By Rosa Chamorro
Eighty years have passed since the birth of the Black Club in Colombia, created by young people from the Caribbean and the Pacific:
Manuel Zapata Olivella, who would later travel through Central and North America as a vagabond, and would undoubtedly be the most important humanist, researcher and writer of Afro-Colombian intellectuals and the tireless promoter, together with his sister Delia, of culture and Colombian folklore.
Aware of his destiny, he abandoned his medical studies to go in search of the real causes of social ills; Before embarking on a trip that would take him to other different places, he would meet in Puerto Tejada with his friend Natanael Díaz, who was, in his opinion, the creator of blackness in Colombia.
Díaz was a democrat who was always in the political arena in defense of the working classes; Of the strikes that he accompanied, one of the most notorious was the Avianca workers’ strike in 1961 that led to a hunger strike due to the company’s intransigence in refusing to negotiate the union’s list of demands.
Nathanael was undoubtedly a libertarian man with a courageous story that we can read in the biography “A Poet in the Labyrinths of Politics”, written by Luis Carlos Castillo.
Another of the great protagonists of the Club was Helcías Martán Góngora, aptly named the Poet of the Sea, who would also stand out in defense of the rights of the black population and in letters; Marino Viveros, parliamentarian and doctor from Cauca; Delia Zapata Olivella, cultor, researcher and disseminator of Colombian dances with African roots; Adolfo Mina Balanta, lawyer, founder of the Colombian Institute of Procedural Law and Víctor Viveros, prominent sports, civic and political leader.
All of them excelled in their careers and in the different activities in which they performed. But in 1943, as some young university students in Bogotá, motivated by the death of two black workers in the United States, they carried out a series of actions that had as their objective, in addition to protesting these violent deaths and racial discrimination in that country, the tell Colombian society that blacks existed there, that they made contributions to the construction of the nation.
That protest of June 20, 1943 that gave rise to the first organization of Afro-descendants in our country, began when its organizers demanded songs by Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson at the National Library
Then they recited verses by the poet from Mompos Candelario Obeso and the poet from Cartagena Jorge Artel in various bars in the center of the capital and ended in the Plaza de Bolívar, standing in front of the statue of the Liberator to reproach him for not having fulfilled the promise he had made to Álexandre Petition to abolish slavery as soon as victory in the struggle for independence was crowned.
On Thursday, June 29 of this year, in homage to these Afro-Colombian intellectuals who created the Black Club of Colombia, we will talk about two of its main figures, Manuel Zapata Olivella and Natanael Díaz, at the Magdalena Cultural House, Santa Marta.