CARACAS, Aug. 26, 2004 (IPS/GIN) -- 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. 9."
"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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