170 years ago today slavery was abolished in Colombia. Fragment of “Playing the masks”, chapter of the book “Get up mulatto! The spirit will speak for my race ”, an autobiographical essay in which the writer from Lorica Manuel Zapata Olivella recalls his arrival in racist Bogotá.
Manuel Zapata Olivella was a Colombian physician, anthropologist, and writer. Among his legacy are novels that vindicate black culture marked by slavery such as “Chambacú, corral de negros” and “Changó, el Gran Putas”. He was born on March 17, 1920, in Lorica, Córdoba, and died on November 19, 2004, in Bogotá.
In the eventful descendants of my slave ancestors, less than a hundred years after emancipation, I was the first of my long lineage to reach the capital’s university. Despite my father’s condition as a bastard, one of his many brothers scattered among several women, he was able to complete his high school studies and still attend the first two years of law at the University of Cartagena. However, two months ago, when I revealed my aspirations to continue my studies in Bogotá, his response was painful and categorical:
—Mijo, if you want to fly out of the nest, you have to do it with your own wings.
My father’s only economic income was his modest teacher’s salary with which he had to support children and strangers in a long family whose ties and obligations knew no limits. By persisting in my decision to study in the capital of the Republic, I should have counted on Uncle Gabriel, then based there. He generously gave me the opportunity that all my brothers and cousins, fishermen, mechanics, shoemakers, stevedores and peasants, could not afford.
The uncle had arrived in Bogotá fleeing the local political persecution that never forgave him for his heroic defense of the liberal peasants in Montería. Through persistent savings, he managed to set up a pool hall in one of the stormiest areas of the capital, 10th Street. The School of Medicine itself was installed in that epicenter of prostitution in the capital, surrounded by bars, cafes, redoubts of thugs and nearby from the main market square. During the first part of my career I alternated my studies with the administration of my uncle’s billiards, which was attended by men and women of sinful arts.
At night he had to attend to their screams and complaints, but also listen to long stories of their lives drowned in a sea of despair. Their expertise in dodging death threats, more than their nobility of soul, kept them out of penitentiaries, hospitals, and cemeteries. These castaways of life served to inspire me the characters, unfortunately true, of my novel La calle 10.
The racial awareness process was quiet and slow. In the beginning, recently arrived in Bogotá, he barely noticed the curious look of the boy holding onto his father’s hand in fear. For centuries the image of the black had served to identify the devil in the school; in the plates of the books and in the church. I had to smile during visits when the naughty girl in the house took a fancy to unraveling the specks of my hair. Confronted with the experiences with the Cauca brothers, lengthy anthropological and political readings, the lucidity around my ancestor deepened until it touched the bottom of the class problem. Colombian society, still eroded by the caste antagonisms imposed since the Colony, had foreseen the designated place for a mulatto. My mere presence in Bogotá already expressed a distinctive trait.
In billiards, at the university, among my fellow newspaper writers and intellectuals—poets, painters, playwrights, novelists—I was the “black”. The primary connotation collected the feeling of appreciation, the somewhat affectionate accent that this name usually has on the coast. A little mercy and a little disdain. Gradually I was calibrating that the word also constituted a barrier. All my efforts to achieve the status of a pure scientist or intellectual were shortened by invisible borders that separate the majority of blacks and Indians from truly decision-making and representative positions in Colombian society.
At that time or now, I was unaware of the existence of blacks and mulattoes in some prominent positions in the public administration. There have been many parliamentarians, ministers, governors and mayors in the country’s history. But what is silent, a truth known to all, is that such “emblems” of the race must silence their origin, if they remember anything of their ancestor. They claim that they enjoy these positions as “Colombians” and not on behalf of their lineage. Consequently, they do not identify with the class from which they come, much less with their race.
The attitudes assumed by me and my sister Delia, affirming our identity, were harsh lessons. From the mocking and surprised glances of the young women as we passed, we discovered the closed doors, the appreciative comments, but ineffective when trying to change the rigid schemes of a discriminatory society.
Why didn’t there exist a section of the black man in the Colombian Ethnological Institute? Answer still forbidden at present. Why not establish the chair of black or indigenous art in the Faculty of Fine Arts, where Delia was studying? Silence. The history of aesthetic conceptions of aboriginal or African cultures had to be studied, and is still being studied, in the context of European culture.
The questions and the whys were added to a long list of questions that sowed live embers in our minds that would never go out. Every day we verified the galloping discrimination. In the beginning, we were proud to see the brothers of the race from Chocó, Antioquia, Cauca, Nariño, Bolívar and La Guajira participate in the troops in the military parades with which patriotic dates were celebrated, mainly when the presidential guard did it, where they they selected the most outstanding units of the regiments of the whole nation.
Many of them, surprisingly, were black. By exception, an Indian from a ranch. The rest made up of mestizos from the interior and “whites”. To the extent that we sharpened our judgments, we noticed that none of those who paraded, generals or officers of lesser rank, belonged to the negromenta or the indians. He is also not found in palace ceremonies, diplomatic receptions, academics and other official institutions. However, such acts are carried out behind the public gaze, in aristocratic venues where the people pay for the cutlery, the tables, the trays, the lamps, the decorations, the plush, but to which they do not have access due to their plebeian origin. , indigenous or African.
Raised in Cartagena, since we were children we psychologically adjusted to the closed exclusion of blacks in the Naval Academy. It seemed natural to Delia and me, and it is to everyone in the country, that admirals, rear admirals, captains, second lieutenants, and cadets have to be “white” or mestizo, even if neither they nor their grandparents had known the sea. Later, after washing our eyes of the complexes imposed by elitist and racist education, we were able to realize that the problem of the “white” cadets went beyond ethnic prejudices.
Naval officers, like crown princes in monarchies, are educated to exercise political and social command. The race also came to constitute a class superstratum. Only a long time later, just a few years ago, we have verified that social discrimination accentuates ethnic prejudices to the point that naval cadets who come from popular classes in the interior of the Republic are prohibited by military regulations from visiting the poor neighborhoods of Cartagena: they cannot get on the buses, or even visit their relatives if they temporarily or normally reside in one of these sectors.
We know of cases of professors at the Naval Academy whose children have been rejected for living in poor areas. Can there be more ominous acts against democracy in a republic and in a region where the predominant thing is mulatto and poverty? The racial and class identity crisis had to explode in an attitude of affirmation in those of us, like Delia and myself, who could not forget our double lineage of Indians and blacks.
On a certain occasion, my mother, somewhat hurt by the ostensible side that I took with the Zapatas, frankly forgetting about the Olivellas, anguished confessed to me:
—Son, my blood counts little or nothing for you.
“Yes, very much, mother!” -I replied-. If the persecuted and exploited were the whites, I would be fighting alongside him.
He fell silent, looking into my eyes, penetrating into the most intimate of my confusions.
—You may be right, but don’t forget that if you visited a country in Africa tomorrow, they wouldn’t think you were a black man.
I didn’t need to travel to Africa for his prophecy to come true. Invited by Natanael Díaz to his hometown, Puerto Tejada, to give a lecture on the history of Africans in Colombia, while the public was gathering in a school, a dark-skinned lady approached me and asked me in a low voice:
“When is the black lecturer coming?”
“It’s me!” I told her trying to hug her. She separated a little and after looking at my face, she exclaimed in surprise:
“But you’re white!”
I looked around me. The school was crowded with blacks: schoolboys, male and female teachers; guards who had approached; sugar mill workers; washers and farmers, there was no other mulatto like me in that place.