Africa Speaks Reasoning Forum

VENEZUELA:
Black Contribution to Local Culture Has Been Largely
Ignored

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Aug 26 (IPS) - When Berta was a little girl,
she met Micaela, ”an old black woman, whose back was
full of scars.” When she asked the adults around her
why, she was told ”it was the whips and red-hot iron
bars, because she was a slave.”

This is one of the personal accounts presented in
”Obscurity, Silence and Rupture: 150 Years Since the
Abolition of Slavery in Venezuela”, an exhibit
currently on display in the Museum of Fine Arts in
Caracas, which also presents photos, prints,
paintings, musical instruments, tools, weapons, masks,
carvings and posters reflecting Venezuela's African
heritage.

Slavery was officially abolished in Venezuela on Mar.
24, 1854. At that time there were 25,000 slaves,
accounting for three percent of the population.

The Network of Afro-Venezuelan Organisations is
commemorating the 150th anniversary of the abolition
of slavery this year with the exhibit aimed at raising
public awareness and increasing social recognition of
the cultural contribution that blacks have made in
this South American country.

The Network ”is pushing for a reconceptualisation of
the contributions and struggles of people of African
descent in Venezuela,” Jesús García, the head of the
Network and one of the exhibit organisers, told IPS.

”On this occasion we are emphasising the political
importance of our contribution, specifically
'cimarronaje',” a term that refers to the phenomenon
of black slaves who fled to remote uninhabited areas
where they created free communities, both during the
Spanish colonial period and under the newly
independent Latin American republics.

”When talking about the presence of African cultures
in Venezuela, the focus has traditionally been on
ornamental aspects, like music, clothing or their
participation in the Catholic religion, and there has
been no rethinking of the deeper aspects -- their
submission to slavery and the rebellions staged by the
'cimarrones',” or runaway slaves, also known as
maroons, said García.

In the decades and centuries following the famous 1552
rebellion led by ”El Negro Miguel”, who proclaimed
himself king of a community of slaves who had escaped
from the mines of Buria, 200 km west of Caracas,
thousands of slaves fled the homes and plantations of
their white masters and created dozens of free
communities known in Venezuela as ”cumbes”.

Although most of the people living in the cumbes in
Venezuela's coastal and plains regions were maroons or
escaped slaves, the remote communities also attracted
people who were not of African origin, mainly
fugitives and criminals.

Similar phenomena occurred in other places with large
slave populations, like Cuba, Haiti and Brazil. In
other Latin American countries, cumbes were known as
palenques, quilombos, mocambos, ladeiras, or mambises.


”Starting when I was a child I worked in the
'trapiches' (sugar mills). (Then) I crossed the
Turimiquire mountains (in eastern Venezuela) and
gradually became a cimarron, working in the hills and
the sea.

”I was whipped a lot, because I was always running
away. I worked in pearl-harvesting, salt farms,
fishing villages, or selling firewood or goat's milk,”
said the elderly Juan Jiménez, in another of the
accounts shown in the exhibit.

The exhibit ”presents the personal accounts of men and
women who worked, struggled, suffered, sang and
danced, but who have been victims, since the times of
the War of Independence (1810-1824), of a kind of
hypocrisy, according to which there is no racism in
Venezuela,” Marizabel Blanco, the main organiser,
commented to IPS.

Schoolchildren filing past the displays stop and read
with curiosity a blown-up ad that appeared in the
Gaceta de Caracas newspaper on Jan. 17, 1812 -- when
the independence fighters had control over the city.

The ad offers a reward to anyone who returned to her
owners a woman slave, Azú, ”from the Congo nation,
strong of body and flat-chested, between 28 and 30
years old, who does not speak anything but her
original language and who escaped the night of Jan.
9th.”

”I am amazed that these people who suffered so much
would, in their free time, make music, drums, and food
like the 'buñuelos de ocumo' that my grandma used to
cook,” said 11-year-old Gerardo Castro, a
fifth-grader.

Buñuelos de ocumo are fritters made with a tropical
starchy tuberous root known in the Caribbean region by
names like ocumo, dasheen, cocoyam or taro.

Visitors are also offered samples of typical dishes
from eastern Venezuela. ”The influence of people of
African descent is still noted after many generations
in the rural and urban gastronomy, for example in the
use of cacao as an ingredient,” noted Tamara
Rodríguez, who runs a workshop on traditional cooking.


It was cacao plantations that made the heaviest use of
slave labour during the Spanish colonial period and
the first decades of Venezuela's life as an
independent nation.

The plantations were at first the source of escaped
slaves who went to live in cumbes, and later produced
an exodus to coastal towns and cities like Caracas,
which continued throughout the 20th century.

The exhibit shows the variety of drums, which have
names like 'cumaco', 'mina', 'chimbangle' and
'quimbángano', that were played in festivals by
maroons and slaves, but which also served as ”a
vehicle for communication at times of persecution and
rebellion,” said García.

”We want the phenomenon of the maroons to be
recognised as a contribution to Venezuela's struggles
for freedom, such as the rebellion led by Miguel, the
one headed by Andresote (a mixed-race slave of African
and indigenous descent) in Yaracuy (in central
Venezuela) in 1732, and the uprising led by the
forerunner of independence José Leonardo Chirinos”
against the Spanish in 1795 in the hills of Coro in
the northwest.

The Afro-Venezuelan Network wants the 1999
constitution, which highlights the contributions made
to the Venezuelan nation by Latin American liberator
Simón Bolívar and other independence leaders, as well
as the resistance of the country's indigenous people,
to be modified ”to include the contribution made by
blacks, because we numbered 400,000 out of the one
million people who won independence,” said García.

”Without losing sight of those long-term goals,
through activities like this exhibit we are working
towards a reassessment of the contribution to
Venezuelan life made by people of African descent,
which has simply been ignored and omitted,” said
Blanco.

The exhibit is accompanied by recitals and concerts,
as well as workshops on drumming, black hairstyles and
the black identity.

And in the next few weeks a series of conferences and
gatherings will be held in different cities of the
interior on the history of the slave trade, the
phenomenon of the cumbes and maroons, and Venezuela's
cultural heritage and identity, she added.

It is difficult to estimate the proportion of
Venezuelans of African descent. But a rough idea is
given by the Britannica on-line encyclopedia,
according to which more than two-thirds of the
population of 25 million are mestizos (mixed European
and Indian), followed by whites (about one-fifth),
blacks (one-tenth), and a tiny minority of ethnic
Indians.

Class divisions in Venezuela tend to cut along racial
lines. The residents of poor neighbourhoods are
frequently darker-skinned, while people of exclusively
European descent are often found in middle-class and
upscale districts.

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