In early 2003 I took a trip to the city of Cartagena, Colombia. During my stay there a friend wanted me to meet one of her former professors, but our plan was foiled by a strike going on at the university. I had to laugh at the incident; it reminded me of the many strikes I’d encountered on visits to Italy. (Strikes, soccer, beauty contests and tacky religious statues are among the things for which Italians and Colombians seem to share a passion.)
I mentioned this to an Italian-Canadian friend at work. He however insisted the people of Colombia were “Indians.” I explained in response that while most Colombians have some Amerindian ancestry, native traditions have largely disappeared from that country. (In contrast, Indian culture is very much alive in other South American nations like Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador.) Furthermore, if there is any non-European influence at all in Cartagena, it is African, not Indian.
Cartagena lies on Colombia’s northern coast along the Caribbean Sea. A beautiful city with colonial architecture and lovely beaches, it draws thousands of tourists every year. When Spain ruled Colombia, Cartagena served as a gateway to the rest of South America.
In his autobiography Stranger in Their Midst, Belgian sociologist Pierre van den Berghe described Cartagena as “perhaps the most African city in the Spanish Americas.” The African presence was evident to me in the appearance of the city’s people, even though according to the Latin American color scheme most seemed to be mulatto rather than Black. This was quite different from Colombia’s capital Bogotá, where many people had Amerindian features. (A personal observation on the people of Cartagena: just as van den Berghe said in his autobiography that the Peruvian Andes were probably the only place on earth where he could reconcile himself with celibacy, my visit to Cartagena was the first time in a long while that I was tempted to alter my then-celibate status; the men there were almost uniformly handsome and charming.)
But Africa’s presence in Cartagena went far beyond the physical. It was apparent in the culture as well: the music, the dancing, and other things. For example, many women wore their hair in cornrows, a style of braiding that originated in Africa and is also common in some of the Caribbean islands. (By the way, you don’t have to be Black to wear cornrows; during my stay in Cartagena a very nice young girl put cornrows in my hair for a mere $20.) I also had the pleasure of listening to some very African-sounding music — with emphasis on the drums — and watching a dance, performed very skillfully by two little girls and a boy, that could have come straight out of Africa.
Though the African contribution to Latin American history and culture has often been overlooked, Blacks were present from the very beginning of Spain and Portugal’s conquest of the region. Several Blacks are believed to have accompanied Christopher Columbus on his voyages. Others played a role in helping the Spaniards establish settlements in the New World. In many cases, the first Blacks who went to the Americas had been born or had lived in Iberia (Spain and Portugal) and were more or less Westernized in terms of religion, language and culture. However, the vast majority of Blacks who came to Latin America did so as slaves transported directly from Africa. There in the New World they interbred with Whites: as in North America and the Caribbean, White male-Black female unions were a frequent combination, especially on slave plantations. Africans also formed relationships with Indians, producing a mixed group of people known as zambos. Many Black men were motivated to pair off with Indian women because the resulting children, unlike those of pure African descent, would not be born into slavery.
Given this history, it’s not surprising to find large groups of African-descended people (and by “African-descended” I mean anyone with Black ancestry, mulattoes and zambos as well) in various parts of Latin America. These include the northern coasts of Colombia and Venezuela; the western parts of Colombia, Peru and Ecuador; northeastern Brazil; Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic; and the Caribbean coast of Central America. In addition, individuals of African origin formed a large percentage of the populations of Uruguay and southern Brazil until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when they were displaced by massive waves of immigrants from Europe.
Of course people of African descent also make up a considerable portion of the United States’ population. But the histories of Blacks in the US and Latin America diverge substantially in one respect. As Pierre van den Berghe explains in his book Race and Racism, while Blacks in the former basically lost their original culture, African customs still persist in the latter region. For instance, rituals from Africa play an important role in the Santeria and macumba sects of Cuba and Brazil, respectively. And I definitely saw traces of Africa on my visit to Cartagena.
All this being said, I still consider Cartagena (and Latin America in general) to be Western first and foremost. In going to Cartagena I had no feeling of entering non-Western territory as I did to some extent when I visited Cape Dorset in the Canadian Arctic. Cartagena in fact reminded me in many ways of Palermo, Sicily, also a port city. Still, if you want to enjoy the African experience in Latin America, Cartagena may be the place to go.
A general in the Indonesian army, Suharto (like many Indonesians he used only one name) took power in 1965 after conducting an anti-Communist purge and deposing then-president Sukarno. During his thirty-two-year leadership Suharto greatly industrialized the country and reduced its poverty. He gained the support of the United States, who saw his “New Order†administration as a bulwark against the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia. On the other hand, his regime was known for its corruption and brutality. Hundreds of thousands of people, mainly real or suspected Communists, were tortured by the police, kept in prison for long periods without trial, made to “disappear,†or killed outright. The Suharto administration’s invasion and annexation of West Papua (Irian Jaya) and East Timor (now an independent nation) and repression of the independence movement in the province of Aceh drew condemnation from international human rights organizations. Though Indonesia was the recipient of aid from the US and other Western countries, much of it went into the pockets of Suharto himself and his family members. There were discussions after his resignation in 1998 about prosecuting him for embezzlement, but he was never formally charged in a court of law.
Suharto’s treatment of different ethnic groups challenges the simplistic notion of a world made up of Whites on one hand and “people of colour†on the other. Ironically, this vision is shared by two factions who otherwise appear to have nothing in common: White Supremacists and leftists of all racial backgrounds. The latter tend to see non-Whites as victims of European colonialism - or American imperialism - and expect them to band together against the White oppressor. But this was hardly the case in East Timor, even if both that country and Indonesia at one time fell under European powers (Portugal and the Netherlands respectively). Though the West was rightly accused of turning a blind eye to Indonesia’s persecution of the Timorese people, the fact is that most of the human rights violations in Timor were committed not by Europeans or Americans but by Indonesians. East Timorese freedom fighter Constancio Pinto writes in his book East Timor’s Unfinished Struggle: Inside the Timorese Resistance that while not perfect, Timor’s former Portuguese overlords were far more humane than the Indonesians who came after them. And contrary to White racists’ idea of a vast anti-White conspiracy by “hordes of colour,†Timorese activist Xanana Gusmao has actually expressed solidarity with the people of Poland and the Baltics – at whose struggles for independence White “progressives†have often scoffed. Nor within Indonesia itself did Suharto love his Chinese subjects as fellow Asians.
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