VENEZUELA:
Black Contribution to Local Culture Has Been Largely Ignored

Humberto Márquez


CARACAS, (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.