move forward the agenda
of this neglected community.
In particular, the 10th Regional Conference on Women in Latin
America and the Caribbean urged Iberoamerican countries to
broaden sustainable access for women to land ownership and access to water, other natural and productive resources, sanitation
and other services, such as financing and technologies, valuing
work done for household consumption and recognizing the diversity of economic initiatives and their contributions, with particular guarantees for rural women, indigenous women and Afro
descendent women.
Furthermore, the access of Afro descendants to social and health
services must be improved. Indeed, Afro-Latinos in general and
Afro-Colombians in particular are living in extremely difficult social, political and economic conditions that prevent them from
enhancing their talents, potential and overall well being. What’s
more, access to comprehensive healthcare, which includes sexual
and reproductive healthcare, is an essential condition in guaranteeing women’s participation in paid work and in political affairs.
African Descendants in Colombia
The Colombian Constitution officially recognized the multicultural and pluri-ethnic nature of the Nation and granted specific
rights to indigenous peoples and Afro-Colombian communities.
Colombia has the second largest African descendant population
in South America after Brazil. In the last 2005 national census ca-
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rried out by DANE, the official figures stated that Afro Colombians
constitute 10.4% of the entire population in Colombia.
Afro-Colombians comprise one of three major ethnic groups in
Colombia that differ in certain respects from the majority population in terms of their social, geographical and cultural backgrounds.
The African descendent communities in Colombia live in different regions throughout the country, including the inter-Andean
valleys of Patia, Magdalena and Cauca, the low lands of Pacific
Andean, the Uraba region, the Atlantic Coast, the islands of San
Andres and Providencia and urban centers such as Cali, Barranquilla, Cartagena, Medellin and Bogota.
Afro-Colombians have made meaningful contributions to Colombia through the richness and diversity of their cultures. They are
characterized by their ability to coexist peacefully, their sense of
community and solidarity, their vast knowledge of the country’s
natural resources and their love and concern for the environment.
According the Colombian constitution, Afro-Colombians are entitled to cultural, territorial and natural resources rights, which
allowed these communities to have access to natural resources
according to their cultural traditions as the Law 70 of 1993, established. On this regard, the Afro-Colombian community collective lands are concentrated where important country’s natural
resources are located: tropical rainforest, biodiversity, water, oil,
gas and mineral resources, such as gold. Unfortunately the presence of this natural resource wealth on ethnic territories has led
to conflicts particularly with illegal groups and such has generated in some cases the forced displacement of Afro-Colombians.
Some of the statistics available provide a clear picture on the
magnitude of the challenges, as the indicators shows that there
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are specific gaps and needs in terms of the development of the
areas where the Afro Colombians live and on their living conditions.
Significant support is currently being provided to these communities by the Government of Colombia and the International
Community which gives us hope that this situation will improve
in the medium and long-term.
Migration and Cultural Diversity
Migration is currently one of the major issues in the agenda
worldwide. Migrants often come from different socio-cultural
backgrounds making migration a major source of cultural diversity. Cultural diversity is widely recognized as an asset in a globalizing world and as a stimulating source of socio cultural change.
However, migration also poses challenges when it comes to the
respect for cultural diversity in multi-ethnic and multicultural societies. This is why addressing the challenges of migration includes promoting the respect for cultural diversity.
Understanding and valuing cultural diversity are the keys to countering any negative impact of migration or racism. Along with
human rights, respect for diversity is an essential component of
successful migration management.
Efforts to strengthen and preserve cultural diversity and at the
same time to promote respect for other cultures can counteract
the marginalization of social groups such as ethnic or religious
minorities. The promotion of cultural diversity is therefore an
element of a general strategy for poverty reduction and for supporting the participation of poor or marginalized groups in social development. As part of this process special attention must
be devoted to the situation of women and ethnic minorities.
I am very glad that the Government and the Civil Society of Colombia are addressing these challenges in a very serious and
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effective way. I also want to thank the United States Agency for
International Development (USAID) for their generous support to
our programs.
IOM and African Descendants in Colombia
The mandate of the International Organization for Migrations
is to help ensure the orderly and humane management of migration, promote international cooperation on migration issues,
assist in the search for practical solutions to migration problems
and provide humanitarian assistance to migrants in need, be
they displaced persons or other uprooted people.
IOM supports efforts to integrate ethnic minorities’ issues into
development frameworks and supports partnerships to ensure
the protection of, and respect for, their rights and the realization
of their visions of development with respect for their culture and
identity. This strategy aims at ensuring the implementation of
culturally appropriate and sensitive programs which also include
the full and effective participation as well as the free, prior and
informed consent of ethnic groups.
For a number of years a crosscutting approach has been applied
with respect to the rights of black and indigenous women. This
attention is part of all programs implemented by IOM, in which
it applies differential focuses for gender, ethnicity, and location,
for the handicapped and according to age. In this respect, special
emphasis is placed on support for actions associated with sexual
and reproductive health, domestic violence and elimination of all
forms of violence against women and the family. These projects
are directly carried out by IOM and in alliances with other organizations and institutions.
The work of IOM in relation to ethnic groups aims to achieve
comprehensive human development based on the concept of
ethnic collectives and their cultural characteristics, autonomy
and territorial sovereignty. That is why community organization
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processes are supported along with institutional strengthening of
their ethnic organizations at the different levels. A commitment
to productive development in harmony with the environment
and ancestral practices is also important.
Evidence of these actions can be seen in the results of certain
programs and projects, such as:
• Installation of the Provincial Consultative Commission of Córdoba in the framework of the Third Ethno-cultural Encounter
for Peaceful Coexistence in Córdoba. “A project aimed at the
Afro-Colombian population”.
• Inclusive and comprehensive educational attention for boys,
girls, young people and families in a situation of displacement and vulnerability.
• Program for building indigenous housing based on ancestral
knowledge of the culture of the Pasto indigenous people to
tackle and prevent the phenomenon of forced displacement
on the reservation.
To conclude, I would like to thank the organizers of this important conference and I look forward to hearing and discussing best
practices in this domain.
Thank you for your attention
Agustín Lao Montes.
Profile
Professor of sociology at University of Massachussets Amherst,
where he is member of the post grade in Afro American studies
and also researcher at the Center for Iberoamerican and Caribbean Studies. He considers himself ad activist-intellectual with
militancy in a variety of fronts both in the political arena as well
as in the intellectual field in the United States and also in Latin
America and the Caribbean. Among his main research and tea-
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Encuentro Iberoamericano Agenda Afrodescendiente en las Américas
ching areas one finds: the critical decolonization, global-historic
sociology, cultural studies, political sociology (specially the state
topics and social movements), critical studies of race and ethnicity, feminist critics and politics, and urban studies. He has Publisher several books and a good number of articles in these fields.
He is a member of the Network Institute for Global Democratization (NIGD), the Inter-American Observatory on Migrants´ Rights
(OCIM), the Hemispheric Council of the World Social Forum, and
the association for coloniality / modernity / decolonization. He
currently works on two book projects, a co-publish volume called
“Global Constellations of Powers and Future Insurgents “ and a
manuscript “Afro-Latin Diasporas: Black Movements and Ethnoracial Policies in the Americas”.
Lecture
Empowerment, decolonization, and fundamental democracy:
Refining Ethic-political principles for the Afro-Descendant Diasporas in relation with the millennium challenges
“The problem of the XX century is the problem of the color line”,
stated at the beginning of the past century the eminent AfroDescendant Intellectual WEB DuBois. Said statement proved to
be prophetic and reveling both for the central issue of the racial question and the racism problem in the main dramas of that
time, as well as the leading importance of the historic agency of
the African nations and Afro Descendants in the most important
developments of the modern world specially in the fundamental
deeds for liberty and equality which are the guiding values of any
justice and democracy project. Today, in the thresholds of the
XXI century, following the fights for independence that attained
the formal decolonization of Africa and the Caribbean, alter the
movement of the 1960-70s for the civil rights and black power
whose axis was in the United States but that was of global historic importance and influence, and after the world conference
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against racism and other forms of discrimination celebrated in
Durban, South Africa in 2001; the ethnic question and the problem of racial disparity and discrimination are still among those
main challenges for a society project where real equity and fundamental democracy prevail.
In this presentation I will attempt to address the main question
that I have been asked for this initial panel; what is the power of
the Diaspora in the Americas today?; from both an historical and
global perspective. This implies reviewing our collective historic
memory and the very definition of the Diaspora. There are two
main angles from where to direct such review that both draw
two intertwined histories, one of domination and oppression in
relation to one of empowerment and liberation. The Greek word
Diaspora means dispersion which recalls a long history of rootless
ness, banishment, forced displacements, and over exploitation.
In this sense, the histories that build and the threads that tie the
African Diaspora as a transnational population, are directly related to the institution of slavery and continuance after the abolition of inequality in the distribution of wealth, social and political
exclusion, and the cultural devaluation of the African and AfroDiasporic subject. The harsh drama of forced displacement that
a considerable percentage of Afro-Colombians live today is a sign
of continuity of a long process of dispersion and banishment that
started with the slave trade and that continues today as result of
a variety of processes (wars, genocide, financial and ecological
crises) that created a structural condition in the modern world
system that maintains Africa as a continent in everlasting poverty
in spite of its great human and resource wealth, and the majority
of Afro descendants in a situation of financial inequality, racial
and cultural discrimination, and lack of political power. I consider important to highlight these connections with Africa that are
not simply cultural but that on the contrary point to the relation
between the subordinate inclusion (or dependant) of the Afri-
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can continent to the western imperial powers which Caribbean
intellectual Walter Rodney analyzed in his book How Europe
Underdeveloped Africa, with the long road of over-exploitation
and economic inequality from the plantation slavery until today
in situations similar to those of the cane workers that have gone on strike in Valle del Cauca. In summary, this is what we call
structural racism, which also has its institutional and every day
dimensions as we will see later. But the African Diaspora can also
be visualized from another angle; otherwise we would only see
ourselves as victims and not as creators and history makers.
In this other genealogy of modernity that we have given different
names from telling stories from down there to the historiography
from the subordinates’ perspective; the African Diaspora is one
of the greatest sources of cultural creation and of democratization of society, economy and politics. In this alternate narrative
that constitutes the African Diaspora as a “counterculture of modernity” (to use the expression of the African-British Paul Gilroy)
there are key moments as were the Haitian revolution from the
18th to 19th century, where the actions of the Afro descendants
men and women occupied the main stage of change not only at
local level but also at global scale. The freedom deeds of the
cimarrones, of the plantation slaves, led by great figures such as
Toussaint Loverture who the Afro-Caribbean CLR James called
“Black Jacobinos”; headed the deepest social revolution of that
time that at the same time advocated against colonialism and
slavery, in favor of the construction of a new nation with full citizenship for Afro descendants. This implied the consolidation of
the French revolution democratic Project at the same time with a
vision and an own practice of freedom cradled in the heat of the
struggle for emancipation. This chance of placing the cultural
struggle and creations of the Afro descendants both in the center
of the national and regional stages as well as in the global ones,
is one of the main tasks of what we call the decolonization of
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our historic memory from the Afro-diasporic perspective. In this
sense, the African Diaspora is a formation of nations from what
DuBois called a double conscience, on one hand national and on
the other Afro-diasporic.
Said decolonization requires no more and no less than a thorough
review of how we see and understand the critical moments, who
are the main actors and the stories they tell and that should be
told, and what are the forces that move the past and the present,
and, consequently, what are the possible horizons for the future.
Two fundamental milestones to understand Africa’s global-historic meaning and the African Diaspora in the period following the
Second World War are the national liberation movements of the
1950s-1960s in the African Continent and the Caribbean, and the
movement for the civil rights and black power of the 1960s-1970s
whose action axis was in the United States. The so called movements for the national liberation of Africa and the Caribbean
ended the formal political colonialism of the European empires,
and grew political and economic independence ideals, along with a search for pan-African cultural unity and pride. In this context a new Pan-Americanism was created of which I would like to
highlight its most critical and brilliant voices and proposals which
are still present, such as Amilkar Cabral´s thesis on the need to
promote a culture of liberation, the distinction established by
Franz Fanon between the mere national independence and true
national liberation, and Kuame Kruhmah´s analysis on the danger
of neocolonialism (both economic and political as well as cultural) following the formal decolonization. In the cultural field it is
important to highlight the conferences between Africa and Afro-America as those held in Senegal in 1963 and in Algiers in 1975
that were part of a kind of re-identification between the African
continent and the Diaspora whose fruits we are still harvesting in
the most recent resolution of the African Countries declaring the
Diaspora as a fifth region of the African Union. But without failing
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to recognize the great importance of Africa’s formal independences and the Caribbean, it is also important to point out that the
famine, genocides, and inequality problems experienced by the
African continent today are to a great extend the result of both
colonial legacy as well as the significant elements of continuity in
the structural financial dependence in conjunction with the political subordination to western powers. To continue insulting, this
situation feeds the fact that the western racial imagination still
considers Africa as a backward and primitive continent in relation
to the developing ideals that emerged as criteria of modernity
as of the 1940s. This global pattern of economic, political and
cultural inequality that started about 500 years ago, and that in
the Caribbean region after independence, turned into a subordination related to the imperial power of the state and the United
States capital, we call it together with Aníbal Quijano coloniality
of power. Due to the tenacious continuance of said power pattern, in spite of all the struggles and achievements of the African
and Afro-diasporic movements, today we still seek to complete
the unfinished decolonization project.
Another historic milestone to analyze and to evaluate the power
of the Afro-Descendant Diaspora today is the black movements
of the 1960s-1970s. We dare to state with certainty that the constellation of social movements of the 1960s-1970s (feminists, ecological, indigenous, Afro-Descendants, students, workers) constituted the largest wave of change in modern history. The black
movement in the United States was one of the columns of that
moment not only of protests but also of living protests of which
we still enjoy the effects, for example in the democratization of
gender relations, and the dismantling of the social segregation
regimes legalized first in the south of the United States and later
in South Africa. Specially in the situation of global-historical importance between the end of the 60s and the beginning of the
70s, the black movement of the United States elevated its leader-
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ship in the wave of change at global level and ended up having a
main role in the opening of roads towards racial equality and full
civil rights of Afro-Descendants in several fronts including legal
and legislative reforms as well laws against discrimination and
repairing justice measures like the Affirmative Action programs.
Channels were also opened in the field of elective policies and
this together with the growth of the Afro-Descendants medium
layers promoted by the relative improvement on education and
employment, resulted in a significant increase of the number
of black legislators, majors and commissioners. To calibrate the
state of power of the Afro-Descendant Diaspora, it is necessary
to analyze this new Afro-North American political class, a task
that goes beyond the boundaries of this presentation. However,
we have to say that the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama
would not have been possible without the political and cultural
opening up caused by the black movements of the 60s and 70s.
On the other hand, the growth of the medium layers and the
Afro-North American political class was accompanied by an increase in the gap with the working classes and the socially marginalized of the black population. This junction of classes inside
the Afro population intensified with the neo-liberal policies that
since the Reagan administration insist on reducing the social expense in areas like housing and education and to privatize basic
services in their offensive against the sponsor state. This in turn
was accompanied by a neo-conservative campaign against the racial equity policies including the Affirmative Actions and the laws
and measures against discrimination. Said policies are supported
by a racial ideology that declares the end of racism and the existence of an inclusive society free of color in the United States.
However, the persistence of racial inequality not only financial
wise but also in the political field and the daily discrimination experiences, is an evident fact of which testimony can be obtained
from Afro-Descendant, Latin, Asian, and indigenous majorities,
as well as from the study of social science. But what sociologist
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Bonilla-Silva ironically calls color blind racism is legitimized by the
relative rise to the executive branch of the imperial state of an
Afro neo-conservative sector whose most visible figures are Colin
Powell and Condoleezza Rice. Here, the key topic I would like to
present for the discussion is the relation between the state, the
elective politics, and the Afro-diasporic social movements. My
argument is that on the one hand, it is necessary to have representation in the state and in particular in the elective arena, at
the same time that we have to maintain the social movements
with an autonomy and own power to open up non-governmental
spaces of cultural live and financial development while we push
the state and our representatives to perform equity and social
justice politics.
After the wave of change of the 60s and 70s in the US, there was
a relative reduction of the social movements’ policies in relation
with the state and parties’ policies. In contrast, as of the end of
the 1980s in Latin America there was a notorious emerging of Afro
and Indigenous social movements. We characterize this as a spin
towards the South in the main axis of the Afro-Descendant movements that finally brings to the open the 150 millions of AfroLatinos that remained both outside the cultural and political maps
of Latin America as well as in the Anglo-Northern representations
of the African Diaspora. There is a long organizational history of
the Afro-Latino American Diasporas and it is worth to mention that
this year in Cuba, they celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the
foundation of the first expressly Afro political party in the Americas, the Colorless Party (el Partido Independiente de Color del
1908). In the cultural and intellectual field it is worth to highlight
the magazine AfroAmerica published in Mexico in 1940 and that
gathered intellectuals from Brazil, the Great Caribbean, Latin America, and the US. However, the turmoil of the autonomous Afro
social movements in local and regional spaces that ended up in
the weaving of national and hemispheric networks with convening
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capacity and capacity to influence the power scenarios is a new
development that yielded results at the beginning of the 1990s.
There is no room to analyze the why, but we would like to highlight
three key moments beginning by the campaign in 1992 against the
celebration of 500 years of the so wrongly called discovery of America, which facilitated the organization of both indigenous as well
as Afro-Descendant communities. That same year, the Network of
Afro-Iberoamerican and Caribbean Women was organized in Dominican Republic, a dual expression of the rising of a new wave
of feminism in the region as well as the urgency of black women
to raise the racial question in the feminist field and beyond. The
second moment is particularly in Colombia between the new constitution of 1991 that declares the pluri-ethnic and multicultural nation, and Law 70 of 1993 that recognizes collective property rights
of the lands with self government of the community boards, political representation and ethno-education to the Afro-Colombian
population, so being a legislative piece without precedent that had
influence in the region later. The other is what we call the Durban
process and agenda, this is to say the transnational networks such
as the Afro-Descendant Strategic Alliance that were created with
organizing purposes for the World Conference Against Racism in
Durban, South Africa in 2001, the Durban Conference itself, and its
consequences for the governments’ policies and the movements.
This is another major topic that we will discuss thoroughly during
this conference, but I want to emphasized two things: first, that
Latin America has proven to be the only region in the world where
the majority of the governments declare themselves in favor of
the Durban Agenda and second that the Durban Program has also
served as partial platform for the struggle against racism and for
racial equity of the black movements in the region. The Durban
process opened up a historic continent for racial justice in Latin
America. An important product is the institution of state offices
and branches in favor of racial equity in a series of countries, whose most advanced example is the Ministry of Racial Equity of Brazil
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which has raised the topic to the level of executive office and that
works the racial topic as a crosscut axis with other ministries such
as education, health, and culture. I suggest for our discussion that
in this sense, Brazil should serve as an example for the region. As
a result of the movements’ actions, we have a series of achievements including the election of Afro legislators in several countries
and the organization of a Black Parliament in the Americas whose
president Epsy Campbell is here with us. Another example to follow is the Observatory against Racial Discrimination of Los Andes
University and the Black Communities Process that has just won an
historic case against racial exclusion in a disco in Bogotá. However,
our achievements should not blind us to see and to analyze the
serious problems and great challenges that we still face.
Let’s remember that the World Bank still shows the Afro-Iberoamerican populations with the highest levels of poverty, to which
we can add the highest levels of imprisonment and the lowest
rates of higher education. This structural racism reveled by the
tenacity of the socio-economic inequality is also expressed in a
daily experience of violence caused by deterioration of the social fabric in the urban neighborhoods, the loss of land by the
farmers and over-exploitation of rural workers which is aggravated by the neo-liberal politics that promote mega-development
projects and free trade treaties. If to this we add the rest of the
deaths and forced displacements in situations of armed conflict,
we complete the chart of a rediasporization condition in the sense of banishment and violent dispersion. Given the achievements
as well as the limitations, I will finish by listing what I understand are five of the major challenges and contradictions today,
followed by five of the main work areas and proposals for the
Afro-Descendant Agenda that we are to discuss and to define during this conference. I present these with a critical vision in the
good sense of seeing contradictions, limitations, and possibilities
to identify obstacles as well as avenues for transformation. These
are the challenges:
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1. Given the global capitalism crisis that has effectively hit the
neo-liberal model of globalization, with the respective implications in terms of massive unemployment, fiscal pressure
for the states accompanied by the reduction of the social remuneration and increase of social inequalities; in this critical
moment of transition in the global order, what are the historical change projects and the development paradigms that
we are to design and to develop?
2. The question of the development paradigms is also related
with the life projects, what the indigenous cosmo vision calls
“the good living”, in view of an ecological crisis exemplified
in the global warming that puts the stability of the planet at
risk, and of the agricultural crisis that points towards an increase of hunger. Here, two key topics are the ecological harmony ethnic and popular economies and food sovereignty,
both columns of the Afro-Descendant and indigenous ethno
development.
3. The third challenge is in relation to the escalation of a network
of forms of (domestic, social, political, military) violence at all
levels from the neighborhoods to wars and massive genocides as it happens in Darfur and Rwanda, which also constitute the structural racism which DuBois called the obscure
races of the world and that Fanon called “the Wretched of
the earth” are those who suffer the consequences the most.
4. All this is related to the persistence of Racism in its three
dimensions: structural, institutional, and every day, at the
same time the ideology of its denial takes precedence (the so
called color blind racism)
5. This in turn points to an important contradiction in the
Diaspora’s power and force where on the one hand we have
greater political representation in the states and greater
recognition depending on our identity and culture, at the
same time that today, economic marginalization intensifies
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displacement and violence in the experience of the Afro-Descendant majorities.
Now I would like to point out five principles and areas of work for
our collective agenda:
1. The first principle is that there is a fundamental relation between racial equity and fundamental democracy. In contrast
to democracy in the merely formal sense (this is to say only as
a question of rhetoric and procedure), the fundamental democracy implies identifying social inequalities and their roots
to develop public policies in favor of equity, and to facilitate
the process of empowerment of the subordinated and excluded subjects and sectors. This supposes a correspondence
between financial, cultural, racial, sexual and political democracy, and in public policies it implies coordination between
the financial, cultural, racial, and educational policies.
2. This brings me to the second point which relates to
the area of cultural policies. It is interesting to observe
that until recently we had three Afro ministers of culture in Latin America (Paula Moreno in Colombia, Gilberto Gil in Brazil, and Antonio Preciado in Ecuador).
The most skeptic ones would say that these are insignificant
ministries without much power and budget but assuming
culture as a resource (to use George Yudice’s expression) for
economic development, for the redefinition of the national
space as a inter-cultural scenario, for the democratization of
the citizenship itself and of all institutions in favor of a true
intercultural democracy where identity is based on that difference, is a fundamental column of any social justice horizon and fundamental democracy. Here a priority task is to
explain and to negotiate the relation between the cultural
policies of the communities and social movements with that
of the states.
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3. The third area that I suggest for discussion is in relation with
the development paradigms, a topic I already mentioned
but I want to emphasize that there are cosmo visions and
development practices in our communities that have been
conceptualized and turned into explicit paradigms of sustainable and ecologically harmonic ethno development, and
based on our coexistence, re-distribution and self-governing
rules. At this moment of crisis, change possibilities open up
which enhance the possibilities of change that improve the
importance and feasibility of said development practices and
proposals.
4. The fourth point is the need to combine universal policies
such as the right to a fair remuneration and to public education with ethno-racial policies like the Afro Reparation and
Affirmative Actions. There is a false debate between the universal equity policies and the policies of recognition of ethnic-racial and cultural difference. On the one hand, ethnicracial equity requires of social and economic policies in favor
of the distribution of goods and resources, and on the other
hand the realization of the equity democratic ideals and full
civil rights require recognition, the valorization and empowerment of the excluded differences.
5. The fifth area is the legal and political front. We are gathered
in Colombia, pioneer of legal change with its 1991 constitution that declared the pluri-ethnic and multicultural country,
and with the -Descendants rights Law in 1993, it is necessary
to reflect on the progress and limitations of legislative changes. How to perform the constitutionally declared inter-cultural democracy? How to defend the achievements, develop
the potential, and extend the coverage of law 70 despite the
continuity of banishment and rediasporization? Also, how
to execute and extend the Durban program against racism. I
suggest that all this supposes a multifaceted strategy of col-
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lective empowerment where on the one hand the levels of
organization and autonomy of the black movements and Afro-Descendant communities are promoted, and on the other
hand that influences and representation forms of the states
increase. This is to say, a road of a visible empowerment and
of representation for the collective power.
To conclude I would like to remember that in 1977 in Cali, a historic conference was held, The Conference of Black Cultures of
the Americas at the dawn of a great wave of Afro-Descendant
movements in Latin America. I hope that here and to continue
the tradition, we can continue opening up channels to empower
the Afro-Descendant Diaspora and decolonize power and knowledge. In this sense, the integration as a task of articulating the
Diaspora of gathering its several pieces as of and in favor of a decolonization project in the broad sense of decolonizing memory,
imagination, education, economy and culture, which means to
reinvent the nation and to redefine the state, this is to say for
the construction of a fundamental democracy and fair society.
These are the ethnic-political principles that I suggest and that
are the result of a long historic agency process and empowerment of the persons and movements of Africa and its Diaspora.
This was DuBois’s vision; his spirit is inscribed in the Durban plan
against racism.
I want to finish by saying that the greatest force of the Diaspora lays in empowerment, in assuming the own power and building new forms of collective power. In this sense, decolonize the
power means create power formations without name, because
as the philosopher Enrique Dussel proposes, the basis of power
is the own statement of life. For that reason the Diaspora’s main
power has always been its vision and practice of joy and hope in
spite of the sorrows, being reborn even from the ashes as the
phoenix bird to come to life again and to live beyond the kingdom
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of survival and resistance, in the Cosmic Palenque of freedom,
desire and rumba.
Discussion and conclusions
Challenges and major contradictions:
• In view of the capitalism crisis, what are the historical change
projects and the development paradigms?
• Life Projects “the good life”. In view of an environmental crisis (global warming).
• Escalation of violence at all levels, domestic and political. The
Afro population is more vulnerable.
• Persistence of racism.
• Greater political representation in the States vs. Intensifying
of violence and marginality.
Proposals:
Fundamental Democracy: social inequalities and their roots
should be identified. Empowerment of subordinated sectors. Coordination between economic and political policies.
Cultural policies. Only until recently Afro-Descendants have held
ministries positions. Culture should be assumed as a resource
for economic development and defining the national space as
an intercultural space, is a fundamental column of social justice.
To clarify the relation between social movements and state policies.
To establish harmonic development practices, based on self-governance. The crises generate feasibility for such practices.
Ethnic equity requires redistribution. The equity of rights requires the valorization of diversity.
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One should reflect on the advancements and limitations of legislation. organization and autonomy; the representation of the
states should also increase.
The nations should be reinvented pointing to fair societies. To
create power without domination: power is the statement of life.
Diaspora: joy and hope. “Cosmic Palenque of freedom, desire and
the rumba”.
in spite of the long history of exclusion and marginality of the
Afro-Descendant communities, the Diaspora is the “life memory”
of cultural traditions. Africa’s influence is present in the cultural
foundation of Latin America; its developing role, however, is forgotten.
It is necessary to develop projects that give special attention to
Afro-Descendant women. In this group of the population, discrimination by gender and ethnics are deepened and concentrated.
Despite this situation, their organizational potential is highlighted
in the trajectory of the Afro-Descendant movements.
In Colombia, a great part of the Afro-Descendant population is
found in zones that hold an extensive wealth of natural resources. However, said communities have not seen any benefit from
the exploitation of said resources.
The increasing access of many Afro-Descendants (to public jobs
could be interpreted as opportunities for new development projects that may contribute to solving problems of social inequality
and to drive the international cooperation agenda. The increase
of political representation, however, contrasts with the intensifying of social inequalities.
The formulation of development projects should give extensive
importance to culture and education as fields that contribute to
consolidating full citizenship.
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There are two ways of reading the meaning of Diaspora. On
the one hand, it is understood under a logic of domination and
oppression that pictures the Afro-Descendants as victims of history. On the other hand, the Diaspora is interpreted as a process
where social movements are agents of change and transformation. The Diaspora, from this perspective, is “a counterculture of
modernity” to the extend that there is a search of full citizenship
that is expressed in a double national and afrodiasporic conscience.
Obstacles/ identified challenges
• There are major weaknesses as to the quantitative and qualitative identification of the Afro-Descendant communities
present in the region.
• The migration processes pose challenges for the multi-ethnic societies to the extend that social inequalities are emphasized. The diversity should be recognized as an asset in the
globalization process.
• In view of the capitalism crisis. Likewise, the environmental
crisis, product of global warming, poses challenges in terms
of food security of the Afro-Descendant communities. What
are the historical change projects and the development paradigms?
• There is a notorious increase of the violence that affects the
Afro-Descendant communities at different domestic and political levels. Racism persists under three types: structural
racism, institutional racism and every day racism.
• The biggest political representation acquired by the AfroDescendants contrasts with the intensifying of violence and
marginality.
• The Afro-Descendant communities now have more leaders.
However, there is a generation of young people left behind
that are exposed to several forms of violence. How to use
culture as a tool for transformation and inclusion?
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Proposals that could be replicated:
• Despite the lack of precise information on Afro populations,
the governments are compiling the necessary data. In Colombia’s case, the DANE included the ethic component. The international community ought to support this type of efforts.
• In the legislative field for Afro-Descendant communities, we
can highlight the progress that has been made in Colombia,
particularly the 1991 Constitution and Law 70 of 1993. Also
important to mention is the work carried out by the Observatory against Racial Discrimination of Los Andes University of
Colombia.
• The creation of the Ministry of Racial Equity in Brazil, that
concentrates its efforts on addressing racial inequality issues,
can serve as reference point for the Afro-Descendant Agenda
of other countries.
Proposals for cooperation mechanisms and schemes between
countries
• It is necessary to assume culture as a resource for economic
development, the definition of the national space as an intercultural space, and the strengthening of citizenship.
• The relation between the State, the elective policy and the
Afro-Descendant social movements should enable the latter
to be autonomous and to have an effect in the definition of
public policies.
• The current neoliberal crisis offers possibilities to formulate new development paradigms. Said formulation should
involve the Afro-Descendant communities’ knowledge and
local practices with the state’s resources. It is possible that
the contradiction between the greater political representation and the increase of socioeconomic inequalities and the
structural racism, intensifies.
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• We have to move forward in the constitution of solidarity
bonds not only at cultural level but also in the economic and
social areas.
• It is necessary to reflect over the legislative progress and limitations for Afro-Descendant communities
Development challenges for the AfroDescendant populations in the world
The purpose of this forum is to propose cooperation mechanisms
and schemes on actions that foster specific bonds and synergies
between economy and culture.
This forum will emphasize on the need to foster cooperation
between the countries in the framework of culture as means or
instrument for development. Special emphasis will be given to
the interaction avenues between culture and development. The
fundamental objective is to propose cooperation mechanisms
and schemes on actions that foster specific bonds and synergies
between economy and culture.
Kei Kawabata
Profile
Of Japanese origin, she assumed the position of Social Sector
Manager of the Inter-American Development Bank on November 16th/ 2007. She joined the BID after 23 years with the
World Bank, where she held the position of Manager Health,
Nutrition and Population Sector. She has broad experience in
the area of health systems, services, financing, in addition to
her knowledge of education and gender. She took 6 sabbatical
years to serve as Coordinator of transfer of resources and risk
protection, and as health policy adviser with the Sustainable
Health Department of the World Health Organization. Prior
to joining the World Bank, she worked for the United Nations
Development Program Latin America Office, both in New York
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and in Brazil. She holds a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy
from the Fletcher School, Tufts University, and a bachelor’s degree granted by Colgate University.
Lecture
Message from the President of the Inter-American Development Bank, Mr. Luis Alberto Moreno.
Good morning to all. I am truly sorry for not being with you
today in Cartagena in this important event, but I do know that
I will be very well represented by Social Sector Manager, Kei
Kawabata and by Claire Nelson of her team, and with them I
want to take this opportunity to send a message for them to
share it with you during this conference of Afro-Descendants
of the Americas.
I want to send a special greeting to the Minister of Culture,
Paula Marcela Moreno, to the Mayoress of Cartagena, Judith
Pinedo, to Mr. Oscar Gamboa, AMUNAFRO Executive Director
and Director of the Intersectorial Commission for the Progress
of Afro-Colombian Communities directly led by Vice-President
Santos, to the former Governor of Chocó, Luis Gilberto Murillo, and to the Governor of Cesar, Cristhian Moreno. I met with
some of them in the past month of September at the Bank’s
Headquarters to review the projects they are developing and
to see what else we could do to develop Cartagena’s black
communities, Cesar, Buenaventura, and in general the Colombian Afro-Descendant population.
For this reason I want to start by congratulating the AfroColombian community for the efforts made towards a better
internal organization and coordination, and for having in this
same city of Cartagena de Indias, 5 years ago (a series of institutional conferences in favor of the progress of the Afro-Colombian communities.
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The community has assumed a proactive and constructive attitude in favor of its inclusion, of which I have been witness
since I worked as Ambassador in Washington; From this initiatives – mainly motivated by the call of the United Nations
during the world conference against racism in August 2001, in
Durban – have resulted many of the advancements in the past
years, such as CONPES 3310, the alliances with the Black Caucus of the United States Congress, the special budget allocation within Plan Colombia, the mobilization of other resources
through international cooperation.
The importance of the social inclusion of Afro-Descendant
communities lays in that the groups represent between 25 and
30% of the Colombian population, and between 30 and 40% of
the entire population of the region (being Brazil and Colombia
the countries with the largest settlements). I am convinced
that their social inclusion is the driving force of growth and
social cohesion for our countries.
I have said several times that there are no magic potions or
short cuts towards development. Although promoting social
inclusion is not the exception, I believe that is important to capitalize on the issues where there is a consensus, to put them
on the table and to use them as a compass and continue with
local organization efforts, and with the building of alliances with countries of the region and the donor community.
Likewise, we have to identify strategic opportunities and situations to promote inclusive approaches. It is necessary to
strengthen the local governments in the areas where the poorest communities are concentrated and to improve the focalization of social programs; and lastly, to identify the additional barriers faced by the Afro-Descendants which should be
addressed by means of affirmative actions.
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As I said in 2006 during the IV Institutional Conference of AfroColombians in Medellín, the advancements in organizational
terms of the Afro-Colombian community are huge. They have
applied the approach promoted by President Kennedy of reciprocity among the citizens: where rights come together with
responsibilities. It is important to continue these efforts in the
face of a largest building of consensus that maximize the impact of lobbying initiatives, rendering of accounts and building
of alliances.
And so then, addressing social exclusion does not only require
affirmative actions, of temporary and remedial nature, but also a cultural exchange that sees diversity as an asset and not
as a threat. Therefore I want us to think ahead, with a strategic, realistic vision, but above all orientated towards results.
Even though the BID seeks to be a great ally of the countries in
the promotion of social inclusion, we have to recognize that it
has limitations to act. As many of you know, the Bank responds
to the countries’ loan requests, and accompanies them in the
implementation of development projects. This way, the initiative and demand always come from the countries.
The challenge is great but not greater that the commitment of
all of us who know that social exclusion does not wait, and that
promoting exercising of the excluded groups’ rights of the region
more than an economic growth topic, is an ethical imperative.
Before finalizing, I want to reiterate my personal and institutional commitment with the search of opportunities for all AfroDescendants. The Bank is ready to support the governments,
and to hear from the interested organizations constructive, solid proposals focused on results and the rendering of accounts.
My best wishes for a great conference and I will make sure to
be well informed on the results of this event.
Many thanks
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Silvia Beatriz García Savino. Consultant Iberoamerican General Secretariat , SEGIB
Profile: Was born in Argentina. She is a Doctor in General Linguistic and Philosophy by the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität of Germany. She has been working for 15 years in the
design, the evaluation, negotiation and the management of a
wide range of social, environmental, and economic projects
and humanitarian demining. She is an external consultant in
international organizations. In the present time she works
in the Iberoamerican General Secretariat (SEGIB) in Madrid,
Spain in matters related to the Afrodescendant population in
Latin America and the Caribbean.
Intervention
First and foremost, my thanks to the Colombian government
for this initiative and for the invitation extended to the SEGIB.
We are, as always, very pleased to be in these lands.
SEGIB was invited to participate in this meeting in the person
of its Secretary General, Mr. Enrique Iglesias, who very much
regrets not being with us today. Many of you know that issues
of discrimination and situation of Afro-descendant people in
Latin America have been among the concerns of Mr. Iglesias
long ago. Therefore, he recorded and sent us a greeting video
that includes some thoughts on the subject for today. We are
here to present the video and add a few comments.
First, let me mention that the Heads of State and Government
meeting at the last Ibero-American Summit held in Santiago
de Chile (8-10/11/2007) gave the mandate for SEGIB to make
“a compendium of information on the situation of Afro-descendant population in Latin America.” That mandate has been
fulfilled through three activities:
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1. An investigation was conducted on the bilateral and multilateral cooperation leading resources to countries of Latin
America and whose ultimate beneficiaries are the populations of African descent in those countries.
2. Thanks to the cooperation of the European Commission, 3
papers were developed and are available to those who require “statistical visibility of Afro-descendant population in
Latin America: Conceptual and methodological issues” by
Fabiana del Popolo and John Anton; “Current status of implementation of civil, political, economic, social and cultural
rights of Afro-descendant population in Latin America” by Alvaro Bello and Marcelo Paixao and “Organizations and joints
of the Afro-descendants in Latin America and the Caribbean”
by Martha Rangel.
3. In collaboration with the European Commission and the Regional Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean of the
United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the SEGIB organized a seminar on this topic in Panama in March this year,
where leaders of African descent of the region attended to
discuss, analyze and record the documents mentioned in the
previous paragraph.
Secondly, and very briefly, I would like to refer to something in
the present time: the current financial crisis will affect, more
hardly, the most vulnerable populations of Latin America and
the Caribbean, including the Afro-descendant populations. I
regret being the bearer of bad news.
As we all know, there have improvements in our region, especially since 2003 and 2004, in fact, the improvements of recent decades in access to health and, primary and secondary
education have to add the sharp reduction in poverty and particularly extreme poverty or indigence. However, this should
not make us forget that the number of poor (190 million) and
indigent (69 million) in the region is higher than in 1980.
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Moreover, progress in terms of equity, including income distribution, has been scarce, if not zero, during the last decades.
A prime example is the Afro-descendant population that is
among those most impoverished sectors, which have come to
a lesser extent improvements in recent years and which continue to suffer from inequality in the region hardest.
Just to give a few examples: currently over 80% of Latin American children and adolescents between 5 and 18 years in
school, but with the exception of Costa Rica, this figure drops
sharply when looking indicators of the population African and
especially of those living in rural areas. When you look at the
numbers of work insertion, and the quality and type of employment, the Afro are placed in the worst job categories with the
exception of the Garifuna of Honduras.
However, gains were insufficient, but, worse yet; they can be
reversed more or less rapidly as a result of the international
crisis, a product of irresponsible handling of the financial system in most developed countries, and especially in the United
States. This crisis, which will produce an increase in unemployment and poverty, is likely to be added to the rising prices of
food and energy, although these prices have declined in recent
weeks, the cumulative increase remains high.
Just to give an idea to the case of food, its price began to rise
in 2006 but had a very strong acceleration in early 2008. When
comparing June 2008 with June 2007, those prices, in many
countries, doubled the increase in the general price level. And,
as you know, the poorer a family is more intensive in their food
basket.
The increase in prices of food and energy as the slower pace of
economic growth expected for the countries of our region for
the remainder of 2008 and 2009, will, as always, affect more
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to the most vulnerable, those with no savings or assets to cope
with the crisis.
We have to ask who these sectors are; however, they are the
lower income middle class and poor, including Afro-descendant populations in our region. In this way, if nothing is done
to compensate for these most vulnerable sectors, it is not excluded that the crisis soon remove the improvements achieved in the last 5 or 6 years. As I read some days ago, financial
crises in the north causing humanitarian crisis in the south.
This is the bad news I had for you today; it is an alert, respectful
but urgent, our rulers and developed countries. A child who
goes hungry for several months will suffer irreparable loss. It
is the time to act.
Thank you very much! With you now, Enrique Inglesias, the
Secretary General of the Iberoamerican General Secretariat.
Enrique Iglesias’s Message. Secretary General of the
Iberoamerican General Secretariat
(Video)
Good morning. I begin by thanking a very special way the Colombian Government and its Minister of Culture for their kind
invitation to attend this important event. I sincerely regret not
being able to attend, first because it is a subject that has always
been very close to my personal interest, not only on this occasion, but, previously, in my passage through the Interamerican
Development Bank, we had opportunity to make this issue a
topic of concern. Even here in this very city of Cartagena, in
this beautiful city, in particular we had a meeting of the Board
of Governors of the Bank; there are surely some people in the
audience who have had occasion to remember this important
opportunity to challenge for us and before us, this topic that
concerns us.
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I think we should congratulate, besides the Government of
Colombia, the Afrodescendant population for the challenges
posed by this event. It is very important that this issue is concerned, is discussed, not to create special categories, because
we are all, in short, Colombians, Brazilians and Mexicans ...
but to identify within the company where are the groups most
affected by social deficits. And I think when we look at this population, the population of Afrodescendant, in countries where they are minorities, there is a clear discrimination against
them, that, somehow, has to be addressed with the title you
want, but it must be treated as policy interventions from the
governments and the private sector, to pursue a genuine policy of combating discrimination.
Starting with the fact that we do not yet know exactly how
many people are involved in such discrimination, because we
do not have uniform statistics on the number of people classified as African descent; but from CEPAL, which speaks of one
hundred and forty six million, the World Bank, which refers
to little more than a hundred million, one could say that 25%
of the population is of African descent in Latin America. And
particularly, where they are minorities is where one finds the
worst levels of discrimination.
Discrimination with regard to health: a very high percentage
of people of African descent have no access to basic health
services, and this is reflected in things as serious as the child
population or diseases that are part of a big social gap that
must be begin to address and correct.
In education, which is the big factor of comparison, the single
biggest factor in opening opportunities, I was touched to see
many cases of discrimination that exist in fact. 80% of children
arrive at school, but in the Afro-descendant population that
percentage is considerably less. Needless to say, in secondary
and higher education. I remember very well the programs, for
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example, in Brazil, aiming to facilitate access for people of African descent to the university cycle, with specific policies and
policies designed precisely to enable this population to advance their training.
Poor education also means a lack of ability to dynamically insert in labor markets, and when one looks at the statistics reveals that the opportunities available to this group than those
that open to the rest of society. Why is this? Well, simply because education has failed and will not allow this ethnic group
to come forward to have equal opportunities with respect to
others.
This year we are in the year of non-discrimination, in the year
of combating discriminatory ways, it is important to discuss
the issue and discuss it in a broad sense, not to create categories, but simply to determine that there are groups in the
society who have severe social deficits. I think in this case is
justified only too well the need to address and treat the entirety as claimed in this important meeting.
I must say that for us the issue is of particular importance, because we’re trying to build, or rather, to consolidate the construction of the Latin American society. Latin America is in the
background, the large mixing of the confluence of three great
dominant strands that formed what today is our society. To the
Native American civilization must be added the European and
particularly the Iberian slope. But added to that, afterwards,
the very important influence of Africa. These three strands formed this great melting mixtures gave rise to this great mix we
have today in Latin America.
If we are committed to Latin America, we must be committed
to the three strands. And if one does not progress, something
must be done. Each country will have to do it their way, will
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ensure that the mechanisms for influencing it, but we have to
enhance the theme and enhance the political sensitivity and
awareness of society as a whole to achieve the progress that
has formed Iberoamerica and has been so rich, not only contributing their labor, their work-often in dramatic situations, as
the period of slavery in America, but also bringing the vitality
of this group, bringing its enormous contribution to the culture. We find in Latin America, in the formation of this crucible,
an enormous cultural contribution that has been done by the
Afrodescendant population, and therefore, there is a duty to
society as a whole to address the discriminatory ways, starting
with knowing where the discrimination is and how many are
being discriminated.
That’s why I congratulate the Minister of Culture of Colombia,
because I think the fact of this meeting, along with institutions
that accompany this event, is an important fact. I wanted to
be in this event, unfortunately I cannot do it personally, but
of course the Secretariat was represented at the meeting. We
join to this effort with great enthusiasm; because we believe
that we must confront all obstacles to create an Iberoamerican
society more just, equitable and equal opportunity for all.
Discussion and Conclusions
The social movement of the African Diaspora has grown and become stronger. However, there are still conditions of inequality
and exclusion expressed in the lowest indexes of access to education, health and the offer of cultural goods and services of the
Afro-Descendant population among others.
Among the young Afro-Colombian population, specially among
the poorest there concentrates exclusion problems, lack of opportunities, reproduction of poverty, high indexes of violent deaths,
marginalizing of science and technology, as well as employment
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options, participation in politics, recreation and expression possibilities. These aspects make of them a vulnerable population.
Another structural element that is identified for the analysis related with the development challenges of the Afro-Descendant
population is the profound inequality present in the power structures that limit development of equitable relations among the
nations, persons and cultures at symbolic level and of material
conditions required for traditional cultures to develop.
The minimum access of Afro-Descendants to the popular elective
positions aggravate more the possibilities of being recognized.
This is an expression of exclusion of the political system in which
representative democracy prevails above the opportunities and
challenges that a participative cultural democracy offers, where
ethnic groups and other minorities would have a higher incidence
in the political decisions and programs that affect them.
In the context of the global capitalism crisis, the role of the State
as the regulating body in front of a development hegemonic and
dominant model has been harmful and backward before the traditional productive practices, consequently, an alert is suggested,
given that the populations that have been excluded and marginalized will suffer with more severity the current crisis of the
economy.
According to the foregoing, the following challenges have been
identified:
1. To inquire into the alternatives that offer tools such as TICs
and digital culture.
2. The inclusion challenges and valuation of wellbeing indicators used by the state and the multilateral development
agencies.
3. The historic lap as an obstacle to resolve, question and identify the paradigms and traps of poverty where for example
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the extracting systems and oil, coal, gold exploitation have
generated but misery, cultural impoverishment and ecological devastation.
4. To implement the advancements of the Durban conference
that fights against racism, as an efficient instrument that
should be put on the Latin-American States’ public agenda
.
Forum II: Culture as base of reunion and
recreation of the global ethnic agenda
Cultural Diversity and the African Diaspora in the Americas
Discussed the importance of cultural parameters that determine
development for the Iberoamericans countries for the progress
of the Afro-Descendant population. Suggested the ethnic integration role in the recognition of the nations’ cultural diversity.
Doudou Diene
Profile (Senegal, 1941). Was United Nations Special Rapporteur
on Racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and other related
forms of intolerance from 2002 to 2008. Diène has a Bachelor’s
Degree in Law of the University of Caen (France), a PhD in Public
law of the University of Paris, and a diploma in Political Science
from the Institut d’Études Politiques de París.
Between 1972 and 1977 he worked as UNESCO’s deputy representative. In 1977, he joined the UNESCO secretariat, where he
held several positions including Director of the Inter-American Division of Cultural Projects. He was appointed Special Rapporteur
on racism and related topics with the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in August 2002, following Maurice GleleAhanhanzo from Benin.
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Lecture
I would like to start by saying that I am very pleased not only to
be invited here but also to see you. One of the first countries I
investigated was Colombia; six years ago I was here. There were
no African descendant people in the Government, so it is now a
pleasure to see you occupying this position, because I really think
that after many years of wandering in the region, not only on the
slave route, but also on the intercultural dialogue as United Nations Rapporteur, I believe that culture is the key, a key issue in
this hemisphere.
We cannot continue our discussion without contextualizing our
conference. We have to keep in mind in what context we are having this conference here in Cartagena and there are two key factors which have an impact on this discussion. One is the financial
crisis. For many it seems very far away from our discussion, but
I think it is very close because the financial crisis we are seeing
right now is one of the most negative consequences of the present day globalization, and please keep in mind that the first form
of historical globalization was the Atlantic Slave Trade, organized
structured globalization because it linked Continents, regions.
The main purpose was the so called exploitation of the so called
“newlands” (they were not new), and the means of exploitation
was moving financial powers, investing in the slave ship, in the triangle of trade and the using of population in the moving around
as work force, just as migrants are being used now.
So the first globalization was the slave trade and I wanted to remind it to you because, in my view, one of the most important
powerful forces which has really limited the negative, and which
has destroyed my view in the slave trade, was culture. We all
know that the Atlantic Slave Trade has certainly been a story of
permanent resistance, and African salves always resistant, fought
back, from the villages they were taken, along the routes to the
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force of the corps of Africa, in the ships in the middle passage and
in the Americas and the Caribbean, they keep fighting.
But, one dimension of the resistance which has been ignored
even by many African descendants is the cultural resistance. I do
believe that one of the most powerful arms used by the slaves
has been culture. Why? Because the ideological column of slavery
has been racism, this ideological column was that theorization of
the cultural inferiority and the human inferiority of the Africans
slaves. It was the basis, and because of this basis, the slaves realized an outset that in the long term, the so called “masters”
where going to lose. Because the masters saw only the slaves and
slavery as work force.
The women, children and men captured and sold by some African
regimes, were seen only as work force and because of prejudice
there is a very deep belief by this people that those that they are
selling and taking across the Atlantic were not human, lack civilization, and even lack the capacity to think their own situation.
There own suffering was something they could not grasp. It was
part of the intellectual construction of racism, in the black person. And this was maybe the weakest point of the Atlantic Slave
Trade, because slaves realized very quickly that the masters, the
so called masters, were completely ignorant, were not taken into
account in the other slaves’ dimension: their culture, rituals, and
values, all very human.
The masters could not see this because for the masters salves do
not have this kind of things; they were supposed to be inferior
and uncivilized. It is from this initial observation that the African
slaves, as you know, kept observing the masters, they kept a long
the four centuries of slavery, looking at the master to see who he
is, what it is bizarre, what does he like, what does he don’t like,
and they used the only thing, factors that the master could not
see to organize the cultural resistance, what I call the Maroon
Culture. That culture was base on the capacity of very intelligent
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creativity of the slaves that for centuries of literarily subverting
and transforming what the masters wanted to input on them
without the masters seeing it.
When the masters asked them, because the cultural and ideological power of the time, the Christian Church, the Holy Church,
gave its blessing, as you know, to the Atlantic Slave Trade; the only
thing the Holy Church did was asking the masters to really make
the slaves more Christian and the slaves were asked as Christian virtue to obey the master. By obeying the master they can
gain paradise, they can be more Christian. But when the masters
asked the slaves just to come back to the intelligent resistance of
the Slavery, to take the Christ and Virgin Mary as their new God,
the slaves had no possibility to say no, no possibility, if they say
no, they would be killed.
So what they did, as you know, was to transform the Christ and
the Virgin Mary to African Gods, they literally integrated them
to their Gods; they gave them new names, new identity, without
telling the masters. Giving the name of Orishas, African stilted realities. This is one example; even on the more trivial aspect, and
our friend Zulu knows it, of cook and food when in a country like
Brazil, on Sundays a masters asks a slave to kill the pig and prepare the meal for the master and its family, and left for the slave
the bones and the so called inferior pars, as you know, what the
slave did was just to take those bones and mixed them up with
herbs and fruits, sea fruits, and created the Brazilian Feijoada,
which is now the national dish, mixing.
They kept mixing, integrating, transforming, and one of the most
important form of cultural resistance was the ethical resistance.
Because, this is were the roll and the very fundamental trunk role
of women in the combat against the slavery has been a way to
minimized because it is the women, the slave women, who kept
this institution who is the family, as the ultimate place were in
the evening, when the slaves came back from the cotton fields
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or the mines of whatever, suffering after days of exploitation
and violence, when they came back, to find in the family more
strength, to regain their humanity. And it is the women, who are
walking in the fields as men, who created this strategy and this is
why the institution of family is so strong and so important in the
whole hemisphere.
So the point I want to make out, is that cultural resistance has
been the most profound force to literary win, destroy this first
form of globalization which was slavery. And just one last example: you know the so called Revolt of Santo Domingo; it is Slave
revolution, which has literary shaken up the foundations the slavery systems which happened in August 1971. You know that the
Santo Domingo Revolution in front of the masters; the masters
did not see because in the evenings after working in the mines
and in the fields, slaves met sometimes in the woods to practice
vudu and to play drums, the masters said let this wild people go
and do this, tomorrow they will be in a better shape to work.
Slaves used that possibility, that window, that ignorance and
prejudice, and organized the Santo Domingo Revolution, which
happened in the Island of Espanola, from one part to the other.
During that time there was no mobile phone, but the Revolution
started at the same time in the whole island because they used
everything; the drum rituals, songs, everything to organize the
revolution.
So the point I was making here is that we are witnessing now, one
of the worst consequences of the actual present day globalization, the financial aspect, but as we know, those who are going
to suffer of the impact of this financial crisis are the poor communities, those who are already socially, economically marginalized and not as this morning we have heard, the Afro-descendant
population will have to suffer an employment marginalization,
socially and economically.
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And as we know also, this is a point I want to bring out, certainly
the so called powers of the world are getting together in their
dark suites and white shirts are trying to get solutions without
asking you what your views are. But, as we know that, one of the
most important bases of the crisis is not financial per se, it is not
the way some people are behaving in the banks and in the financial institutions, it is the lack of ethic in the human perspective,
the human dimension, of development.
It is that ethical dimension, the moral, the human part which has
been missing, and there is not doubt that human dimension will
have to be brought in the picture for a final solution of what the
crisis has rebuilt.
The point I wanted to share with you it is one factor of the context. The other factor I wanted to mention is Obama. We cannot
continue to talk about diversity, our conference here, ignoring
what Obama factor means. The Obama factor means two things,
because I just came back from the United States, two months
ago, it was the last mission as a Rapporteur, to investigate the
state of racism in the United States. My report should be finished
by the beginning of the year, and Howard Dodson hosted my conference in Harlem with the communities to listen to their experiences of racism.
But the point I wanted to point out is that because of the Slave
Trade, we are seeing the possibility that the most powerful country in the world has its next leader, a member of the Afro-descendant community, that it is very important. We know that is the
result of the combat of African Americans for civil rights against
racism, but we wonder why in the United States where African
descendant communities are not so big, why that phenomenon
is does not exist now in this part of the hemisphere as South
America. And I just wanted to tell you that I have never used the
expression Latin America. I am sorry. I have been doing this publicly in the United Nations in New York and in Geneva because the
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notion of Latin means that the ignorance of the other root of this
hemisphere. There are three routes, the indigenous first, they
were the first people, and they were slaughtered, killed. African
brought work force and the European, this are the three routes.
The European is a Latin so using the context of Latin means ignoring the other two routes. This was a parenthesis. Because the
enterprise of racism, the intellectual construction of racism has
been so profound in this hemisphere that it touches everything,
even the geographical names, language, not only color, it impregnated the culture, very profound. It has a historical and cultural
debt which people did not understand by using certain concept.
The point I wanted to tell you about Obama, he can be the next
President of the United States. It is a very important new beginning, there is no doubt. Why this possibility does not exist in this
part of the hemisphere, you have to wonder. A country like Brazil
which has received 14 % of this African and slaved, that went to
Brazil; 14% in the Caribbean, 10% in the U.S. 10% in the other
South American countries.
Why? So this brings me to another point because, we have to,
when we meet like this, and this is a fantastic initiative from the
Colombian Government to do it, but I hope it is the beginning of
something more profound. We have to revise the concept because in the program the central concept is diversity.
But let us revise this in two minutes, not too long, what diversity
means, please. Remember two central points. First, it is one in
the 18 and 19 Century when the first research on the notion of diversity on species and racism started with philosophers, thinkers,
scientists, the so called “Enlightment”. It was in this intellectual
context, as you remember, that the hierarchy of racism has been
defined.
One of the first consequences of the intellectual reflection on
diversity is the hierarchy of racism. It was from this perspec-
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tive; please revise it, the writing of scholars and philosophers,
so called scientists, of the end of 17, 18 and 19 centuries, people
like Voltaire and other. It was during those times of research of
diversity that they put two points; one, the human species are
divided in different pieces, there is diversity, but this diversity is
not equal, some races were superior than others by their blood,
by the culture, and by their civilization.
Please keep in mind that it was in this context that the all dynamic of leaving Europe and conquering other lands started. So
this point is important; diversity has been historically connoted,
diversity used alone as a concept involve the notion of racism.
And this we have to keep it mind.
Secondly, we know that diversity has been ideological instrumentalized by even Europe now, if you go to extreme parties, racist
parties which have racists agendas, they accept diversity but they
put a hierarchy between the different races and communities.
This is why we have to revise the notion of diversity and try to
move from diversity to something that has more moral content,
like pluralism, because pluralism is a different thing from diversity,
it is a value, it is a recognition acceptation, promotion of diversity
but given it as a value. If you take diversity alone, then diversity
will be instrumentalized by whatever political forces.
In this hemisphere, all the Governments which have founded
their policies in the last three centuries, on this very profound
racist ideology of the inferiority of the indigenous first and the
African slaves, recognize diversity. But diversity mean everybody
stay in its color.
But what I do believe in Madame Minister, that what you are aiming at and all participants is going beyond simply recognizing that
there is differences between the different communities. But going
beyond that means a second point I wanted to share with you.
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You have to understand that the recognition of diversity as a value not only as a simple fact has been violent painful conquest by
the slaved, by the African descendant. Because as I said initially,
their humanity has been denied at the beginning; their capacity
to reflect on their own situation was denied; they were not recognized as humans. It is on this basis that they were slaughtered,
exploited, in different ways during this three or four centuries.
But as I said, it was a slave that started by walking out; the best
way to combat enslavement by using what remind as humanity
in their listened themselves, what the masters could not see and
slowly in the four centuries they regain inhumanity. They regain
inhumanity integrating in their culture whatever their masters
imposed to them, this was the first point I made to you.
So please keep in mind that diversity not only as a simple fact,
which can be instrumentalized, but as a value, pluralism, meaning recognizing the other community and its humanity, recognizing its right, promoting this right, etc. has been brought, has
been a result of a conquest of three centuries of fighting by the
enslaved. And as I said.
Edouard Firmin Matoko
Profile
Born in the Republic of Congo and is Doctor in Development
Economy and Politics Development of the University the Sapienza in Roma, Italy; Post-doctoral in Political Science and International Relations, at the University of Florencia Cesare Alfieri.
In his career with UNESCO he has held, since 1984, several positions and has obtained considerable experience in identifying,
designing and implementing program development projects in
the areas of education, some of which he manages jointly with
other United Nations’ agencies. He has contributed to the development of educational policies on Human Rights in Africa, Asia
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and the Iberoamerican and Caribbean region, and represented
the Organization in several international fora and conferences.
He was in charge of implementing the Organization’s Action Plan
in the decade of the Right to Education at United Nations and
of implementing the international conventions, which included
technical advice and experiences to the Member States Latin
America, Africa and Asia, and the development and evaluation of
policies, programs and curricula in this area. Likewise, he played
a significant role in developing UNESCO’s Culture of Peace Program. The launch supervision of this initiative in Latin America
and Africa, especially in El Salvador and Guatemala, contributed
to strengthen the relations between the different actors involved
in the process of national reconstruction and consolidation of
peace.
Lecture
The UNESCO and the cultural development of Afro descendant
communities in Latin America and the Caribbean.
On behalf of UNESCO’s Managing Director, I would like to sincerely thank the organizers of this conference for their kind invitation,
and in particular to Dra. Paula Marcela Moreno Zapata, Minister
of Culture of the Republic of Colombia, since the topic addressed
has been part of UNESCO’s agenda for more than a decade, when
in 1994 the Slave Route Project, destined to both highlighting and
dignifying Africa’s cultural legacy in the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe, as well as facilitating the dialogue between the
communities inheriting that legacy, with the purpose of a greater
strengthening of its activities directed at eliminating discriminating injustices and actions, as well as conquering access to development.
The city of Cartagena de Indias, declared by UNESCO in 1984, Cultural Heritage of Humanity, became as of the XVI century one of
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the most important centers of redistribution of enslaved Africans
towards the Hispanic Caribbean and opened one of the most passionate topics that marks the profound knowledge of the cultural
exchanges in the area in that enables us today to interpret the
cultural diversity of the region from continuous transformation
processes. I am referring to the Trans-American and Caribbean
slave trade, an extension of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, but in
a new and hitherto network of complexity, yet to be studied and
spread in all its colors.
This city is today an appropriate space to place the Afro-Descendant’s Agenda in the Americas in the governments’ center of
attention, and of the entire international community, to direct
the execution of social and economic programs and policies that
should be destined to the marginalized nations according to their
cultural characteristics; that is to say, through respect to cultural
diversity.
UNESCO’s work, based on the recommendations of the Member
States, correspond with the objective of this conference. In the
most recent years, two important conventions have been approved which also have a high degree of complementarities and
that by own right are part of the interests of the communities
represented here.
The CONVENTION FOR THE SAFEGUARDING OF INTANGIBLE CULTURAL HERITAGE, approved in 2003, has defined its objectives
aimed at protecting a special characteristic of the cultural heritage related with the use, representations, expressions, knowledge and techniques, along with the handling of instruments,
objects, artifacts and cultural spaces that are inherent, that the
communities, groups and individuals recognize as part of their
cultural heritage. This living cultural heritage, passed from generation to generation, is a permanent resource of the communities
and groups in function of their environment, of their interaction
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with nature and their history, which contributes to promoting the
respect for cultural diversity and human creativity. It also promotes the rising of awareness, at local, national and international
level, about the importance of this cultural heritage and of its
recognition; as well as international cooperation and assistance.
This convention has already been ratified by 95 states, according
to the information to May of this year, a part of them depositaries of a profound African inheritance, enriched and transformed
during several generations in the Americas and the Caribbean.
Due to its binding function, compliance of the mandate of the
referred Convention implies the safeguarding of these cultural
expressions in their broadest sense.
Jointly, the CONVENTION ON THE PROTECTION AND PROMOTION OF THE DIVERSITY AND CULTURAL EXPRESSIONS, approved
in 2005, whose objective is to protect and to promote the diversity of cultural expressions; to create the conditions for the
cultures to be able to prosper and maintain free interactions in
a mutually profitable fashion; to promote the dialogue between
cultures to guarantee more extensive and balanced exchanges in
the world in favor of intercultural respect and of one culture of
peace; to foster inter-culturality in order to develop its interaction; to promote the respect for diversity of the cultural expressions and to be more conscious of its value at local, national and
international level; to reaffirm the importance of the indissoluble
bond between culture and development for all the countries and
to support the activities developed at national and international
level to recognize the authentic value of this bond; to recognize
the specific nature of the cultural activities and the goods and
services in their quality of bearers of identity, values and meaning; to reiterate the sovereign rights of the States to preserve, to
adopt and to apply the policies and measures they deem necessary to protect and to promote the diversity of cultural expressions in their respective territories; to strengthen international
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cooperation and solidarity in a spirit of collaboration, in order to
reinforce, in particular, the capacities of the developing countries
with the purpose of protecting and promoting the diversity of
cultural expressions.
Both conventions have generated several measures to undertake
actions of continuity and follow up. Between the years 2001,
2003 and 2005 90 masterpieces have been proclaimed; of which
17 correspond to Latin America and the Caribbean. An important
part of them evidences the cultural footprints of Africa in America, such as language, dance and music of the Garifunas (2001)
in Belize, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua; Bahia’s samba
de Roda de Recôncavo (2005) in Brazil; Carnaval of Barranquilla
(2003) and the cultural space of Palenque de San Basilio (2005)
in Colombia; la tumba francesa (2003) in Cuba; the cultural space
of the Cofradía del Espíritu Santo of the congos of Villa Mella
(2001) and the tradition of the Cocolo Dancing Theater (2005)
in Dominican Republic; and the cimarroness traditions of Moore
Town (2003) in Jamaica. These expressions of diversity go beyond
national pride and transform themselves in a world pride, in man
made treasures.
Just as it has been pointed out during the first process of identifying, nominating, evaluating and proclaiming the first ninety
works:
An essential component of the Proclamation Program is the preliminary assistance that contributed a financial aid to the developing Member States to prepare their dossiers for candidacy. This
aid could be used for different types of activities: field work, research, inventories, identification jobs, seminars and workshops
with the involved communities and institutions, development of
audiovisual documentation. By establishing this financial support,
UNESCO pretended to urge the involved communities to perform
a direct role in the development of action plans. This preliminary
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assistance enabled some of the countries to undertake the execution of national inventories, to create committees in charge of
coordinating the safeguarding activities and to launch awareness
rising campaigns. Thanks to UNESCO’s ordinary budget and to the
Trust Fund UNESCO/Japan for the preservation and promotion of
immaterial cultural heritage, 120 institutions of developing countries received assistance in the framework of the Proclamation
Program. 1
In the same way, in the New strategy for the Slave Route Project2,
the Culture Office for Latin America and the Caribbean located
in Havana, has concluded its first phase through the making of
the Slave Route memory sites in the Latin Caribbean, that for the
first time combines natural heritage with that built and that alive.
This experience adds an interesting multi country work and action methodology to visualize not only the African legacy in the
Caribbean, but specially the diversity of its cultural expressions
through its current inhabitants, many of them descendants for
many generations of enslaved Africans or emigrants from other
places.
Proposing and proclaiming the new MEMORY SITES as part of the
cultural heritage of the humanity, just as is the purpose of this
project, would generate an important source of employment for
the communities settled in those sites and it would be one of the
avenues to fight inequality, poverty and to win new spaces for
social participation.
On the other hand and in coordination with the referred Regional
Office of the Habana, the UNESCO office in Quito, with representation for Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela, has sponsored the CACAO ROUTE PROJECT IN LATIN AMERICA AND THE
CARIBBEAN whose background information is the Second Confer1
2
Masterpieces of the Oral and Immaterial Heritage of Humanity. Proclamations 2001,
2003 and 2005, UNESCO, p. 5.
See new strategy for the Slave Route Project, CLT/CPD/HIS, UNESCO, 3 of February 2006.
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ence of Experts of the Afro American Center for Cultural Diversity and Human Development, organized in Esmeraldas, Ecuador,
from August 1 to 5 of 2005; and the second: «Cacao Route in
Latin America as a History Research Project», during the International Workshop on «the Cacao Route in Latin America: towards
an Endogenous Development», organized by the Venezuelan National Commission of Cooperation with UNESCO, the Ministry of
Science and Technology of Venezuela and UNESCO’s Office for
Andean Countries, in Higuerote, Barlovento, State Miranda, Venezuela, from 26 to 30 March of 2007.
The general objective of this project is to: «Identify, promote and
spread the Cultural Routes related with cacao in Latin America
and the Caribbean to promote the knowledge and valuing of
cultural diversity in the memory sites linked with its collection,
growing, production and consumption, result of a dynamic and
shared historical process ». 3
This is a project not limited to the original populations and its
descendants, but that due to historical and current reasons, it
also covers communities identified as «Afro-Descendants », although their human and socio-cultural structure is more complex
that the limited scope of one or other term. Such are the evident
cases of Venezuela and Cuba or the more subtle and less evident
cases of Bolivia, Mexico and Perú, where the native populations
have coexisted since the XVI century with Africans and descendants and have generated several intercultural bonds with much
varied shades that fade any type of denominated exclusion or
self exclusion. 4
3
4
See the BASE DOCUMENT, of the CACAO ROUTE IN LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN PROJECT: CULTURAL DIVERSITY FOR AN ENDOGEOUS DEVELOPMENT approved in
the Second Conference of Experts, Esmeraldas, 24-26 of August 2008.
See Arteaga Muñoz, Sonia and Luís Rocca Torres (Editors). Africans and original roots
(Africanos and pueblos originarios) Intercultural Relations in the Andean Region (Relaciones interculturales in el área andina). Memories. Museo Afroperuano and UNESCOQuito, Ecuador, Lima, 2007.
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Due to its scope, this project covers a lot and includes the complete cycle of cocoa /chocolate, therefore its is worth to make it
know in different regional spaces such as ALBA, ATPA, CARICOM,
MERCOSUR, TLC, and others, for it to become part of regional
agendas, as well as for the interagency work of the United Nations organizations involved with nutrition (FAO), infancy (UNICEF), development and trade (UNCTAD and PNUD) and work
(OIT), for example. This would enable a complex approach of the
cocoa/chocolate cultures in Latin America and the Caribbean to
facilitate from the cultural diversity perspective, a cultural development process that implies adequately remunerated employment, healthy food, attention to children and young people, that
is to say, that they are self sustainable and independent.
The academic consensus that we may reach, far above any other
type of exclusion or of self exclusion, inherited from the cultural
colonialism, should facilitate the exchange of experiences in the
region to attain an integration of approaches on the development
problems and to place consistently our concerns and actions on
the inter-institutional agenda.
UNESCO supports action programs that promote respect for cultural diversity without distinctions or exclusivities that is to say
with an inclusive vision at regional and global level.
Alberto Abello
Profile Economist, Master in Caribbean Studies. At present, he
is director of Master studies on Development and Culture of the
Universidad Tecnológica de Bolívar in Cartagena de Indias. Cofounder and former director of the Colombian Observatory of the
Caribbean, he has published and compiled books among which
we find The Caribbean and the Colombian Nation and A Caribbean without Plantation and he has been director of Aguaita magazine. He has been advisor to the Ministry of Culture of Colombia
and coordinates the International Network project on Develop-
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ment and Culture sponsored by the Spanish Agenda of International Cooperation for Development (AECID).
Lecture
Fragments of the African Diaspora in Colombia before the reconstruction of development
In Stockholm in 1982, during the acceptance speech of the Nobel
Prize of Literature, Gabriel García Márquez (GGM) in his beautiful
text known as the loneliness of Latin America, he made an appeal
to the international cooperation for development: the solidarity
with our dreams would not make us feel less lonely, as long as nations that assume the illusion of having a life in the distribution of
the world, are not supported with legitimate actions, and later he
asked himself, why the originality that is allowed in the literature
without reservations is denied to us with all sorts of suspicions of
our so difficult efforts for social change? 5
I wonder if in this reproach GGM is not inviting us to think in
own models for the development of the nations and these models built and strengthened from the very characteristics of life in
society, of the identities, of the inherent cultures? I think of his
idea, still very much applicable, of accepting the originality of the
Iberoamerican nations for their social change processes, for their
own live in the distribution of the world, suggests– in the space
of building an Afro-descendant Agenda in the Americas- the need
to take up again what the Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar calls the “question of the development that it has not yet
been resolved by any social modern epistemologic model” 6
Three representative cases of Afro-descendant Colombian communities –the native population of San Andrés, Providencia and
5
García Márquez, Gabriel. Latin America’s loneliness (La soledad de América Latina). Acceptance speech of the Nobel Prize. Stockolm, Sweden. 1982
6
Arturo Escobar ([email protected]). Anthropology and Development. Text
found on Internet (undated).
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Santa Catalina, the population of the province of Chocó and the
population of San Basilio de Palenque- are examples –in the case
of Colombia-that contribute to explain the importance of an
Agenda for the African Diaspora in the American continent and
to think of the culture when taking up again the reconstruction of
ideas on development.
The archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina:
in the small archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa
Catalina, located nearly 800 km from Cartagena and some 200
km off the coast of Nicaragua, the final settlement of its population started as of the XVIII century with the arrival of Afro-Descendants from Jamaica and other places in the Caribbean. This
settlement broadened the wealth of Colombian cultural, being
different to Colombia’s continental settlements derived from
the Hispanic conquest and colonization. Descendants of African slaves English speakers and of a Creole language of English
origins, believers of a non-catholic religion and with cultural expressions different to those of the rest of the country and even
from the continental Caribbean, constituted the majority of the
population of the island until mid XX century, when the Colombian government decreed the Free Port of San Andrés in 1953.
Already as of the beginning of this century the religious missions
were known and whose purpose was to ensure the national uniformity and to that end they stimulated the teaching of Spanish,
the conversion to Catholicism and the adoption of cultural practices imported from the continent.
With the Free Port the island was occupied during the second
half of the XX century by continental Colombians and foreigners
original from other cultures that drove the trade, tourism and
illegal activities that ended up removing the natives from the
main resources of the island: the land, the sea and the landscape,
which has caused that today the natives are not the largest part
of the population of the islands but also the deterioration of their
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living conditions and that survival of their culture is at risk, thatas June Marie Mow notes- for the dominating business mentality
results in an obstacle for economic growth7.
In a recent article written with Mow we noted how the replica
of the continental models, without taking into account the particular conditions of these small islands, nor the ecological seacoastal processes that characterize them and, even less, without
taking into account the cumulate traditional knowledge, have altered the local socio-cultural capacities, the structure of its ecosystems and their ability to adapt to global environmental and climate changes. This way of economic growth leaves deep wounds
in the environment and produces intercultural conflicts that have
not yet been overcome in this archipelago that was declared Biosphere Reserve in the year 2000. 8
Faced with this situation I remember how surprised I was of a
fishermen community in Thailand that survived the tsunami due
to the way they had built their habitat, of understanding the unknown, of knowing the sea. Now, this community that had been
underestimated before, scorned and even criticized for their fishing practices, has been declared national cultural heritage and
the government recommends its protection and the learning of
its cosmo vision.
In our archipelago, given the lack of opportunities, the young
people descendants of the native homes, sea lovers and skilled
sailors, are driven to render their services to the traffic of drugs
as captains or assistants of the go fast that score the western
Caribbean seeking to break the restrictions of the American in-
7
8
June Marie Mow. The potentialities of the native culture of San Andrés, Providencia and
Santa Catalina to contribute to developing the island and Colombian society. Universidad
Tecnológica de Bolívar, Cartagena de Indias, 2008.
Alberto Abello and June Marie Mow. San Andrés, Island city. Credencial Magazine,
2008.
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terdiction to go as far as possible. Meanwhile the island natives
cry their drama quietly. 9
The province of Choco: The second case is that of the province of
Choco, that borders Panamá and has coast over the Pacific and the
Caribbean sea. In the last census carried out in Colombia in 2005,
87% of its population was identified as Afro-Descendants, Choco
is the poorest province of Colombia. The situation of this population, studied by economist Jaime Bonet, is deplorable: the average
income among the Chocoans is an eighth part of the average income of the inhabitants of the capital Bogotá; 79% of the inhabitants of the province live in poverty conditions if it is measured by
the satisfaction of basic needs; the illiteracy rate here is double
than the Colombian rate and 97% of the schools present a low
academic performance. According to the author, if the provincial
economy average growth rate were looked at between 1990 and
2004 (0,85% annual), “the PIB would double each 82 years. If this
current trend continues, several generations of Chocoans would
live before achieving an average development level”. 10
The author rules out corruption that despite the high indexes is
the cause of poverty in this province as frequently read the lectures given in the Choco case. He evidences how, if corruption
were reduced to zero cases, the life conditions of the population
would improve but it would not be enough to reach the average
Colombian product per capita. On the contrary, factors such as
colonial legacy and inherited institutions, as well as the isolation
of the province from the national economy, affect even more the
social conditions of this population.
All this with the additional problem that 15% of Choco’s population is victim of forced displacement. The Colombian Choco has
9
Alberto Abello. The snow on the sea (la nieve sobre el mar): a Caribbean border crossed
by drugtrafficking. The case of Colombia and Nicaragua. Aguaita Magazine No 13-14,
Colombian Caribbean Observatory, Cartagena de Indias, 2006.
10 Jaime Bonet. Why is Chocó poor? in Joaquín Viloria de la Hoz (editor), Economy of the
Colombian Pacific (Economías del Pacífico colombiano). Banco de la República, 2008.
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been in the last decades the dark scenario of atrocities committed against its population by the different forces involved in the
Colombian conflict. It is the violence in its different expressions,
included the setting up of production enclaves applauded by the
economic development mentalities, which has caused the forced
displacement of the Afro-Colombian populations.
San Basilio de Palenque The third case presented here is San
Basilio de Palenque, that symbolic place, very close to Cartagena
de Indias, only 45 km and with 4.000 inhabitants, declared by
the UNESCO Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of
Humanity, that makes it a universal reference for the collective
memory of the African Diaspora.
With its Creole language–the palenquero- that went, in as short
period of time, from being a hidden language, of which the population would feel embarrassed, to a language proudly spoken,
as the linguist Armin Schwegler noted after his recent visit to
Palenque; its ways of social and political organization, its rites
and music, San Basilio is like a memory kapok tree with roots that
reach the other side of the Atlantic, fed by the sap of the contact
with the new world, with its foliage free of emancipation, that reminds the world each day that goes by, the horrors of the colonial
society in which the capitalist era was born.
The material living conditions of the palenquera people, about
which I will not talk, since this Iberoamerican Conference has included in its program a visit that will gives us the opportunity to
appreciate them in person, revel already in the XXI century, the
existence due to the lack of a true will of the state, of a huge
social debt with the descendants of those enslaved by the black
slave trade. 11
11 See Claudia Mosquera Rosero-Labbé. the memory of cimarronaje as heritage: symbolic
reparation for Afro-Colombians inhabitants of San Basilio de Palenque. Anaconda magazine. BAT Foundation. Bogotá, 2006.
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If Palenque is a universal reference of memory, it is also of the underestimation of the Afro-Colombian cultures by the social layers
who have had the power and have imposed their visions on the
different development strategies.
Development and culture
These three Afro-Colombian scenarios are, as I said before, an invitation to learn from their lessons and the time to reflect on the
visions that should accompany the agendas and that promote the
building of societies including, democratic, and culturally diverse
societies. As Néstor García Canclini would say, “the imaginary of
a prosperous economic future usually caused by the globalization
and integration processes at regional level, is too fragile if it does
not take into account the unity of language diversity, cultural behaviors and goods that give meaning to the continuity of social
relations”.
Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize of Economy, wrote recently, “The world
[of today] is spectacularly rich, but is regrettably impoverished”
(Sen, 2007; p.165). with this, the Indian economist wants to introduce not only this great contemporary paradox, one of the
most pressing of the globalized world, but also one of the so
many uses given to the so called ‘cultural theories: [that of] the
political tyranny, that “seeks the causes of disasters not in the
bad governments but in the culture of the citizens”.
Although Sen presents his ideas in the context of the expensive
policies that the British government used to neutralize the famines in some regions of India, specially that of Bengal, skeptically
we observe how today, nearly a century later, the same rhetoric
is applied to our reality.
According to Kliksberg “economic marginalization and poverty
are frequently accompanied by cultural devaluations. The culture
of the poor is stigmatized by sectors of the society as inferior,
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precarious, backward”. The poor feel, says Kliksberg, “that, besides their material difficulties, there is a quiet process of cultural
“contempt” towards their values, traditions, knowledge, ways of
relation”. 12
Fortunately, after the precarious results of the economic globalization, expressed in the social and economic lap of a good part
of the globe, included in them, as is the case of Colombia, AfroDescendant people; which are also expressed in the deterioration of the environment and the escalation of inequality, a new
debate is presented around the traditional concept of development in academic, political and social fields.13
When with the world’s financial crisis, that serves as global context for this Conference- we confirm one more time that the engine that pulls the world economy moved blindly towards the
precipice without any other concern that the elevation of the
profit margins in full fall due to the excess of liquidity and did not
pay attention to the signs to take the road towards the station
called the Millennium Goals, the overcoming of hunger and the
poverty in the world and the attention to the climate change that
is already announcing a dozen of fatal diseases that will affect the
poor of the planet even more, it is a good time to ask ourselves
again for what Arturo Escobar calls the “question of the development, (Escobar, sf ).14
12 Bernardo Kliksberg. Social Capital and culture, forgotten codes of development (claves
olvidadas del desarrollo).2000.
13 Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize of Economy 1998, questions the avenue usually announced for
development, described as “of blood, sweat and tears”, qualifying it as a “cruel development policy”, that at the same time is highly inefficient (Sen, 1997). Joseph Stiglitz advocates for a consensus post Washington that reviews the goals and the instruments of said
consensus, and highlights that” The Latin American experience suggests that we should
reevaluate, remake and broaden the knowledge about the development economy, that
is taken as the truth” (Stiglitz, 1998). James Wolfensohn, suggests that” without parallel
social development there will be no satisfactory economic development” (Wolfensohn,
1996). Enrique V. Iglesias, BID President, points out that “development can only be faced
in an integral fashion; the monistas approach simply do not work” (Kliksberg, 1999).
14 Arturo Escobar ( [email protected] ). Antropology and Development. Text
found on Internet (undated).
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There is doubt that the development visions in the field of economic theory that maintained its hegemony between the social sciences and the discussions about development and design of the economic policies, has changed in the past years15.
But also from the other corners of the social sciences significant
contributions have been made to the debate; the uniform thinking of the economic orthodoxy has been broken.
A fundamental element of these changes has to do with the culture in its relation with development: the development, seen by
Sen is conceived as a process of extending the individuals’ capacities; a process that turns around a basic axis, the cultural
freedom, in which culture is thought as constituting itself of the
human being’s capacities.
Rightly so, based on these new visions, the 2004 United Nations
report on Human Development 2004, dedicated to the cultural
freedom in the diverse world of today, notes that “the cultural
freedom constitutes a fundamental part of human development, given that, to live a full life, it is important to be able to
choose the own identity–what one is– not losing respect for
others or see oneself excluded from other alternatives”.
In this interpretative line, a series of authors have outlined the
important relations between culture and development. Kliksberg
(1999) considers that culture is a decisive factor of social cohesion, reason why the social capital and culture could be great
levers of development if adequate conditions are created. In culture, persons can recognize themselves mutually, grow together
and develop a collective self-esteem. As this author points out,
culture trespasses all the dimensions of social capital of a society,
and underlies behind the basic components of it such as trust,
civic behavior, and association level.
15 An expansion of this analysis can be seen in Aarón Espinosa, Augusto Aleán and Alberto
Abello, Developemnt and Culture: origins and trends of an indispensable relation. Notebook No 7, Universidad Tecnológica de Bolívar, Cartagena, 2008.
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In this context, suggests Kliksberg, in spite of of the astonishment
that produces the scarce attention that they have been given, the
relations between culture and development appear strengthened
by revaluation of all these quiet and invisible elements, but clearly operative, involved in the idea of social capital. This because,
among other aspects, the values borne by a society strongly influence the development efforts. Germán Rey has pointed out
that there are at least six analysis perspectives to be taken into
account in the relations between development and culture. 16
As other authors such as Stiglitz (1998) point out, preserving cultural values is of great importance for development, hence they
serve as cohesive force in a time many others have weakened.
These new visions built on the reconstruction of the development
idea, as well as the culture ideas, reivindicating also the role of the
latter, travel the road contrary to the visions that contempt the culture and see it as an obstacle for development.
Culture on the global ethnic agenda
If we work guided by this vision, there is no doubt that inside
the nations, cultural public policies will be required in function of
development. Culture, in the field of politics, cannot be seen as
one more sector. And cultural public policies cannot be exclusive
of a ministry or public body, they should be incorporated into the
broadest fields of the nations’ political life. It would be expected
that an Afro-Descendant agenda in the Americas contains challenges in several fields, that it is not only concerned about social,
cultural and political reivindication of the Diaspora inheritors,
but that it can suggest incorporating strategies of their cultures,
in conditions of equity with others, into the different fields of
social life. That it is not only concerned about irrigating development benefits to the Afro-Descendant communities but that it
16 Germán Rey. Culture and Development, six perspectives of analysis. Contrast. Universidad Tecnológica de Bolívar. 2008.
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also worries about the contributions of Afro-Descendants to the
development of nations’ integral strategies.
How to promote sustainable human development without the
public policies, called to protect the environment, do not incorporate cultural practices for the preservation of nature? How
to continue designing housing programs, in their different modalities, without incorporating the climate conditions, the use
of materials and the nations’ traditions? But how much do we
know about those own popular organization forms like the kuagro of San Basilio de Palenque that have helped them overcome
the difficulties, to exercise solidarity, to the material survival of
their cultures that could provide the key for social participation
processes so much demanded in the most varied fields of social
and public politics life? What to say about the resourcefulness
of our nations? Is that perhaps this resourcefulness or the originality that García Márquez remembered in the search for own
solutions; will not be useful to us for the poverty eradication programs in our countries?
In this sense, acquires singular importance the restatement of
the relations between the education system and cultures to make
them be the ones that drive the educational processes and not
for the educational system to establish hegemonic visions and
cultures. In the case of the Afro-Descendant population, the new
knowledge that the academy and the communities have built will
have the possibility to enrich an intercultural education: its history
and cultural practices would not only be incorporated into the education system for Afro-Descendant children and young people but
it would also benefit a more universal education for all.
I think that many are the moments, the spaces, and the areas in
which a greater interaction between education and culture will
make their contribution to human development. That could be the
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formula for the originality that is attributed to us without reservations in the literature, is not denied in our efforts for social change.
Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, 16 October 2008.
The strength of the Afro-Descendant
expression: arts, literature, music, movie
making … global trends.
In this forum an interesting discussion took place on the contribution of the African nations to the different artistic expressions
of the Iberoamerican countries. Said discussion suggested the
topic of global trends, fusions and exchanges between the African Diaspora, highlighting the African contribution to the cultural
heritage in general, focusing on the areas of music, oral tradition
and literature.
Rafael Palacios. Bailarín, coreógrafo y director de danza.
Profile
He studied African and contemporary dance in Toulouse in Paris
with Irene Tasambedo; teacher and classical dance, jazz and contemporary at the National Academy of Dance Paris. He worked in
the international dance company Ebene. Has taken dance workshops in Burkina Faso and Senegal. When he returned to Colombia in 1997, he founded the Sankofa Dance Company in Medellin
which performs work that seeks to build a bridge between African
culture and our country, using the ancestral memory as a backup
for the creation of works that, from the root of African dance, developed in everyday contexts and contemporary.
Intervention
As Afrocolombian, I frequently ask myself about the fact of observing children, our children, take their afrodescendence as a
burden on their backs.
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It is unacceptable that even in the twenty-first century in a city
like Medellin, Colombia a black child does not feel like not wanting to be black, as a result of bulling of his fellow mestizo friends.
This example is replicated long time at different scales and in different areas throughout the country.
Cultural policies of the Colombian State are constitutionally hold
on the rights of diversity; nonetheless, the Afro Colombian communities have suffered constant state of omission, the public order, product of armed conflict. And while the discourse of multiculturalism irrigate the living space as the everyday, the academy,
however, the Afro-Colombian men and women are often known
just as exotic tropical and their fundamental rights are being ignored and violated.
Through experience, where I have worked as a choreographer, dancer and dance teacher, I find the inescapable need to
strengthen the mechanisms and ordinary visible identity of the
Afro-Colombian people. The richness of its diverse cultures is in
its ability to express themselves from their roots by participating
in a global world, moving without fossilize, and that on the contrary, feedback, re-created and integrated, sharing its essence.
At the end of my participation in the process of training trainers in the city of Pasto, I wondered why these processes have
focused only on strategic regions; why not propagate in regions
with Afro-Colombian population.
The country, since the 1991 Constitution, made progress in diversity issues and cultural rights. But today the state programs
are still permeated by a central vision that makes African descent
and indigenous peoples the last to benefit from them. It is important to say that this view not only neglects the centralist constitutional commitment to the black and indigenous communities.
The whole country is suffering a disproportionate social indiscrimination today. Many regions of the country are being killed
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by poverty, displacement, and so on. And there, culture is also
banished and displaced.
In this sense, cultural policy needs of real scenarios where cultural
events are placed. This is a scenario that becomes a paradoxical
and complex field as their players celebrate life in the presence
of death. Amid the tense everyday people in the South Pacific, for
example, hold cultural and artistic roots of the population.
We must recognize the value of equity and common law opportunities. Therefore, it is urgent to develop strategies of visibility where artistic and cultural values of the various regions to
achieve recognition and dignification. A simple look to the AfroColombian population or programs which are able to access it
allows to quickly identify the many creators and custodians of
tradition, who are eager to have the tools that enable them enhance their skills and talents for the benefit of the communities
in which they work.
With great effort and an impressive capacity for persistence,
many use small spaces, physical and intellectual, only the ones
can access, to keep their culture alive. And it is this record that
should be compensated or promoted from the tools that can
provide a Ministry of Culture, from, for example, the program of
training trainers.
As always, neither the limitations nor the routine can inhibit the
desire to create. Since our potential, young people who are part
of the Sankofa Afro contemporary Dance Company, we have tried
to share what we have with our colleagues in other regions, in
processes that arguably are enriched by each other.
Sankofa is currently undertaking a process of training in three
towns in the South Pacific: Tumaco, Buenaventura and Puerto
Tejada. The proposal is based on the recognition of multicultural
Colombian society in general and the culture of the ethnic black
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body in particular as a place of knowledge that other hosts on the
body and knowledge about dance, so vitally linked with the environment and bicultural - with a sense of belonging to a dynamic,
interrelated whole. In the belief of that tradition, ritual and the
creation are only possible in an important relationship between
the social being which represents individuals and their sociocultural context. Sankofa has conducted their efforts over ten years
to update the link from the Colombian black population with African culture, from the downsizing of the body as a place of identity in the ongoing dialogue that occurs between the past and the
present condition and the latter as expected for the future.
For this reason, the claim of professional dance as an expression of the temporality of poetic corporality of black culture has
formed the backbone of our process.
Our persistence to take Pasos en la tierra, name of the project
described previously, obeys specially to what we consider that it
is the moment, delayed but necessary and right, to begin a way
of professionalization of the dance work in Colombia as a serious
and opportune work that allow those who dedicate ourselves
to these to work under formal parameters and to obtain necessary pedagogical and educative tools for the good development
and professional growth, like any other discipline in the different
fields from the knowledge.
These processes also require a cultural component, so that the
work does not imply a spacing gap between African roots and
achieve at the same time, new proposals that part of the identity,
not as a straightjacket, but as a way to express our concerns and
solutions from the community that we as a people must be taken
into account from its origins in Africa, not only since the arrival in
the situation of slaves to the Americas.
The afro contemporary technique, created in the Mudra School in
Senegal as a petition of President Leopold Sengar, and directed by
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Maurice Bejart and Germaine Acogny, is a form of expression of
the richness and forms of traditional African dance and complemented with contemporary techniques to create new languages
in keeping with a culture that has multiple ways to demonstrate.
From that experience, I consider a valid approach to this technique as a way of assessing the cultural roots of Afrocolombian
communities, in order to understand better the African country,
regardless of the type of dance that develops.
For me it is impossible to think about the dance from my condition of a afro man, since this circumstance has been my main
thing as a dancer and choreographer, my strength as an answer
to the limitations and barriers imposed by this society, where a
black person cannot think about dancing as a profession, since
its desire is discarded with the trivial supposition that it is in our
blood, that arises to us easy and from spontaneous way, which
prevails us in a serious matter, real and professional in the Colombian labor scope.
For this reason, I consider important to address the recognition
of Afro-Colombians from their ancestral knowledge, as this also
means opening the perspective of those who want to make a
dance of life project.
In our populations, there is only the opportunity to dance traditionally, which is fine, but it is something with which we count on,
and it survives thanks to the same community. If an artist of such
moves to a big city where job opportunities are limited, he finds
out that his profile is accepted only when tailored to the representations that are of their culture, most likely against their tradition and being forced to play inappropriate stereotypes of what
the Afro-Colombian culture is, a culture that provides a political,
social, economic, and artistic construction of the country.
The multiethnic and multicultural character of Colombia is beyond discussion. However, historically the country has known
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this condition, reducing the identity of indigenous peoples and
Afro-Colombian territories clearly marked as belonging to specific minority, and denying the links shared by all its inhabitants,
which makes them a nation.
This is the time to starting changing the inability of the Colombian educational system, in which there is a total lack of respect
for indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants. The situation is
even worse for Afro-Colombian men born in the urban centers of
Colombia, because many times they receive references of their
own culture through a distorted look of mocking, disdain, underestimation of the strengths they culturally have. That is why the
work of social repair that the country must confront its origins is
a difficult start, but by no means impossible.
It is a pity that obsolete formulas that distort the dance tradition are still alive without a reflexion that permits reviewing the
way the country’s regions are represented in a disrespectable
manner, without any shame, when showing visions of the ethnic
group with the prudent rigor of an exact investigation.
We are tired of seeing black and indigenous dances in which the
clothing or the techniques used, essentially contradict the historical events that these communities have faced. With what right is
named a dance currulao, for example, when has not event visited
the area with due regard to the great masters who have worked
all their lives to preserve their traditions.
Most often, in these fieldworks the fellow has money to advance his project, but sees no need to financially compensate the
source of knowledge, even though they become a great manager
to charge for their investigations or placed on stage. We also see
indigenous dances using classical ballet movements with the argument of being stylish or exalting tradition. It is discouraging to
work in dance, for example, when we find great restaurants in
the country, with waiters dressed in dance costumes represent-
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ing a particular cultural area. I am surprised to pride riding in
what supposedly should have been when I see there a society
that places its roots in a state of servitude, and not in the place
of patron and connoisseur of ancient knowledge, which are the
pillar of society.
It is wrong to think that dance is a technique for isolation of the
philosophy of the people that created it. The technical talks about
a specific culture which of course that then can be extended or
not their own borders. But to believe that taking part in a workshop or an assembly, makes the dancer or a teacher familiar with
the technique, is that it is limited to the body movements that
identify a culture, forgetting that they are only one feature and
that the real essence is the philosophy behind it.
In this context it is important to worry about training processes,
but also by the processes of deconstruction, and to disarm those
concepts on which it is thought that Afro dance is a technique
that is limited to hip movements, shine on skin and taste that is
carried in the blood, ignoring the ritual and spirituality of AfroColombian people with racist stereotypes that do not allow the
integrity and true wisdom of the ethnic diversity of Colombia.
It has been, and remains, a custom in Colombia to minimize the
effort of working people, and this is how it becomes a habit to invite institutional communities to working tables for processes of
thinking or doing field work in which people, under investigation,
are not paid and sometimes not even mentioned in the credits of
the final work.
Traditional dance gives us a starting point for thinking and develop a Colombian Contemporary dance with an ability to interpret
our culture from the social concerns we have, that allow us to see
ourselves in valuable different way from what we are representing us, making legitimate expressions and, above all, construct-
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ing, from marginalization to which we are subjected, a strong engine to make others understand the importance of specificity.
Discussion and Conclusion Forums I y II:
Global tendencies: African Diaspora and the need to inclusion:
• Global movement of the African Diaspora: Power, solidarity
and encounter.
• The development challenges for afrodescendant population
in the World.
• Culture as the basis of reencounter and recreation of the ethnical global agenda:
• Cultural diversity and the African Diaspora in the Americas.
• The force of the Afrodescendant expression: art, literature,
music, filming…Global tendencies.
The forums sought to create a space for reflection on the current
status of the African Diaspora and its interrelation with the development and culture to guide public and prospect of national and
regional agendas.
Principal Ideas
The social movement of the African Diaspora has grown and has
become stronger. However, conditions of inequality and exclusion are at the lowest rates of access in education, health and the
provision of goods and services for people of African descent,
among others.
In the young afrodescendant population, especially among the
poor, there are concentrated problems of exclusion, lack of opportunities, of poverty, high rates of violent death, marginalization from science and technology, as well as the options for
working, political participation, recreation and opportunities for
expression. These aspects make it a vulnerable population.
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Another structural element that is identified for analysis related
to the development challenges of the Afrodescendant population is the deep inequality in the power structures that restrict
the development of equal relations between cultures and people
at the symbolic and material conditions that are required for traditional cultures to develop.
The minimum access of Afrodescendant people to elected offices
heightens the chances of becoming more visible. This is an expression of exclusion from the political system in which representative democracy prevails against the opportunities and challenges it offers a cultural participatory democracy, where ethnic
and other minorities have a greater impact on policy decisions
and programs that affect them.
In the context of the economic crisis that it is shown as global,
the role of the state as regulator compared to a model of development has been hegemonic and dominant regressive and
harmful compared to traditional production practices; therefore
a warning is given to the populations that have historically been
excluded and marginalized suffer more severely.
Despite the long history of exclusion and marginalization of Afrodescendant communities, the Diaspora is the “living memory”
of cultural traditions. Africa’s influence is present in shaping Latin
American’s culture and its role in development, however, is forgotten.
There are two readings of the concept of Diaspora. On one hand,
it is understood in domination and oppression logic that Afrodescendant people are portrayed as victims of history. On the
other hand, the Diaspora is interpreted as a process where social
movements are agents of change and transformation.
The Diaspora, from this perspective, is a “counterculture of modernity” in a way that there is a quest for full citizenship which is
expressed in a dual national and Afro Diaspora.
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The formulation of development projects should provide a farreaching importance to culture and education as areas contributing to consolidate full citizenship. They must include the recognition of African descent and their ancestral knowledge as a
strategy.
Challenges
The speakers and participants of this Conference noted some potential challenges and obstacles that have to be faced in order
to overcome in the development of an agenda at a national and
regional level that seeks to link development with a focus on Afrodescendant people in Latin America.
We must recognize that racism and racial discrimination still exists and it is manifested at several levels: routine, structural and
institutional. It is important to remember this fact in the formation of public policies toward Afrodescendant people.
• There are major weaknesses in terms of qualitative and
quantitative identification of Afrodescendant communities
who are present in the region.
• Migration processes impose challenges for multi-ethnic societies in which social inequalities are emphasized. Diversity
should be recognized as an asset in the globalization.
• The environmental crisis, resulting from global warming, imposes challenges in terms of food security for Afrodescendant communities. What are the projects of historical change
and the paradigms of development?
• There is a marked increase in forms of violence affecting Afrodescendant communities at different levels and domestic
policy. Racism persists in three ways: structural racism, institutional racism and everyday racism.
• Increased representation gained by Afrodescendant contrast
with the deepening of violence and marginalization.
• The Afrodescendant communities are now leaders. However,
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•
•
•
•
there is a generation of young people behind who are exposed to various forms of violence. How to use culture as a
tool of transformation and inclusion?
Explore alternatives that offer tools such as TIC’s and digital
culture.
The challenges of inclusion and assessment of welfare indicators which are used by governments and multilateral development agencies.
The historical gap as an obstacle to resolve, question and
identify paradigms and poverty traps, where, for example,
the mining and oil systems, coal, gold has only generated
misery, impoverishment and cultural ecological devastation.
Implement the advances of the Durban conference against
racism, as an effective tool that should be taken to the agenda of public institutions of Latin American countries.
Political Representation
Much remains to achieve the political representation of Afrodescendant. Besides encouraging, it needs to ensure that the state
and electoral politics that will allow the social movements of Afrodescendant can maintain their autonomy and that are relevant
for the definition of public policies. We need to reflect and revise
existing legislation to examine whether they are efficient and / or
sufficient.
Self recognition
We must recognize and work on the problem of self-recognition
as a cause and consequence of other problems faced by Afrodescendant people as the valuation of their culture and lack of reliable statistics on their situation. It is important that data collection is accompanied with awareness campaigns and cultural value
and active participation of social movements of Afrodescendant.
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Migration
Migration imposes challenges for multi-ethnic societies in which
social inequalities are emphasized, but also a possible life-force
of social and economic development that presents an opportunity to foster inter-culturality.
Economic Factors
In general, Afrodescendant people are concentrated in the poorest sectors of society. We must seriously consider how the global market and macroeconomic problems, especially the recent
global economic crisis, will be even harmful, leaving a situation
of marginalization and inequality faced by Afrodescendants. It is
necessary to identify and challenge the paradigms and poverty
traps, where for example the mining and oil systems, coal, gold
has only generated misery, impoverishment and cultural ecological devastation.
Violence
There is a marked increase in forms of violence affecting Afrodescendant communities at different levels: household, in urban
centers, but also exile and displacement.
Folklorization of culture
There is a tendency to make the Afrodescendant culture folklore.
You must think of culture as an asset, but also as a resource for
development.
Proposals
Substantive democracy: You have to identify social inequalities
and their roots to empower of subordinates sectors and Coordination between economic and political policies.
Cultural policies: We recently have Afrodescendant Ministers of
Culture in the region. We have to assume culture as a resource
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for economic development and define the space as intercultural,
fundamental pillar of social justice. Elucidate the relationship between social movements and state policies.
Harmonious development of practices based on self-government.
Crises generate sustainable practices.
Ethnic fairness requires redistribution. The equality of rights requires valuing diversity.
We must reflect on the progress and limitations of legislation.
Organization and autonomy should also increase the representation in the States.
We need to reinvent the nations pointing towards equitable societies. Create power without domination: power is life affirming.
Diaspora: joy and hope.
Despite the long history of exclusion and marginalization of Afrodescendant communities, the Diaspora is the “living memory”
of cultural traditions. Africa’s influence is present in shaping Latin
American culture and its role in development, however, is forgotten.
It is necessary to develop projects that give special attention to
women of African descent. In this group, focus and depth discrimination by gender and ethnicity. Despite this situation, highlighting its potential organizational of the movements of Afrodescendant.
In Colombia, much of the Afrodescendant population is located
in areas that have a rich wealth of natural resources. However,
these communities have not benefited from the exploitation of
these natural resources.
The growing access of Afrodescendant in many public positions
can be interpreted as opportunities for new development projects that help solve problems of social inequality and promot-
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ing international cooperation agenda. The increased political
representation, however, contrasts with the deepening of social
inequalities.
The formulation of development projects should provide a farreaching importance to culture and education as areas contributing to consolidate full citizenship.
There are two readings of the concept of Diaspora. On one hand,
it is understood in a logic of domination and oppression that Afrodescendant people are portrayed as victims of history. On the
other hand, the Diaspora is interpreted as a process where social movements are agents of change and transformation. The
Diaspora, from this perspective, is a “counterculture of modernity” in that there is a quest for full citizenship which is expressed
in a dual national and Afro Diaspora.
Collect statistics disaggregated by ethnic / racial group in order
to analyze better the current situation that Afrodescendants are
facing.
Investing in training and technology access for Afrodescendant
young people, especially among the poor, where there are problems of exclusion, lack of opportunities, poverty, and high rates
of violent deaths, marginalization of science and technology as
well as the options for work, political participation, recreation
and opportunities for expression.
The official version of history in many Latin American countries is
exclusive and the incorporation and representation of the contributions of Afrodescendant people has not been adequate. There
is a serious need to reconstruct knowledge. The Ministries of Culture in conjunction with the educational system have to review
the history and educational materials for the entire population,
not only in Afrodescendant communities.
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Develop projects that give special attention to Afrodescendant
women because in this population it is concentrated the social
exclusion and discrimination in areas such as the labor market,
access to medical services, and formation.
Proposals that could be replicated:
Use of experiences and examples as best practices that could
be replicated in other countries such as the Secretariat for the
Promotion of Racial Equality (SEPPIR) in Brazil, the programs that
support cultural education in the youth orchestra program and
IDB theaters, conditional cash transfers to the IDB is supporting
the Cultural Center in Esmeraldas as an experience to be replicated as a space where they can develop partnerships. In Latin
America, for example, it must be replicated, a project on the African History that was conducted by UNESCO.
Some of the successful experiences are:
• Despite the lack of accurate information of Afrodescendant
populations, governments are compiling the necessary data.
In the case of Colombia, DANE included ethnicity. The international community should support such efforts.
• In the legislative field for Afrodescendant communities, highlighting the progress made in Colombia, particularly the 1991
Constitution and Law 70 of 1993. It highlights the work that
the Center against Racial Discrimination of the Andes University has advanced.
• The creation of the Ministry for Racial Equality in Brazil,
which focuses its efforts on addressing the problems of racial
inequality, can be a reference point for the Afrodescendant
agenda of African in other countries.
Proposed mechanisms and patterns of cooperation between
countries
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• It is necessary to take culture as a resource for economic development, the definition of space as a national exchange,
and the strengthening of citizenship.
• The relationship between the state, electoral politics and social movements of Afrodescendants must allow that they can
be autonomous and that they have an impact in the definition of public policies.
• The current crisis of neoliberalism has the possibility to develop new paradigms of development. This formulation must
link local knowledge and practices of Afrodescendant communities with state resources. It is possible that the contradiction between the increased political representation and
increased socioeconomic inequalities and structural racism,
deepens.
• We must move forward in building solidarity bonds not only
at the cultural level but in the economic and social as well.
• There is a need to reflect on the progress and limitations of
the legislation for Afrodescendant communities.
• Incorporate the ethnic issue in the millennium development
goals and to use existing mechanisms in order to promote
cultural diversity and improving conditions and access to opportunities for Afrodescendant people.
• Implement the advances of the Durban conference (which
was for many speakers at the event concerning the visibility of Afrodescendants in many subject areas) as an effective
tool that should be the agenda of public institutions of Latin
American countries.
OCTOBER 17
EJES TEMÁTICOS
Working Groups
During the Conference, a reflection and exchange space of experiences between the different participating countries was sought,
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in order to sponsor the formulation of recommendations for developing a cooperation agenda aimed at recognizing cultural diversity, in the framework of the search of alternatives to improve
the life conditions of the Afro-Descendant population.
The groups gathered conclusions, which are presented in the
event’s final declaration as recommendations for the Ministries
and their subsequent follow up.
Group 1: the contribution of Afro-Descendants in building
the Americas: rewrite history.
Identify preservation strategies and reproduction of the AfroDescendants historical contribution to the building of democratic
societies, in their social and economic development, based on
their roots and identity, values, practices and symbols as ethnic
group, generating social cohesion and identity as a full expression of freedom and human development.
Discussion axes:
•
•
•
•
•
Memory preservation mechanisms
Different historical forms of slavery in the Americas
Memory reproduction mechanisms
Simplification of history and the Afro contribution
Access to technology by Afro nations
Howard Dodson
Profile
Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
of the United States, he is a specialist in Afro-Descendant history,
teacher and consultant graduate of West Sheet Said Collage. He
has been teacher in several universities of the United States and
under his direction the Schomburg Center has developed a public
library specialized in Afro-Descendant history and at present is
developing a support job for the Directorate of Ethno-culture of
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Colombia’s Ministry of Culture and the Universidad Tecnológica
de Chocó, for the development of the National Center of Studies
and Documentation of Afro-Colombian Cultures.
Lecture
At the beginning of the XX century, the idea was that black people did not have a history; these were the myths that led to the
creation of the Center for Research in Black Culture of the United
States.
Today the collection amounts more than ten million of articles
that record the Afro-Descendant contributions.
People say that the Afro-Descendants did not contribute in building nationality; this implies assuming that others created it and
that the Afro-Descendants only helped a determined elite. The
greatest part of the Afro-Descendant contribution continues to
be ignored, overshadowed. The traditional historiography constantly commits these imprecisions, for example by considering
Egypt as part of the Middle East and not part of the African continent.
The African slaves in the Americas were active and creative, with
social, political and cultural actions that led the new world to really become the new world, they as active agents that produced
impact.
The colonial history is a history about colonization, written by the
colonialists, which is simply an extension of this domain. These
historians have not considered the fact and importance of that
the great majority of those who are building this history, were
Africans. Which helps put aside a good part of the countries’ realities.
Restoring and preserving colonial cities like Cartagena should
serve to show the Afro-Descendant contribution, who were the
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true masters and builders and not to honor the memory of the
colonial elite as it would seem to happen sometimes.
The nations reinvented themselves, the African slave population
was not an extension of the enslaving mentality, they were much
more than that, in fact they created a new world, The Jubilee, the
emergence of the African culture.
The triumph over slavery: the symbols among which we find ourselves are part of the reaffirmation of that colonial power that
denies our presence and contributions.
In New York, a cemetery was found that force the rewriting of
colonial history in the North-American territory.
Alfonso Múnera
Profile
Born in Cartagena. He has written several articles about the history of the Colombian Caribbean in several national and international magazines, and he is the editor of a selection of essays of
costeño (from the coast) of the XVIII and XIX centuries. Among
his main works we find the failure of the Nation (El fracaso de la
nación). Region, class and race in the Colombian Caribbean (1717
1821), published in 1998. He obtained a PhD in Latin America and
Caribbean history at the University of Connecticut, United States,
in 1995, and was Dean at the Faculty of Human Science of the
University of Cartagena, where he has taught history since 1981.
Currently, he is director of the International Institute of Caribbean Studies, which is part of said academic center.
Lecture
The great contradictions in the teaching of history.
As historian I tend to experience certain frustration about the
daily distortions of history, when faced with that, what I do is to
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recall the facts of my own experiences in which at school nothing
was taught about Afro-Descendants.
We continue to be immersed in a country that does not abandon
its racist practices; millions of children continue to be condemned
by the racist practices as of their early school age, where a hegemonic history of excluding nature is taught. But now we have an
army of youths coming from black communities studying their
own history and thinking in a solution to their problems.
It is worth to remember how José María Henao and Gerardo Arubla addressed the black people issue in our history. In the text
that was selected as history of Colombia only in page 223, the
historians consider important to refer to slavery to study the leprosy phenomenon, in something less than one page of the nearly
thousand that the book has. There is nothing about their contributions; nothing about their struggle.
This entire outrageous version, prevailed in a country that
throughout the XVIII century did not have any economic or social
activity that did not rest on the shoulders of the enslaved.
We had to wait until 1963 for Jaime Jaramillo Uribe to point out
something so obvious like transport and a great part of the colonial economy depended on the slaves. Today we have important
studies, we are moving in the correct direction.
The Afro-Descendants in Cartagena had been the decisive factor
in the Independence facts of Cartagena in 1911, and even the
first leader of Cartagena’s independence was a black man from
Cuban origin.
The struggle for citizenship was led by the Afro-Descendants and
even today they continue their fight.
It is little or nothing what has been said of the undeniable vocation of the peace of the Afro-Colombian women.
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It is necessary to get inside a process in which the research that
confirms this history, gets to the students.
Maguemati Wabgou (GEACES, Universidad Nacional de Colombia)
Profile
Sociólogo de nacionalidad togolesa (Togo), licenciado de la Université du Bénin (Lomé-Togo). Doctor en Ciencias Políticas y Sociología de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, realizó una
estancia posdoctoral en el Centre d’Études Ethniques des Universités Montréalaises (CEETUM) con énfasis en estudios étnicos y
de migraciones. Actualmente, se desempeña como profesor asociado en el Departamento de Ciencias Políticas de la Universidad
Nacional de Colombia (Sede Bogotá: Facultad de Derecho, Ciencias Políticas y Sociales). Es integrante del Grupo de Estudios Afrocolombianos (GEA), categoría A de Conciencias, del Centro de
Estudios Sociales -CES- y responsable del Grupo de Estudios sobre
Migraciones y Desplazamientos del Instituto Unidad De Investigaciones Socio-Jurídicas Y Políticas “Gerardo Molina” -UNIJUS-. Entre sus publicaciones recientes, se destacan Migraciones subsaharianas. África entre el orden mundial y las redes sociales (libro,
2006); Sistemas políticos africanos. Debates Contemporáneos
en Colombia desde la Ciencia Política (libro, comp. & ed., 2007);
“Poder y sociedad en África subsahariana: los pueblos entre las
tradiciones y el Estado” (capítulo de libro, 2007); “Governance of
Migration in Senegal: the Role of Government in Formulating Migration Policies” (capítulo de libro, 2008); “Transnationalism and
Dominican Women: Intersections between Gender, Migration
and Development” (artículo de revista, co-autor, 2008); “Africa: a
bridge between Latin America and Asia”, (Impreso Universitario,
2008); “Estudios Africanos en Colombia desde Ciencias Políticas
y Sociales” (capítulo de libro, 2008).
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Lecture
Analyzing the realities lived by the black population in Colombia
implies interpreting the historic, political, cultural and educational situation of these Afro-Descendant communities, taking into
account their past, present and future. Through this road, the
Africa, the African and the Africaness have become subjects of
academic interest together with the Afro-Caribbean Afro-Colombian and black cultures. In this sense, it is necessary to feel and to
listen to the Black Colombia in relation with the African cultural
guidelines: to that end, a historic tour enables apprehending the
African memories17 in Colombia in different social spheres. This
implies showing different forms of intertwining of the African
cultures and identities with those of the black populations in Colombia.
In this Lecture we inquire, in the first place, to slavery as historic
process and socioeconomic practice, plotted and executed by the
Europeans throughout the XVI and XIX centuries (I). In the second place, it is analyzed how, after the slave trade, the African
cultural practices were transferred from the African continent
to Latin America in general, and Colombia in particular with emphasis in some centers resistant to Africanism like Palenque de
San Basilio (II). Likewise, an examination is made of the impact of
these African cultural guidelines in Colombia to music, oral tradition, art, religion and the African thinking (philosophy), among
others. This attitude enables highlighting the cultural interactions
and relations that constituted the basis for the building of identifying similarities and of ways of socio-political organization in the
Afro-Descendant communities; that justifies the need to project
the consolidation of initiatives and actions in favor of a greater
17 The use we make of the concept “Africa” is introduced into the framework of previous
studies in which “the notion of «Africa» is to a less or greater extend related with the
public blossoming of negritude of the «black communities » […] the notion of «Africa»
constitutes a crucial reference to understand the Afro-Colombian culture […]” (Wade,
2002: 246-247).
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integration among the African countries and Colombia since,
without doubt, it contributes to consolidating the identity construction of black men and women of this country and to extend
collective struggles to transform their living conditions generally
marked by the lack of opportunities, little political participation,
growing racial conflicts, , mixing of races myth, ethic and racial
discrimination, among others.
Afro America: a historic-political perspective
The history of Africa, full of shadows, semi-darkness and lights,
draws our attention when it comes the time to reflect about the
anthropologic, sociologic and human elements that were moved
from the old continent to the Caribbean and the Americas. These
elements turned into identifying components of the African nations that have survived the time and the space following one of
the nastiest practices of human kind: the slave trade.
In Africa, as in other continents, the enslavement was not unknown before the arrival of the Europeans18, although it is observed that between some ethnic groups like the Fang (in general
in Equatorial Africa and exactly in Equatorial Guinea) the concept
and enslaving practices already existed (Ki-Zherbo, 1980: 302-304
& 306). The combination of history, political and economic facts
(exploration of the African coasts, the discovery of America in the
XV century and its colonization in the three following centuries,
18 It is true that “the practice of enslavery dates back to prehistoric times, although its
institutionalization was probably produced when the agricultural advancements made
more organized societies possible which required slaves for determine jobs. To obtain
said slaves these societies would conquer more nations; however, some individuals
would sell themselves or members of their families to pay debts; the enslavery was also
the punishment for those persons that committed a crime “. (Available on: http://html.
rincondelvago.com/historia-de-colombia_1.html). Then, we think it is relevant the observation which, “different to the old Greece, for example, where the slave was placed in
the category of “thing”, in this continent [África] the slave had civil rights and ownership
rights, existing also, several emancipation procedures. There used to be a difference between home and war slaves, although the latter would end up being part of the first category after certain time. In general, In Africa, the slave would quickly integrate into the
owner family. In Kongo, for example, a parent calls his slave mwana (the son, the child).
In other places of Africa, the situation would not be as favorable, but the patriarchal and
community structure would impede the black slave to be a good in the Greek sense of
the term” (“Past and present of enslavery”. Available on: http://www.monografias.com/
trabajos10/trini/trini.shtml).
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among others), considerably encouraged the slave trade. As of a
turn in history, the idea of enslavement in/from Africa with the
expressions of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, due to its capitalist
nature, its sophisticated character, trans-oceanic, international
or trans-national and its trade implications at great scale with the
subsequent reduction of the human being as merchandise, and
for being originated, materialized and led by the Europeans, it
remains indelible in the memory:
“The transatlantic slave trade circuits are many. The slave trading ships passed by the African coast, from Senegal to Angola to
load the slaves. After the voyage that would sometimes last more
than two months, they would arrive at the ports of Brazil, Guyana, Caribbean and United States19 ”.
Different from the slavery practice in Africa prior to the arrival
of the explorers, the slave trading became a recurring business
between Europeans to sustain their interests in America. Millions
of natives of the American colonies would die due to the harshness of the work that would demand a long-lasting and cheap
labor force. As the idea was that the African slaves could endure
forced labor better, the import of black Africans from the Spanish
and Portuguese colonies was a more opportune alternative. To
cover labor force need in the American and Caribbean colonies,
the Europeans intensified, between the XVI and XIX century, the
banishment and deportation of millions of African captives to the
Americas and the Caribbean.
This inhuman trade in the XV century, more exactly in the year
1441, with the traffic of the first African slaves is executed by the
Portuguese from their African colonies. A short time later, Spain
19 Own translation. See « the slave trade, the enslavery and the abolitions. Some points of
reparation » (“La traite négrière, l’esclavage et les abolitions Quelques points de repère)”.
Available on: http://www.comite-memoire-esclavage.fr/inventaire/historique.html: “Les
circuits of the traite transatlantique sont multiples. Les navires négriers longent the côte
africaine, du Sénégal à l’Angola, pour y charger leur cargaison d’esclaves. Au terme d’une
traversée longue parfois of plus of deux mois, ils accostent aux ports du Brésil, des Guyanes, des Caraïbes et des États-Unis”
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followed although for more than a century Portugal continued to
monopolize the trade20. The black considered as human goods
merchandise by the State would reach an economic and social
value in the slavery market. Generally, the future slaves would be
captured by other Africans and transported to the west cost of Africa where one would find slave sale and purchase displays. The
calculation is that during four centuries (from mid XV century until
the decade of 1870), between 15 and 18 million of Africans were
exported to the Americas not including the millions of those that
died in Africa while being captured followed by their accumulation
in specific places of the coastal areas, and during the long voyages
on the slave trading boats. In the latter case, the captives would
experience inhuman conditions due to the dirtiness, stench, the
suffocating heat, torture, pain, frustration, depression, thirst, hunger and panic; conditions that in fact caused the death of part of
the slaves. What is more, the sick or injured, that could not be sold,
were thrown into the sea, as per report (Ki-Zerbo, 1980: 314). This
sentence would be equally applied to those who could not react
to the sound of music of their villages that the slave traders would
play with the purpose of measuring their physichological state or
state of mind. A dramatic reality is experienced: the traditional African music and dance were used as instrument to select captives
during the trips. The selection processes of captive labor force were
frequent aboard the ships to ensure arrival at destination with
the “best products”. The fact that the black man would not dance
would be a sign of dismay, weakness and mental depression; being
condemned to the death sentence, he would be separated from
the rest and thrown into the ocean. But if he would react positively
and dance vigorously, this would be interpreted as if he still conserved his energy, courage and intrepidity; and he would continue
20 At the end of the XVI century, The United Kingdom started to compete with Portugal,
France, the Netherlands and Denmark that, until then, held the right to provide slaves to
the overseas colonies. France, for example, would resort to trade channels that, departing from the East coast of Africa and Madagascar would end up in the Bourbon Islands
(Reunion) or of France (Maurice) and in South America. Other would go to Northern
Africa traversing the Sahara.
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to be part of the contingent, reserved and maintained until arrival
at final destination.
The Caribbean and Americas were frequent geo-commercial
destinations. In less than thirty years (between 1611 and 1640),
Cartagena (Colombia) became the main slave trading port of the
entire Hispanic America since approximately 95.000 slaves went
though this port at that time. From Cartagena, the captive Africans were moved to the Caribbean, Panama and the interior
of the Nueva Granada. And from Panama, onboard small vessels, they would go to Peru from where they were delivered to
merchants who would take them to different Central American
countries like Nicaragua and Costa Rica; also to South American
countries like Chile and Ecuador. Panama became an important
destination and transit point in the history of slavery given that
the slaves, stored in subhuman and appalling conditions, would
wait for months in the houses called warehouses (los depósitos)
before being dispatched and redirected to other destinations (El
Callao, for example), by traders that would combine their slave
trading activities with the supply of other goods. The important
position of Panama in the slave trading platform (slave trading
circuits and networks) and the provision of other goods are highlighted in the following:
“During the colonial period, the Isthmus of Panama was the supply port for what would be one of the main Spanish colonies in
the continent: Peru. The Isthmus’ strategic position placed it in
the vertex between Jamaica and Cartagena, and on the route
to Africa; as of that moment the region has shown its condition
communication channel, a vocation that it has kept until this day.
This position made it the confluence scenario of persons from
different origins and cultures, in particular of African origin […]
Panama was not a plantation economy but its role as corridor for
the gold coming from Peru and goods from Spain soon turned it
into a multi-colored world where persons from different origins
and beliefs would gather […]” (Cáceres: 2002: 145 & 154).
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Colombia’s black slave population was located especially in the
provinces of Cauca, Valle del Cauca, Chocó, the north part of the
province of Antioquia, Bolívar and Atlantic coast (with its center
in Cartagena). Many of its members came from areas that correspond today to African countries like Benín (former Dahomey),
Togo, Ghana (Former Gold Coast), Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Mozambique21, Angola, Cape Verde, Senegal, Guinea (Arocha, 1999:
34) and belong to different African towns such as the wolofs,
mandingas, fulos, cazangas, biafaras, monicongos, anzicos, engolas, among others. Despite the resistance offered by the future slaves, it is evident that the members of these ethnic African
groups were forced to come to Panama and Colombia, piled up
in slave trading ships:
“[…] in the lower part of Senegal one could differentiate three
main groups: the wolofs, the lebu and the sereer, and three kingdoms: Waalo, Kajoo and Bawol, the first two Islamic and a large
part of the third animist, and therefore seen as barbarians. In
the last region different razzias took place whose purpose was to
obtain slaves, reason why its extensive wooded areas became a
zone for cimarrones to seek refuge. The sereer, organized in small
political units less complex than the Islamic ones, without aristocracies or slaves, reacted violently against slavery, closing their
communities to any interference from outside, which gave them
in the oral tradition the reputation of fierce and cruel”22.
Soon, part of the African slaves that were transported by force to
plantations and mines in America started to organize resistance
to break the slavery chains. Several Cimarron movements arose
21 As of 1645, Mozambique started to become affected by the slave traffic (capture and export of slaves) led by Portuguese traders since the Dutch controlled Angola and Beguile
that, four years earlier (August 1641), were under Portuguese rule. As of 1830, many
Arab vessels, from different ports of Mozambique brought a large number of slaves to
the Islands of Comoros and Madagascar, among other regions. And as of 1839, the city
of Zanzibar became a true slave traffic center in the East coast of Africa where the Arabs
were the main slave traffickers.
22 James Searing (1987), cited by Cáceres (2002: 163).
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from this: the slaves started to fight23 for freedom, through rebelliousness, the development and execution of resistance strategies, as of the second half of the XVI century, slaves started to
escape the colonies: they fled to hide and inaccessible territories
where they would regroup sometimes to organize themselves in
defense groups against hunters sent by their owners, or to seek
refuge in territories occupied by indigenous to whom they ended up teaching insubordination methods against the Spanish or
Portuguese colonist. Slave revolts take place to attaint freedom
in the Isthmus of Panamá24, the Pacific Coast, Cartagena, Venezuela, Cuba, Brazil (the Quilombos), Puerto Rico, among others:
fiercely.
“[…] in 1532 in Venezuela; in 1533 in Cuba and Panamá In 1547
the long-lasting rebellion of Sebastián Lemba in the Española;
in 1550 the rebellion of Juan Criollo that lasted several years. In
1579, the revolt of the black rebels in Portobelo (Panama) that
led to the signing of a peace treaty with the Spanish colonist via
which, the slaves attained collective freedom. In 1635 we can
highlight, the rebellions of the black slaves in Jamaica that went
so far that the Jamaican Assembly was forced to see the need to
send an assistance petition to the metropolis. The list is endless:
the rebellion of slaves in 1791 constituted the center of the Haitian process of independence and the rebellions of Puerto Rico
and Cuba in 1812 that were strongly suffocated due to the fear
for a Haitian like situation. These rebellions, add to the long list
of personal resistance, revolts and rebellions that took place in
23 Espinosa and Friedmann (1993: 105) highlight the participation of women in the struggle
against freedom: “in the cimarrons’s struggle, women fought fiercely with darts, cudgels
and spears facing the Spaniards […]”. In the same sense, Mena García (1993: 88) reiterates the magnitude of the black women support during the colonial era, she regrets the
scarcity of historic documents to that respect and the need to recognize their active
presence in the Colombian anti-slavery struggle.
24 During the colonial era in Panama, the cimarrons cooperation with the pirates and freebooters was remarcable; we refer to the role as pirates’ guides that they played against
the colony.
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the very Africa, in the Caribbean, in America, and in those places
where slavery was known to exist […]” 25
In the same line, it is important to highlight the insurrections of the
slaves of the French colony of Saint-Domingue (Haití today) that,
having started in the night of 22 to 23 August of 1791, ended up with
the slavery abolition proclamation in 1793 and the adoption of the
decree for the emancipation on February 4th, 1794. The resistance
of the towns of Saint-Domingue to the reinstatement of slavery by
Napoléon Bonaparte, by way of decree of May 20th/ 1802, gave way
to a bloody repression. Although slavery was restored in the other
French colonies, Saint-Domingue managed its independence on
January 1st/ 1804 with a new name (Haití), after a year of cruel war
against Bonaparte’s armies (1802-1803), and the capture and death
of the resistance leader Toussaint Louverture. The situación in Haiti
gave way to several insurrection movements of African slaves established by force in several countries of the Caribbean and America;
movements that were led by slaves native of the coastal zones of
West and Central Africa (Cape Verde, Congo, Goald Coast –today
Ghana-, Dahoney –tiday Benin-, Nigeria).
Prior to Haití’s independence, it is worth to highlight Benkos Bioho’s, a slave of African origin ,exceptional and notable nature of
leadership in the organization of resistance and offensive actions
against enslaving Spaniards, settled in the coasts of Cartagena.
His role was so outstanding that he is considered today as the
“Black Bolívar” of the palenqueros. He founded the cimarrones
town, know as the first “free town of America”26 which was iso25 See “Past and present of enslavery”. Available on http://www.monografias.com/trabajos10/trini/trini.shtml
26 “[…] What makes palenque de San Basilio different is, in first instance, to be the sole
palenque that forced the Spanish crown to make a peace agreement, what they called
then “cordial entente”. This agreement enabled the Palenque de San Basilio to become
autonomous in its language, organization, rituals, economy and all other internal aspects, different to other palenques, that were being governed by the crown and church
rules. The Palenque de San Basiliosigned the peace agreement with the crown in 1713.
No other palenque, neither in America nor, particularly in our Colombian territory, obtained this denomination; hence the Palenque de San Basilio is called “the first free town
of America” (Peréz Palomino, Jesús Natividad, 2006: 2).
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lated from the rest of Colombia since 1713, preserving its identity
of African origin. Today the palenquera language is a mixture of
bantú words (language of Central Africa) and Creole.
This heritage shows that despite the fact that men and
women27 were moved forcedly from Africa to America and were
stripped from goods and land, they brought along their cultural
background that marked the lives of the Afro-descendant populations in Latin America and the Caribbean. In this context, it is important to go into reflection on the African presence in Colombia.
African presence in Colombia: a socio-cultural
perspective
This paragraph starts with my personal experiences when I started
to know the Iberoamerican continent in 2004, following a tourist
trip to Bogotá and Cartagena. I was already aware of the existence
of African-descendant black people, but seeing this was a new reality. On the streets of Bogotá I hardly came across a black person
(at least I don’t remember) but in Cartagena I found black people
(even in tourist areas) who were selling art objects or were trying
to survive. I was so impressed that I felt in Africa; however, I was
not aware of all sorts of discrimination and racism that the black
people of Cartagena suffer, ways and realities hidden by the tourist representations and attractions of this city. I left the country
happy and saying to myself that I had found Africa in Colombia.
What is more, in 2005, I was in Caracas and Margarita Islands (Venezuela) again as tourist. One of my curiosities was encountering
black communities. To that end, I went to popular city districts of
Caracas inhabited by low class people, of all cultures and races,
with a predominance of black persons. One afternoon I attended
a music and dance soiree organized in a cultural center by a popu27 We emphasize the presence of women in the enslavery era since “for many years the
studies on black slave women were limited by the intensifying of the economic aspects
of enslavery […]” (Castaño Zapata, 1993: 77).
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lar committee of Venezuelan youths of the neighborhood, where
they played music with popular airs at the drums’ rhythm. It was
there where I felt under the skin, the cultural similarities shared
with the black people of Venezuela. I let myself be driven by the
emotion which was reflected in my overwhelming enthusiasm to
dance to the rhythm of the drums; airs and melodies that were
very familiar to my ears since they sounded very much like the moba sièk (rhythmic melodies that make one move the hips frantically
–by the moba-gurma towns of the north of Togo, in West Africa -),
blékété (frantic rhythms accompanied by mystic dance and trance–
by the populations of ewe-mina of the south of Togo-), apkèssè
and tuméwé (Traditional joy, relaxation and divertissement –between the ewé-mina peopl-). I said to myself the following: «This is
Africa; this is Africa!»28. in 2006 and 2007, I was in Palenque de San
Basilio and Quibdó respectively where my previous observations
have been confirmed by the experiences I lived: far beyond the cultural guidelines what stands out is the nature of their people, the
way they interact with others, the way they look, their eagerness
and pride to reaffirm themselves as black people with references
to Africa, among others; reflecting and evoking in the same way
identities shared with Africa. This part of the Lecture corresponds
to the advancement of research results, fruit of my observations,
compared reading, conversations with black man and women or
Afro-Colombians, wanderings Afro-Colombian forums and gatherings, after one and a half year of residence in Colombia: one gets
inside the forms of sociopolitical organization of Afros in Colombia,
28 ¡What a happy coincidence to find the testimony of the distinguished writer originally
from Congo-Brazaville Tchicaya U’Tamsi with respect to one experience that is very similar to mine, while I am reviewing files on the African footsteps in Latin America! According to Denise Mendez report (2002), the writer tells that he visited Cartagena and that
he felt so much admiration and emotion that he would not stop saying: «Je me croyais in
Afrique, j’aurais voulu parler comme chez moi»; “I felt I was in Africa, I would like to have
spoken as if I was at home” (referring this way to the language barrier that separated him
from his brothers and black people of Cartagena –a linguistic distance between Colombia and Africa-). See Denise Mendez’s testimony (2002) on the conference of Tchicaya
U’Tamsi and Manuel Zapata Olivella in 1988 in Paris: “La Présence Africaine in Colombie”.
Available on: http://www.africultures.com/index.asp?menu=affiche_article&no=565 ).
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in relation with the African ones (2.1) and the expressions of blackAfrican cultures in their social spheres (2.2).
Black communities in Colombia: languages, thinking, organizational forms and traditions
We inscribe ourselves in the context of the Afro-Latin-American
studies in order to explore the sociocultural, philosophic and political contributions of Africa in Colombia. The slavery years managed to bring men and women “ripped from Africa” to work in
coffee, tobacco, cotton and rice plantations; sugar manufacturing
factories and the mines in the different countries of Latin America and the Caribbean among which Mexico, Peru, Gran Colombia (Colombia–Nueva Granada- and Panama), Venezuela, Cuba,
Santiago de Chile, Costa Rica and Brazil. In this way, the black
Diaspora was formed in Latin America which has consolidated
itself throughout time (history) in Iberoamerican spaces; Brazil
and Colombia represent the Iberoamerican territories with the
largest black population of Latin America. More than 12 million
of Afro-Colombians live currently in Colombia of which nearly 1
million are in Bogotá; they represent a little more than 26% of
the Colombian population and make Colombia the third country
with the largest black population in America, after Brazil and the
United States.
Among the Afro-Colombian people, there are values and expressions derived from the African conception of big family along
with the acute sense of solidarity. In reference with the traditional Africa, it is fundamental to have descendants: it is the anger to
their duty of contributing to the continuity of life on the earth.
Likewise, the perpetuity of the ancestral chain is ensured; hence
the big families are the most appropriate means to guarantee the
clan’s emergence and consolidation: having a daughter or a son
(fertility) implies a capital or social value gain. As the Chocoan
researcher Perea Chalá Alumá (2004) explains, in Chocó, there
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exist marks of Africaness related with the importance of the inheritors:
“In Chocó, Colombia, where the bantú presence is evident, we
have not heard the Muntú29 and Kulonda voices, but the concepts
of love for nature and human (the Muntú) and the anti-abortion
philosophy, according to which each son is the product of the
agreement of two ancestral lines both paternal and maternal,
one concludes that–each child has a piece of bread under his/her
arm - (kulonda), therefore the right to live is not even debatable”
(Perea Chalá Alumá, 2004: 20).
In relation with the contribution coming from the African
thinking, Mina Aragón (2006) highlights some determining
aspects: the African antropos, the modern homo sapiens,
would start fantasizing with his psyche to invent the «oldest
philosophy in this planet»: the Muntú philosophy, and as of
this thinking of fraternity between the beings and entities of
creation, built all its cosmo vision in myths, esthetics, law,
technique, medicine, social organization, etc. All these are
imaginaries socially built by the Africans and their descendants in the world Diaspora of ethnic diversity and cultural
polyphony, that what the Afro imaginary element with its
overwhelming creativity in voices and languages, the paradigmatic referent through which the world’s mixing of races
has enriched itself” (Ibíd., 2006: 63-64). 30
29 According to Perea Chalá Alumá’s explanation (2004: 13), the Muntú phylosophy consists in the conception of the human being as the product of nature and not as its owner.
Consequently, destroying the nature is equivalent to ignoring the principles and rules of
the common law.
30 For more details on the Muntú thinking see Mina Aragón (2006: 64-69). This author
(2006a: 19) defines the Afro creating capacity as “any piece of art, of ideas, thinking, values and technical inventions, materials that the African man and his descendants, using
his radical individual imagination and of his collective imaginatory, have made in favor of
the cultural, biological and sociohistoric mixing of races in the world, to make of the self
constitution of our complex civilization, something more than hate, wars and conflicts”.
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In the same way, polygamy, the way of marriage par excellence
to ensure a greater number of children, is a heritage of cultural
practices around the African family:
“With the enslavement abolition law, a type of polygamist extensive family was triggered and consolidated an efficient strategy
for the territorial control of the jungle, consisting in that a male
would take several spouses, all being equally important. Each
one of them would live along a river and would specialize in determine crops, the husband would visit them on a regular basis,
providing them with the things they could not produce” (Chalá
Alumá, 2004: 15).
Childrens’ education takes place within a traditional context
marked by the teaching of the importance of the sense and exercise of solidarity between the members of the extensive family:
“For the sons, the most important thing is the mother’s kinship
consaguinidad uterina; being the quality of the mother the social
determiner of descent. The family concept in the Biogeographic
Chocó is so strong that cousins are assumed as brothers in degrees of kinship so distant for the western society, as a seventh or
eight degree is still family, with a solidarity obligation. Religiousness and family meet, when a father or mother die, they decease
is not buried until the last relative shows up” (Ibíd., 2004: 15).
This way, the black human resources, inherited by slavery in
Colombia, adopt forms of political organizations very similar to
those of their African ancestors. Hence, their combative and reclaiming nature is close to that of Africans against the nature’s
aggressiveness, slavery and colonialism.
“The perception is that the Afro was submissive and passive, but
Chango and Elegba were always encouraging the heroes’ combative spirit […] in the Caribbean (Mackandal, Toussaint Louvertuere, Dessalines), in Brazil (Gunga Zumbi) and, of course, in Co-
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lombia, with the great Benkos Biojó, the African king that started
the «war of the palenques» in this hemisphere, and whom would
serve to develop a new political, ethno historic and ethno educational pedagogy of Colombia and America, since he was the first
American «revolutionary » that said no to the Spanish crown. It is
with him that the «humanitarian law », starts given that he made
a political negotiation with the governor of Suazo, who acted on
the Spanish King’s behalf for the exchange of some war prisoners
(1605). It is with Benkos Biojó where one should start valuing the
Afro identity and political contribution to the struggle for independence and autonomy, that then the communeros will make
(1781), creoles against the crown’s negligence and arbitrary acts”
(Mina Aragón, 2006: 78-79).
The forms of political resistance tend to be supported by cultural guidelines very much marked by language. Here, we observe
many linguistic contributions of African origin in the development of strategies to break the chains of slavery. In the so called
African corner in Colombia, the invention of the palenquera
language helped invent a vehicle for internal and own communication that the slave trader could not understand. Likewise,
it constituted the possibility of building palenques in and from
the places where the fugitives reorganized their life projects, altered by slavery. They were the social center of resistance with
which true republics were created «independent republics» and
aggressive action centers were consolidated to hide and escape
from their pursuers and to defend themselves from them. This
way, the Afro-descendant cimarrones fought for their freedom:
Palenque (Colombia) became the first free town of America. This
element (Freedom and independence) has been determining to
maintain, both in time and space, one identity and some cultural
expressions like the palenquero language.
“The palenquero invention as frank language is an attempt to
seek a convergence point, to seek freedom and to affirm identity;
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without a common communication it would not have been possible to unify the project to end the Afro servitude here in America […] the resistance spirit only acquired unity and cohesion by
the intervention of an Afro-Colombian language that recalls the
distant but always present African cultural-linguistic wealth of
infinity of languages of endless traditions” (Ibíd., 2006: 71-72).
To highlight the importance of Africaness in the linguistic configuration amongst Afro peoples of Colombia, we refer to Perea
Chalá Alumá’s (2004) and Mina Aragón’s observations (2006) that
coincide in that African words and terms have survived both in
the Hispanic forms as well as in the culinary art, very much present in the black communities.
“It not a coincidence that at present names as Madagascar, [Angola] and Mozambique are maintained as family names for example. Although it is clear that many slaves arrived at our beaches
not with his/her original tribal name but with that of the port
were he/she was forced to embark. However, the presence of
cultural practices (dance, music, religion, etc.) talk about the
ethnography of these supérsites and in some cases, cultural continuation […] we collect this list sufficiently representative: Acué,
Angola, Beté, Biáfara, Biohó, Coco, Congo31, Chalá, Chamba32,
Chocó33, Egba, Fanti, Ludango, Mandiga34, Maní, Matamba, Nagó
[…]” (Perea Chalá Alumá, 2004: 18)35.
“We celebrate the Afro contribution to Castilian, which has made
the latter a mixing of races, languages that took Amerian-indian
31 It its original version means those of the country of the panter: K’ongo; its inhabitants
are kikongos (Perea Chalá Alumá, 2004: 31).
32 in moba (language of the moba-gurma people from the north of Togo), chamba, written
câmba, means the family of clan chief.
33 According to the same researcher, “Chocó is a territory and an ethnic group, provided
with an own language of the great bantú family, that, in fact, entered the province in the
first decades of the XVI century” (Perea Chalá Alumá, 2004: 31-32).
34 The mandingas correspond to an ethnic group in East Africa, originally from what is today Malí that are also distributed between parts of Senegal and Niger.
35 In relation with the contribution of African languages to the Spanish spoken among the
Afro-America people See Perea Chalá Alumá (2004: 16-32).
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expressions (tobacco, corn, sweet potatoes, savanna, hammock,
crabs, canoe …) and Africans (mondongo, manguala, catanga,
salar, tanga, tunda, chiripa, tula, bitute, bemba, cumbia, banana,
chimba, guineo…), to enrich its polyphony and the power of its
meaning” (Mina Aragón, 2006: 71-72).
“Dishes as the carimañola, voices like cucayo, cocolón, to refer to
the roasted rice adhered to the bottom of the pans; the constant
presence of garlic, or the acidulation, etc., revels a strong African
influence, apart from the usual mondongo. […] the kitchen is also
an ethnic resistance fortress, this way mondongo, refuses to give
up its place to the Hispanic callos, or to the quechuismo guata
(bellie), mofongo, mangú, fufú, ñame, etc., still enjoy their vitality” (Perea Chalá Alumá, 2004: 14 & 21)
“The possible African footsteps appear in the name of foods, in
certain mixtures or combinations and in diverse forms of preparation. Even, the coffee with milk is attributed to a Dutch man
who lived in Africa; and the habit of frying plantain is also presumed to be African” (Villapoll, 1977: 325).
Similar to the African traditions, death occupies a very important
place in the rituals practiced by the members of black communities in Latin America. The death is the birth of a new life. In this
sense, we observed in the palenquero towns, funereal ceremonies called “lumbalú”, a ritual that is done in the funerals and
during the nine days following the burial. In this context, the lumbalú is a reflect of the religion anchored in the belief of the invisible given that that people sing for the decease next to the coffin
and play drums because they believe that by singing and playing drums it is easier for the decease to travel to the other life.
Together with the traditional music, this ritual is an organizative
and expressive form of their vision of the world: this palenquera
cosmo vision is a traditional spelling that, day to day, is practiced
and is part of being palenquero. Here, we think that the lumbalú
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is the most authentic, religious and ancestral forms that express
the Africaness and profess the traditional African beliefs and religions (RTA), the death never die.
Moved forcedly to Colombia, the slaves brought along their cultural values (cultural background) and rituals in their soul since
they were stripped off all their material goods. For that reason,
in their destiny they were able to resist to the total imposition of
Catholicism:
“The death never dies, because his spirit, the immortal part that
the orischas would place in him, for him to bond with God, is far
beyond the space-time; it is an unfading shadow the one that
binds and encourage the indiscriminate actions of men in their
daily life. The yoke of Catholicism was not able to kill the orichas
of the Afros; despite «the cross and the sword » they enriched
the western religions with the syncretic mixing of races that will
be constituted among the African orichas and the catholic Gods
for the emergence of the Afro-Amer-Indian-Catholic religious
syncretism” (Mina Aragón, 2006: 74, citing Zapata Olivella –in
Chimá nace un Santo-).
In summary, “the configuration of the Afro-Colombian communities was initially done in the framework of slavery, under the
rulers’ parameters, and it is from the processes of resistance, syncretism, cimarronaje and configuration of palenques, purchase
of freedom and ending of slavery that the Afro-Colombians manage to structure their communities, families and creating their
organizations. The palenques constitute one of those organizative forms. As Aquiles Escalante points out here , the palenque
summarizes the anti-colonial insurgency, from the palenques the
Afro-Colombian started to create conditions to settle in a territory and from said conditions he starts organizing his new way
of life, to create his own forms of government and social organization. These constitute spaces for the construction of identity
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and according to Jaime Jaramillo were «the social ID in which the
black man tried to open a channel for his tendency to free life
and the needs of sociability, in the palenque they used to elect
their authorities, organize their festivities, organize their religious
cult and had town councils. In fact we needn’t forget that the
palenque has a military nature, site of strategic entrenchment,
protected with traps, pits, stockades, sites for training, provision
and rest and refuge from the cimarrones»”36.
African culture expressions in Colombia: literature, oral tradition, religiousness, arts, music and dance
We address the cultural contributions of Africa to Latin America
through the process of de-culturalization37 and culturization38
that implies the reception of incorporation by people or a social
group with own cultures (languages, religions, ways of thinking,
literature, arts, music and dance etc.) of cultural guidelines coming from others to the extend that, sometimes, they replace their
own partially. In this line of thinking, we mention that, from the
XVI century, the cimarronismo and the settling of palenques (quilombos in Brazil) in regions of Central and South America, constituted the greatest strategy of cultural survival and of struggle for
freedom. Following the abolition of slavery in Hispanic America,
36
See, “Cimarrones and Palenques”. Available on: http://html.rincondelvago.com/historia-de-colombia_1.html
37 To broaden this concept see, Manuel Moreno Fraginals (1977: 14-27).
38 Processes that, with the sociocultural transformations, are today perceived as transculturization processes. This term, taken from the modern anthropology, “refers to the
process via which the constant and uninterrupted contact between two or more groups
of different cultures affect mutually the cultural answers of each one of them […] in their
analysis, [the anthropologist and Cuban thinker Fernando] Ortiz provides the tools to
dissent of its justification for the use of a neologism when he explains, «by aculturization
one means the transit process from one culture to the other and its social repercutions
of all genders. But trans-culturization is a more appropriate word. We understand that
the word trans-culturization expresses better the different phases of the transition process from one culture to the other, because it does not consist in acquiring a different
culture, which is what the English word aculturization really means, but that the process
also implies necessarily the loss or uprooting of a previous culture, what we could say
a de-culturization, and, it also means the subsequent creation of new cultural phenomena that can be called neo-culturization » […]”. See Sonia Ruiz, “Aculturization or Transculturization?”. Available on: http://ceci.uprm.edu/~sruiz/ciso3121/id12.htm
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the cultural expressions of the Afro-descendants were maintained from several perspectives favoring the consolidation of the
African cultural heritage in the Iberoamerican territories. From
there, the descendants of African slaves engaged in activities of
artistic and literary creativity, following the African footsteps:
“The African, from his constitution as man, is a subject of imagination and thought who would not have to be envious of this
or that culture. The African, from the magic thought and amazement visualized the cosmos, the nature and all the things, and
started to question it; he accumulated wisdom, wealth, and it
is precisely the Afro creativity, spread in the mining, the agriculture, the arts, the medicine, in the oral tradition of those African
families and kingdoms, who the colonizer overpowered. It was
one way of the other that they contributed with their radical and
their collective imaginary, to enrich the Colombian historic and
social culture […] of all the imaginaries that we have captured in
the economy, politics, music, religion, then, the Muntú creator is
the great legacy of the Afros to this «earthly human singular »”
(Mina Aragón, 2006: 44).
Oral and written Literature (oraliture; oral tradition). There may
be oral expressions without any written version; but in contrast
with difficulty can there be a written tradition without ‘orality’
(i.e. speech). As a matter of fact, globally, traditional African and
native first nation societies characterize themselves by an oral
culture or by primary orality, i.e. societies that did not have any
type of written forms. According to, Friedemann, (1999: 25), “the
term oraliture is an African neologism while at the same time it
is a trace of word literature. According to Yoro Fall (1992) its objective is to find some how a concept status that rises up to the
same level as that of literature. Because the idea is to recognize
the esthetics of the word incorporated in the oral history records,
the lawendas, myths, stories, epopeyas, or songs, they are forms
of creativity, which have managed to survive up to our time by
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word of mouth. And, due to the globalization of cultural critique
they also constitute poetical subjects of study by societies with
written traditions”. Thus, it is worthwhile to mention that there
are other means of writing that, based on ‘oraliture’, documentary sources, oral history and ethnography may yield a new type
of text. The idea is to point out the existence of oral forms of
literature that coexists with the other classical forms of literature
(the conventional or “cultured” form) in different contemporary
societies: There is a literature or a form of associated literature(s)
linked to a popular culture that gets passed on, orally. Under this
perspective, it becomes a political vindication that recognizes the
variegated means of narratives as channels for the discourse towards literature since in Africa for example, the white colonial
powers condition the possibility of having the African version of
their own history (as a people) in writing.
The belief that words have different powers (that of creation,
that of enchantment) participates in consolidating ‘orality’ in Africa: “The most tangible characteristic of the African is and has
been their oral expression, but ‘orality’ has not been simply a
mental symbol that shapes. Instead it has been the equivalent of
a memory, a tradition and a specific culture. Orality, the invention
of a language is to a degree a means of leaping out of the natural
world and into that of human culture, socially and historically”
(Mina Aragón, 2006: 71). And the power to name provides the
possibility of apprehending different phenomena whether empirically or spiritually that constitutes the universe of knowledge.
Although words are permanently surrounding human beings, only those who have managed to dominate them have managed to
unveil their power. That is why the elderly are more susceptible
to dominating such knowledge in using the spoken word. Knowledge transfer via informal education is performed orally; that is
why when an old person dies without sharing his or her knowledge and wisdom it becomes a loss for the entire people.
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In Colombia’s Pacific Coast, the formation of a specific orality
characterizes itself by phonetic peculiarities, morphosintactical,
grammatical and lexicon-morphological singularities in every day
speech.
“[…] In Afro Latino cultures [of Colombia’s Pacific Coast] orality
ha emphasized movement more than the written word […] the
higher weight awarded to oral tradition and corporal expression
in cultural survival probably have been associated to low levels of
social strata in their communities, in comparison with the rest of
the nation. […] Notwithstanding the religious attitudes present in
the oral tradition structure, […] Afro Latino cultures of Colombia’s
Pacific Coast have still a literary vocation, expressed in variegated
forms of graphical arts and popular texts of recent tradition in the
region” (Pedrosa, 1994: 33)
This orality prevails in transmitting knowledge among Choco settlements as is stated by Perea Chalá Alumá (2004: 20-21 & 29):
“Transmitting and sharing culture by word of mouth, fundamentally by mothers, ayas and grand mothers, was the most expeditious vehicle in preserving and disseminating it. This is one of the
reasons why the strength of oral tradition, specifically ‘oraliture’,
the material that constitutes culture and above all professional
discourse facilitated the preservation of many word sounds, i.e.
among washing maids who preserved the instrument to beat the
clothes and the soap as well as who preserved the word sound, of
’el manduco’” […] Thus, thru multiple paths oral traditions, a broad
array of African word sounds have not only survived the journey
across the Atlantic but enriched the Spanish of the Americas”.
Formal education prevalence in Afros regions has enabled several
slave descendents in Colombia to get a college degree in fields like
anthropology, sociology, mathematics, medicine, teaching and policing. Among the formally educated population there are writers,
novelists, script writers and poets of outstanding talents whose
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works, regrettably, are not commonly known by the general public. Among the pioneers in Afro Colombian literature, Aquiles Escalante, Manuel Zapata, Arnaldo Palacios are usually mentioned,
who, attracted by issues discussed in literary and poetical works
of African writers – ‘la negritud’ (Blackness), for example-, have
lead the way towards sociological, historical, anthropological research, in favor of recognizing human, cultural and philosophical
Afro Colombian values: “Another significant emergent Afro art
was what came to be known as ‘the Negritude’, a literary poetic –
philosophical movement that was born in Paris during the 1930s,
with Damas, Senghor, Césaire, where they cherished the values,
the creativity and the social vision of the Afro starting as of the
word while preserving the sense of belonging to a civilization that
is exclusively creative of a different Cosmo vision, a philosophy an
a form of esthetics. […] that seeks its Afro roots and it roots in its
never-ending blend with the native American nations yielding new
reference icons in the words of poets like Alfredo Vanin, Edelma
Zapata, Héctor León Mina, and in essays by Hugo Hidrovo [or by
Arnoldo Palacios], in the verses by Fernando Maclanil, in music by
pianists like Edison Valencia and Sody Brayde, in sculpture by Abou
Sidibe and in novels by Ben Okri” (Mina Aragón, 2006: 77).
Arts and Religiousness39. In Colombia’s Pacific and Caribbean
Coast, the provinces of Cauca, Antioquia, Chocó, Bolívar and the
entire Atlantic cost constitute the traditional Colombian regions
were the Negro slave population settled in clearly defined territories. These provinces make up the social nucleus where profound
traits of African Art have flourished in a blend with rituals, myths
and religiousness of Colombian society.
39 with respect to the religious imagery (religiousness), we mention that “Africans were
always close to their orichas, who they considered their supreme divinities, creators and
organizers of all general existence […] rituals have been held using the sensuality of the
body with the sound of the bambam, a «witch doctor drum», from the gods that come
from the yorub olimpus, or who come down the «witch doctor tree» to aid the living in
their epopeyas and enterprises […], the entire cosmos is filled with gods; all religions are
polytheists with deities in each human group” (Mina Aragón, 2006: 73-74).
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“Religiousness presides, virtually, over all Afro Chocó acts […]
under an apparent veil of Christianity, or popular Christianity,
as theologians prefer to call it, i.e. the «viejos católicos (the old
catholics)», there is always present a set of religious philosophies
of African origin” (Perea Chalá Alumá, 2004, pp. 13 & 12).
“African art always has had the same goal as those great artistic
civilizations: expressing divinity, cherishing their ancestors, immortalizing the living, singing to liberty and heroism of the most
significant members of society. Art has been precisely that, a way
to seek, a way to feel and to interpret collective existence. Africans, in that pursuit, were not inferior to the creativity demands
of Muntú” (Mina Aragón, 2006: 75-76).
Music and Dance. The African dimension of the musical compositions and dances cross over the variegated forms of music, dance
and recital among the AfroColombian communities. From the Pacific to the Colombian Caribbean, the djembés (drums) are ever
present in the popular musical rhythms: in ‘currulao’, in ‘mbasú’,
in ‘calypso’, in ‘saporondó’ and in ‘bullerengue’ for example, are
pure African inheritance (from men and women brought from
Guinea, Cameroon, Angola or Congo). African ancestors used the
drum to communicate and to dance in festive days; the drums
pound at the time when one sees the first light at birth and at the
time when one passes away: convening unity.
Among the modern musical rhythms there is champeta that was
born in the poor and popular boroughs of Cartagena at the end
of the seventies, emigrating towards ‘Palenque de San Basilio’.
Currently, among the unofficial kings of champeta music is Viviano Torres. It is a mix of soukous (from Congo – in central Africa
-) and highlife (Ghana and Nigeria – west Africa-) the fuses with
Caribbean rhythms (Haitian ‘compa’, rap -reggae- ragga, socca,
calypso, among others). Marginal people form popular boroughs
– fishermen, shoeshine men and self thought musicians - have
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been important in disseminating champeta40 in Colombia. Today,
in spite it being popular music, it is one of the most discriminated
in Colombia and in the Caribbean.
Conclusions
This discourse (Lecture) is inscribed within the framework of Afro
Latino - Americans with the intent of exploring the social and cultural, as well as philosophical and political contributions of Africa
in Latin America as a whole, and in Colombia specifically, with an
emphasis in specific areas such as ‘Palenque de San Basilio’.
As aforementioned, enslaved blacks in Colombia were localized
especially in the provinces of Cauca, Antioquia, Chocó, Bolívar,
an in cities like Popayan or Cali, in the northern part of the province of Antioquia and in the Atlantic Coast (with its geographical
center in Cartagena). Several of the peoples came form regions
that today are African countries such as Benin (former Dahomey), Nigeria, Sierra Leona, Mozambique, Angola, Cape Verde,
Senegal, Guinea and they belong to different peoples within
Africa such as the wolofs, mandingas, fulos, cazangas, biáfaras,
monicongos, anzicos, engolas, among others.
The configuration of the afro Colombian communities was based
initially on the mechanics of slavery, under parameters of their
masters and it is as a result of the resistance processes, syncretism, cimarronaje and the configuration of ‘palenque’ settlements, the purchase of their own freedom and the end of slavery
from which Afro Colombians manage to structure their communities, their families and to create their forms of organization.
There was a black Diaspora formation in Latin America that has
been consolidating in time (throughout history) in Iberoamerican
scenarios; Brazil and Colombia represent the Iberoamerican territories with the most Negro populations.
40 Wade refers to this musical style (2002: 273) while exploring the different musical forms
in the coast as an expresión of negritude and ‘africaness’ in Colombia (Ibíd.: 268-274).
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Colombia is the third country in the Americas, after the United
States and Brazil with the greatest Negro population. The main
concentration in Colombia is in the Pacific coast with 82.7% of
the total Negro population. However, this Negro population in
the Pacific only represents 12.7% of the nation’s total population.
69.4% of the Negro peoples live in urban areas. The main urban
nucleolus of afro-descendents are in Cartagena, Barranquilla, San
Andrés Islands, Sucre, Buenaventura, Tumaco, Quibdo, Cali, Medellín and Bogotá.
As per the analysis of the work herein, how slavery operated is
shown in order to bring African men and women to the “new”
world of Central and South America, forcing them to live with
social and cultural realities that were totally different from their
own, in plantations (either of cotton or coffee), in mining and in
factories. This work explores how the slave trade which came to
be one of the most despicable and repugnant activities of human
history lead to the systematic separation of parents from their
children, of brothers, of spouses, of friends or neighborhoods according to the needs of the slave merchants. One of the objectives was to achieve their total alienation. However, it was shown
that part of the slave population had been developing social and
cultural production and reproduction mechanisms as a means of
resistance to the status quo (i.e. cultural, political and economic
oppression) and as a path to finding freedom.
In different countries, the struggle was accompanied by abolition
of slavery initiatives that ended in a series of proclamations of
political nature; the last countries in Latin America and the Caribbean to abolish slavery were Cuba, in 1886, and Brazil, in 1888.
We share the idea that “[…] abolition did not mean suppressing
definitively slavery but rather declaring it illegal. As a matter of
fact, forced house help, clandestine people trafficking, exploitation and prejudice attitudes did not end with the abolition of
slavery. The majority of former slaves continued living in miser-
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able conditions, many of them under the same slave master and
subjected to the same – physical and mental - exploitation prior
to the abolition of slavery. Furthermore, abandoning the slave
master implied leaving the only territory known in a foreign land
and being subject to going totally astray in terms of finding a job,
a house and food or any basic need. Legally they were free but as
a matter of fact they remained enslaved with scarce possibilities
of ever enjoying freedom: domination, being subjected, discriminated and exploited remained common traits of their reality41”.
For example in Colombia the issue of Afro ‘Colombianess’ is one
of those aspects that worries society in general and worries the
Negro communities in particular. Mostly speaking, they are marginalized and excluded from regional and national policy making.
That is why the treatment tailored to theses peoples in Colombian political spheres poses challenges.
Quickly, part of the African slaves that were forced to come to
plantations and mines in America began to regroup and to set
up resistance in order to break the chains of slavery. There were
important slave rebellion movements in the XVI century that contributed to create an atmosphere of emancipation after a clear
participation of slaves in independence processes of the XVIII
and XIX century, up until the declaration of official emancipation
in the XIX century.
Before Haiti’s independence (between 1791 and 1804), one
must highlight the exceptional and notable leadership character
of Benkos Bioho, a slave of African decent who organized resistance movements and offensives against the Spanish slave masters who had settled in the Coasts of Cartagena. His role was so
outstanding the he is considered today as the “Black Bolívar” of
the ‘palenqueros’. He founded a town of ‘cimarrones’ (maroons)
Negros, known as the first “free town in the Americas” that re41 See “Pasado and presente de la esclavitud”. Available at: http://www.monografias.com/
trabajos10/trini/trini.shtml
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mained isolated from the rest of Colombia since 1713, preserving the identities of their African origin. Today, the ‘palenquera’
language is a mix of Bantú words (a Central African language) and
Creole.
Certainly this analysis has enabled us to explain the African customs and traditions that revolve around cultural, social and political realms as an extension of family. In turn the study has lead us
to learn the way how some of these components have survived
the test of time and of space, to resurge in Colombian soil.
With that inheritance, it was shown that men and women were
forcedly sent to America out of Africa and they were stripped
of their assets and territory. They brought with them only the
cultural baggage that ended up branding the lives of the Afro descendent towns in Latin America and in the Caribbean. Given all
these reasons, the settlements of African ancestry have had to
come up with cultural resistance mechanisms and pursue defense
movements of civil rights. Among the most important manifestations of their specificity and cultural resistance is religion, music
and Negro movements or negritude (‘negroness’).
Also, one may perceive how the Muntú philosophy brings us closer to fraternity among beings and the forces of creation as is stipulated in African traditions. We realize that the Afro-American
conception (that of the ones in the Americas) of family (mainly
after the abolition of slavery), based on the practice of polygamy
is very similar to the African way. Within the framework of family
education among Afro-Americans (i.e. those of the Americas), we
find reference frames of African traditions such as the teaching
that essential or primary trait of solidarity.
Among the Afro Colombian settlements, in general, and ‘palenqueras’ in particular, there are still values and expressions derived from African conception of extended family that prevail in
conjunction with that acute sense of solidarity.
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In respect of the forms of resistances of Afro-Americans (i.e. those
of the Americas) in Colombia, we find that they are very similar to
those of their ancestors, in as far as the role played by the beliefs
and the language of African origin, which were key in the political
processes of liberation of the enslave peoples. From there, we
mentioned the linguistic contribution of the African languages to
Spanish as is spoken in those Afro-American (of the Americas)
towns. Furthermore, the study ascertains that the rituals, the religious ceremonies, the burials, the oral tradition, written literature and the variegated artistic forms such as culinary art, music
and dance among other expressions are social, cultural and religious practices of the Negro communities of Colombia that have
the branding of ‘Africaness’.
Discussion y Conclusions
Table I: Rewriting history
Main Ideas
1. Challenge the idea that Afro-American peoples (i.e. those of
the Americas) are people without history.
2. Highlight the contribution of Afro-Americans (i.e. those of
the Americas) in building the nation, by providing an inclusive
look from a national historical and economical stand point.
3. Highlight via documental recollection and organization the
contributions of the Negros in different civilizations, thus
enabling the reinforcement of the idea of their influence in
constituting new nationalities.
4. Highlighting the creativity, the social, political and cultural
contributions of actions by Afro-Americans (i.e. those of the
Americas), that lead to turning the New World into a genuinely New World, by being active agents that had profound
impacts on their societies.
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5. Highlighting the epistemological rupture between the categories of slavery and enslaving as an indispensable tool in
building new paradigms.
6. Exploring the social-cultural, philosophical and political contributions of Africa in Latin America in general, and in Colombia specifically, with emphasis in specific places such as
Palenque de San Basilio.
Obstacles
1. Surpass the voids and fight the prejudices of traditional history and geography that in other matters has affected history teaching, highlighting the linguistics structures typical of
each group.
2. Stimulating the exercise of full citizenship by Afro-Americans
(i.e. those of the Americas), not fully allowed due to phenomena such as displacement, exclusion and racial discrimination.
3. Avoid the continued practice of folklore-demeaning the cultural practices of Afro-Americans (i.e. those of the Americas).
Policy Proposals
1. Highlighting the collective reaction of Afro-American (i.e.
those of the Americas) peoples in academic formation of
their own sets, which they have begun to assume as their
own challenge in teaching the historic processes in their
communities.
2. Proposing a new framework for education that recognizes
and integrates fully to the national set of Afro-American (i.e.
those of the Americas) peoples.
3. Coordinating among the deferent countries and governments
in the continent collective construction of the history of AfroAmericans (i.e. those of the Americas).
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Cooperation Proposals among nations
1. Highlighting and multiplying experiences as basis for the
‘Fundación Palmares’.
2. Sharing the experience of the Schomburg Center for research
that concedes fundamental importance to the various means
of preserving the memory thru archeological findings, such
as cemeteries. Colonial constructions should serve as samples of Afro-American (i.e. those of the Americas) contributions, which were really the ones who actually mastered the
art and who actually built the buildings, as oppose to honoring the colonial elite as it would seem at times.
3. Highlighting cultural inclusion policies by the Brazilian government such as the celebration of the black awareness day
among others.
4. Celebrating a forum with Afro-American (i.e. those of the
Americas) historians from different regions in the continent.
Politics Proposal
Emphasize the collective reaction of Afrodescendant people in
academic training, who have begun to assume its own challenges
in the teaching of the historical processes of their communities.
Propose a new scheme of education that recognizes and integrates the full set of citizenship to the Afrodescendant people.
Coordinate between different the countries and governments of
the continent, the construction of a collective history of Afrodescendants in the Americas.
Table II: experience exchanges among youth
and children
It was an arena for reflection on inclusion and on participation
of youths in social, political and cultural processes via the dissemination and the exchange of local experiences as well as by
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identifying ideas and opinions relating to problems and situations (progress made, opportunities and strengths) that manifest
themselves in the cultural realm of the Iberoamerican countries.
Discussion themes:
• Problems and situations that require prime attention in as
far as cultural offerings of cultural products and services in
our nations.
• Projects and actions related with stimulating capabilities and
talents among youths: social-cultural research, artistic formation, craftsman production, artistic creation, cultural dissemination, artistic appropriation of traditional practices and
emerging artistic practices.
• Intercultural Relating amongst Afro-Americans (i.e. those of
the Americas) Communities and other ethnics groups.
• Developments and problems which are present in respect of
productivity issues regarding the cultural realm.
Axel Rojas
Profile
Professor at Universidad del Cauca, Department of Intercultural
Studies; Faculty of Human and Social sciences. His research interests are mainly focused on inter cultural issues, poly–cultural expressions and the ethno education in Colombia; also on research
of Afro-American (i.e. those of the Americas) settlements in the
country.
Among his recent publications are: (Coordinator) Lecture on Afro
Colombian Studies. Inputs for Teachers (that is “Cátedar de Estudios Afrocolombianos - Aportes para maestros). Editorial University del Cauca. 2008
Afro-Americans (i.e. those of the Americas) in Colombia. Bibliographic Compilation. Editorial Universidad del Cauca. 2008 (Coauthor with Eduardo Restrepo).
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Lecture
The “Cátedra de Estudios Afrocolombianos” is an educational
proposal whose intent is achieving inclusion within the educational system of pedagogical strategies in order to make visible
the trajectory of Afro-Americans (i.e. those of the Americas) in
the nation and the eradication of racism and other forms of discrimination. Since it is a proposal geared for basic and middle
education levels, it offers an invaluable possibility in forming children and youths in an ethics of respect and recognition of the
multi-cultural society as well as the promotion of a type of different means of relating, based on the possibility of building an
intercultural society, with especial attention to the presence and
contributions of Afro-Americans (i.e. those of the Americas) in
the nation’s history, the region’s history and the globe’s history.
Given that one of our goals is to share significant experiences
that contribute to making visible the contributions of the African
Diaspora to American societies, I shall start my presentation by
pondering from the start, from a set of educational experiences
whose purpose coincides closely with set for this congress.
Initially I’ll approach the reflection in pedagogical terms, then I
shall discuss generally speaking the meaning of Diaspora, its current expressions in Colombian society and the meaning that its
study and signification has in education. Afterwards I shall reflect
upon the educational experiences of the past decade in our nation, identifying some progress and some difficulties found in the
process of applying them throughout the different regions in the
land. In closing I propose some possible lines of action in other to
build an Afro-American (i.e. those of the Americas) Agenda, pertaining to the field of cultural policies, that could nourish direct
or indirectly these types of experiences.
Curricular guidelines on the Lecture on Afro Colombian Studies,
that is, the document on general guiding principles in applying
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them within Colombia’s Educational System, were presented formally in 2001, precisely when the nation was commemorating
150 years of promulgating the law abolishing slavery in Colombia
(MEN 2001). However, the background on these issues goes back
further in history where Colombia went thru diverse institutional
transformation processes, among which it is worthwhile highlighting the constitutional amendment of 1991 and the promulgation of the 70th Law dated 1993, known as the Black communities’ law. In it the first legal norm that grants specific treatment
to Negro populations in as far as being subject of collective rights
are stipulated and as of its promulgation they acquire the status of ethnic group at an institutional level. Within this legal and
political context, a series of rights are promulgated in different
realms of social life, including education, geared towards protecting these peoples.
I shall limit this presentation to Lecturing, without mentioning
any other means consecrated in the law as a result of the times;
maintaining this historical context as a reference frame.
It is pertinent to state that throughout my presentation I’ll be
referring to Negro populations, Afro Colombians, ‘palenqueras’
and grass roots population, to name the set of Afro Colombian
peoples of our nation. In this manner by naming the set of peoples we would be obeying the mandates of respecting the diversity of forms in self recognition present amongst our peoples and
highlighting the diversity of identity expressions that have given
rise to the Diaspora process currently taking place in Colombia.
Pedagogical Dimensions of the problem
If the educational institutions have the mission of forming the
new generations according to the knowledge that a society
deems pertinent and concurrent with its political project, why is
it important to include African Diaspora in school curricula? Why
is this knowledge important for Colombian society? What should
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be taught when dealing with the Diaspora? How is it possible to
recognize the historic presence of Afro-Americans (i.e. those of
the Americas) in the Colombian society? In which manner may
one transform practices, knowledge base and values, which have
historically legitimized racism? These are some of the questions
that one must pose in the pedagogical realm and that one uses
as basis for the implementation of experiences on a Lecture on
Afro Colombian Studies, i.e. the “Cátedra de Estudios Afrocolombianos”.
Albeit it may seem relatively easy to reach an agreement regarding the value of ‘cultural diversity’ and the value of some expressions such as Diaspora, it is also true that there is no generalized consensus on what it all means. If the challenge is changing
the curriculum, what is at stake is the formation of students in
their very integrity; that is to say, the challenge is affecting the
entire set of formation processes, reviewing all those elements
that constitute that which transcends the work of the educational institutions and it encompasses the educational system in
its broadest sense. It implies transforming critically the curricular
guiding principles in the entire set of formation areas, the evaluation systems, the editorial policies regarding school texts, as well
as strengthening the educational research practices, redefining
even the training programs for teachers. That is why it is necessary to clarify the starting points of this curricular project. I mean
to say that the problem or the set of problems that have lead
teachers, social organizations and other experts to call to our attention the need to incorporate nationwide educational projects
that make a direct reference to the trajectory and the achievements of Afro-Americans (i.e. those of the Americas), whether in
their contributions to building national society or in as far as the
inequity conditions to which they have been subjected, and that
in turn have given rise to diverse discrimination practices. In the
end, this would be the justification as to why the Diaspora should
be taught.
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Transforming curricula requires pedagogical intervention in the
knowledge, values and practices fields that are part of the formation process that needs to be built. In this sense, the curricula
problem is not one that can be solved exclusively in the realm
of new content or with the introduction of a greater number of
such. Certainly there is need for greater awareness and clarity regarding the problem, in order to intervene more effectively. Also,
it is necessary for that intervention to be steered from a clear
ethical–political project. Knowing the problem is not enough. The
solution must correspond to a clear project of the desired reality;
a model of society that we aspire to have.
Knowledge is not an end in itself, while transformation of practices is; the transformation of knowledge and attitudes of students
and of society in its broadest sense is an end. It is so with the
intent of building a perspective for a different type of social and
political reality, which is marked by such new knowledge, such
new practices and such new attitudes. Said society project is the
ever more referred to intercultural society.
If education in a society like that of Colombia were to offer a balance knowledge regarding the historic presence, contributions
and current expressions of the Diaspora, and if, furthermore,
within its practices and orientations it were to have a clear inclusion of strategies that promote intercultural activities with a clear
posture of opposition to the multiple forms of discrimination in
certain areas of the population, surely we would not have to
think today on Diaspora from the pedagogical realm. The problem would be solved.
Regrettably, the educational system has been more a realm were
types of diverse expressions of non visualization and discrimination circulate and legitimize themselves, instead of having relations that promote equality. That is why it is necessary to unveil
these concrete expressions of discrimination and non visualization pursuant to processing them pedagogically.
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Concretely the means to achieve this goal and the reasons to do
it, must not subjected to consensus. The “Cátedra of Estudios
Afrocolombianos” may be part pertaining to how, meaning part
of the action strategies. Nonetheless, solutions to complex problems do not depend on single interventions or on a unique social
life plan. That is to say, an integral comprehension of the problem
and of the actions is needed, in order to tackle the problem integrally as well. That is the desired direction of this intervention,
where we focus on the analysis of the pedagogical dimension and
on a sense of an educational project that may be pursued by the
“Lecture on Afro Colombian Studies” or other similar projects.
Why this Lecture? For what?
One of the first issues that must be clarified in the curriculum
proposal is for what, the change. Schematically, one may propose
that the Lecture follows three central purposes:
• Contributing to overcoming the diverse forms of non visibility
of the historic presence of Afro-Americans (i.e. those of the
Americas) in the country, particularly those promoted and /
or legitimized by the educational system.
• Progressing in eradicating the different forms of discrimination and racism that have affected these peoples.
• Consolidating the role of the Colombian educational system
and thus of teachers, parents and students, in building intercultural relationships and in building a more democratic
society.
Keeping in mind these goals, a series of questions arise regarding
means to achieving them in the educational practice. That is to
say regarding the basic considerations to materialize these objectives and regarding the manner in which such achievement may
be obtain. Among them we have:
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What should be taught / learnt within the educational system regarding the historical and contemporary presence of Afro-Americans (i.e. those of the Americas)?
Are these purposes, learning, contents and methods the same for
all people? Which educational materials are pertinent to achieve
such learning?
Which contributions have Afro-Americans (i.e. those of the Americas) made to Colombian society? Do we have enough knowledge
to properly testify in that regard?
Which should be the role of the different disciplines in this project?
How could we increase our knowledge formation in this respect?
What can education per se contribute to eliminating all forms of
discrimination and of racism in Colombia?
How could we teach values, knowledge and practices that promote and eliminate all forms of discrimination, including racism?
How could we form kids and youngsters in practices and values
that promote setting up intercultural relationships?
In which manner could we strengthen horizontal relationships
that respect cultural differences?
Both the objectives as well as the need to define pedagogical
strategies to incorporate them in educational practice makes it
necessary to define which are the problems that constitute the
focus of the formation. That is to say, it is necessary to consider
the set of situations that one wishes to overcome in the formation process.
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Problems or standpoints: Why Fellowship?
As way of illustration I will highlight, very briefly, some of the practices and representations frequently seen in educational spheres
and which I consider most relevant to understand the problem’s
dimension with which we are dealing; they refer to issues often
found in curricular guides, textbooks and teachers’ practices. Finally, I will mention what we call racialized thinking, a dimension which, even though present in the different expressions of
racism, is not exclusive of discriminatory practices, being found
even in some academic and political discourses aimed at finding
a solution for the problem. Let’s see: A history that begins with
slavery: erasing free men and women’s history (Africa before European colonization). This might be one of the points of great debate among academics and pedagogues linked to the Fellowship
debate. In teaching Afro-Descendant History we often find that
their presence in America is seen as a natural fact, resulting from
the need for cheap labor force in colonial economies affected by
the death of indigenous peoples submitted to forced labor.
Associated to this discussion and as a natural fact, Africans’ and
their descendants’ presence appear tightly connected to slavery.
This is to say, separated from their previous history in the African
continent, their freedom and their particular societies and cultures.
This type of story is not questioned, nor the causes for slavery, or
its injustice and even less its effects.
‘Naturalization’ of slavery: a history showing submission of human groups as a ‘normal’ and even ‘necessary’ fact. As an expression and correlative of the aforementioned point, a slavery
naturalization effect is produced, particularly in the colonization
process. By ‘ignoring’ the historic motivations that caused slavery, and by presenting the submission of populations as an obvious fact in the colonization process, the effect of obviousness
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appears over social and political processes marked by the imposition of some colonial societies’ power over the set of colonized
and enslaved populations. Both indigenous and Africans are presented as inferior populations who should carry out a mission of
reproduction of the colonial system in which they would also be
evangelized and civilized.
These types of imaginaries produce very deep effects that have
lasted up to the present time, in which a social system of inequalities anchored in racial type hierarchies is legitimated, being reflected in the different spheres of life such as work, sexuality and subjectivity. Consequently, the idea of certain forms
of work, eroticism and knowledge belong to or are ‘natural’ of
certain populations and that, when it comes to Afro-Descendant
subjects and populations as well as to indigenous ones, they are
also inferior (Quijano 2000a).
Overshadowing of knowledge and practices: slavery as mere servitude, and passive condition (crafts and knowledge). Another
consequence of the naturalization of slavery is the denial of intellectual capabilities of Africans and their descendents. As they are
presented as beings reduced to the condition of submissiveness,
they are conceived as unable to have their own initiative and
knowledge; they are located in the place of beings whose activity
lacks will and which responds only to the slave master’s desires
and the colonial system’s needs.
The presentation of Afro-Descendant people as beings with no
agency: the denial of political practices (rebellions, negotiations,
adaptations, etc.). Another realm in which history usually erases
the Afro-Descendant participation, is politics. As their political
expressions are reduced to ‘cimarronaje’ and ‘palenques’, lots of
other expressions such as organization of rebellions and negotiation processes with the colonial and independent elites, aimed at
the transformation of their life conditions, are omitted. Participa-
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tion in Independence wars, for example, was one of many AfroDescendants political expressions, and there, different political
projects of those populations were expressed. In recent times,
organizational processes that fight against racism and promote
collective rights are another expression of the aforementioned.
Ignorance of the contributions made by Afro-Descendants in different social spheres during history: economy, politics, arts. Besides the aforementioned, a very common mechanism to overshadow the historic Afro-Descendant trajectories and contributions, has been denying their production in different economic,
political and artistic sectors, among others. This is expressed in
different ways, among which ‘whitening’ of notorious characters
leading to their overshadowing as Afro-Descendants, the subvaluation of their artistic production or underestimation of their
contribution in different spheres.
Consequently, even today, it is difficult to recognize the contributions of outstanding politicians in regional or national history, as
well as the recognition of Afro-Descendant artistic works.
Denial of the Afro-Descendant cultural legacy shared by a majority of Colombian society. Some are more ‘visible’: music, dancing, gastronomy, sports. Some are less visible: literature, politics,
and academia. A discriminating society will hardly recognize the
legacy it shares, when it comes from the populations it has subordinated.
Nevertheless, some of these legacies have been crucial in the
history of societies such as the Colombian one and sometimes
they have achieved a certain level of ‘recognition’. One of the
risks of this recognition has been that of being tied to different
stereotypical expressions; this is to say, recognition marked by
the association to subordinating imaginaries such as folklore or
gastronomy which are only visible while not being part of highly
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considered values for society; these spheres are visible, but those
with a higher value remain hidden.
Racial thinking: even though races ‘do not exist’, we keep thinking in racial terms. Even though it has been widely acknowledged
that races are social constructions with no moral or biological
bases, they keep operating on an everyday basis in social relationships and not only in discriminatory practices. This is to say,
that even though race is a widely questioned concept and that it
has been strongly excluded from common language, social relations are still marked by race related thoughts.
This race related thoughts operate in different ways, being the
most evident, but not the only one, the thought that discriminates people due to phenotypical characteristics. Association of
people to certain works, artistic or sports practices, or the subvaluation of their knowledge according to the color of their skin
are other samples of that. One of the risks posed by this fact is
that it remains even in some aggressive dialogue.
Besides thinking racially, we establish hierarchies between ‘races’
and assign those ‘races’ some alleged physical, intellectual and
moral conditions that contribute to strengthening such ideas.
Both in common sense as well as in many expert discourses by
the academy and the institutions, stereotypical imaginaries of
Afro-Descendant people and populations are reproduced, assigning them an alleged physical, moral, emotional or cognitive
‘nature’ which supports their subordination. For example, “Slavery of Africans arose because they are stronger and are ‘naturally’ prepared for climate harshness”; “Black people have dancing
in their blood”; “Black women are hotter” The racial democracy
myth: “There is no racism here”. Besides thinking racially, society
vehemently denies its racism. That seems to be a characteristic
that unfortunately tends to be more noticeable before certain
achievements made by Afro-Descendants in terms of recognition
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of their rights. This is to say, a greater formalization of rights
ends up serving the argument that denies the existence of the
problem.
The meanest expression of this logic leads to making some sort of
counter-argument that states that racism is a problem generated
by those who have been discriminated; its expression becomes
evident in phases such as “they marginalize themselves, black
people are quite racist”.
Racism does not appear ‘from the outside’, there are also racism
related practices ‘from the inside’: endoracism. One of the most
complex dimensions of racism is expressed in its incorporation
by those who have been affected by it; so that it does not come
from people different from Afro-Descendants but it takes place
within the relationships among people belonging to the same
population group.
Not all forms of discrimination refer to racial conditions. Some
forms of discrimination are not experienced only by Afro-Descendants (sexism, classism, religious discrimination). This point
highlights the complexity of subordinating expressions in society.
Eventhough this is true that black, Afro-Colombian, ‘raizales’ and
‘palenqueras’ populations have endured inhuman discrimination
forms, this is not a condition affecting only this group of the population. Consequently, one of the possibilities for educational
projects such as this, is creating new spaces for reflection on the
multiple and diverse expressions of social injustice which should
be solved in the process of building inter-cultural societies; this is
to say, more democratic.
In conclusion; I have stated just a few dimensions of the problem
and I have done so very superficially, to draw the attention to
the multiplicity of fronts in which it is expressed. They define,
in turn, the spheres that should be approached in pedagogical
processes.
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Yet, it is still necessary to design a more integral approach, both
of the problems as well as of the pedagogic alternatives to include them in the educational practices.
At the end of the document, there is a presentation of some limitations which have hindered developing of educational experiences of Afro-Colombian Studies; public educational policies, the
relevancy of racism, institutional cultures opposing changes and
other set of factors that also have influence on the possibilities
for a curricular transformation such as the one required by the
Fellowship, are mentioned. Such analysis makes visible the ways
in which the aforementioned dimensions survive even after the
institutions have drawn the attention to the scopes and limits of
initiatives.
Finally, it is necessary to draw the attention to the dimensions
not included herein, whose role has been considered decisive
by some analysts. I am referring to school books, relationship
between Fellowship and teaching of the knowledge disciplines,
teacher-education processes, educational research and academic
production in the field of Afro-Colombian studies, among others
barely mentioned in this reflection. They should all be considered
in a more thorough analysis of the issue.
Considering space limitations, I will advance towards the subject
of the Diaspora, its meaning and current expressions.
African Diaspora: Contemporary demographic presences
The Diaspora is a long lasting historic event with deep implications in the present.
More than a fact occurred in the past, it is necessary to understand the Diaspora as a constitutive dimension of the present
time, whose expressions cover the most diverse spheres of everyday life in American societies and in societies of other regions
of the globe.
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One of these expressions is the presence of the Afro-Descendant
populations in the region’s societies. Nevertheless it is not the
only evidence of this historic process whose origins go back to
the beginning of the European colonization dynamics at the end
of the 15th century.
In this African slavery process it was a determining factor to establish the capitalist economic system, which since then started
to spread at global level (Quijano 2000a, 2000b; Wallerstein). Despite the information available regarding the number of slaves arriving in America not being completely reliable, the existing estimates are enough to illustrate the phenomenon in demographic
terms.
In the period comprised between the 16th and the 19th centuries, the presence of Africans and their descendents in the American colonies acquired a great population weight; the majority
of settlements were found on Caribbean costs in Central America, Colombia and Venezuela, and the Pacific cost in some South
American countries. Also, an important number of slaves entered
Brazil, where they have become an important percentage of the
population. According to William Dubois’s estimates, more than
twenty two million people were slaved between the 16th and
19th centuries. Caio Prado Junior estimates the number of slaves
taken into Brazil, only in the 19th century to be almost seven million people (Rodríguez, 2006:25).
As it has been mentioned, analyzing the demographic factor allows us showing one of the Diaspora’s dimensions: its population presence; both in historical terms as well as in contemporary
terms. Nevertheless, this is not a mere statistical ‘data’: Visibility of the demographic presence of the black, Afro-Colombian,
Raizales and Palenque populations allows us questioning some
of the stereotypes that survive deep inside the theoretical and
political imaginaries of societies such as the Colombian one.
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Additionally, the value or importance of these trajectories and
presences is not just of a numeric or quantitative nature; their
contributions and the multi-culture nature do not depend on the
number of people or its percentual weight in a society, but on
the sense collectively assigned to said presences. The American
continent is the heir of multiple legacies of the African Diaspora,
expressed even in those societies or human groups where their
presence may appear to be less significant. It is enough to go over
the traditions and artistic, intellectual, linguistic, gastronomic
or political expressions in a society such as the Colombian, and
quite surely in many others in the region, in which these legacies
remain alive and are expressed in different ways, both among
those who recognize themselves as Afro-Descendants, as well as
those who build their identities and lifestyles from other references.
Even though nowadays the demographic weight represented by
Afro-Descendants is undeniable in the countries of the region,
recently estimated in around 30% of the total population (Hopenhayn, 2003:9; Bello and Rangel, 2000:38), its quantification
has caused many debates and proposals. In the recent years,
censuses and population estimates have been carried out, but
it has not been easy to get to consensus regarding the criteria to
be used when defining who are catalogued as Afro-Descendants
and what strategies to use in the quantification process.
As Table 1 shows, the way to understand the ethnical/racial are
quite diverse and vary according to each country, and their particular historic circumstances (Antón and Del Popolo, 2008; Rangel 2005; Flórez, Medina and Urrea, 2001).
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Table 1.
African American (of the Americas)
Population according to census of the 2000 round
Country
Brazil (1)
Colombia (2)
Costa Rica (3)
Cuba (4)
Ecuador (5)
Guatemala (6)
Honduras (7)
Nicaragua (8)
TOTAL
Census 2000
Round Afro-Descendants
Census 2000
Round Afro-Descendants
Total
Population
45,0
10,6
2,0
34,9
5,0
0,04
1,0
0,5
32,8
75.872.428
4.311.757
72.784
3.905.817
604.009
5.040
58.818
23.161
84.853.814
168.666.180
40.607.408
3.713.004
11.177.743
12.156.608
11.237.196
6.076.885
5.122.638
258.757.662
(1) Preto + Pardo, (2) Raizal + Palenquero + Black(3) Afro-Costa Rican or Black, (4) Black
+ Mulatto/Mestizo (mixing of races) , (5) Black + mulatto (6) Garífuna, (7) Garífuna +
English Black, (8) Creole + Garífuna (*) Note: Excluding the category “ignored”. Source:
Census micro-data processing in Redatam (Taken from Antón and Del Popolo 2008:27)
One of the most recent census processes took place in Colombia, carried out in 2005, which included an ethnic-racial self-perception question with multiple answer options (black, mulatto,
raizal, palenquero), which was possible thanks to the pressure
exerted by social organizations and academic sectors during the
census preparation stage, this was a conflicting process.
Once the results were obtained and even though they yielded
significantly better data than those obtained in the previous
census, (carried out in 1993), different organizations highlighted
possible ‘mistakes’ made by the entity in charge of the statistical
production in the country (DANE), accused of reproducing forms
of racism and demographic overshadowing.
Nevertheless, it is worth highlighting that one of the most significant contributions offered by this type of information is the
possibility to change the image of a population in minority with
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little presence in the national society. It also allows us questioning one of the deepest rooted stereotypes in Colombian society:
its geographic location.
In Colombia, the idea of black populations inhabiting mainly the
Pacific region, in rural areas and mostly on the river banks, has
been widely used (Restrepo 2004a). Nevertheless, the census
shows that their geographical presence does not meet this ruralizing stereotype. More than 70% of this population inhabits
urban contexts, municipal capitals, intermediate cities and large
capitals such as Cali, Medellín and Cartagena; this is to say, they
are not predominantly a rural population.
The other stereotype linking these populations to the Pacific region is widely controversial according to the census data. The
presence of black, Afro-Colombian, Palenquera and raizal population is extended around the different regions of the country,
even in provinces that have not been historically considered as
settlements for black population. Three provinces (Valle del Cauca, Antioquia and Bolívar) comprise 51% of all the country’s AfroColombian population (See Table 2). Regarding cities, only Cali
and its metropolitan area comprises more black population than
the four provinces on the Pacific coast; this is to say more than
one fourth of the national total.
After Cali, other urban centers with a high concentration of black
population are: the metropolitan area of Cartagena and then,
from highest to lowest, the metropolitan areas of Medellín, Barranquilla, Bogotá, Santa Marta and Pereira (Urrea 2007: 18).
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Table 2
Percentage distribution of the Afro-Colombian population
by province, regarding with respect of the total of Afro-Colombians at a national level, 2005 Provinces %
Valle del Cauca 25,63
Antioquia 13,87
Bolívar 11,66
Chocó 6,72
Nariño 6,35
Cauca 6,01
Atlántico 5,33
Córdoba 4,51
Sucre 2,86
Magdalena 2,59
Others 14,49
Source: DANE 2006
As we can see, demographic information is not only used to learn
how many people we are talking about, which is in itself crucial
data, but also gives us a better understanding of the concrete
geography of the African-Descendant presence, the latter being
essential to see the Diaspora expressions and to advance in the
understanding of the concrete dynamics through which Afro-Descendant trajectories have gone in the country.
Consequently, it is necessary to overcome a number of ideas expressed in the common sense, the media and in many academic
publications and school books, in which the image of a racial
geography linking populations and places as natural facts is being depicted (Wade 1997). This very same idea is the one that
considers Afro-Descendant presence in concrete countries and
regions that do not correspond to their imaginary (like thinking
of the presence of Afro-descendant population in Bolivia, the Co-
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lombian mountains or in the urban contexts such as Bogotá or
even Cartagena).
It is also necessary to review the predominant academic practices which sometimes contribute to the reduction of the phenomenon’s complexity to its local expressions. The majority of
academic studies on the issue are reduced to a country and/ or
region within a country, which hinders the construction of more
integral approaches about the processes at continental level, or
under the perspective of the African Diaspora in a wider way.5
It does not mean that those studies are irrelevant, it means it is
still necessary to enrich their contributions with studies that offer a wider perspective in terms of time and space (long term and
regional coverage).
In this sense, the Diaspora history should allow us making evident the phenomenon in two complementary directions. First,
the recognition of the fact that Afro-Descendant trajectories
have been marked by common circumstances, and second, that
said trajectories have had different manifestations within each
country and their regions. This way we may understand the plurality of historic experiences that the Diaspora has meant to the
region, as well as its global articulations.
In Colombia, for example, the Afro-Descendant settlement processes in the republican period and after the legal abolition of
slavery took place according to different patterns and more recently, black populations have participated in the urbanization
processes that took place in the region as of the 40’s, reason
why an important percentage of those populations is today in
the cities. If we cross the history-related facts, referred to the
colonization patterns and the type of socio-racial dynamics they
promoted with the intra-regional dynamics of each country, the
issue becomes even more revealing.
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Continuing with just the Colombian case, it must be considered
that the forms that constituted the regional economies were not
homogeneous and the participation of slaved labor was different
in each one of them; In such way, that today the Afro-Descendant
demographic presences are quite heterogenic, finding particular
patterns for regions such as the Caribbean, the Pacific or interAndean Valleys. Also, the urbanization dynamics and the armed
conflict, among other factors, have transformed that scenario
even further.
In the case of México, Bolivia and Uruguay, just to call three examples, where it is possible to ignore the African American presence (see Hoffmann 2006, Angola 2007, Bucheli and Cabella. S.f.,
respectively). Also, we may find similar situations in countries
such as Argentina, Costa Rica or Peru. About this situation, different authors have call for attention and have made efforts for
reversing it. Regarding the Afro-Descendant presence in the Andes, the Journal of Iberoamerican and Caribbean Anthropology
has recently published a special Dossier on the subject: Afro in
Andean America (November 2007, Vol. 12, No. 1); also, UNESCO
published in 2004 a collective book titled Afro-Andean (Finocchietti 2004).
Nevertheless, there are interesting exceptions. Recent work by
Reid Andrews (2007) and Wade (2006b), are examples of that. In
turn, UNICEF published in 2006 the Manual of Afro-Descendants
of Latin America and the Caribbean, a tool especially useful for
ignorant and experts on the matter (See Rodríguez 2006). On
linguistic aspects of the native ‘Afro-Iberian’ languages, see Lipski (s.f); regarding different dimensions of the Diaspora in Latin
America and the Caribbean, Yelvington (2001); for a partial revision of the available bibliography on the Afro-descendant presence in Latin America, see Barrenechea (s.f); regarding the history of Afro-Descendants (of the Americas) in America, Martínez
(1992).
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All that makes evident the need for a more integral analysis, including judicious history and the possibility to intensify the analysis of these phenomena’s articulations, at different levels (local/
regional/global). This way, understanding that the Diaspora was
not an isolated event in each country or society in the region, but
that it is rather part of a process with global implications, in which
many of its current manifestations are shared, even though they
have local expressions in each case.
What’s more, it must be emphasized that to understand the
Diaspora, it is not sufficient to look back to the past, but we must
rather look to a long term perspective, including its contemporary
expressions, found today under different forms in everyday life in
all Iberoamerican and Caribbean countries. Even, the idea is to
think of Africa exactly as it is today in America, just as it is in the
present time; or as it is stated by the Jamaican black intellectual
Stuart Hall, carefully thinking on the Diaspora in the Caribbean:
Africa is alive, sound and safe in the Diaspora. But this is not the
Africa of the territories obscured by the colonial cartographer,
from where so many slaves were pulled out, or today’s Africa,
which is at least four or five continents comprised in one, with its
survival forms destroyed and its people structurally adjusted in a
devastating modern poverty. Africa is alive, sound and safe in this
part of the world, it is what Africa has become in the New World
(Hall 2003:491).
The complexity of the task that should be undertaken by the
educational system while committing to the visibilization of the
Diaspora’s trajectories in the region’s societies requires continuing thinking and building alternatives in the face of the meaning
of assuming this goal integrally from an educational field.
Afro-Colombian Studies Fellowship: Background and Legal
Framework
It has frequently been pointed out that one of the weaknesses of
the Colombian educational system is having ignored the historic
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presence and contributions of the different groups of population
and cultural traditions that shape society, added to the fact of
having been one of the main spheres in which racism was reproduced in conjunction with other forms of discrimination. This argument has been an important departure point to evidence and
highlight the urge for educational projects oriented as of ethics
different from the ones recently used, and that perhaps up to
the present time, have prevailed over the national educational
system.
It is in this sense that Fellowship emerges, as a result of a political
process in which the State and Afro Colombian population representatives, accompanied by some academics, arrived to some
basic agreements for the design and implementation of an educational policy. Although it is true that such process was not exempt
of conflicts and that not all participants had the same possibilities
of influencing the final result, even today it is acknowledged that
this educational Project represents an important opportunity to
influence the type of education offered to Colombian society.
Nevertheless, there are still some who see it as an imposed regulation in the educational system, a whim of the social organizations or an ‘invention’ of academics; which reflects some of the
tensions it has been and will continue being object of.
As an educational policy, Fellowship presents among its background some similar policies already existing in the country, particularly the educational policies for indigenous, whose history is
prior to the Constitution of 1991 and which was known in public
policy, and even today, as the ethno-educational policy.6 Nevertheless, and as we will see later, the new educational policy for
black, Afro-Colombian, raizales and palenqueras, populations
comprise a series of new aspects, with no precedent in the policies existing before the constitutional change.
Ethno-education had been understood until the early nineties
as an educational policy from and for ethnic groups; something
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that has not substantially changed. For this reason, the Afro Colombian Studies Fellowship introduces a new unprecedented element: that of looking to affect the Colombian educational system
integrally; this is to say, that of being a policy for the national
society as a whole and not only a policy for an ethic group. In this
sense, it responds to the demands of the black, Afro Colombian
and ‘raizales’ populations to transform education, for the Colombian society, and specially its new generations, have a balanced
version of their contributions to the country’s current history and
reality. This may be one of the most significant contributions of
the recognition processes of multi-culturality and particularly of
the demands of Afro-Descendant organization of the country in
the educational field.
The publication of general guidelines (curricular guidelines), as an
institutional document of the Ministry of Education (MEN 2001),
was posible after an agreement and collective production exercise in which different experts, the National Educational Commission of the Black Communities and the Ministry of National
Education participated.
In the field of Educational practices, the guidelines took up again
the richness of a set of experiences managed by social organizations, teachers and NGOs, at least since the 80’s. Additionally,
they fed from developments in the academic and educational
fields as well as Afro Colombian Studies.
Fellowship emerged in that particular historic moment in which
the country was looking for the most appropriate mechanisms to
concrete the constitutional principles related to its multi-cultural
nature. There, its sense, the mechanisms for its application in
the curricular design processes and its guiding dimensions were
defined. Even though all this is an important advancement per
se, its implementation is not guaranteed though, just as it is evident in the experiences we will see later. In general terms, ethno-education is the educational policy for ethnic groups, which
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was regulated after the constitutional change by Law 115 of 1994
and Statutory Decree 804 of 1995. Nevertheless, before being
included in Law 115, it had already been incorporated into the
public educational policy since the 80’s; after the 1991 Constitution, and particularly upon recognition as an ethnic group of the
Afro-Descendant populations, ethno-education applies for these
populations as well. However, in some particular aspects, the existing legal regulations set forth differences between both groups
of population.
The Pedagogic Commission is an Advising instance on educational policy for black communities, which includes representatives
of the government and the populations. It was created by Decree
2249 of 1995
If the idea is drawing elements for an agenda of institutional policies, it is necessary to consider that the application of Fellowship is not resolved only in the educational field. Being a public
policy, it should be thought through in all its complexity; it requires mechanisms which guarantee its fulfillment within the legal framework, political willingness, technical capacity from the
institutions for its development, continuous and decided work
from and with teachers in the country, the demands of social organizations regarding their rights fulfillment and academic developments in the educational field and in the field of Afro-Colombian studies, among others.
Throughout this document, I will insist on the need to consider
the multiple facets of the problem, the actors involved and the
purposes that are at stake, in order not to forget that we are
dealing with a complex issue that will not be solved in a simple
way or only by means good intentions. Current historic expressions and manifestations of the Diaspora non-visibility, racism
and other forms of discrimination, as well as weighting of the
Afro-Descendant legacies in society and the construction of new
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practices and ethics projects, are tasks for which the educational
system and Colombian society are not yet prepared, or at least
not sufficiently prepared; the object of this reflection is to continue inquiring about that possibility.
Regulatory Background
The Afro-Colombian Studies Fellowship is an educational proposal aimed at recognizing Afro-Descendant presence and contributions to Colombian society through education, with emphasis on
primary and secondary education. I am summarizing the purposes as follows:
• Contributing to overcoming the different forms of historic
non-visibility of Afro-Descendant presence in the country,
particularly those promoted and/or legitimated by the educational system.
• Advancing in the eradication of all forms of elimination and
racism that have affected those populations.
• Consolidating the Colombian educational system’s role, and
consequently that of teachers and students in the construction of inter-cultural relationships and of a more democratic
society.
Initially, Fellowship was conceived as a subject to be included in
study plans of the country’s educational institutions as part of
the social science area. This is the way in which it was stipulated
in Article 39, Law 70 of 1993, that sets forth:
The State shall oversee that the national educational system
knows and spreads the knowledge of cultural practices inherent
to the black communities, their contribution to Colombian history
and culture, in order to offer equal and formative information of
these communities’ societies and culture. In the social areas of the
different educational levels, the Afro Colombian studies fellowship shall be offered, according to the corresponding curricula.
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Just as they were stated in the curricular guidelines (MEN 2001),
the number of objectives is larger and state specific aspects not
comprised herein. If I state them this way, it is with the purpose
of focusing reflection in a few gross lines that I consider essential.
In agreement with the Law, Statutory Decree1122 of 1998 sets
forth some thematic, methodological and didactic related precisions:
Article 2º. The Afro-Colombian Studies Fellowship shall comprise
a set of subjects, issues and pedagogical activities related to the
black communities’ culture, and it will be developed as an integral part of the curricular processes of the second Group of
mandatory and fundamental areas set forth in Article 23 of Law
115 of 1994, corresponding to social sciences, history, geography,
political constitution and democracy. It may also be carried out
through pedagogical projects, which will allow co-relating and
integrating cultural processes belonging to black communities
with experiences, knowledge and attitudes generated by the areas and subjects of the studies plan of the respective educational
institution. Paragraph. In agreement with provisions in Article 43,
Decree 1860 of 1994, the public educational institutions should
consider the provisions in this Article, when selecting the texts
and materials, to be used by the students. (Emphasis added)
What I want to highlight is that Fellowship was originally conceived as a subject within the social sciences area and in the regulation process, an opportunity was opened for its development
through pedagogic projects co-related and integrated with the
areas and subject of the study plan. This is to say, there was an
attempt to give teachers a wider margin for its implementation
not to be restricted to a single subject (the Fellowship) and the
curriculum could therefore be more integrally affected.
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In the same direction, when bringing the proposal from the regulatory field to the curricular one, the objective was for it to acquire a transversal dimension in the study plans, releasing it from
ist subject condition, as it is stated in chapter 6 of the curricular
guidelines:
The Afro-Colombian Studies Fellowship is a wide spectrum educational proposal to be placed, not only in the study plans, but
also in the Institutional Educational Project as well as in all curricular activities, and to impregnate the entire school life (MEN
2001:31).
Another aspect characteristic of this Fellowship and that I mentioned earlier, is that it is a project conceived to be implemented
within the national educational system, and not to be an educational project for Afro-Descendant populations exclusively: its intention is affecting the formation processes of society as a whole.
In that sense, it is a very powerful project in the construction of
inter-cultural relationships.
These changes seem to obey several factors, among which there
is the experience accumulated at a national level with similar
experiences that aimed at making visible (visibility) the formation aspects of students through fellowships. There have been
several experiences of fellowships in the Colombian educational
system (understood as subjects), which did not obtain the best
results; an example of this was the Political Constitution Fellowship, which had an ephemeral existence.
While ethnic-education is understood as education for ethnic
groups, the Fellowship is a Project directed at the educational
system as a whole that involves the entire. Even though both
projects complement each other, each one of them has a specific
pedagogical orientation and is directed at different sectors of the
population. Nevertheless the Afro-Descendant population has
the option of orienting its educational projects from either ap-
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proach; it can create ethnic-education or Afro Colombian Studies
Fellowship.
Article 34 of Law 70 of 1993 enables us seeing the projects’ ethnic-educational approaches: Article 34.- Education for black communities should consider the environment, the productive process and the entire social and cultural life of these communities.
Consequently, curricular programs shall ensure and reflect the
respect and promotion of their economic, natural, cultural and
social heritage, artistic values, expression means and religious
beliefs. Curricula should be based on the black communities’ culture to develop the different activities and skills in individuals and
in the Group, necessary to perform in their social environment.
More than focusing the discussion on the legal or technical
sphere, the idea is to show that, according to the valid legislation,
it is possible to understand the educational rights of the AfroDescendant population in the two aforementioned spheres, each
one with different scopes and limitations. In fact, educational experiences developed in the country and covered by this legislation do not stipulate a Sharp distinction between the Afro Colombian Studies Fellowship and ethnic-education, as the confluence
of interests of both projects make they overlap each other very
frequently.
Finally, it is necessary to state that the formalization of a set of
rights in the legislation means a transcendental advancement,
but does not constitute sufficient response. Colombian experience has demonstrated that many of the educational experiences
existing in the country emerged before the constitutional change
and of the legislations derived thereafter, meaning, among other
things, that the regulating frameworks do not create the educational experiences per se, or the social processes in general. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the legislation is useless, as it
has been a key factor for many teachers to support their innovat-
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ing decision in the educational institutions, besides having been
a mechanism to promote experiences in different places.
A more precise definition of what is understood by ethnic-education within the regulating framework can be found in Law 115 of
1994, Article 55: “Definition of ethnic-education. It is understood
by education for ethnic groups that education offered to groups
or communities that integrate nationality and that possess their
native culture, language and traditions with autochthonous characteristics. This education should be linked to the environment,
the productive process, the social and cultural process, with due
respect for their beliefs and traditions”.
What should be analyzed are the concrete possibilities of maintaining the validity of this project in the country, not so much
in legal terms, but regarding educational policies and their institutional practices. While there is not a clear correspondence
between the ‘special rights’ and the national educational policy,
it will still be a marginal issue whose survival possibilities will correspond to the efforts of a few teachers committed to put it into
practice.
Up to this point, it is a pending task. Even more, if we consider
that the current national educational policy has not incorporated
the Fellowship into its guidelines and programs.
Educational experiences of the Afro Colombian Studies Fellowship
Seeing the laws and decrees which define the field of the educational rights of Afro-Descendants, we can see a legislation which
seems to have the possibilities for a radical transformation of the
national educational system. Both regarding the possibility for
black populations to design and implement educational projects
governed from pedagogical conceptions chosen by themselves,
as well as regarding the transformation of practices which re-
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produce racism and other forms of discrimination in educational
institutions, either due to action or omission. Nevertheless, despite the existing legal support, the ongoing educational projects
should face on a daily basis the demands of innovating in the
educational field, the limitations frequently posed by inter-institutional cultures, the lack of material means for their work and
the countless contradictions of the national educational system
in its regulations.
In this part of the presentation we will provide a general glimpse
of some of the most common tendencies in the application of
this Fellowship in the country, with the purpose of highlighting
new aspects of the experiences studied and to point out their
potential for the construction of educational projects in which
the visibility of Afro-Descendant trajectories is implemented.
The Fellowship as a subject
Just as it was pointed out while referring to the legal framework,
the term ‘Fellowship’ very frequently recalls the idea of subject
or ‘matter’. That is the reason for the distrust on the impact
and sustainability of the Afro-Colombian Studies Fellowship to
be centered on the ephemeral nature of other initiatives of the
same type, which proved to be temporary and of which no one
can recall. Those who criticize argue that assuming this type of
projects as fellowships implies a series of difficulties for academic
planning in the institutions, since it means opening space for a
‘new’ subject, designating a teacher to it, but even more, taking
away a teacher from other areas often considered of greater importance. In time, and given the non-existence of means to guarantee its mandatory nature or since it does not ‘demonstrate’
its appropriateness, fellowships usually disappear almost unnoticed. One of the reasons for not giving them any importance is
that the competencies promoted therein are not incorporated
into the evaluation systems or State Tests, or they do it margin-
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ally, which supports teachers in not finding any reason at all to
continue carrying out a work that is not among the institutional
priorities.
The characterization presented below is the result of the research project mentioned earlier in the presentation. It is based
on a series of workshops carried out in different places around
the country, which teachers, students and parents attended, as
well as some officers of territorial entities and other experts in
the matter.
In addition to the workshops, visits were paid to educational institutions that work the Fellowship. Workshops and visits took
place in the cities of Cali, Buenaventura, Quibdó, Popayán, Cartagena, Medellín, Bogotá, San Andrés and Guapi. 74 experiences
and more than 400 people participated.
By observing the Fellowship experiences in the country, we find
that some of them develop their proposal as a subject. Most of
them do it as part of the Social Sciences Area and in some cases,
accompanied by complementary pedagogical projects. Working the Fellowship this way guarantees the existence of a formal
space to work subjects that otherwise would not be included in
the pedagogical work. This way, the Fellowship becomes visible
and should be included in the academic planning, assigning the
task to a teacher and a time for it.
In the majority of cases, it was assigned as a weekly subject with
duration of one or two hours. The experiences included in the
research showed that it is basically worked in two ways: as a subject in the social sciences area and as an independent subject
in the study plans, outside the mandatory and fundamental areas. In both cases, it is possible to organize it in thematic units,
with contents, objectives and evaluation criteria. Sometimes, it is
worked at the basic and secondary levels, in others only in one of
them; there have been attempts to work it at transitional level.
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Probably, due to their link with the social sciences area, most
experiences work over thematic areas related to history; even
though sometimes it is worked over ancestral knowledge, artistic
expressions (music, literature) or gastronomy, among others.
Finally, the potential of these types of experiences should be
highlighted. When studying the work of an Afro-Colombian intellectual such as Manuel Zapata Olivella, or of men of letters such
as Candelario Obeso, it is not just about studying ‘Afro-Colombian characters’, which could be understood as something ‘new’
or additional. The potential is rather in the way in which new approaches on the history of literature and intellectual production
in the country and in the planet are built, to which Afro-Descendants have made fundamental contributions, even though they
are barely known. The same happens with other areas of knowledge such as Natural Science or Mathematics.
Experience: Female Educational Institution of Secondary and
Professional Teaching – IEFEM El Museo
At the Female Educational Institution of Secondary and Professional Teaching in the municipality of Quibdo, province of Chocó,
Social Sciences area teachers lead the Afro-Colombian Studies
Fellowship, being El Museo one of the key projects for its implementation. El Museo allows studying the history of Afro-Descendant populations, with the participation of the educational community.
This is a space in which objects talk about the Afro Colombian
history, especially of Chocó’s. There are pictures of important figures in the areas of literature, scientific and technological knowledge, the struggles for the defense and dignifying of black populations, sports and music; also biographies, newspapers files,
manuscripts, fossils of plants and maritime animals, handicrafts,
typical garments, clothing, tools and ancestral work implements,
a collection of coins and notes, paintings with writings on Afro
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Colombian history and a section with objects representative of
different socio-cultural groups. Additionally, the students have
written a text recording all the information about the museum.
The Museum is considered as an ethnic-educational laboratory
around which students, parents and people from the community
work towards its strengthening with contributions ranging from
research on Afro Colombian history and culture to the acquisition
of representative objects bearers of knowledge and ancestral nature.
This experience, due to the aforementioned characteristic, allows seeing the Afro-Descendant contributions to the building of
the country in the science, economy, ecosystem transformation,
culture and political fields. It becomes a pedagogical experience
that allows working on the Diaspora phenomena.
As pointed out above, the Afro-Colombian Studies Fellowship has
been understood as a pedagogical Project that may work in two
complementary directions. On the one hand, on the visibilization
of Afro-Descendant trajectories, as a strategy directed at any type
of population and on the other hand, in a sense of re-dignifying
this historic experience, directed at the black, Afro Colombian
and raizales communities. The different projects studied reveal
the coexistence of both purposes.
Experience: Santa Rosa Educational Institution. Cali – Valle
This Institution has a student population identified by its teachers as diverse (coexistence of Afro-Colombians and white-mixed
population), in which the implementation of the Afro-Colombian Studies Fellowship is ongoing with a strong axe on identity.
The experience takes place in several areas in the basic primary
grades, emphasizing the capabilities of black people in the fields
of arts, academia and politics.
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The Project has been called “Aguablanca birthplace of your roots”,
and its purpose to generate an attitude of recognition and respect
for diversity in the case of the white-mixed population, as well as
self knowledge and valuing of themselves in the Afro-Colombian
case. As part of the process, celebrating or commemorating important dates such as the Afro Colombianess day in which different Afro-Descendant cultural expressions are celebrated, are
taken into account.
The Fellowship as a crosscut project
An important group of the experiences analyzed develop the
Fellowship following very closely the legislation and guidelines.
These are Fellowship projects placed across the group of subjects
in the social sciences area.
Institutions, at the beginning of the school year include in the
academic planning a Fellowship Project developed from all the
subjects in the area.
Thematics related to Afro-Descendant cultures are included, and
in the curricular design they are articulated by axes and thematic
units with their respective contents, objectives and evaluation
forms. In most experiences, an important level of integration was
evident, expressed in the easiness for unifying themes and their
development.
Some other crossing the board proposals have been designed to
affect several areas, in addition to Social sciences. We find proposals in areas so dissimilar as mathematics, natural science or
Information Technology. In these cases one works on projects
such as ethno-mathematics, research on medicinal plants and
creation of web pages to promote and socialize pedagogical projects, in addition to activities linked to Afro-Descendant organizational traditions, such as the indigenous councils (“cabildos”)
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(from the Caribbean region), collective memory and/ or community’s outstanding members.
There are also experiences that include working on a framework
project, sometimes framed within the Ethno-educational or Institutional project (PEI) that is developed in different knowledge
areas with articulated themes, which allow integration of different areas through different strategies. For example, articulating
history based on African stories which are related with the language area in the production of texts with geography as to space
location, etc.
Another form is the driving theme project, which penetrates all
areas of knowledge, but the pedagogical and research activities
are performed in each one of these areas independently.
Among several strategies we found that some institutions work
simultaneously with one subject in primary school and across the
board in secondary school.
We also found the option of Fellowship as a subject and as crosscut strategy in all grades, which would represent the option with
the widest presence in an educational project, even though this
is not the most frequent one.
Experience: Manuela Vergara School, Curi
The Manuela Vergara School, Curi, in Cartagena, develops a Fellowship proposal in the form of a crosscutting strategy. The performed activities are included in the study plan and people work
in a crosscutting fashion as of the life project guidelines called:
self-recognition of the African American community, which works
around integrating themes designed according to the needs, interests and hobbies identified in the student population.
In the experience, students are asked to perform visibility and
recognition activities of those who have stood out in struggle for
freedom and dignifying of Afro-Descendants. This work is carried
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out from bulletin boards aimed at praising Benkos Biohó’s actions, the participation of black people in the communeros insurrection (‘insurrección de los comuneros’), and the organization of
cultural activities to celebrate or commemorate the declaration
of Cartagena as Historic and Cultural Heritage, the National day
of Afro Colombian Nature (colombianess), Culture Day, Democracy Day, San Pedro Claver’s Day, folklore festival, day of the race,
day of Colombian Youth, and the ‘Angels that We Are’ Day (ángeles que somos).
In some cases, institutions prepare their curricular program indicating the themes by grades, objectives and achievements indicators. In general, we could say that crossing the board was more
frequently seen in the Basic Secondary level, while in primary
level work by subject was predominant.
Although in general strong levels of coordination in actions were
found, there is not always integration. Teachers say that work
requires joint planning, coordination and constant agreement,
which is not always easy to achieve.
Experience: Antonio Villavicencio School. Work on narrative
and oral history
At the Antonio Villavicencio School a crosscutting experience
takes place in which all the primary education teachers participate and whose objective is implementing the Afro-Colombian
Studies Fellowship through the project ‘Language as a concrete
set of experiences and realities’. The proposal permits working
with the students on self-recognition and historic affirmation.
The project is developed through life stories, involving parents
in the recognition and self-affirmation process of children os of
questions about their origin and cultural identity. The parents,
besides sharing their life stories in the school context, teach children traditional games, songs and riddles. This way, joint educational and exchange of knowledge are promoted with the par-
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ticipation of people from the educational community. Children’s
cultural identity is stated as the pedagogical axe of this project.
The information gathered during the activities serves to develop
the diversity theme in relation with regions, costumes, language,
tourist sites, archeological and ecological places, etc., comparisons and valuations regarding each context’s economy and the
reasons for families’ displacement into the city are determined.
During the classes, children describe their region with the support of materials such as boards, photographs, maps and statistical charts. In this sense, the fellowship has served to study different cultures and regions of the country, as well as to analyze
the causes of forced displacement, not only in relation to black
people but with all people who experience similar situations in
the country.
Finally, it is worth noting that the Fellowship’s work, in contexts
where there is cultural diversity among the student population
has been an important factor in the building of intercultural relationships. Mutual respect as well and the recognition of shared
heritage are promoted.
Fellowship by projects and activities
This may be the most incipient way of doing Fellowship. In some
schools, where Fellowship cannot have a formal place in the
study plan, the fellowship is worked on as a set of activities developed with the purpose of showing cultural manifestations of
black populations, both at local, regional and national level.
Projects can be found on artistic or gastronomic expressions, music festivals, works on local history through collective memory,
among others. These projects promote research and seek to
strengthen the feelings of dignity of Afro-Colombian students.
In some cases an active participation of parents is generated, incorporating them into the development of these activities.
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Some schools presented as a form of doing Fellowship, punctual
activities that are part of their institutional calendar. Among them
we have: celebration of special dates, Afro Colombianess Day and
commemoration of important events in recognition of outstanding figures inside the black, Afro-Descendant, palenqueras and
raizales populations. It includes the performance of artistic acts,
cultural weeks, gastronomic festivals, handicraft fairs, etc.
Experience: Asnazú School
At Asnazú School, in the municipality of Suárez Northern part of
the province of Cauca, teachers, students, parents and other inhabitants have organized for several years reflection days on the
history of Afro Colombian populations’ rights, highlighting the
role of social organizations and the Afro-Colombian social movement in the attainment of this recognition. These reflection days
take place within the framework of Afro Colombianess day during
the month of May. Students make boards and banners in which
this information is spread, and participate with these materials in
parades around the municipality. Additionally, leaders are invited
to share their experiences on the organizational processes and
they offer the community ideas to go ahead with these types of
dynamics.
Reflections from educational experiences
As we have pointed out, in its initial conception, fellowship was
not thought as an educational project mainly directed at AfroDescendant populations; it is a project they can develop, but that
pretended to affect primarily the national educational system
as a whole. This is to say, the Fellowship projects beneficiaries
should be all Colombian students. In spite of this, the majority of
the student population that is being educated in the Fellowship
projects is black, Afro Colombian, palenquera and/ or ‘raizal’.
This situation may indicate several things. On the one hand, it is
possible that those who historically have suffered different forms
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of discrimination are the most interested in resolving those issues, and that may be the reason why the majority of teachers
involved with Fellowship projects are Afro-Colombians. It is also
probable that Fellowship is still seen as a Project for black people, which should be managed, which is used as “justification” by
those who do not include it in their educational projects.
Additionally, it is surprising that not just a few teachers ignore the
Fellowship. In many places, when asked about the subject, many
teachers told us they were not aware of it.
Some said they knew it existed but that it was not mandatory.
Then, the question arises on how to promote its implementation
as effectively as other curricular activities; most teachers doing
Fellowship have adopted the standards, but just a minority of
those working with standards have Fellowship.
The characterization carried permits us seeing the experiences’
advancements, which under different schemes have managed
to bring fellowship into practice, innovating as to contents, planning schemes, methodological proposals and evaluation forms.
We also find that there are difficulties regarding the availability
of teaching materials, lack of educational text books that incorporate contents about the history and current realities of Afro
Colombian populations and their contribution to the construction of the nation, as well as pedagogical proposals for the construction of intercultural relationships and the elimination of all
the forms of racism or educational programs which contribute to
drivingthese types of educational projects.
On the other hand, many teachers continue understanding fellowship as a subject, which generates the idea that the issues
they want to address may be dealt with outside the teaching dynamics of the different fundamental and mandatory areas. This is
to say, for example, that it would seem that the Afro-Colombians’
history is not a problem of the area of history, but an additional
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problem to be added to the study plans, and so for each one of
the matters or issues addressed; assuming fellowship as a subject releases the different areas’ teachers from thinking of different possibilities to guide their classes. Finally, we cannot forget
that they are not just some additional contents for which a space
should be found within the study plans, or what’s more, in the
curriculum. On the contrary, what the fellowship should make
possible is new glance at the set of educational proposals of each
school.
In this sense, the Fellowship should refrain itself from promoting
the idea of being an addition to the school learning process and
show itself as an opportunity to build enriched learning processes
in the plurality of the cultural matrices which conform the nation.
It is necessary to make an exception regarding those experiences
working the Fellowship as a subject: The idea is not to disqualify
its work, on the contrary, many of them show a transforming potential important for the ways to understand multi-culturality at
schools, and in particular, the possibility of knowing and recognizing the Afro-Descendant trajectories in the country.
It is evident that fellowship is a project under construction which
requires from teachers new ways of being teachers and new ways
of making schools and that is not achieved from one day to the
next. Recognizing the value of multi-culturality in educational
practices means transforming from the inside of educational
projects many of the conceptions and pedagogical practices,
which has not been easy and has made that its application encounters different obstacles and resistances at institutional level.
We cannot forget either that this is a society which configured its
identity around the idea of a homogeneous national identity.
A nodal aspect to operate the fellowship is about teachers´ training. Given its novelty and also the resistance from teachers, the
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fellowship has few experts and it does not always find teachers
as its great promoters.
Besides, teachers usually argument their inappropriate or inexistent training to develop the Fellowship, which they see as a task
for social sciences’ teachers or for those who are Afro-Colombians.
The Fellowship still faces serious limitations to transform the
ways of understanding and managing pedagogically and socially
the cultural difference and in particular, with regards to AfroDescendant populations. Recognition of the historic and current
presence of Afro-Descendants should be a political commitment,
since it involves a critical reflection about the reasons why this
recognition was historically absent from the educational processes and from the conflicts that should be pedagogically addressed
and managed to solve the important issues that have caused different forms of exclusion, both inside and outside schools.
An additional fundamental factor has to do with the historic trajectories of the disciplinary fields that correspond to the mandatory
education areas that are part of the national educational system.
Although it is true that the issue of teaching has not been solved
in all of them, it is also true that the fellowship’s demands are still
great, given its recent trajectory and the novelty it supposes as to
the conventional perspectives to address subjects such as black,
Afro Colombian and raizales populations’ history and their contributions to arts, science or politics. In this sense, its rate of success
implies new looks and renewed strategies for thinking and designing curricular projects and teachers’ practices.
Despite the significance of these advancements, developments
in this field are not yet sufficient, even more if we consider that
legislation foresees its implementation in all educational institutions in the country. What these experiences do seem to show
are some of the possible ways in case the possibility of making
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the Diaspora’s contributions and trajectories visible, are to be
strengthened from the education perspective.
Factors that limit the experience’s development
Several factors influence the advancement of the experiences.
One of them appears to be especially determining: the institutional action of regional entities to promote the Fellowship, which
is expressed in different ways. Maybe the one with the greatest
effect is the promotion of educational programs for teachers.
However, the institutional action schemes are diverse and include
educational programs for teachers, designing of didactic materials, publishing of curricular guidelines, and pedagogical guidance
to experiences, exchange meetings and regional policy actions to
comply with regulatory mandates.
The existence of these actions in the territorial entities has taken
place in association with technical and university educational institutions, whose educational work has been crucial; it has also
been developed in association with social organizations promoting the fellowship’s development. Despite these advancements,
more than six years have passed after the publication of the Curricular Guidelines for the Afro-Colombian Studies Fellowship and
its development is quite diverse. On one hand, we find significant
advancements led by a number of experiences located in different places of the country, which have achieved important developments regarding public policy, curricular design, didactic material and teachers’ education. On the other hand, multiple factors
remain that hinder the consolidation of these advancements or
actions to support new developments are still pending.
Although the operation of a public policy is closely linked to the
existence of a legal framework common to its objectives, it has
been proven that this does not guarantee its compliance.
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The limitations for the advancement of some of the initiatives
analyzed at the institutional level of the territorial entities are
related to the lack of resources and personnel responsible for
their development, which in turn affects the possibility of institutionalizing the actions to give them continuity. Frequently, the
initiatives depend more on the will of isolated officers than on
institutional decisions of a permanent nature. On the other hand,
the State decentralization scheme seems to negatively affect the
possibility of guaranteeing that policies traced at a central level are applied at territorial entities. The Ministry of Education’s
influence on the operation of regional education secretariats is
limited and it is only achieved during periods of government or
in the face of before actions rather than in a sustained way as
an institutional policy. The problem seems bigger when it tries
to affect those sectors of society where the the black population is minority and there is no one to demand the application of
the policy. If it is considered important to affect the educational
system as a whole, the educational policy should be oriented
towards the entire population, rather than being assumed as a
policy from or for the ethnic group. This is to say, if the policy
has been conceived and regulated as a policy to affect the educational system of those sectors which historically discriminated
and non visibility of the Afro-Descendant populations, and at the
same time as a policy specific for the historically discriminated
and non visibility sectors of the population, both characteristics
should be reflected decisively on institutional actions.
Implementation of this policy requires for its operation investing
in research resources, designing of curricular adaptation strategies, training of teachers and officers and producing of educational material, which offer effective application tools. All those
accompanied by the institutional actions necessary for its regulation, spreading and follow up. In the research, we found limited
educational processes for officers, production of didactic materi-
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al, promotion of educational research, teachers’ educational programs and other actions, which would allow intensifying the fulfillment of the educational policy’s purposes for ethnic groups.
Despite the fact that multiple proposals have been developed
for the implementation of the Fellowship, greater developments
are still required in the research field both in the Afro-Colombian
studies field as in the educational sphere’s specific fields, such
as curricular design or didactic material. Lack of research makes
our knowledge of educational practices and pedagogical developments still limited.
Up until today, the fellowship has had limited resources for its
work at schools; research in the field of Afro-Colombian studies is
still limited and in some cases they only report a set of problems
and populations, but not of others.
Frequently, the black people’s visibility efforts in the educational
system have privileged a glance at the traditional rural and the
Pacific region. That is a significant advancement which has allowed recognition of cultural expressions, territories, organization forms and contributions of this black populations’ sector.
However, more integral and wider horizon perspectives are still
required, allowing populations who are currently barely considered in general educational projects, such as Afro-Descendant
populations of the continental Caribbean, raizal populations of
San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina, urban populations,
both of large capitals as well as of those medium and small cities,
as well as black populations of regions from the Andean interior,
to be clearly included.
Finally, we cannot forget that we live in a society where forms of
discrimination and racism still survive and which are expressed
on a daily basis inside and outside schools, which makes us think
that the possibilities to develop the Fellowship faced several cir-
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cumstances and contexts, all of which should be considered when
evaluating the advancements and proposing new alternatives.
Looking into the future: elements for an agenda
To finalize, I will point out schematically some elements that I
consider may be relevant in the construction of an Afro-descendant Agenda, some of which already exist within the valid institutional policies. I will mention four fields of action:
1) Research: Strengthening research policies, prioritizing thematic lines and problems aimed at making visible the AfroDescendant populations in the country and the regional context. In this sense, lines oriented to the following directions
may be included:
• Analysis the African Diaspora expressions in their regional dimension (Latin America and the Caribbean), including comparative analysis and joint research with teams from different countries
• Contemporary expressions of the Diaspora
• Intercultural relations in the African Diaspora
• Afro-descendant participation in the construction of nationality. A propos of the bicentenary.
• Afro-Colombian thinkers and thinking.
2) Strengthening actions and institutional coordination
• Strengthening of existing institutions (Icanh, Center of Studies and Documentation of African-Colombian Cultures) and
inter-institutional actions strategies
• Strategic alliances to define and support research lines (Colciencias, International cooperation)
• Research scholarships that include prioritized research lines
(Diaspora expressions, regional analysis, African-descendant
thinkers and thoughts)
• Educational action lines in coordination with the Ministry of
Education, including the strengthening of academic commu-
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nities through events and investigation networks. Also, creation and strengthening of libraries and documentation center programs with an emphasis on socialization of academic
productions related to the Diaspora
• Strengthening of alliances with universities to promote and
research lines and editorial policies.
3) Publications. Publications’ promotion strategies of both unpublished works and new research. Awareness rising strategies in mass media, both public and private, including
problems such as racism and racial discrimination, as well
as dissemination of numerous historic experiences and contemporary Diaspora expressions.
Bibliography
Angola Maconde, Juan. 2007. “Los afrodescendientes bolivianos”.
Journal of Iberoamerican and Caribbean Anthropology. Dossier
Actualidades: Lo Afro en América andina. Vol. 12, No. 1. Ver:
http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/abs/10.1525/
jlat.2007.12.1.toc
Antón, Jhon y Fabiana Del Popolo. 2008. Visibilidad estadística
de la población afrodescendiente de América Latina: aspectos
conceptuales y metodológicos. Preliminary version (Pending final
revision by author). Santiago de Chile: CEPAL-European Commission project: “Valuing of regional cooperation programs of the
European Union, aimed at strengthening social cohesion”. February 2008. EN: http://www.segib.org/upload/File/doc_dis_1.pdf
Barrenechea, Paulina. sf. Bibliografía comentada para iniciar el
estudio de la presencia negra en hispanoamérica y Chile. Practical Guide. Santiago de Chile: Universidad de Concepción EN:
www2.udec.cl/~docliter/mecesup/articulos/biblionegro.pdf
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Bello, Álvaro y Marta Rangel. 2000. Etnicidad, “raza” y equidad
en América Latina y el Caribe.
CEPAL.EN:
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(LC/R.1967/Rev.1. august 7 2000) Bucheli, Marisa y Wanda Cabella. S.f. El perfil demográfico y socioeconómico de la población
uruguaya según su ascendencia racial. Encuesta Nacional de Hogares Ampliada 2006. Montevideo: UNFA, PNUD, INE. En: http://
www.ine.gub.uy/enha2006/informes%20tematicos.asp
Finocchietti, Susana (Coordinación y edición). 2004. Los afroandinos de los siglos XVI al XX. Lima: UNESCO. See: http://unesdoc.
unesco.org/images/0014/001412/141269s.pdf
Flórez, Carmen Elisa, Carlos Medina y Fernando Urrea. 2001.
«Understanding the cost of social exclusion due to race or ethnic
background in Latin America and Caribbean countries. Washington: Inter-American Development Bank (Banco Interamericano
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Hall, Stuart. 2003. “Pensando en la diáspora: en casa, desde el
extranjero” (pp. 477- 500). On: Heterotropías: narrativas de identidad y alteridad latinoamericana. Carlos Jauregui, Juan Pablo
Dabove (editores). Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana.
Hoffmann, Odile. 2006. Negros y afromestizos en México: viejas y
nuevas lecturas de un mundo olvidado. Revista Mexicana de Sociología 68, núm. 1 (January-March): 103-135. México, D. F: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México-Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales. On: http://www.ejournal.unam.mx/contenido.
html?r=24&v=2006&n=001
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Hopenhayn, Martín. 2003. La pobreza en conceptos, realidades
y políticas: una perspectiva regional con énfasis en minorías étnicas. División de Desarrollo Social CEPAL.EN:http://www.iidh.
ed.cr/comunidades/diversidades/docs/div_enlinea/Pobreza%20
afros.pdf
Lipski, John M. (s.f) Las lenguas criollas (afro)ibéricas: estado de
la cuestión. Universidad del Estado de Pennsylvania. En: www.
csub.edu/~tfernandez_ulloa/HLE/LIPSKILENGUAS%
20CRIOLLAS%20AFROIBERICAS.pdf
Martínez, Luz María. 1992. Negros en América. Madrid: Mapfre.
Ministerio de Educación Nacional. 2001. Cátedra de Estudios Afrocolombianos. Lineamientos curriculares. Bogotá: MEN
Quijano, Aníbal. 2000a. Colonialidad del poder y clasificación social. Journal of World-System Research. (2): 342-386.
Quijano, Aníbal. 2000b. Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y
América Latina. Edgardo Lander (ed.), La Colonialidad del saber:
Eurocentrismo y Ciencias Sociales. Perspectivas Latinoamericanas. pp. 201-245. Caracas: Clasco.
Rangel Martha. 2005. La población afrodescendiente en América
Latina y los Objetivos de Desarrollo del Milenio. Un examen exploratorio en países seleccionados utilizando información censal.
CEPAL, Fondo Indígena, CEPED. Santiago, 27-29 de abril del 2005.
EN: http://www.choike.org/documentos/afros_al_2005.pdf
Reid Andrews, George. 2007. Afro-Latinoamérica, 1800-2000.
Madrid / Frankfurt: Iberoamericana.
Restrepo, Eduardo. 2004a. “Hacia los estudios de las Colombias
negras”. En: Axel Alejandro Rojas (ed.), Estudios Afrocolombianos. Aportes para un estado del arte. pp. 19-58. Popayán: Editorial Universidad del Cauca.
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Rodríguez, Romero Jorge (coordinador). 2006. Manual de los afrodescendientes de las Américas y el Caribe. Ciudad de Panamá:
Oficina Regional para América Latina y el Caribe de UNICEF. Ver
en: http://www.unicef.org/lac/manualafrodesc2006(2).pdf
Wade, Peter. 2006b. “Afro-Latin Studies. Reflections on the field”.
Iberoamerican and Caribbean Ethnic Studies. Vol. 1, No. 1, pp.
105–124
Wade, Peter. 1997. Gente negra, nación mestiza. Dinámicas de las
identidades raciales en Colombia. Bogotá: Ediciones Uniandes.
Miguel Pereira
Manager of Sponsorship and International Cooperation,
Every Child, Peru
Profile
Member of the Standing Advisory Group of Afrodescendant Leaders of UNICEF Regional-TACRO in policies and actions targeted at
Afrodescendant Children and Adolescents in Latin America and
the Caribbean and a member of the Advisory Group of the Youth
Program Fund Youth driven by the IDB, and the Microsoft Foundation SES. Currently serves as Manager of Sponsorship and International Cooperation of the International Children EveryChild
in Peru.
Lecture
In Latin America, 10% of the wealthiest people receive between
40% and 47% of the total income generated by the region, while
the poorest 20% receives only between 2% and 4%. This is to
say, richness is concentrated in just a few hands. These indicators
transform this region in the most unequal of the world.
This is not new for young Afro-Descendants. It is enough to look
around and with no much effort they have known for a long time
that the difference between those who have a lot and those who
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do not have anything at all, is quite big. This is stronger in some
countries and not so much in other countries, but in all of them,
poor people are the victims of a deep inequality.
Although this inequality may result evident, it is necessary to analyze the historic reasons, to find out how deep is the gap and to
look for solutions to reduce it.
As stated before, inequality in Latin America has historic origins
and goes well back to the region’s colonial past, where slavery
left its footprints in what used to be, a priori, the relationship
between European colonists and African slaves (currently whites
and Afro-Descendants).
The greatest weight of slave trade fell upon young people due to
their production capacity, but once the womb law (“Ley de Vientres) came into force in several countries, those who were born
free were deprived of their rights until reaching their legal age (in
some countries such as Paraguay, 25 year of age). This practice
was later transformed into patronage (“padrinazgos”, “patronatos”) or any other legal figure or action covering a forced submission to others.
This way, new states are formed with a sector of the population
that is part of the “black and young” labor force, with the early joining of women of the domestic service and odd jobs, and
young men into non qualified works, both with limited education
possibilities given the critical context in which these works were
performed.
The States’ failure to take measures to revert this situation is
translated into a single fact: “the absence of policies is a policy”.
There were no actions directed at this sector of society because
they all had been assigned a role. Therefore, we have to acknowledge that we are in front of populations and states that have
developed under these principles and that have considered the
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Encuentro Iberoamericano Agenda Afrodescendiente en las Américas
situation of these young men as “natural”. This deprivation of cultural, social and economic rights became a structural exclusion
that still lasts today. Therefore, analyzing the Afro-Descendant
young men’s exclusion requires considering a variety of factors.
In the last few years, there has been a lot of progress in the region, both political as well as economic; nevertheless, the bases
of those institutions have lasted. Countries with the greatest
indigenous population and/ or Afro-descendants are today the
most unequal ones.
The situation is in some cases critical, as in Colombia, because
the internal conflict, in Brazil due to the criminalization of Young
black men or in Central America and the Caribbean with the added problem of HIV/AIDS.
Attending the problems of young Afro-Descendants requires specific measures, since they are victims of multiple discriminations
(aggravated in the case of young women). These measures should
comprise facilitating access to education, TIC’s, employment programs, crime prevention, and drug abuse and AIDS prevention,
among others.
The Durban Declaration and Action Plan, Santiago de Chile, Young
People Summit, Affirmative Actions’ Workshop, among others
establish a framework to undertake actions in that direction.
General Information
As stated in the introduction, several factors play a role in young
Afro-Descendants exclusion.
In Latin America, orientation changes have take place, where social policies play an outstanding role, however, at the time we
analyzed their effects, we could see they have little effect on
Afro-Descendant communities. This reality reaffirms the need of
generating focalized policies or affirmative actions directed spe-
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Encuentro Iberoamericano Agenda Afrodescendiente en las Américas
cifically towards the situation of Afro-Descendants and especially
towards young people.
In the case of rural communities, youngsters are forced to migrate
towards the cities, and even out of the country. There is constant
overcrowding in deprived sectors of the cities, and they all have a
common denominator, the presence of Afro-Descendants.
Access difficulties to education generate very little perspective
for development, which in turn translates into a lack of incentives
for insertion into other educational levels above the mandatory
ones (when it is possible to access them).
Globalization and media contribute to the construction of a negative image of Afro-Descendant young people as they are permanently broadcasting images of young black in deprived situations.
Within a hostile context, which systematically marginalize them,
young people see their self-esteem undermined, generating a reaction against social insertion.
Revealing Data:
The absence of references that result excluding when designing
focalized strategies towards the Afro-Descendant young people
in Latin America and the Caribbean constitutes a limitation. This
is not a coincidence. It must be understood as a direct consequence of the non-visibility that in many aspects is suffered by
Afro-Descendant communities in general, and their young people in particular.
In this situation young people are part of especially vulnerable
sectors due to the multiple cross the border problems. (Racial
discrimination, poverty, gender, acculturation, HIV-AIDS, violence, forced migration, etc.)
The Document “Millennium Development Goals: A look from
Latin America and the Caribbean” clearly reflects the region’s inequalities:
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Encuentro Iberoamericano Agenda Afrodescendiente en las Américas
“In America Latina, Indigenous people—which represent more
tan 25% of the population in Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala and
Peru — and Afro-Descendants —that constitute more than one
fourth of the population in Brazil, Nicaragua and Panamá — are,
to a great extend, the poorest in the region, present the worst
socio-economic indicators and have very little social recognition
and access to decision making instances”.
9,0
AMÉRICA LATINA (14 PAÍSES): INCIDENCIA DE LA EXTREMA POBREZA DE INDÍGENAS
Y AFRODESCENDIENTE, COMO MÚLTIPLO DE LA INCIDENCIA
EN EL RESTO DE LA POBLACIÓN
(Línea de 1 dólar por día)
7,0
8,0
7,0
5,0
6,0
5,0
191
Paraguay (2001)
Panamá (2002)
3,3
México (2002)
2,2
2,8
Chile (2000)
2,1
2,8
Guatemala (2002)
2,1
Nicaragua (2001)
1,8
Bolívia (2002)
1,8
2,3
Brasil (2002)
1,0
Colombia (1999)
0,0
1,0
Haiti (2001)
1,0
1,6
Perú (2001)
2,0
Honduras (2003)
3,0
Ecuador (1998)
4,0
Costa Rica (2001)
Incidencia extrema pobreza indígenas y afrodecendientes incidencia
resto de la población
This Document continues with the analysis and specifies the following, “Among their poverty situation’s factors, the progressive
loss of land, community economies’ bankrupt, poor access to
educational and health services and the structure and dynamics of social insertion are outstanding. Indigenous people and
Afro-Descendants (of the Americas) — who are usually the victims for ethnic-racial prejudices — receive less remuneration for
comparable work when compared to the rest of the population
and have more probabilities of working in the primary sector of
economy, in small companies or in the informal sector. Difficulties
for access to credit and new technologies that may allow them to
increase or to improve their production have also an influence”.
Encuentro Iberoamericano Agenda Afrodescendiente en las Américas
“As you can see in the chart, the incidence of extreme poverty
among indigenous people and Afro-Descendants (of the Americas) between 1,6 (Colombia) and 7,9 times (Paraguay) the incidence in the rest of the population, excluding the cases of Costa
Rica and Haití, where the ethnic condition seems not to have an
influence on poverty levels”.
While macroeconomic indicators give positive results, Afro-Descendants (of the Americas) are still marginalized from development programs, which effectively consider their economic, social
and cultural rights.
MERCOSUR Particulars
Brazil
Data from Childhood and Youth
Black children and youngsters represent 23,6% of the country’s
population, this is to say, 40,1 million people. Most of them live
in urban areas, 77%.
Data about Brazilian childhood and youth are shown below, according to the demographic census of 200 – IBGE and the Ministry of Health.
Exclusion in teaching:
During the last decades there was a marked increase in literacy in
Brazil, nevertheless, there are still in Brazil 24 million Brazilians,
around 16%, who do not have one of the basic conditions for the
exercise of a full citizenship, literacy. Among the illiterate, black
people are 22%, while White people are just 11%.
Of the total of white children from 7 to 14, 7,36% do not attend
school, this is to say, some 507,603 thousand.
Of the total of black children from 7 to 14, 17,22% do not attend
school, this is to say, some 926,353 thousand.
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Basic education:
Basic education demands a minimum of 11 years of permanence
in school. Barely 18% of the population in Brazil has or had the
years of study necessary for a basic education.
If the cut to analyze were the racial one, we would find a huge
inequality between white and black people.
Upper Education: Access of youngsters into the University:
Looking at the chart we can see that among blacks, barely 5,7%
are at the University.
In the white population this index goes up to 21,9%.
Of youngsters between 15 and 24 years of age accessing the
country’s universities 81% are white.
Upper Education:
In courses such as medicine and dentistry, the index of 19% of
blacks in the universities drops respectively to 0,7 and 1%.
In an initiative of the organized civil society the PVNC (Pré-Vestibular para Negros e Carentes) was created, preparatory course
managed by volunteers and professors from the public network
which trains students coming from poor communities for the
entry test at the universities. In 5 years this innovative initiative
spread all over Brazil.
In 2000, in Rio de Janeiro, Law 3524 was approved, which establishes the creation of 20% quotas for the access of black students
into the Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ). The polemic was
able to beat the demands of the black movement and progressive sectors, establishing quotas for black people in 16 more universities in the country.
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Uruguay
According to the diagnosis of Black Woman (1998), the high participation in PEA of the youngest women (15 to 20 years of age)
lets us suppose that black women enter the labor market very
early, this is to say even before they are 15.
The same diagnosis demonstrates that while 8% of women aged
between 15 and 19 stated having obtained their first job before
the age of 15, in the case of Afro-Descendant women, it was 16%,
this is to say twice as many.
41.5% of black women studied only primary education (complete
or incomplete). This, added to a 6.9% who did not study any type
of courses. Thus, almost half the population did not access to
secondary or Upper Education.
While in the total population 12.1% went through Upper studies
(teaching or university), among the women included in this study
only 4.1 had access to these education levels.
COMPARATIVE DATA:
COMPARATIVE URUGUAY – BRAZIL
INCOME AVERAGE OF AFROS COMPARED TO WHITE RACE
BRAZIL
URUGUAY
MEN:
WOMEN:
63%
68%
68%
66%
AFRO WOMEN WITH DOMESTIC SERVICE EMPLOYMENT
BRAZIL
40 %
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URUGUAY
42.4 %
Encuentro Iberoamericano Agenda Afrodescendiente en las Américas
PROBABILITY FOR AFRO BOYS REACHING THE SECOND EDUCATION CYCLE
BRAZIL
15 %
URUGUAY
15 %
These indicators reflect reality in a regional context
Absence of a State policy
Non-visibility of Afro-Descendants (of the Americas) in Latin
America was a constant in several countries. Concepts of “equity” along the region hid the discrimination problem which in
2000 alone (Santiago de Chile), starts being recognized in its real
regional dimension. Absence of policies was in itself an exclusion
policy in social development.
Until the process towards the III CMCR (Durban 2001), there
were no regional strategies by the States or International Organizations, except from some very specific examples. Organizations
such as the Interamerican Development Bank had until 1999,
29 projects filed for Afro-Descendants (of the Americas) against
more than 300 for indigenous (approved and in process).
In the case of young Afro-Descendants (of the Americas), there
are still few measures fostering their development, promoting
their participation in decision-making spheres, among others.
In the South Cone the situation is even worse. If we consider
all the countries involved in MERCOSUR, with the exception of
Brazil, there are no disaggregated data considering the Afro-Descendants particulars. This leads to not counting with referential
frames appropriate for the implementation of focalized policies.
They may want to argue that the existence of policies aimed at
youngsters involves, due to their character, Afro-Descendants (of
the Americas). Facts demonstrate that mass policies perpetuate
differentiating situations that go beyond the membership to an
age group.
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Encuentro Iberoamericano Agenda Afrodescendiente en las Américas
Except from the process currently taking place in Brazil with
quantification in universities, Afro-Descendant youngsters do not
have educational programs, labor insertion programs or active
participation involving them.
As result of the aforementioned we quote Congresswoman Epsy
Cambell from Costa Rica “Structural adjustment or State Reform
programs being executed in Latin America for almost two decades
have a greater impact on populations than on Afro-Descendant
women because they limit the scarce insertion of the State in public policies to which Afro-Descendants had access”.
Youth Race
We have demonstrated that the economic situation of Afro
youngsters is characterized by exclusion and marginality.
Poverty is the norm and the most common characteristic in which
they live and it has historic causes and contemporary explanations due to the dreadful distribution of richness in Latin America
and the Caribbean and because States have nor fulfilled their responsibility of guaranteeing their welfare.
Construction of societies fragmented by the membership to a certain ethnic Group (indigenous or African American (of the Americas)), has led to the creation of social disadvantages, sharpened
by the absence of state policies which may intervene to support
the most underprivileged sectors and, in particular, of young AfroDescendant men and women (of the Americas). Its main consequences are the existence of a wide sector of these unemployed
populations expelled from the labor market, desertion from the
educational cycle and the reproduction of the poverty cycle.
This reality is given by racist practices, many times covered that
affect circumstances such as insertion into the labor market. The
best known practice is the famous legend “Good Look”, that has
evident discriminatory connotations and its constant practice has
led many youngsters to excluding themselves from application
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Encuentro Iberoamericano Agenda Afrodescendiente en las Américas
to the labor market. We must add to this the stereotypes made
by sexuality of young Afro-Descendant women, men’s criminality (Brazil: If you see a black man driving an important car he is
either a football player or a drug dealer), and innumerable social
practices which condition these young people’s insertion in an
equity plane against their comments and the rest of society.
This exclusion from full participation in the investment in human
capital and productive employment by their respective countries,
as well as their structural limitations to access the productive resources makes them poverty reproduction agents.
Racism towarts young Afro-Descendants (of the Americas) also
becomes violence, and there are many testimonies supporting
this, here we transcribe the story of Denis Oñate Torres, 19, AfroEcuadorian “I heard a voice threatening me with a fire arm and
that I had possibly been confused with a thief, (due to my color,
as I am black). That voice told me: “FREEZE OR I WILL SHOOT
YOU”, as I had not commited a crime against people or private
property, I answered: “I HAVE NOT DONE ANYTHING WRONG, IF
YOU WANT, SHOOT ME”!!!, a few seconds later I heard an explosion and fell down in great pain”
But if we look at the region, according to the violence map made
by UNESCO, 7 of every 10 youngsters murdered in Brazil are AfroDescendants (of the Americas).
Exterior problem:
Predominant economic models that characterize our world today, spattered with strong ideologies based on individuals’ competence, labor flexibilization (in the case of youngsters we may
talk about the events in France), increasing consumerism and a
relatively homogeneous constant technological insertion, do not
constitute processes leading to the wonderful instrumental development meaning evident improvements for the population.
On the contrary, among the social and cultural social processes
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Encuentro Iberoamericano Agenda Afrodescendiente en las Américas
which characterize this era, it is important to point out national
conflicts and broadcasting of “essentialist” postures, based on
univocal identity ideologies which values negatively, separate
and condition common life to the “others”, the “unwanted”, the
different ones. This is a time in which old forms of stigmatization
against certain collective identities have re-appeared together
with the broadcasting of cultural discredit based on different
types of stereotypes.
In the face of this new historic chapter, black communities are analyzing the dynamic generated by this reality, seeing the consequences of the new political order in the world, reflecting about
its main components which have facilitated these changes:
• Rupture of bi-polarity and the formation of homogeneous
economic regions (USA, Canada, Mexico, Europe, Japan,
etc.)
• Deep contradictions that generate economic, social and technologic differences between North and South.
• Terrorism, drug trafficking and corruption.
• Tensions between countries in the region.
• Regional blocks (MERCOSUR, Andean Region, etc).
Analyzing these changes and acquire experience from these facts
is the essential axe where these debates cross each other, as
these new forms introduce aspects of racism applied to this new
order.
Facing these challenges, that on one hand count with developed
countries displaying the economic reconversion, the technological revolution and the economic inter-dependence, our countries
struggle between the option of becoming marginal and backward
areas or finding regional integration ways to get into dynamic
forms of the global economy.
Within these options posed for Latin America, African American
communities are looking for a theoretical, programmatic answer,
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Encuentro Iberoamericano Agenda Afrodescendiente en las Américas
with the objective of combating racism, consecrating equality
and economic development. This vital need is based on our historic heritage, its cultural richness and its experience, which gives
the authority to offer, from our point of view, action programs assembled with the social cultural and economic set as a whole.
Hegemonic models are in a direct political and economic fight
and peoples uth differentiated cultures in our region (indigenous
and black) are their primary victims. To stop this, it is necessary
to design strategies that can get over this model and stop this offensive. This, of course, identifying its components correctly, as it
responds to a historic logic.
We must correctly determine the ambiguous effects of the ruling
systems: on one side, the economic development, on the other
side, crystallization of unemployment markets, informal, poor labor and the reproduction of new forms of racism. This
This mixture between progress and reversing obliges the afro
community to make their own action plans, clearly determining
that those policies locate us in the most degrading positions it develops. Our goal is to achieve the implementation of democratic
in which the social and economic elements count with a strong
presence of innovative mechanisms of democratic control and
goes through the inclusion of the racial equity promotion. Therefore, this Project is supported on the promotion of ethnic plurality and on highlighting the multi-culturalism of our regions.
Recommendations:
• To articulate social policies regarding African American childhood, adolescence and youth.
• Support from the private sector to actions and affirmative
measures for African American youth employment.
• Regulation of the legal system for adolescents, particularly
African Americans.
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• Enhancement of the concept of Ministry of Education of the
countries to the dimension of multi-cultural education and
ethnic-education
• Create a base on disaggregated information regarding youth,
childhood and women, in census, including the African American ethnical perspective.
• To include in census the ethnic-racial dimension of African
Americans.
• To promote instances of political and democratic participation for young African Americans.
• To reaffirm the afro identity among children, adolescents and
youngsters of the African American populations.
• To introduce in the regional and local organizations for the
youth specific units attending young African-Americans (of
the Americas)
• Demand from the states to make effective the commitments
in different international spheres such as: III CMCR, Affirmative Actions’s Workshop, Americas Summit, DESC, etc. with
an emphasis on young African-Americans (of the Americas).
• To implement Action Plans within the framework of commitments assumed.
Introduction:
1. Acknowledging that in the caucus statement od young people of the Americas an equal selection of the young representatives, particularly of the African American peoples, indigenous, ethnias and discriminated groups is demanded for
the participation in the Young People World Forum and in the
World Conference Against Racism.
2. Recognizing that youth is determinating for the society’s future.
3. And it is a permanent victim of discrimination.
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Encuentro Iberoamericano Agenda Afrodescendiente en las Américas
4. Knowing that it is an age intermediate between childhood
and adulthood with no specifically directed programs.
5. And, that youngsters are constantly excluded from the forms
of access to the social network.
6. We consider that the youngsters’ situation becomes worse,
especially talking about Afro-Descendants people in Latin
America and the Caribbean, wher we are in extreme poverty situations and we live a constant violation of our human
rights.
7. Our exclusion is also linked to the access to education, health
and employment, and regarding the situation with the authorities who identify us as potential criminals, subjects of all
types of violence within the jail system.
8. Reconognizing that in the caucus statement of young people
of the Americas the developed countries members of the
United Nations’ states are demanded to provide financial resources for the participation in the World Youngsters Forum
and in the World Conference Against Racism.
9. Considering that Afro-Descendant young people of South
America have not been active participants within the demands and proposals posed by the African American people
in the process of the Third World Conference.
10. We know that as the African American (of the Americas)
people we lack a dignifying policy and health. We can see
that there are race-tendency related illnesses such as the falciform anemia.
11. Just as we also see the absence of prevention and assistance
to juvenile sexuality as we are victims of the fast propagation
of venereal diseases, such as HIV/ AIDS.
12. We affirm that Afro-Descendant young people are in an unequal situation in the educational system.
Educational programs are inefficient; exclude African American
population from social climbing.
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Reaffirming the demands and action plans of the Statement of
the African American People of the Americas towards the 3rd
World Conference against Racism.
Statement:
We demand that the International Committee of Youth and the
High Commissioner of the United Nations guarantee the equal
participation of young Afro-Descendants of South America in the
selection process for scholarships and financial support for the
participation in the Youngster Forum and in the 3rd Conference
against Racism.
We demand the introduction of the subject ‘Young Afro-Descendants (of the Americas) and other victims of racism’ as primary
axes over which the development of the World Youngsters Forum
is built.
We demand from the International Committee of Young People
and from the High Commissioner to guarantee the presence of
Afro-Descendant youngsters of South America in the International youngsters’ network against racism to be installed after the
World Youngsters Forum
Wer demand recognition and inclusion of the term Afro-Descendant Youngsters in the demands and action plans designed for
the Afro-Descendant People in the process of the 3rd World Conference against racism, social discrimination, s (of the Americas)
en el proceso de la III Conferencia Mundial contra el racism, discrimination racial, xenophobia and linked forms of intolerance.
We recommend to carry out a Worls Youth forum in five years
as a follow up to the Youngster Forum and in the 3rd Conference
and this consultation to be supported and financed by the Office
of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and also to be part
of the official instances and programs of the United Nations.
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We recommend that the states members of the United Nations
and especially the developed countries provide support and financiation to organized and without resources Afro-Descendant
youngsters of the Southern Countries to attend the previous instances and the aforementioned world consultation.
We demand from the states members of the United Nations to
integrate within their legal system laws to protect the physical
and moral integrity of Afro-Descendant youngsters and to recognize them as international mechanisms for the protection of
human rights.
We demand from the World Health Organization to integrate an
integral and multi ethnic health conception in every level of complexity which establish attention policies specific in the young
people’s area.
We demand that the states revise and re-do educational programs, including Afro-Descendants’s history and their contribution to the development of society. Also, we demand the training
of teachers to implement the said programs.
We demand from the States to broadcast and promote the creation of spaces for the broadcasting and political-cultural information of the African Americans, providing support with the resources necessary for its implementation.
We demand from the states to recognize and value all ethniccultural manifestations, and especially artistic manifestations of
African American young people. The society and the state discriminate African American young people because they are migrants, immigrants, from oppressed nations by the states, people
with different capabilities, lesbians, homosexuals, trans-sexuals
and people with HIV/AIDS. Therefore, we demand fom the states
the promotion of dialogue and awareness actions in public and
private instances.
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We demand that states adopt effective measures to stop sexual
trafficking and exploitation labor practices of young people, particularly those suffered by African-American children and young
people. Also, to investigate on the role and advancement of the
globalization of the economy based on sexual trafficking and exploitation labor practices of young people.
We demand from the states members of the United Nations to
ratify the existence of African American poverty stricken and to
create specific and effective policies to eliminate the causes and
consequences of African American juvenile poverty.
We propose the promotion of the constitution of networks of
African American Young people in South America to excert social surveillance over the actions of the states and the society
as a whole regarding the agreements of the 3rd World Conference against Racism. We demand the states’ support, the support of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner and
of the African American organizations of South America for the
strengthening of the said networks.
African American Young People’s Statement:
Youth, more than a stage in people’s lives becomes a very important determinant for the future of society, but in practice, this
does not happen this way, on the contrary, we are permanent
victims of age discrimination.
For those of us who are in this stage in lige, we do not see our
needs reflected in any one of the programs directed to other ethnic groups. When we stop being children we loose the family and
state protection, on the other hand, we are not cinidered adults,
as supposedly we do not have experience in life. This makes us
to be constantly excluded; for example, regarding the access to
employment and to a good remuneration.
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This situation is a lot more serious for the African American people in Latin America and the Caribbean, where we live in extreme
poverty conditions in all the cities in the continent, reason for
which we are more vulnerable than the rest of the population,
we are constantly victims of violations of our human rights, especially regarding access to education, health, employment and to
decision making. We are also victims of violations of our human
rights by the authorities, who consider us to be potential criminals, which cause us to be unjustly imprisoned.
Regarding education, the African American people shows the
worst escolarity levels, which is related to the lack of public education programs in agreement with the social, economic and cultural conditions of that population. Also we find that the young
African American population is being excluded from the different
national and international public instances of power, denying us
the possibility to have an effect over the decisions in our countries.
In most countries in the continent young people are obliged to
be part of the internal armed conflicts. First, through the armed
forces as military service is mandatory. Second, because outlaw
grups recruit youngsters, mainly from popular sectors that are
mostly African American. This makes us the main victim of that
type of violence. Additionally, it is in the urban centers with high
concentration of African American population where the highest
number of violent deaths occurs.
Recommendations:
Carry out joint actions between the national and international
organizations to improve the life conditions of African American
populations and to eradicate discrimination against youngsters
from those communities
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Implement in all the states, policies for the access to education
for young African Americans of Latin America and the Caribbean
Consider thier contribution to the social construction of the continent, as well as their cultural, social and political particularities.
It is necessary to make curricular changes to achieve this goal.
It is necessary that the states prioritize and carry out development programs towards African American young people, which
would allow us generate equity conditions, especially regarding
income generation, health, educational strengthening , among
others.
Obtain a permanent participation of African American young
people in the public positions of the respective states.
Promote actions tending to consolidate the social development
proposal of young African Americans with the participation of
the different International Organizations.
Form a Juvenile Commission of Humanitarian Aid for African
Americans in extreme poverty conditions and/ or at risk, which
should be supported by the United Nations.
Create an International commission in charge of designing a treaty to promote the participation of young African Americans in
the social, political and cultural life of their countries, as well as
to offer guarantees for young people to have better development
possibilities.
United Nations must urge the states to be in charge of guaranteeing the safety of children and youngster amidst the internal
armed conflict.
We request from international organizations such as the UN and
the OAS to create an organization specifically in charge of the
subject of rights and development of African American young
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people, with the faculty to exert surveillance and apply sanctions
for the non-fulfillment of agreements.
To completely exclude the African American youth from the
armed conflict, through measures such as the abolition of the
mandatory military service.
We, young people, request from the International Organizations
to give us the corresponding support to obtain from the Governments of each country, the right we deserve regarding the active
participation in the social, political, economic and cultural life of
our countries.
When the barriers of hypocrisy and ignorance finally fall, there
will be equity rights for all human beings.
The toughest subject right now, the toughest subject in history,
for all what it means as an unfair and cruel matter is with no
doubt, the one related to racism. This is not an issue of African
Americans. We may only be a copy of the bloody racism of other
parts in Latin America, but we have our part, and when we talk
about singular racism, we are talking about the real danger of
possessing a recist feeling, outrage and hate against others.
Racism, when is hidden and strengthend against something natural and known, and when its terminology does not concern those
who teach and those who should learn, becomes a feeling. A
feeling must be suffered and it is not so easy to eliminate from
the impunity surrounding it.
Statement of the African Americans (of the Americas) at the Forum of the Americas for diversity and Plurality
Quito, Ecuador 13th to 16th March 2001
Preamble
Considering the principles, regulations and rules of the international instruments regarding the promotion of human rights, and
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particularly the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Agreement of Civil
and Political Rights and the International Convention about the
Ellimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination, reaffirming the
commitment of peoples of the United Nations to highlight the
fundamental rights of man, in the dignity and value of the human
person and in the equality of rights for men and women, promoting social progress and improving the level of life of a wider
concept of freedom;
Also considering that the General Assembly of the United Nations
in its resolution 52/11 of 12th December 1997, in which the World
Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia
and Connected forms of Intolerance was called, it fixed as one of
the primary objectives of the Conference the analysis of political,
historic, economic, social, cultural factors leadin to racism, racial
discrimination, xenophobia and connected forms of intolerance;
Knowing that the World Conference should thoroughly examine
the complex interaction existing between discrimination based on
race and discrimination based on other reasons, as well as economic marginalization and social exclusion; demand at the UN,
the OAS and the states in the region to recognize Afro-Descendant people and to develop legislation, policies and programs to
protect and promote the civil and political rights of these peoples
and within their respective states and to be included in all levels
of the process of the World Conference.
We acknowledge that African American people are the survivors
of the greatest holocaust in contemporary history, distributed
as slaved beings, considered as non-human through the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa. Slave trade, colonialism, segregation, other forms of contemporary racism, the traumatic effect of
forced displacement, sexual exploitation, humiliation to human
dignity, mutilate and kidnap the capabilities to reach their poten-
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tialities as citizens of the world and condemns the attitudes and
indifference of the international community who is still ignoring
and deepening into the contemporary slavery practices.
Recognizing the results of the work and contribution made by
American peoples during the preparatory process for the Conference, ratified in the Statement and Action Plan of Santiago and,
particularly, the thematic areas concerning the African American
People.
Considering that the struggles and social, political and economic
recognitions aim at the apology, still pending from the societies
involved in slave trade.
Emphasizing that the different preparatory instances of this conference allowed identifying clearly that the African American people is a vulnerable group and that it is victim of racism and racial
discrimination, without losing sight of the universal perspective of
the subject, managing to articulate a specific vision over the subregional and national particularities in agreement with the central
subjects proposed by the World Conference.
Highlighting that the links of the African American People with
the slavery trade, as a labor force, contributed significantly to the
development of the nations, it locates us as makers of a historic
event that accelerated the direction of humanity and that therefore, constitutes us as subjects of a universal debt.
Recognizing too that the different preparatory instances of this
Conference allowed identifying that there is a phenomenon
called “racialization and ethnization of poverty” which, added
to the already recognized feminization of poverty, should be
faced with the incorporation of the ethnic racial perspective in
all specific policies promoted to combat poverty of the African
American peoples and especially of African American women
and youngsters.
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Reaffirming the principles, regulations, guidelines and international instruments regarding the promotion of women’s rights,
comprised in the international conventions, statements and
agreements.
We state:
We demand recognition for the African American peoples as subjects of all human rights as we have been victims of racism, racial
discrimination and slavery.
We affirm that we must be treated with equity and respect to
dignity, that we must not suffer any type of discrimination due to
origin, culture, skin color, religion, language, aggravated because
of age, gender, sexual orientation, disability and social-economic
position. Therefore, we have the right to our culture and to our
own identity, to participate freely and in equal conditions in the
political, social, economic and cultural life, to development within the framework of our own aspirations and costumes.
We demand being recognized as relevant political actors, subject
to development and over whom States and international organizations have the political and economic responsibilities.
We denounce that the exclusion of the matter of the African
American peoples (of the Americas) in the Agenda proposed by
the High Commissioner of Human Rights to be considered at the
Third World Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and connected forms of Intolerance, constitutes a contradiction to the spirit and proposal of the World Conference.
We highlight that the situation of the African American People (of
the Americas) constitutes a convincing example in the context of
Racism and Racial Discrimination as we are part of a group that
has been consistently violated in our human dignity.
We acknowledge the contribution of African American women
in the construction of the societies and countries of America and
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the Caribbean and that all forms in which racism, discrimination
and xenophobia are manifested have particular connotations
which are even more acute against African American Women.
We recognize the rights of the African American peoples and
especially those of African American women to enjoy development, quality of life with work, education, health, recreation and
a real participation policy.
Statement:
We demand from the States to affirm that one of the primary victims of racism in America is the African Americans (of the Americas).
We demand from the States to recognize and value the five
hundred years of contributions of the African-Americans (of the
Americas) to the economic, cultural, linguistic and artistic wealth
and to the historic identity of the Americas.
We demand that slavery and servitude of the African American
peoples whose sequels are still valid, covered by the racist and
colonialist ideology constituted crimes against humanity. This
Statement reminds us of the right of the peoples to redress and
addresses the states to start the redress as a moral and ethical
obligation which should orient national and international policies
in their countries and to the international organizations as the
ones called to manage and serve it. This shall require serious and
deep discussions with Afro Americans in every country.
We demand from the states to show political will to terminate racism and the power and wealth imbalance in prejudice of African
Americans, product of genocide, slavery, racism and other forms
of exploitation. We urge the States to recognize that these acts
have hindered the development of African American Peoples.
We request from the States that they reaffirm that African Americans have the right to their cultural identity and the legal recog-
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nition of their identity as a fundamental right. This requires the
adoption of measures to protect and promote the identities of
Afro Americans.
We demand from the States to develop legislations, policies and
programs to recognize the rights of the African American Peoples
to their lands, ancestrally inhabited and to the territories and
natural resources. We call the States to recognize the rights of
the African Americans to the administration, control and usage of
these natural resources through traditional practices.
We call the States to denounce and to put an end to the systematic pressure applied through administrative and legal methods to deprive African descendents of their lands, territories and
natural resources. Such pressures covered by the States have resulted in internal displacement, migration, high levels of poverty
and the destruction of families, cultures and ecosystems.
We call the States and the international community to recognize
that African Americans are victims of police brutality and receive
a seriously discriminatory treatment in the legal system.
We call the States to respect, protect and promote the religious
identities of African Americans, to stop religious, social and economic persecution of groups such as the Rastafari or other expressions of African spirituality.
We also identify that the phenomenon of covered structural and
systematic racism covered by state organizations, public policies,
investment for development implemented by the States from the
Non visibility and denial of the consequences of racism and discrimination practiced against African Americans, has deepened
the inequality and the violation of fundamental economic, social
and cultural rights.
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We demand from the mass media, the elimination of stereotypes, pejorative images, cultural and religious values of the African American persons and peoples.
We demand the development of curricular proposals in the training of teachers on the contribution of this people to the construction of our respective countries, contributing to the increase of
racism, discrimination and xenophobia.
We demand the inclusion of African American peoples in the social, economic, cultural and educational development plans as
an instrument to eliminate the poverty maps and the absence of
research on the racial situation, racism and other forms of intolerance.
We alert about the environmental racism practice which becomes a form of contemporary racism that threatens the African
American people’s lives.
We demand from the States the responsibility for implementing
public policies of Affirmative Action in the short, mid and long
term, for which state resources and resources from international
institutions are required.
We demand from the States the adhesion to, respect for and fulfillment of Agreement 111 of the ILO that ensures the elimination
of all forms of discrimination in the labor market.
We denounce the inhuman conditions of prisons which affect
unevenly African Americans and demand the definitive abolishment of death penalty for going against all principles and instruments of human rights, and whose application is also biased by
racist prejudices.
We demand the recognition that up to the present time states
have not guaranteed the full enjoyment of sexual and reproductive rights and that rather, the African American women’s bodies
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have served as experimental laboratories, denying them not only
the right to information, but also the right to make decisions over
their own bodies
We demand the incorporation of public policies on affirmative
actions in favor of African American women, aimed at closing
the gap existing between women and men, promoting the productive capabilities of African American women, as well as their
successful insertion into the labor market though education and
technical training in activities promoting gender equity and quality of life.
Discussion and Conclusions:
Main Ideas
• Is it possible to visibilize the contributions of the Diaspora
from education? Strategies should modify the traditional
ethno-education schemes. The traditional ethic educational
model was directed by and for the ethnic communities which
allowed recovering traditional and linguistic practices. Nevertheless, educational proposals are supposed to be directed
to the society as a whole, as it is there where discrimination
practices are reproduced.
• Strategies should transform the educational system as a
whole. If the system is not transformed as a whole, there is
the risk of them being experiences isolated from other policies and sectors different from the educational one.
• Schools is a strategic scenario for the transformation of stereotypes and the images that folklorize the African American
culture.
• There has been intense work from social organizations and
educational institutions. Initiatives, mostly, are not the result
of public policies. They are the result of the efforts of social
organizations.
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Obstacles and challenges:
• In education, images and old stereotypes are reproduced, in
which racism expressions prevail. These images distort the
African culture, create and reproduce stereotypes through
culture “Folklorization. Which are the images received from
youngsters?
• There is an absence of state policies specifically aimed at the
juvenile population. This is what generates the invisibility of
African American communities.
• Exclusion from full participation changes African adolescents
into poverty agents.
• Education may be an opportunity or a space for the reproduction of exclusion.
• African youngsters’ vulnerability, aggravation in young women. Specific measures are required.
• There is scarce access of African American youngsters into
the formal educational system in basic, intermediate and Upper Education, with prevalence of the lowest indexes of access and desertion.
• There are not appropriate figures for the generation of focalized policies.
• The escalation of violence is a matter of concern that falls
on African American youngsters. They, and especially young
women are very vulnerable to conflict situations and all forms
of violence.
Proposals for policies and experiences that may be replicated:
Implement the advancements of the Durban conference on fighting against racism as an efficient instrument to be taken into the
public agenda in the American States’ institutions.
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Mechanisms and cooperation schemes proposed
• Encourage social policies to promote children, adolescents
and young persons’ development. Carry out, from the Ministries of Culture mass campaigns to reaffirm the identity of
the Africans and to create units specialized in the prevention
promotion into the said population
• Support from the private sector to employment of youngsters.
• Transformation of the legal system for the attention to young
persons. We propose substituting the legal punitive justice
for a restorative legal justice.
• Multicultural and ethnic-educational inclusion into the census instruments for 2010.
• Verify the fulfillment of commitments acquired in previous
international congresses (Durban Conference).
• Because of the vulnerability of young people, expressed
through the appropriation of violence and victimization, we
propose to, based on the notion of “audacity of hope”, formulate and strengthen local processes of artistic and cultural
training. These areas stimulate the formation of identity and
undertaking in African American children adolescents and
young people. Arts and Culture have a preventive and therapeutic function that allow the promotion of human rights,
values and respect to the body as a peace territory.
• It is necessary to design and develop educational communication strategies. We propose the generation of an exchange
of educational experiences with children.
• We find it necessary to strengthen social networks and programs implying the generation of material conditions to get
over the socio-economic inequalities.
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Table III
Migration and ehnic and cultural diversity
In this table, the migratory phenomenon in Latin America and the
Caribbean was analyzed to define possible strategies to channelize it efficiently and to lower the impact and affectation of African
American population towards the preservation of their identity,
diversity and culture.
Discussion axes:
• Transnational Migration
• Demographic Trends
• Economic inequalities between developed and underdeveloped countries.
• Internationalization of economy and globalization of commerce
• Mobility of the labor force
• World communication networks
Table IV
Afrodescendant Culture Entrepreneurship
Some mechanisms and cooperation schemes between countries
were analyzed and proposed for the development of promotion
strategies and access to cultural undertakings as a dynamic economic line, income, employment and entrepreneurial strengthening generator in an enlarged and diverse free commerce market. Identify actions to boost the links and synergies specific to
economy with African Americans.
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Discussion axes:
• Cultural industry options (music, dance, literature, audiovisual production, gastronomy, tourism and others)
• Culture as a development instrument for other economy sectors
• Access to tertiary education and professional training with
technical and ethic conditions for the effective leadership
and undertaking among young people.
Discussion y Conclusions
Table V:
Main Ideas
Cultural events are the most expeditious route in the processes
of inclusion.
We can not talk about entrepreneurship without undertaking a
sustained process.
What is the role of culture as a mechanism to overcome poverty?
How Afrodescendant people will get visibility and recognition of
products, such as art?
Culture is an inexhaustible source of resources; one has to think
what they can do with the talent from the school.
Culture, science and education must be related to major construction projects for the Afrodescendant population for their
development.
The strengthening of competitiveness is much more than selling;
it is to anticipate, adapt and prepare for changes.
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Experiences and policy proposals that could be replicated
The State should establish policies for the cultural entrepreneurship.
Create tables for dialogue between artists and people interested
in this matter.
Afrodescendants should go for self-determination, being autonomous.
The incorporation of the Afrodescendant story is the most expeditious way to the country’s body.
Perform a portfolio that allows us to know the offer.
What are the opportunities of the market of goods and services
that can move and what are the channels of circulation.
Proposed schemes and mechanisms for cooperation
It should encourage strategic partnerships between Afrodescendant.
The calls in the framework of cooperation should be simple methodologically speaking.
Conduct an investigation about the Afrodescendant Market.
Construct more holistic indicators for evaluating projects that are
more appropriate to show the impact of such programs in Afrodescendant communities.
Obstacles
Culture has been economized when the idea was to culturized
the economy.
Folklorisation of Afrodescendants cultural events.
One should keep in mind that there are sectors, like the media,
that invisibilizes the Afrodescendant population.
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Table VI
Political Representation
Know the achievements, opportunities and challenges and to define the critical elements of a common agenda for democratic
representation and participation and the effective leadership of
the African American population of the Americas in the political,
economic and administrative power spheres.
Discussion axes:
• Status of the African American (of the Americas) political representation and its meaning for national history/ memory.
• Regulating aspects and constitutional and legal advancements related to ethbic diversity and African-American culture.
• Relationship between representation policy, electoral systems and the creation of institutions for the implementation
of social inclusion policies for African American population.
• Afro participation and representation policy within institution and processes of the private sector, the international
community and their relationship with the support to recognition and exercise of ethnic and racial diversity.
• Critical aspects of an African American political leadership.
Giancarlo Salazar Caicedo. Historian
Profile: Historian from the Javeriana University. Candidate for
Master in Political Studies, IEPRI National University of Colombia. Deputy Director of Analysis and Development of Historical
Research and Documentation Center of Afro-Colombian Culture,
Ministry of Culture - Technological University of Choco. He has
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been Professor of International Politics in the African International Relations from the Jorge Tadeo Lozano University.
Intervention
National visibility of ethnic identities may depend on its relevance in electoral terms. Specific communities have managed
to achieve visibility in both importance to politicians and rulers.
It is important to understand that the rulers (with a presidential election) are interested in communities that provide votes
to their political ambitions. Doubling the black vote in Colombia
can be a key strategy for leveling in social and economic rights.
This paper discusses the possibility of double voting for Afro in
the frameworks of political philosophy and theory of the state of
John Rawls.
We don’t need to show the historical marginalization of black
communities. It is enough to assume some social, economic and
political unobjectionable realities such as: 1. statistics of quality
of life make the predominantly black population municipalities
at the end of the table; 2. statistics of entrepreneurship and economic development are at the bottom of Table 3. Political representation of Afro-Colombians in the political system is reduced to
three seats wrongly appointed by the Ministry of the Interior.
Although the current system failed to consider the special district, this paper will not attempt to make a balance of this model
of representation. This would deepen the crisis of representation
of all democratic systems. This discussion will not be covered
here. However, some assumptions must be made to sustain the
failure of the system of representation, particularly in relation to
the goals set at the time of institutionalization: 1. The objective
of greater empowerment for communities through a representation in the House of Representatives, is diluted in the same
representation marked by the popularity footballers, rather than
responding to organized political process. 2. The validity of the
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Advisory Committee is zero. 3. The Office of Black Communities
Affairs and the current Office of Ethnic Affairs has no budgets. 4.
No development plan has been implemented for the Black Community in the last three governments. 5. The National Education
Commission has regulated only some curricular guidelines for
the class of Afrocolombian Studies, which do not apply. The only
significant advance is the recognized collective titling of lands in
which they acknowledge some economic and cultural rights.
If it is accepted that political participation of Afrocolombians
continues to be marginal, and that the system of representation
by special district has not made a real empowerment of people,
then we can come to discuss a proposal to be discussed with the
arguments of the contemporary political theory. The sole purpose of this paper is to argue that since the concept of justice
“rawlsian” it is possible to establish an unequal freedom in the
electoral vote, without violating the fundamental principles of
justice. This means to give a higher value of the black citizen voting: a two black vote. The establishment of a real empowerment
of communities less privileged. Thus we must show consistency
with the “rawlsians” arguments.
In this way the arguments of favorable ethnic politics must demonstrate that they are based on the most important natural duty:
to encourage fair institutions. Therefore to argue that such inequality is to be a fair set of historical circumstances. In this sense
the obligation of the argument must lead to recognition of the
need to amend the rules of the system of popular election, and
shore up a system where inter-ethnic political cooperation reach
common benefits. It is necessary to make it clear of the usefulness of the social norm by identifying shared interests.
Thus, to sustain itself, the proposal must identify some difficulties.
The greatest difficulty would appear favorable for the reflection
of this can be done in the original position. Several conditions of
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the original position will validate the adoption of a standard type
of its kind in the original situation. For example, the veil of ignorance, equality, utility, and rational choice. Upon this difficulty it
must be favorable to the proposal to locate better relevance in
the process of applying the principles to the institutions. Those
four steps outlined by Rawls (Original position, constituent congress, legislation, enforcement of particular rules) which gradually lifts the veil of ignorance and in the same way the historical
and political sociology factors are taken into account.
Another major difficulty is faced in the limit of equality that requires the scheme of liberties. Recall that the latter did not give
in to economic or social benefits. However there is a possibility
that it could transfer if it is found that current regulations are in
conflict with the rules of basic freedoms for blacks. In that sense,
the argument seeks to demonstrate that it is possible to restrict
basic freedoms of the rest of the Colombian population only for
the same freedom, the one to vote of the elector,help tune the
system better, as suggested by Rawls.
Here then the claim policies are in accordance with the Rawl
principles of justice, mainly from the theoretical coupling to the
proposal principle of participation. The latter is a major vein of
the arguments raised for political favors. In this respect the limitations on the principle of participation help, partly, in sustaining the inequality of the vote, since the constitution “may enable
political inequalities, particularly in economic differences that go
against the principle of participation”. So then, it is possible to
give up some freedom “to transform a less fortunate society in
which all other basic freedoms can be fully exercised”, and exercised by all ethnic groups in addition to participating in a social
contract.
In this way, we can consider the possibility of structuring arguments in favor of what Rawls calls political inequality, particu-
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larly in the context of a democratic society that believes the basic
precept of the immutable principle of participation: voting by an
elector.
Social and political cooperation
The neo-contractualism of Rawls considers a premise that we
will use here: there are certain circumstances that require us to
live together and cooperate. We signed agreements to the extent that we believe that prosperity becomes a cooperative effort. Maybe in the economics aspects it is more clearly seen how
the problem is resolved. While in the political, viewing a political
cooperation that goes beyond what would be a system of perfect
procedural justice, which guarantees equal rights and freedoms,
equal vote for all, is no less easy. To make it more legible to the
terms of political cooperation we must assimilate a number of
principles of economic cooperation: redistribution, efficiency,
and length difference.
Cooperate politically represents the right to vote not only as a
basic freedom, but as a primary good. Primary goods in a society as a whole sees the vote as a public benefit resulting from
the cooperation and social policy throughout history. And as a
basic freedom which guarantees the right to participate in public
decisions. If it is recognized that blacks have contributed to the
consolidation of democracy, then it is possible to recognize that
society should ensure a more balanced result in the benefits of
social cooperation. If the right to vote are met or is been consolidated with the participation of blacks, then you can consider a
redistribution of profit achieved for the least advantaged.
This is not a procedure that tries to compensate and redistribute
the benefits to vote or subtracting the same right to restrict other
citizen. The objective is to find a system in which institutions are
just. A system in which the principle of difference bonds with the
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efficiency one and leads to a fair distribution of political participation.
Then the redistribution of votes in favor of political marginality
conditions seeks to balance the political participation of less politically advantaged people. Everything without diminishing other’s
participation. It would be an efficient configuration of political
participation to the extent that you may enjoy at least one person to change, “without at the same time damaging other people
(at least)”. In the same sense, there is no configuration found that
effectively improves the political conditions of the Afrodescendant communities, even though the opportunity of change is low
and can be instituted.
Furthermore, writing of the vote is the issue of political participation. In Rawls it translates into a requirement that is expressed
as follows: “this principle requires that all citizens have an equal
right to participate and determine the outcome of the constitutional process established by law they must obey,” which means
for voters to vote and equal access to political power according
to abilities and talents.
Historical periods in these conditions have not been met for black
communities. As mentioned above the law 70, it has tried since
1993 and in general since the 1991 constitution, to ensure equitable access to political power. This is the situation we face mainly with the principle of participation outlined above in Rawls. The
window to address our goals is to open from the economic considerations, the extension of the principle of participation and
the limits to freedom.
The economic differences
The hypothetical situations and theoretical abstractions of the
author seem to deny his proposal in some kind of historical sociology or political situations. But John Rawls has not always closed
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the window to considerations of this kind. It is the first case of
economic inequalities in relation to political participation. The
author in his text is fully aware that the principle of equal liberty can be affected by circumstances that violate the principle of
participation. His answer is that, in these vices, “political parties
should be independent of private interests, giving them enough
income to take part in the constitutional scheme.”
Limited in their formulation of the solution Rawls fails to specify a
special situation of disadvantage politics, only makes it economic.
Our adaptation of the exception that Rawls makes in political participation takes two elements: first, a warning to the possibility
of exemptions from political equality, and second, the exception
to political equality for economic reasons. In both circumstances,
the proposal of favorability is compatible politically.
Extension of the principle of participation
Another filter through which the proposal can be reconciled with
the Rawls theory is the extension of the principle of participation. The latter refers to “the degree to which the procedure is
restricted to government by the majority of the constitutional
mechanisms”.] In multicultural societies the idea of social unity is
not sufficient to ensure the excesses of the policies of the majority. “A constitution that restricts the majority rule by traditional
means poses a different” body of law more just.” Thus, increasing
the value of participation by ethnic minorities, blacks in this case
equals to establish a slow and meditated on the actions of Colombian mestizo majority. The proposal brought a constitutional
arrangement which has to reflect a delay in the exercise of the
will of the majority.
Limit the freedom
While freedom is a priority in every way, this does not mean it
is absolute. Rawls’ arguments yield to historical possibilities de-
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fined and may change depending on circumstances not favorable. Openly in Theory of Justice Rawls confirms the possibility
of an uneven political freedom: “If some have more votes than
others, political freedom is uneven, and the same is true if some
votes are valued much more than others; or if a part of society
has no political rights. In many historical situations a less political
freedom can be justified”. Rawls has laid this proposal since the
beginning of his Theory of Justice. It is not inconsistent because
it says that the freedoms may be limited to transform a society
not so fortunate, so that at any given time they can enjoy the full
freedoms.
This suggests two ways to limit or requirements: first, the relative inequality of freedom of participation conditional historical
defenses, and the second, time. In the first Rawls argument leave
the historical circumstances may limit the participation. We assume that from historical arguments validated from a constitutional and consensual position. In the second point it specifies
that an unequal liberty is tolerable only in two ways. Rawls explicitly proposed as an injustice is tolerable only to prevent a greater
injustice. And as we infer from his implicit arguments: should be
established as a measure of temporary and transitory, which ensures unhappy end. In these conditions freedom of participation
could be increased in favor of an ethnic minority.
The norm
More often has John Rawls taken the liberty in relation to “constitutional and legal restrictions”. And more specifically: “Freedom is a certain structure of institutions, a system of public rules
defining rights and duties”. So our discussion should address the
problem faced by law and institutionalization. Rawls meant by
the institution of a public system of rules that define jobs and
positions with their rights and duties, powers and immunities,
and so on. These rules specify certain forms of action as permis-
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sible, others as prohibited, and establishing certain safeguards
and penalties for violations to occur when the rules. Our proposal would be part of a set of rules that constitute a democratic and
pluralist system embedded in a constitution adopted by recognizing, in the seventh article, its ethnic diversity.
It is located in the heart of the same idea of overlapping consensus as to sink roots in the Constitution; the proposal will institute a procedure of dealing with electoral political rivalries. From
these, the way for a reformulation of the rules of black participation in power and politics has its way. Accordingly, a standard for
political favorability should reflect ethnic requirements, procedure and institutionalization.
Agreement conditions
The first thing that has to reflect the proposal is the result of a political agreement between multicultural factions. In that case, the
understanding behind the agreement is differentiated in rights
claims not only from certain historical situations, but this text
aims to support the theory. “This suggests that, if we defend the
rights varying group, we should not rely solely on historic agreements.
Because the historic agreements should always be interpreted
and inevitably updated and revised, we must be able to build
the historic agreements on a theory of deeper justice.” Besides
presenting historical and theoretical arguments, the terms of
an agreement favorable policy must meet normal requirements
of the concept of justice. The main restriction is that Rawls says
that the rule should be guided by a comprehensive approach and
avoid the particular thing. After, the public endorsed by all those
involved in the agreement.
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Procedure
Ensuring fair implementation of a disparity in the principle of
equal liberty lies in the result as in the procedure for its institutional formulation. Although not proved fully capable of ensuring a fair totally just, the process in formulating the agreement
should provide a favorable policy that minimum guarantees enshrined in the constitutional processes.
However, one can not escape considering the opposition of the
agreement. People will bring the arguments and considered them
as unfair. At first, it could be argued that from the two sources
of injustice is not correct to qualify the agreement as unfair. Recall that Rawls has two sources for the injustice which occurs:
1. agreements differ from public standards and 2. Although the
rules adjust to the agreement is irrational. Thus, the procedure to
adjust the proposed rule and the arguments would not be irrational, while demonstrating effective, consensual and cooperative.
In this way, “almost in a fair State, we have normally the duty to
obey unjust laws by virtue of our duty to support a just constitution.” Finally, rather than an unjust law, the proposal can be
viewed as a derogatory action. Primarily, because this is a compromise on granting political disparity in favor of a person or a
group of people.
Principal conclusion
A key finding is that the unequal bargaining freedom is not a zero
sum game. It is this condition which makes much of the inequality. Note that the term refers to inequality and difference rather
than a lesser or greater freedom. This means that rather than
adding value to the citizen’s vote is subtracted black political
participation to the rest of citizens eligible to vote. The proposal
achieves the optimal efficiency with which Pareto would agree.
So that it is not possible in the political participation of anyone,
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but if progress is made in the recognition and empowerment of a
politically and economically less advantaged community.
As it became clear, the resolution and feasibility of the proposal
has a close relationship with him when and where one should
take an institution. In this case, the recurring references to the
constitutional process that require thinking about space and time
to agree on political inequality are the Constituent Congress.
Within four stages raised by Rawls, the most relevant is the one
mentioned, given the constraints presented by the Original Position. In that sense, it is possible to conclude that under conditions of total “Veil of Ignorance” is not an explanation of political
inequality, because the social and historical arguments are relevant in the discussion.
If the objective of any proposed contract, and in particular the
Rawls theory, is to achieve a minimum of well-ordered society,
then the policy would be favorable according to the basic structure of that society. If a well-ordered society is to increase its
membership in the property and the rate of welfare, in a tenuous theory of good, being related to the freedoms, opportunities,
wealth, income, trust and respect, then the proposal based on
historical and theoretical constructionists arguments, it points a
well-ordered a pluralistic society.
On the other had, the tendency of stability of this society would
be enhanced by our proposal. As the idea of an overlapping consensus it materializes what makes assortments of any imminent
danger and dangerous ethnic conflicts. In this regard the proposal would agree with Rawls’ conception of justice that “it is more
stable than another if the sense of justice which tends to generate is stronger and able to overcome the destructive tendencies”
such as a radical ethnic separatist.
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Discussion y Conclusions
Table 6:
Main Ideas
There is a tension between the political approach and the concept
of political participation, since it incorporates in its various design
elements relating to the empowerment, organization, resources
and representation in various fields and at different levels.
This topic emphasizes the recognition of our rights as Afrodescendant communities, an issue that must be separated from
the political parties in power, to generate space and to achieve a
political impact in the formulation and implementation of public
policies and institutional activities.
The issue relates more to the policy as a tool for advocacy and
social mobilization, and not from representatively exclusively; it
is about the implementation of policies.
Therefore to speak of political participation involves talking about
representative democracy and participatory democracy.
The challenge is to include, in the agenda of political parties, issues related to the development of Afrodescendants, as well as
the strengthening of political alliances with excluded groups and
minorities.
Political representation affects our lives in many ways, for example, the decentralization has implied chances of an impact but
not political representation and participation of our communities
will not affect the decision making process is an opportunity Afrodescendants should take advantage of.
The big challenge is how the Afrodescendant leaders build an
agenda of policy and joint action to establish political relations
with Latin American countries, with Europe and Africa. There-
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fore, it is about changing the way you see things and especially
the practice of the policy, to understand holistically the processes
of ethnic and racial globally.
Political participation and its representation are crucial for achieving the effect; it is necessary to have representation and advancing the empowerment of Afrodescendant as a social movement.
This is based on the minimum access of Afrodescendant to the
popularly elected officials and decision. This is limiting the chances of being visible and is an expression of exclusion from the political system in which representative democracy prevail against
the challenges and opportunities offered by a cultural participatory democracy, where ethnic and other minorities have a greater impact on policy decisions and programs that affect them.
Obstacles
The strengthening of Afrodescendants’ organizations and associations for the full exercise of rights and the impact on the design,
implementation and decision-making process of public policy.
The empowerment of Afrodescendant communities for effective
participation in decision-making processes at local, regional, national and international levels.
In this scenario, empowerment appears as a necessity to have a
presence on instances, spaces and positions of political decision.
Experiences and policy proposals that could be replicated
Move forward in building a program policy agenda as a mechanism of action and work arising from movement of Afrodescendants in the Americas.
Develop a study for the purpose of obtaining information on the
electoral behavior of Afrodescendants in the various countries of
the region.
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Accountability as a requirement to be elected as representatives
as they do not always respond to interest groups but to the interests of political parties, they do not assume the representativeness of those who elected them.
Generate strategies from the Afrodescendant movement for
the application and implementation of assessments at different
places where Afrodescendant people that are at a disadvantage
stage.
Preserve and strengthen the alliance policy of the Afrodescendant movement with the human rights of social movements
(indigenous, migrants, women, etc..) as a need to create a platform for action to combat racism and racial discrimination in the
Americas.
Proposed mechanisms and patterns of cooperation
Create development programs in the respective government
ministries and portfolios for Afrodescendant people and communities with an affirmative action or positive discrimination.
Share experiences of advocacy, representation and political representation with the English spoken Caribbean countries.
Table 6
The power of the media and positioning of diversity.
This table generated recommendations to strengthen the role of
the media in reaffirming the cultural identity and collective imaginaries of the African American population in Latin America and
the Caribbean and the overcoming of discrimination.
Discussion axes:
• Influence of communication media over the construction of
the African American social imaginary in Latin America.
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• Need for the revision of contents in the media and reconsideration of access.
• Promotion of the cultural diversity in the media, including
advertising.
• Analysis of the contradictory contributions of the communication media and revision of formats, genres and styles.
• Legislation in the media (sustainable development of our societies and protection of the cultural diversity).
• African-Americans (of the Americas) as contents producers
in the media.
Emma Kamau. Journalist
Profile
She is from Kenya with a degree in Journalism and an MA in Information Science from the University of Navarra (Pamplona, Spain.
She has developed her experience in international organizations,
private sector and various mass media. She has lived in Colombia
since the end of 2005. In November 2005, she began to work on
the International Organization for Migrations (IOM), as a Specialist of National Minorities and Reports Officer until March, 2008.
One of her achievements during this period was to support and
coordinate the First National Conference of Afro Journalists in
Colombia. She also developed the strategy Differential Approach
to Ethnic Minorities of the organization in Colombia.
Lecture
Culture and Cultural Diversity
It is necessary to keep revising and going deeper into the interpretation of the cultural diversity concept, from a pedagogical and democratic perspective, within the framework of global
political and economic junctures, and facing the conflicts posed
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by current societies. Otherwise, the debate on cultural diversity
could become a way of masking reality.
The defense and promotion of cultural diversity goes through the
analysis of realities, both global as well as local. Diversity is, on
one side, a matter with a global character which implies the coexistence of different cultural expressions that should learn to
face their differences and conflicts from dialogue and democratic
participation. On the other side, it is a local matter that tends
to reproduce the same inequalities and exclusions, but it does it
from the inside of the States-Nation. Nevertheless, the capacity
to manage the differences inside States, regions or locations requires avoiding that global cultural patterns void the minority or
local cultural expressions, vulnerable per se.
Additionally, it is essential to distinguish between the perception
of the governments and the civil society’s everyday reality. Adoption of a promotion policy of cultural diversity is in essence, a
matter of governability, but it has a huge transcendence for citizens. Therefore, adopting appropriate public policies on the matter implies necessarily a previous active participation of the civil
society.
Cultural diversity should be interpreted as the peoples’ final expression of the material and immaterial social heritage. Societies
need this heritage to recreate their past, interpret their present
and Project their future towards a world with a higher interrelation and tolerance towards each other. It is therefore crucial to
promote and adopt policies and actions necessary for the preservation of cultures, but also to promote their ‘evolution in difference’, this is to say, in a global framework which requires respect
and tolerance from the existing diversity.
So, it is evident that there is a need to restore credibility and legitimacy –finally, the prestige - of the cultural policies required
to regulate balance between different cultures. Therefore it is
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imperative to strengthen public debate, the active promotion of
citizens’ participation and review of the existing inequalities, including the communication media
Communication and Cultural Diversity
The link between communication and cultural diversity stood out
in the Civil Society Statement in the World Summit of the Information Society celebrated by the United Nations in 2003:
“Cultural and linguistic diversity constitutes a crucial facet of the
information and communication societies focused on people.
Each culture has a dignity and a value to be respected and protected. Cultural and linguistic diversity are based, among other
things, on the freedom for information and expression and in the
freedom everyone has to freely participate in the community’s
cultural life, at the local, national and international level. This
participation embraces activities carried out both as users as well
as producers of cultural content. Information and communication
technologies, included traditional communication media have
the especially important task of maintaining and promoting the
world’s cultures and languages”.
It is indispensable to consider communication as a key sphere in
cultural policies. Today, communication media operate as global
instruments. Therefore, a deep revision of the public communication media is essential, especially considering their entering
into the digital era. Communication media have the responsibility of working actively on the suppression of the existing barriers that hinder the cultural diversity promotion, even more in an
increasingly interconnected world. Current changes in the media
and communication technologies constitute an opportunity for
transformation to be fostered. Thus, opportunities are created
for the media to develop new forms of communication, the application of new management, participation and representation
practices from plurality.
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In sum, communication media are required to, within their production processes, face the challenge of approaching the complexity implied by diversity, essential condition to appropriately
managing information, avoiding the trivialization of cultural diversity..
This request also constitutes a challenge for legislators, professionals and academics to contribute to the debate for the reformulation of public policies regarding it, from the responsibility
that implies approaching social needs from a differential focus.
In view of the risk that unique thinking supposes, which tends to
associate discrepancy with threat, this space should promote a
debate which constitutes an active contribution to the adoption
of democratic communication policies and a culture which favors
the elimination of barriers and multiply accesses for cultural diversity into communication media.
Cultural Diversity: Education and Communication
The elimination of barriers to cultural diversity is in itself a challenge for education policies. In this sense, it is required to involve
communication academics and professionals into joint educational programs such as the inclusion of educational contents in
the media, as well as initiatives oriented to critically analyze the
role and performance of communication media.
Universities and research centers have the duty of promoting
critical investigation on cultural diversity and connected matters.
Having reliable, rigorous and contrasted information and making
diagnosis contributes to mitigate the conflicts and stereotypes
with which different and diversity are associated. At the same
time, it allows building alternatives for a plural world including
and respecting differences.
It is necessary that academic institutions act decidedly in the
updating and promotion of studies related to Information and
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Communication Sciences, promoting social-cultural and interdisciplinary approaches, getting through the current phase, essentially descriptive and insufficiently sensitive to diversity in the use
of communication.
Additionally, it is recommended to foster comparative studies
between countries in Latin America, communities and research
groups which allow contrasting the different existing realities and
supporting each other in learning processes which might become
models for the promotion of diversity in the communication media and even have an effect on public policy.
In this sense, it is crucial to count with the authorities’ commitment to favor and support initiatives that allow the development
of research and the broadcasting of the investigator’s critical
analysis in public opinion spaces, this, within a framework of
continuous dialogue between governments, cultural industries,
media professionals and the academic world.
Access and management of communication media for communities
One of the greatest challenges for the promotion of inter-culurality is communication. The first and inalienable condition of
cultural diversity in the media is freedom of speech. In comparison, the media within communities are crucial to promote intercultural dialogue. Recognition of cultural diversity demands the
existence of the communities and groups “own” media. The generalized tendency to excessively rule and to make it difficult for
smaller media to exist and favoring the expansion of the biggest
ones must be avoided. Communication policies must offer an answer to these needs.
In this sense, it is deemed necessary to establish legal frames that
facilitate the use of media by cultural creating communities, including African Americans and other ethnic minorities.
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States should exercise their regulating role for communication
media and for the use of official times of the public media to
promote cultural diversity expressions.
Additionally, it is the States’ responsibility to promote and spread
education on the usage of new technologies in order to strengthen communication capabilities, management of knowledge, organization and social participation.
New communication technologies should be adapted and aimed
at facilitating new participation schemes and to serve the needs of
expression of our societies’ huge cultural diversity.
The digital gap is one more manifestation of underdevelopment
which difficult the appreciation of the existing diversity. This gap
is evident in the fact that the required technologies are highly
concentrated in large urban areas, while they are hardly available
in rural media serving local communities.
Communitarian Media
Communitarian communication media are aimed at carrying out
a work of democratizing society; they are largely committed to
the defense of the civil society’s rights, starting with the right to
think and speak freely.
Communication is a fundamental element in social processes and
in the construction of peace. Spreading proposals arising in base
social processes is essential to create real scenarios of pacific
conflict solution. In this sense, communication taken as a social
relation and expressions of human ideas and feelings mechanism
becomes an extremely useful tool. It transmits knowledge acquired through individual and collective experiences that may be
useful to others or as a reference to making decisions.
Communitarian media become channels of expression for the
communities’ social and political subjects. These may be very
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valuable if they propitiate spaces for the exercise of freedom of
speech and expression and generate new options of communitarian organization.
These media arise from communities when they feel the urge
to stop being passive information consumers and become leading characters, generators and carriers of their cultures. In many
communities, these media are the only voices they have to demand better life conditions. With the increasingly growing tendency of creating international networks, these voices may be
significantly enhanced.
The media, as well as other social and economic sectors, have
been gradually concentrating into the hands of just a few ones.
This tendency affects negatively their opportunity to act as social
and cultural development tools, to become functional structures
subject to consumerism and to the promotion of a single vision
of the world. In this sense, communitarian media represent an alternative to the impositions of global market due to their marked
vocation of social justice and defense of diversity.
Communitarian media offer a service essential for society. Nevertheless, their development (particularly communitarian radio
and television) depend on the access to certain resources that
have not been ensured. The capability to access radio frequencies as well as the appropriation of technical standards is crucial
for the evolution of these media. Therefore, both governments
as well as intergovernmental organizations must facilitate the access and the distribution of frequencies, as well as the development of appropriate technical standards.
Unfortunately, the view is far from being encouraging. Even
though there are international guidelines that promote the development of communitarian media, often national legislation
and policies in the different countries tend to hinder this development. Nevertheless, the situation may significantly change
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from country to country. In general obstacles faced by communitarian media go from restricted concessions or inappropriate
radio frequencies, in favor of private communication companies,
to legal limitations to access financial resources and even threats
and persecution against communitarian communicators.
Afro-Colombians and Communication
Historically, Afro-Colombian communities have suffered the
harshness of exclusion and marginality. Despite their huge human potentiality, this collective has not found the space necessary to significantly contribute to the nation’s development. This
situation of marginality has deepened some much into the AfroColombian mentality, that most of them their misery as something normal and look into their future with resignation.
African descending population in Colombia has suffered a racism
expressed by an extreme contempt towards their traditions and
realities. The subtlety with which this discrimination is exerted
against African Americans makes it almost imperceptible in some
cases, especially for those who do not want to see in racism, a
reality in the country, a social, economic and cultural issue which
calls for an immediate solution.
Afro-Colombians still suffer backwardness in comparison to the
rest of the population in Colombia, with figures beyond an 80% of
the basic needs unsatisfied and 76% of extreme poverty, against
the national average which does not reach a 38%.
One of the greatest obstacles in the Afro-Colombian communities’ development processes is directly related to the general
invisibility applied to minorities in the country. This lack of recognition prevents its contribution to Colombia’s progress, their
wealth, their cultural heritage and the Afro-Colombian environment’s potential from being known.
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Mass media play a crucial role in this situation. Matters related
to the Afro-Colombian population are systematically ignored, despite the possibilities set forth in 1991 Political Constitution.
This lack of recognition and visibilization becomes even more
serious when Afro-Colombians, due to different reasons, ignore
their own history; their rights, being even ashamed of their values, traditions and even their racial condition.
Mass media transmits messages in which African Americans appear in humiliating situations, never as models of behavior or
positive references developing an image different from the traditionally pejorative one that most of the population have regarding them.
Communication media lacks information to make Afro-Colombians proud, information that may build models for the new generations, separated from preconceived concepts which play against
their possibilities.
Watching the communication media dynamics (written, radio,
television, electronic), we may state that Afro-Colombian journalists have also suffered the harshness generated by this juncture by excluding and invisibilize them.
Contrasts with the aforementioned the increasing trend of Afro-Colombians enrolled in social communication and journalism
faculties in different universities of the country. This phenomenon becomes a real opportunity to become more visible, for the
country to know their reality and for their own people to know
their reality.
In regards to the media in the Afro-Colombian settling geographic
areas, even though there are a few ones, they are used as political booster, with no journalistic rigor and lacking commitment to
their community’s development. Additionally, they are isolated
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efforts in their purpose of making their own journalistic undertaking and they often die within a year after they are created.
Afro-Colombians need to develop their own media (mass, communitarian, civil, alternative) to take care of broadcasting the
other vision of their reality, of their history, to contribute jointly
to the initiative of multiple organizations of building a new AfroColombian leadership.
This collective need to potentialize all the Afro-Colombian Organizations’ communication strategies, because their efforts, even
though increasing, are still being carried out in an isolated manner, preventing significant achievements.
Nevertheless, different efforts are being carried out in the country
by communities, in mostly African Colombian regions, to achieve
an appropriate and effective communication for Afro-Colombians, which allow facing the serious problems through which they
go and looking for the solutions necessary to show a multiethnic
and pluri-cultural country.
In this sense, communication media have been being developed,
or there has been participation in mass and commercial media,
but showing the particulars of the Afro-Colombian identities in
the different areas. In their own way and in their context, journalism professionals have developed formats, programs and themes
to access the information itself, as the exercising of a right provided by 1991 constitution and explicitly in Law 70 of 1993, among
others.
Different Afro-Colombian communication experiences have appeared in magazines, newspapers, bulletins, radio programs, web
pages and television programs for the regional channels in which
their own things are seen from other point of view. Values, contributions and initiatives are shown, trying to change the negative image reinforced for years by mass media into the collective
imaginary and ideary.
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Even though these efforts are important, a qualitative lea is necessary to allow a greater impact on the generation of opinion
both in the regions as well as at a national and international level.
. Bogotá, as capital city, has set the example to the country by issuing the African Bogotan Public Policy as a space for affirmative
action in which the right for a differentiated communication is
included.
Advancements: Afro-Colombian Journalists Association, (APA)
The Afro-Colombian Journalists Association, APA, gives its first
steps in 2000, as a space for permanent dialogue between journalists from the black community to define strategies aimed at
promoting, from journalism, the construction of democracy and
development. The APA was legally established on the 12th July
2007 and looks to consolidate as a reflection forum with the capability of affecting the communication media and to look for
spaces for decision making among them.
Also, it works in awareness creation within the Communication
Faculties in the universities to have an ethnic perspective included into their contents and looks for spaces of permanent training and reflection in order to find ways of incidence into national
reality.
The APA is a social organization promoting the honorable and
effective exercise of journalism, while tightening union ties between its members and between them and other organizations
with similar objectives. As a center for thinking and research,
it also looks to contribute to the consolidation of democracy,
equality and inclusion, to the strengthening of the Afro Colombian population and to the country’s development.
One of the main actions has been the organization of the First
National Encounter of Afro-Colombian Journalists, carried out in
Cali, Valle del Cauca, on the 4th and 5th October 2007, in which
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more than 120 Afro-Colombian journalists as well as international guests and representatives of unions, the academy and the National Government met to discuss the reality of the exercise of
Afro Colombian journalism and inter-cultural communication.
This Encounter, which had the presence, among other personalities, of the Minister of Communications, María del Rosario
Guerra, was supported by the International Organization for Migrations (OIM) with resources of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Ministry of Interior, Comfenalco Valle and the University Santiago de Cali.
Proposal about Communication Strategies for the African
Diaspora in the Americas:
During the “First National Encounter of Afro-Colombian Journalists”, organized by the Afro-Colombian Journalists Association
(APA) in October 2007, different work tables were organized to
discuss about “Afro-Colombians and Communication.”
Among others, the following subjects were treated:
• Ethnicity and communication in Universities.
• Afro-Colombians the mass media.
• Afro-Colombians and their own communication media.
• Journalists and Afro-Colombian communicators.
The following are the recommendations generated on these subjects that may be applied to the communication proposal for the
African Diaspora in the Americas:
Ethnicity and communication in universities.
• Carry out a state of the art on the existing legislation and
communication policies of Afro descendents in the different
Iberoamerican countries.
• Establish alliances with different universities in each one of
the countries to carry out a study on the way in which com-
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munication media Project Afro descendents and other ethnic minorities through, for example, the observatories of the
media in journalism faculties.
• To produce a manual on the journalistic coverage responsible
for the ethnic issues in mass media.
• To develop subjects of Intercultural Communication.
• To promote intercultural communication studies with the
support of universities with journalism and ethnic studies
faculties.
• To carry out agreements with universities for diplomacies in
research and communication of the Afro descendents. In Colombia, indigenous have the support of the Universidad Pontificia Javeriana in Cali to obtain the title of the “Diplomacy in
Indigenous Research and Communication.”
Afro descendents and the Mass Media
• To promote the access of Afro descendents and other ethnic
groups into the mass media.
• To promote the social role of mass communication media in
the ethnic issue.
• To develop training strategies for journalists and communicators from mass media on the rights of Afro descendents and
other ethnic groups.
• To carry out agreements with the mass media allowing the
training of communicators and journalists from the African
Diaspora and other ethnic minorities.
• To promote mass media offering internships to African
Diaspora students and other ethnic groups coursing communication studies within their social responsibility strategy.
• To promote affirmative actions from the mass media to offer employment opportunities to Afro descendent journalists
and from other ethnic groups
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• Afro descendents and their own communication media
• To carry out the documentation on the advancements and
challenges within the existing legislation and communication
policies of Afro descendents and other ethnic minorities in
the different countries in the Americas.
• To establish the advancements and challenges posed by the
creation of their own media for Afro descendents and other
ethnic groups and the public and private sector’s role, including a rural and urban approach.
• To promote the creation and sustainability of Afro descendants’ communication media networks and other ethnic
groups (alternative journalism, independent journalism and
community journalism, among others).
• To promote the creation of communitarian and citizen radio
networks of Afro descendents and other ethnic minorities, in
order to define joint proposals, exchange and replicate successful experiences.
• To strengthen the use, management and control of communication media and of new information technologies by Afro
descendent journalists and communicators, as well as from
and other ethnic groups.
• Implementation, by the Iberoamerican Countries’ Ministries
of Communication, of a systematization of the different experiences carried out in radio, film industry, television or Internet about Afro descendents and other ethnic minorities,
to have an inventory of material to be used or re-used in productions and programs and to be commercialized and broadcasted by the media.
• To support the production, broadcasting and commercialization of products made by Afro descendents and other ethnic
groups.
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• Strategy with Journalists and Communicators
• To analyze and to redefine the role of Afro descendent communicators in the social change and progress to contribute
to the strengthening of the defense of life and of their communities.
• To promote spaces and communication and coordination
mechanisms between their own communicators and local
corresponsals to carry out an efficient and articulated work.
• To identify the journalistic specialized training required by
Afro descendant journalists and other ethnic minorities to
offer permanent training for the optimal development of the
journalistic tasks.
• To promote protection mechanisms for the free exercise of
journalism.
• To promote and support the constitution and structuring of
Afro American journalists and communicators networks in
the different countries in Latin America.
• To promote and support the creation of alliances with communicators of other ethnic groups and journalists associations and communication media from Africa and from other
places in the world.
Finally, support the institutionalization of an Award for the mass
media and journalist promoting policies to respect cultural diversity. The proposal of the Afro Colombian Journalists Association
(APA) is to create an award called Manuel Zapata Olivella.
Final Recommendations
It is necessary to adopt a clear and defined strategy to promote
diversity and to help the media facing the challenge of improving
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their diversity levels, both in contents as well as in media institutions and audiovisual industry;
Considering the critical analysis presented by some Afro descendant communicators and journalists and from other ethnic
minorities on the treatment of the “other” in mass media, we
request from academic institutions, professional organizations
and regulatory entities to maintain a critical attitude regarding
discriminatory, excluding, deforming or simply simplifying treatment of those images;
The inter-cultural dialogue should be reinforced through new initiatives increasing awareness about the existence of minorities
and different cultural identities among professionals in the communication media. Also, dialogue should be promoted between
the media and these communities’ representatives;
To recognize the need for a mediatic literacy and to promote the
development of programs to improve understanding among people, as citizens, and to teach how the information may have an
effect on their own lives;
To support scientific research and monitoring in media-related
issues, such as concentration and pluralism of the media, and to
extend those issues’ public debate, including the contribution of
communication media to human rights, freedom, tolerance and
inter-cultural dialogue;
We propose the Ministries of Culture to create and broadcast a
source of resources to collect the media and technology most
successful experiences regarding cultural diversity. With that initiative we want to foster the broadcasting of these experiences
and to constitute an international exchange network aimed at facilitating cooperation;
To make of equality between men and women without concern
for race and religion a reality in the media in the Iberoamerican
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countries, and to renew efforts to eradicate all discrimination
forms.
Pedro Viveros
Profile: He has a master studies in Public Policies Analysis of the
Université Laval, Canadá. Social Communicator and Journalist,
University of La Sabana. Currently, consultant at Dattis Consultores en Comunicaciones and partner of the company Agenda,
Gestión Institucional. Professor of the Javeriana, Rosario and
Central Universities. He has carried out different cinsultancies
both in the public as well as in the private sector, in companies
such as EPM, Chamber of Commerce of Bogotá, Banco de Colombia, World Bank, BID, Uban Development Institute, Bogotá,
Regional Port Society of Buenaventura, among others, and he
was Deputy Representative of Colombia at the Organization of
American States, OAS, in Washington, DC.
Lecture
Authenticity: Politically Correct?
To analyze the culture of a society, it is necessary to consider several aspects: symbols, language, values, regulations and material
objects. We could add to this range of elements the verbal and
non verbal languages, commercial patterns, religion, values and
attitudes, manners, aesthetics and social institutions. For others,
the essence of a culture is to know what is called the National
Soul, or as they would say in Italy, the Genius Loci of a population.
When that is clear, ¡abracadabra there we have the culture!
I do not want to be simplistic; neither to appear as an erudite in
such an important issue and value for modern societies. Therefore, I would like to rescue a few words from the aforementioned
ones which will make of this lecture an approach, very personal,
of communication and diversity.
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Let’s start saying that in a book on Inter-culturality and Negotiation, written by a fine friend of mine*, from which I extracted a
huge amount of information for this lecture, I found the following
historic data that made me curious: in 2004 died the last woman
who knew how to speak mushu, the only language, out of the variety existing in China, used by women for more than 400 years to
communicate among themselves so men could not know about
their conversations.
In the early 90’s, for every person who spoke English, 2 people
spoke Mandarin. In 2050 Spanish will be spoken by a 6% of the
world’s population, while English will drop from the current 9%
to a 5%. But, I am sorry to inform Spanish speaking people attending this encounter that Spanish will be exceeded by Arab,
Hindi and Urdu- the last two languages, from India-.
Language is one of the words that invite to communicate the
most. It is the essence of the interrelation of living beings on Earth.
With the word, base of language, men and women in Shanghai
may express that if they do not speak Mandarin they are not
modern. Countries such as Canada, Peru and Paraguay would not
be able to show respect to the diversity of languages surviving in
these nations. In Philippines, despite the strong American influence, tagalo or chabacano would not survive. Language allows
expressing ideas without ideological borders, race or religion.
Verbal language of non-verbal language (with gestures) invites to
know entire societies. The thumb and the index closed in a circle
are the representation for success in America, while in Brazil it is
considered a vulgar act. Arriving late in England may jeopardize a
business, while in some countries in South America is barely the
beginning of a good friendship and maybe of a business.
The need for communication makes every generation to transmit
the next one its essential values. Islamism, individualism, social
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classes, state-nation, equality, personal success, freedom, comfort, democracy, capitalism (so stunned nowadays), racism, and
so many tutelary principles of societies that lead them to say
what is good, bad, beautiful or ugly for their collective interests.
This also communicates.
Every country has its special brand stuck into its own culture and
born from its values. This makes them unique and different. This
makes it to be through their languages that they can transmit
their values. The next step to potentialize communication in a
society is to symbolize what it has as essence.
In Singapore green is the color for death. In México, every year
the day of the death is celebrated; it’s a time in which Mexicans
decorate their homes to share food, music and even tequila with
their dead loved ones. In Bolivia, the coca leave originated indigenous movements for the defense of this vegetable. Carrying
the Star of David in a Muslim country may be offensive. All social
symbols allow the representation of a regional or national culture. In Colombia, for example, we live with many cultures under
the same clothing of a three colored flag. Each department, of
the 32 that we have, has its own world. We are a sum of languages, values and symbols that allow us, thanks to this sample of
multiculturality, tell the world that we exist. All people are alike,
their costumes is what make them different, stated Confucius the
great Chinese Philosopher.
“In un palacete de La Mancha of wich nombre no quiero rememberarme, vivía not so long ago uno de esos gentleman who always tienen una lanza in the rack, una buckler antigua, a skinny
caballo and un grayhound para la chase” was the way in which the
Mexican Ilán Stavans translated his Quijote. Is this a cult to the
Cervantes’s work? A mockry? None of them. As I see it, it is the
natural intention of a man from a country with Spanish ancestors
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but very closet o the United States to appropriate El Quijote and
that allowed him communicating the way in which he cultivates
Cervantes, with his sole and happy tool: Spanglish.
Imagining is one of the things that make us different. Thinking
differently makes us unique in a world society increasingly globalized and full of paradigms. Now, another one of the words I
wanted to talk about appears: diversity.
If we have a language, values, symbols and we are different (authentic is the word I prefer) we may enter the club of diversity.
I looked up synonyms in my computer’s dictionary and found,
to my satisfaction, the following ones: immensurable, unlimited,
huge, incomparable, infinite, diverse.
Being infinite means having multiple options. Being diverse is
then translated into being infinite in choices. In other words,
diversity has with itself immensurable options for transmitting
what you are or what you want to be as an integral part of each
city, department or nation. It has no limits.
Being authentic is not being different. Being unique is incarnating
a language and language that certainly amalgamate us the soul
of a society. The evolution of word in a society is nothing but the
incoming of new elements that will enrich it, they will not delay
it, they will make it advance because there are new facts that always enter everyday life to develop nations and never to stop the
evolutive coexistence of human beings.
Nowadays, diversity expressions that spread its authenticity in
the media do it, apart from deserving it due to legal rights genuinely earned and granted, because they have earned the right
to enter a bidirectional relationship between the one who has
the characteristics to feel part of a community through the social
diversity to which he belongs and those who would like to know
or to reaffirm about that cultural richness represented by one or
other social sector.
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In most modern democratic countries the government grants
part of its electromagnetic space for ethnic, political and religious
minorities, to be able to express their ideas through public radio
and television.
The previous democratic advancement, recognized and valued
by us all, gave way to the modern qualitative qualifier from which
the most heterogeneous composition of a collectivity qualifies or
disqualifies a good or bad mediatic option: Rating.
This technologic element, in conjunction with the Internet and
modern telecommunication devises, makes that every day those
who want to increase their religious, political or racial adepts,
consider that their expression is being permanently valued and
evaluated by audiences looking for authenticity within diversity,
that generates an empathy that is, finally, an affirmation of their
individuality, guaranteeing therefore their permanence in the
modern electronic media.
In other words, without the value that implies being authentic, it
would have been impossible for such a daring Project as Black Entertainment Television (BET) gathering the most valuable expressions of Afro American culture in the United States of America.
In Chocó, department of the Colombian Pacific, where poverty
indexes are the highest ones in the country, where entering by
ground is one of the greatest odysseys in the history of world
transportation, a few years ago a musical Group was born, that
mixed rural rhythms of that region with hip hop, reaching a perfect mixture of what we know today as fusion music: Chocquibtown.
This fact, authentically Chocoan, generated an epidemic of new
interpreters, composers and musicians all around the pacific
coast region, provoking a direct relationship among a new artistic
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genre and the consequent recovery of self esteem of an AfroColombian community. Nowadays their songs are not only in the
first places of Colombian and in the Word Bill Boards, but also
their members are a life example with thousands of fans.
Chinese people locate the future in the back because that is the
unknown, what they cannot see; the past and the present are
instead seen in the front, because that is what they can analyze.
For westerns, the past is behind us, as if the experiences from
what has happened were forgotten and we locate the future in
front of our eyes because, according to us, it is what is coming. As
if uncertainty could be controlled by just imagining it.
But the simple fact of being Afro American, indigenous, homosexual, environmentalist, enologist, sportsman, or having different
interests in societies is not a guarantee for claiming a presential
space in the media. Give me the facts and I will give you the rights
Says a legal axiom. To be in the media agenda, it is important to
go beyond the law. In English, news means new. Whatever is new
is news. What lets you be different within the wide spectrum of
diversity, as we understand it today is authenticity. Therefore I
dare to say that the right to being authentic is what allows the
different cultural, racial or religious expressions to have a presence in the media.
Yesterday, what called for the reflection of media and diversity was the struggle for the democratic right of accessing the
communication media. Today, this struggle has been concreted. We face an authentic opportunity to gain audience in the
media by being unique and unrepeatable. Learning this is politically correct.
* Interculturalidad and Negociación. Ricardo Eastman de la Cuesta. Universidad Sergio Arboleda, Bogotá, D.C, Colombia, 2008
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Discussion y Conclusions
Table VI:
Principal Ideas
Logical implication recognizes the power of the media. We need
to work with them without sacrificing the goals of the Afrodescendant agenda, according to the type of media.
The media caricatured image. A more active approach to the
problem is to work with people to generate self-representations,
to expand the grassroots participation. Networks, Afrodescendant networks can be made throughout the continent and Africa.
Experiences and policy proposals that could be replicated
Design strategies for different needs: there are different levels of
communication: mass media and intra needs.
Diffusion of government policies and their results for Afrodescendant community, to society, and diffusion of the policy results,
and strengthening research in the field.
The use of the media may serve to uncover subliminal racism. We
must emphasize the link between the school (played as an inside
play that discrimination, but also transforms) and the mass media (also interpreted as a transformer). School site is of strategic
change. It is essential that the school changes.
We need to create empowerment, which social actors make their
communication. Enhance the agenda.
We need to standardize communication and, above all, to define
the scope that the Ministries of Culture have. How far can they go
on the definition of political communication?
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It is necessary to consider differences among countries: challenges and common elements.
Formation of citizens with the right to communicate and to produce of cultural content.
Influencing in the imaginary that media promote. Awareness
campaigns (persuasion) should have a high quality. The design of
these must be cautious in the language: it is necessary to devise
creative strategies.
The work must be inter-institutional. Outreach of the Ministries
of Culture.
The methodology of NGO gives the teacher tools to understand
the situation and begin to transform. The strategy is that the
communication was not aggressive, use of humor and irony. It is
essential that the strategies for awareness have high quality.
Obstacles
Operational strategies, concrete actions.
Attitude towards the mass media, differentiating the media and
media types.
Define the Ministries role.
Coercive regulation of the media.
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Firma Declaración en San Basilio de Palenque.
Kei Kawabata(Japón), Maguemati Wabgou(Kenia), Doudou Diene(Senegal)
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Edouard Matoko(Congo), Paula Marcela Moreno Z.(Colombia), Dudou Diene, Juca
Ferreira(Brasil)
Antonio Monteiro(Angola),Paula Marcela Moreno ,Simao Sounindola, Ana Monteiro(Angola)
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Silvia Olveira(México),Paula Marcela Moreno, Edouard Matoko, Yuri Buenaventura (Colombia)
Larry Palmer (Estados Unidos), Tianna Paschel (Estados Unidos) con algunos relatores del Encuentro
Paula Marcela Moreno, Ministra de Cultura de Colombia; Alvaro Marchesi, Secretario General Organización de Estados Iberoamericanos.
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Zulu Araujo, Director Fundación Palmares; Paula Marcela Moreno, Ministra de
Cultura de Colombia; Ndioro Ndiaye, Directora Adjunta de la Organización Internacional para las Migraciones.
Zulu Araujo, Director Fundación Palmares; Howard Dodson, Director Schomburg
Center; Juca Ferreira, Ministro de Cultura de Brasil; Paula Marcela Moreno, Ministra de Cultura de Colombia.
Juca Ferreira, Ministro de Cultura de Brasil; Paula Marcela Moreno, Ministra de
Cultura de Colombia; Jeronimo Lancerio, Ministro de Cultura de Guatemala; Mateo Morrinson; Viceministro de Cultura de República Dominicana.
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Agrupación Tambores de Cabildo en el Claustro de Santo Domingo de Cartagena
de Indias.
Encuentro Iberoamericano Agenda Afrodescendiente en las Americas, Centro de
Convenciones Julio Cesar Turbay Ayala, Cartagena de Indias.
Paula Marcela Moreno, Ministra de Cultura de Colombia y Ndioro Ndiaye, Directora Adjunta de la OIM.
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San Basilio de Palenque, Firma de la Declaración de Cartagena. Ana Monteiro, Jefe de Gabinete de
la Primera Dama de Angola; Roberto Zurbano, Casa de las Americas; David Soto, Programa Acua; Judith Morrison, Fundación Interamericana; Julio Saldaña, Viceministro de Cultura de Paraguay; Ndioro
Ndiaye, Directora Adjunta OIM; Mateo Morrinson, Viceministro de Cultura de República Dominicana;
Silvia Olvera, Delegada de CONACULTA México; Sydney Bartley, Director de Cultura de Jamaica; Paula
Marcela Moreno, Ministra de Cultura de Colombia; Jeronimo Lancerio, Ministro de Cultura de Guatemala; Juca Ferreria, Ministro de Cultura de Brasil; Charles Maynard, Ministro de Cultura de Bahamas.
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