Cynics Unlimited

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.