Afro-Descendant Resistance

MA Thesis, Faculty of Science, Institute of Geosciences
University of Fribourg (CH)
MSc in Geography: ‘Sustainability and Global Change’
Afro-Descendant Resistance
A Strategy of Territorial Self-Determination
in Colombian Northern Cauca
Bernasconi Attilio, Effingerstr. 61, 3008 Bern
([email protected] / [email protected])
Submitted May 1st 2014
Supervised by
Prof. Dr. Olivier Graefe (Human Geography)
Prof. Dr. Christian Giordano (Social Anthropology)
To Ovejas
With the hope that its waters
Full of ancestral memories,
Will continue to run freely
For hundreds of years to come.
Abstract
Territorialisation is the way a community appropriates its lived space
through a process of cultural sedimentation in space and time. This
process may become a tool for the resistance of societies that struggle
in different settings against the dispossession of land, in defense of
their resources, and against the political economies of the State.
The Afro-descendant community of La Toma in the Colombian
Northern Cauca lives with the threat of the diversion of the Ovejas
River, their major cultural and economical resource. The aim of this
thesis is to display a possible way to resist against such projects, and
therefore to show how the people of La Toma have appealed to a
strategy, i.e. territorial self-determination, and to several tactics, one of
these being to conform into a ‘new’ ethno-territorial Afro-descendant
community.
Keywords: identity, ethnic groups, (accumulation by) dispossession,
resistance, territory, territorialisation process, uneven development.
I Proem
As I began to study at the university of Fribourg, I did not intend to
follow two master programs at the same time. However, after taking
some classes in social anthropology and human geography, my
interest in these two disciplines became so significant that I have not
been able to make other choices than to enroll in both. I found that this
decision not only has allowed me to make the most of the
plurilingualism offered by the university, the master program in social
anthropology being in French and German and that of human
geography in English, but it also has led me to analyze a problematic
from different yet interconnected academic points of view.
I. Where Social Anthropology meets Human Geography
This work counts as a double thesis that will be validated for the
master program in social anthropology ’Anthropologie des Mondes
Contemporaines’ (90 ETCS), as well as that in human geography
‘Sustainability and Global Change’ (90 ETCS). For this reason I tried to
fulfill the three requests made by the faculty of Arts and Humanities
and that of Science1, i.e. a double number of pages, the attainment of
the requirements imposed by the two disciplines, and the separation of
the two branches throughout this writing. Although there haven’t been
any problems in order to accomplish the first two requests, the task of
clearly separating the anthropological part from the geographical one
has been arduous. Nonetheless I tried to divide the two parts where
that has been possible, and the structure of the thesis should therefore
be understood as follows:
1
The requisites of the dean (in 2010) of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, M.
Thomas Austenfeld, and those of the dean (in 2010) of the Faculty of Science, M.
Sylvain Debrot, can be found in Annex 6.
II Chapters one (1), two (2) and three (3) contain the introduction to
the object of study, the research question, the hypothesis (1), the
theoretical background (2), and the methodology used in this thesis (3).
These three chapters are therefore common for both disciplines.
Chapter four (4) offers a historical introduction to the object of
study. In the first part of this chapter (4.1.) we discuss the spatial
dimension of our case study, while in the second part (4.2.) we focus
on its cultural dimension. For these reasons, section 4.1 may be seen
as pertaining to geography, whereas section 4.2 to anthropology.
Chapter five (5) exposes the representations of development as
settled by the State. In the first part (5.1.) we offer an analysis of our
case study by dint of political ecology, while in the second part (5.2.)
we discuss the manner national identities are constructed. Again, the
first section 5.1 may be read as geographical, whereas section 5.2 as
anthropological.
Chapter six (6) is a response to chapter five and therefore
displays the representations the studied community has of itself and its
own ideas of development. In the first part (6.1.) we analyze the local
process of territorialisation and in the second part (6.2.) we relate it to
that of the construction of a ‘new’ ethnicity. Once more, section 6.1
may be comprehended as geographical, while the second section 6.2
as anthropological.
Finally, the conclusive chapter seven (7) and eight (8) offer a
multidimensional synthesis of the results of our research, reflecting on
identity in relation to the geographical space and its historical
dimension. In consequence, these chapters are common for the two
disciplines.
In addition to the above, the thesis contains a visual part, i.e. the
documentary ‘Tierra Negra⎯Journey into an Afro-Colombian territory’
(‘Tierra Negra⎯Viaje en territorio Afro-Colombiano’). This fifty-six
minutes film in Spanish with English subtitles has been directed and
III produced by myself (alias Attilio Oscar Mina). Since the content of the
documentary covers that of the written thesis, it might be understood
as the visual medium striving to enrich the comprehension and the
analysis of the object of study. Therefore the documentary is also
material valid for both disciplines: social anthropology and human
geography.
IV II. Cheers for Mutual Aid
The writing of this thesis would have never been possible without
the support of many people who, consciously or unconsciously, have
encouraged me during the years, in periods of light and in those of
darkness. Although I will not be able to recall them all, my thanks go to:
The community of La Toma and all people of African descent who
shared their knowledge, hosted me as a friend and as a brother, and
dedicated their time to introduce me to their history, for, as one of them
once told me: “The future doesn’t exist! We know our past and we
know our present. From what we know, we can transform our day, and
influence the next one”.
This thesis, and particularly the documentary ‘Tierra Negra’, is my
counter-gift to you.
Professor and political activist Angela Y. Davis for supporting the
cause of the people of La Toma and for allowing me to interview her.
Your
contribution
is
significant
for
the
process
of
self-
determination of La Toma and of other communities around the world.
Professor Christian Giordano for the influence his lectures have
had on me during the past years and for encouraging me in this
double-thesis project.
I began to study social anthropology believing in the utopia of
social revolutions, I will finish my master as a radical anthropologist. I
thank you for the enlightenment.
Professor Olivier Graefe for his overall availability, for the
opportunity of being his ‘tutor’ and for the hours he spent on the
correction and constructive criticism of this thesis.
V I hope to have learned how to analyze an object of study, and if I
will ever be able to produce a substantial academic text, it will be
thanks to you.
My thanks also go to (Senior Lecturer) Olivier Ejderyan and (soon
Doctor) Christine Homewood for the many enriching discussions and
the abundant and precious advice.
You are wonderful people, friends, and not least, geographers.
I’m also grateful to Franziska Marfurt for having been the person
who supported me the most during these years, and for her constant
critiques, which made me a better student, a deeper thinker, and a
better person.
I thank you particularly for having been my light in times of
darkness.
Finally, I would have never been able to be a university student
without the unconditional sacrifices of my family, who supported me in
every way possible so that I could achieve my goals.
Giulia, Elda, Marco, I thank you for the love and the deep
connection that ties us together.
Last but definitely not least, I also thank all my most precious
friends who helped me in the construction of this thesis (documentary
included), even if simply by calling me to check if I was still alive in
times of reclusion in the libraries. Here you are, in no particular order:
Luca and Dimitri Piezzi, Milena Stokar, Gianluca Blefari, Vera
Oldrati, Anna-Cristina Peterson, Piotr Bariatin, Elizabeth Snowden,
Nora Fluri, Sébastien and Olivier Peter, Caroline Homberger, Amos
Pesenti, Thomas Rossier, Virgilio Pohl, Joana Otalvaro, Efraín Avella,
Diego Gomez, Maya Carlina, Mattia Daguet, Monique Angela Schoch,
VI and of course the core of the ‘old’ Fachschaft of Social Anthropology:
Julien Nicolet, Céline Gex, Patrick Schibler, and Renate Bucher.
VII VIII Table of Contents
PART I ........................................................................................................ 3 1. Opening .................................................................................................. 3 1.1. Identities and Territories: A Socio-cultural Product of What? ........... 5 1.2. Towards a Development Against the State ...................................... 6 1.3. People of African Descent in Colombian Land ................................. 8 1.4. The Uprising of Ancestral Territories .............................................. 12 1.5. A Structural Overview .................................................................... 14 2. Theories and Practices: Towards a Geo-Anthropo-graphy .................. 17 2.1. Enduring Marxism .......................................................................... 19 2.2. Why is Anarchism relevant? ........................................................... 21 2.3. Showing Black Emancipation ......................................................... 24 3. What Anthropology and Geography Ought To Be ................................ 27 3.1. Preliminary Choices ....................................................................... 32 3.1.1. The First Contacts and the Initial Difficulties ........................... 33 3.1.2. An Ethnologist on the Field ...................................................... 37 3.2. Some Further Considerations ........................................................ 41 PART II ..................................................................................................... 43 4. A Historical Introduction ........................................................................ 43 4.1. Different Meanings of Gold ............................................................ 44 4.1.1. Gold as Fetish ......................................................................... 47 4.1.2. Gold in the Economic Theory .................................................. 50 4.1.3. Gold in the Field Practice ........................................................ 53 4.2. What the Pachamama Never Wanted ............................................ 60 4.2.1. Capitalist Contradictions .......................................................... 62 4.2.2. The Ongoing Accumulation of Internally Displaced Persons... 66 4.3. The Long Way from Negro to Afro-Descendant ............................. 70 4.3.1. Two Ongoing Processes: Slavery and the Libertarian Project 71 PART III .................................................................................................... 85 5. The (Il)legitimacy of the State, or why Some Ethnicities Disappear ..... 85 5.1. A Political Ecology of “Third World” Development ......................... 86 5.1.2. The Other Side of the Development .......................................... 101 5.2. The Great Illusion of a National Identity ....................................... 111 5.2.1. What is the Reason for a (State) National Identity? .............. 111 5.2.2. How to Write a ‘Beautiful’ Constitution .................................. 117 PART IV .................................................................................................. 129 6. The Political Legitimacy of the Community, or why Some Ethnicities
‘(Re) Appear’ ........................................................................................... 129 6.1. Processes of Territorialisation Beyond Statism ............................ 130 6.1.1. Territorialisation of a Lived Space ......................................... 143 6.1.2. The Opposition of Spaces: Collectivity versus (the State’s)
Individuality ...................................................................................... 151 6.2. Processes of Ethnical Emancipation Beyond Nationalism ........... 161 1
6.2.1. Maroon Features in Today’s Afro-Descendant Identity ......... 165 6.3. The Afro-Descendant Ethno-Territorial Community of La Toma .. 178 6.3.1. The Community ..................................................................... 178 6.3.2. The Community Council ........................................................ 181 6.3.3. The PCN (Proceso de Comunidades Negras) ...................... 185 6.3.4. Ethno-education (etno-educación, or educación propia) ....... 188 PART V ................................................................................................... 197 7. Interdependent Places and Spaces of Resistance ............................. 197 7.1. Place, Levels, and History: a Geo-Anthropo-graphy⎯Part One. . 198 7.1.1. Withstanding Black Bodies .................................................... 200 7.1.2. Uprising Communities as Centerpiece of the Local-Level ..... 202 7.1.3. The Caucan-Palenque, a Microcosmos of Peripheries and
Cores ............................................................................................... 205 7.1.4. Black Communities’ Processes in Neo Pan-Africanism Space
......................................................................................................... 208 7.2. Space, Scales and Networks: a Geo-Anthropo-graphy⎯Part Two.
............................................................................................................ 211 7.2.1. A Global Shield to a Local Territory ....................................... 212 7.2.2. An Overall Pattern of Emancipation ...................................... 215 7.2.3. The Glocal Community of La Toma ....................................... 216 8. Closing: Cheers for Black Anarchism or When the Pawn Becomes
Queen ..................................................................................................... 218 9. Bibliography ........................................................................................ 223 2
PART I
“Vive junto con el pueblo; no lo mires desde afuera,
que lo primero es ser hombre, y lo segundo poeta.”
Atahualpa Yupanqui
1
1. Opening
From the most ancient times until the present day human beings,
consciously or unconsciously, have always shaped and have reciprocally
been shaped by identities and territories. Both concepts define social
constructions that, because of their importance in producing culture,
remain major subjects for anthropology as well as geography. In fact,
identities not only relate to politics of assimilation and exclusion in the
context of States and nationalities (Giordano: 2000), but also model
territorial configuration and arrangements while interacting with the
geographical space (Raffestin: 2012). The latter becomes a territory as a
consequence of the accumulation of cultural symbols resulting from the
different activities accomplished by a community living in that given space
(Pollice: 2003).
Those processes are analyzed in this thesis, which is based on a
five-months fieldwork research in the Colombian Northern Cauca, where
the Afro-descendant community of La Toma lives under the threat of the
diversion of the Ovejas River (Río Ovejas), a watercourse sustaining its
life and representing the main economic (gold), alimentary (fishing), social
(recreation) and environmental (water cycle) resource.
In this work we2 will grasp the tactics that this community has been
using in order to contest the project of the river diversion, thus contributing
1
Song, The Poet (el Poeta). “Live among the people; do not look at them from the
outside, for the former is being a man, and the latter being a poet” (Trad. by the author).
3
to the comprehension of the resistance of societies in different settings
against the dispossession of land, against the political economies of the
State, and in defense of their resources.
This particular case study focuses on the territorialisation process in
La Toma, that is, the way the community appropriates its lived space
through a process of cultural sedimentation in space and time (Turco:
2007). Additionally, this work shows how the difficulties affecting this
community, from the threat of the river diversion to the whole
territorialisation
process,
are
neither
local
nor
regional
ones
(Swyngedouw: 1997), but display multidimensional power relations acting
in different places, levels and times (Herod: 2010), towards spaces of
uneven development (Smith: 1984). The geographical inequalities in
which the struggles of the people of La Toma are enclosed relate to
neoliberal⎯neo imperialist (Harvey: 2003)⎯political economies that
engender processes of ongoing capital accumulation by dispossession
(Harvey: 2005). This latter phenomenon produces the forced displacement
of people from their land and, along with the constitution of Nation-States
and the promotion of politics of homogenization, is what in the last two
centuries (Scott: 2012) has caused the disappearance of many ethnic
groups, particularly indigenous (Stephens et al.: 2006). However, through
the implementation of special rights, like the ILO Convention 1693 of 1989
or the hereafter mentioned Colombian Constitution of 1991, other ethnic
2
In this thesis I will use the pronoun ‘we’ every time that my arguments are supported by
other authors, informants, etc. I will use the pronoun ‘I’ every time that my considerations
are based purely on my personal reflections.
3
The ILO (International Labor Organization) Convention 169 is the major international
convention concerning Indigenous Peoples. In its articles it recognizes the rights of
Indigenous Peoples to develop their own identity, languages, religions, and also
implement their own institutions, ways of life and economies. The Convention can be
found on the website of the ILO (www.ilo.org).
4
groups have begun to enforce and/or (re) construct their identity (e.g.
Jung: 2003).
In light of the above, throughout our case study we put an emphasis
on how the community of La Toma is reacting to the threat of its river’s
diversion, hence to politics of accumulation by dispossession within its
territory.
1.1. Identities and Territories: A Socio-cultural Product of
What?
The leading question of this work is to understand how and why some
ethnic groups ‘(re) appear’.
Through this question, we intend to comprehend the reasons that lead
an ethnic group to empower its ethnicity as a political tactic within a
strategy of territorial self-determination, and especially understand the way
a particular ethnicity is strengthened. Before starting, a clarification is
needed: by strategy we mean a larger plan of action designed to achieve
a particular goal; this goal can comprise several tactics, which are smaller,
focused plans of action responding to the overall plan (Guevara: 2010;
Marighela: 2009).
Every identity is constructed upon the confrontation with a other and in
relation with the lived space. In the case of the Afro-descendants of La
Toma, their identity is created to differentiate themselves from the panoply
of ethnicities characterizing the Colombian landscape, and in connection
to a land rich of cultural symbols. In this thesis we will emphasize the
distinction between the concepts of afro-Colombian (afro-colombiano) and
afro-descendant (afrodescendiente) as two representations of the
Colombian negritude, the latter differing from other perceptions of
5
blackness, e.g. those of Peru (Cuche: 1981), Haiti (Métraux: 2003), or the
United States (Mumia: 2004). I argue that this distinction is necessary in
order to understand the dichotomy within the representation of blackness
promoted by the Colombian government, and the representation the black
communities have of themselves. Moreover, based on the material
collected throughout my empirical work, I assert that the identity
management defining the afro-Colombian idea is issued by a top-down
approach, while that of afro-descendant emerges from a bottom-up
process (Rosero: 2012).
What is also interesting about the Afro-descendant people of La Toma
is that their relationship to the territory is constructed at different scales: a
very local or regional one for what concerns the practical control of the
land; but also a broader, global one, regarding the intellectual, sensible
control of space.
Finally, what characterizes this case study is that the Afro-descendant
territorial identity is constructed upon the myth of maroon societies, hence
the tradition of rebel slaves’ communities that had social structures based
on mutual aid and collective property. The community of La Toma applies
this latter conception to its lived space as a tool to merge as a single
opponent against the (accumulation by) dispossession by the State and to
reinforce the identity-territory relation.
1.2. Towards a Development Against the State
The hypothesis I defend in this work is that this particular phenomenon
of identity construction beyond statism (Bauböck: 2008) happens in
response to the State’s strategies of development. States like Colombia
have political economies based on the neo-liberal model (Gill: 2007),
where the capital surplus is generated through ongoing (capital)
6
accumulation by dispossession. This latter phenomenon is what provokes
a reaction from people who suddenly face the risk of a forced
displacement (Escobar: 2004), and therefore organize in order to remain
in their territory. The dispossession of people of their land for the purpose
of producing capital is a universal phenomenon (e.g. Levien: 2012), and in
the case of my field-study, the tactic that emerged to resist against the
threat of the river diversion consisted in conforming into an ethno-territorial
community.
It is therefore against the political economy of the State that the
community of La Toma has reacted. In simple words, we might say that
before the Colombian government, with its national and international
allies, entered the region of La Toma and started a de-territorialisation
process (Raffestin: 2012), the local peasants and miners were not
interested in intellectual struggles over identity and space, they ‘simply’
considered themselves as black people, peasants and miners living in
Colombian territory. However, as soon as the State began to transform, on
the one hand the landscape, through mega projects like the Salvajina
dam, and on the other hand the communities’ social structures, through
major displacements of people, the inhabitants have been forced to react.
Taking advantage of the new Constitution (1991) that included a text
protecting the ancestral territories (the here-after mentioned law’70), for
the first time in Colombian history the African-descendants of La Toma
began a process of reterritorialisation in order to safeguard, defend and
legally legitimate the land inherited by their ancestors who, centuries
earlier, were brought to the new world in chains.
7
1.3. People of African Descent in Colombian Land
Although this essay has to be read and understood as concerning a
worldwide struggle, we will focus on a case study: the Afro-descendant
community of La Toma, municipality of Suárez, in the Colombian Northern
Cauca.
The Colombian Cauca Department
(Source: www.coha.org)
The municipality of Suárez
(Source: www.wikipedia.org)
In this region situated three hours west of Cali, the third largest
Colombian city4, the Salvajina dam and its related hydroelectric power
plant were constructed in 1984. The dam was built by the C.V.C.
(Corporación del Valle y Cauca), a Colombian company controlling the
public administration and the natural resources of the Cauca valley (Valle
del Cauca) department. The artificial lake created by the dam covers an
area of 23 kilometers in length, with a width of 400 meters and a depth of
150 meters (Villalobos Avendaño: 2009).
4
Cali, with its estimated 2.5 millions of inhabitants only follows Bogotá (7 millions) and
Medellin (3 millions). At the same time it is the city with the highest number of people of
African descent.
8
The artificial lake of the Salvajina (Bernasconi, 2009)
The EPSA S.A. (Empresa de Energia del Pacifico) bought the dam in
2009, and in the year 2000, a multinational Spanish corporation, the Union
Fenosa, has become the major shareholder with 63.82% of the capital
(Ibid.).
With the construction of the dam, around six thousand people have
been displaced (Ibid.), and of the about 20,000 people who remain in the
area, no one has been able to take advantage of the energy produced by
the dam, since this energy leaves through high voltage cables to furnish
the city of Cali and the neighboring country of Ecuador (Ibid.). This
evidences not just a situation related to resource management, but one
which concerns access to these resources and, above all, the very control
of access (Ribot, Peluso: 2003). In fact, while the people who were
exploiting the Cauca River before the construction of the dam used to do it
through everyday eco-sustainable practices, as a way to obtain their daily
9
subsistence, the C.V.C. and the EPSA saw the construction of the
Salvajina as a way to produce wealth. Because of the disproportion in the
economic interests between the local exploitation and the income
generated by mega-projects, the companies had the support of the
Colombian government in the construction of the dam, and the protection
of private security agencies5 to guarantee further privileged access and
control over regional resources.
In a parallel valley to the Salvajina, the local communities
acknowledged the project of the diversion of the Ovejas River into the
dam’s artificial lake only during the nineties, while apparently it was part of
the Salvajina plan from the time the dam was built6. According to the
promoters, the diversion of the river through a 153-meters long tunnel is
supposed to increase the electricity production of the dam by 20%
(Villalobos Avendaño: 2009). Beyond questioning whether the expected
benefits are considered on a short or on a long-term basis, the concern on
which we will focus in this thesis is understanding how the local
communities would be affected if the project is achieved.
5
Those agencies are private armies known as paramilitary groups. Probably the most
powerful in the region is the Aguilas Negras (Black Eagles), which since the years 2000
continues to threaten local leaders (El Espectador: 2010).
6
See the four phases of the Salvajina plan in chapter 5.2.
10
The project of the Ovejas River’s diversion (Source: Villalobos Avendaño 2009: 33).
As previously noted, the people living in the area are not the ones
benefiting from the dam, for around 70% of the energy produced is sent to
the city of Cali, and 30% is sold to the neighboring country of Ecuador
(Villalobos Avendaño: 2009). Indeed it is not the Salvajina, but the little
hydroelectric plant of Gelima, situated on the Ovejas River, that fills the
needs of the communities in the valley. In this case, the proposed
construction of the tunnel, and the resulting drying up of the river, would
also mean the closure of the only energy source for the people in the
region.
11
The little hydroelectric plant of Gelima (Bernasconi, 2009)
In attempting to block this project, the African-descendant community
of La Toma promptly realized that it wasn’t facing a single opponent⎯the
more obvious being the local municipality of Suárez⎯but many different
protagonists active at different scales (Herod: 2010), like the C.V.C. at the
‘regional’ level, or the EPSA at the international one. Yet, it happened that
people living under oppression engage in anti-systemic movements of
resistance (Arrighi: 2011), and the people of La Toma seem to
demonstrate the possibility of acting strategically at different places and
levels (Cox: 1998), and, while jumping over scales (Smith: 1987), of
finding a way to glocal struggles (Swyngedouw: 1997).
1.4. The Uprising of Ancestral Territories
To understand the logic behind the choice to conform into an ethnoterritorial community to defend the river, it is important to explain that this
12
tactic has been chosen in relation to the ‘new’ Colombian Constitution of
1991. In this text, promoted by the government for its innovativeness, the
transitory article’55 (artículo transitorio’55) and later (1993) the law’70
(ley’70) declare that in a territory where communities have been living for
centuries⎯which can therefore be defined as ancestral territory⎯no
project can be enforced without previously consulting (consulta previa) the
community.
As we will deeper analyze in chapter 5.1.2, the law’70 is constructed
upon the following principles:
•
Recognition and protection of ethnic and cultural diversity, and equal
rights for all cultures that compose the Colombian nationality.
•
Respect for the integrity and dignity of the Black Communities’ cultural
life.
•
Participation of the Black Communities and their organizations,
without detriment to their autonomy, in decisions that affect them and
in those that affect the entire nation in conformity with the law.
•
The protection of the environment, emphasizing the relationships
established by the Black Communities and nature. (Ch.II, art. III)
The facts studied in this thesis show however that the application of
those principles is compromised at two levels, the economical and the
cultural: at the economical level by those national and international
producers, which, "[…] in order to survive on world markets and to
conquer profitable markets, […] frequently with the consent of the
respective authorities, are ready to sacrifice everything, most importantly
decent work conditions, social security and the natural environment"
(Bortis 2006: 172); at the cultural level by the nationalist hegemony who
makes use of the law’70 as an instrument to manage diversity inside the
State’s borders. As one can read in the governmental Program for the
13
support, the development and the ethnical recognition of the black
communities 7 , the law’70 intends to empower the black ethnicity, but
exclusively within the boundaries of citizenship (Torpey: 2000). Since the
reference of black communities for their own identity is the African past
and that of maroon societies, we may argue that the law’70 acknowledges
a place for negritude inside the State’s borders, but denies the complexity
intrinsic to that identity.
In spite of those difficulties, the community of La Toma does not
intend to accept the diversion of its river without a struggle on the legal
field, and if necessary, on the ground. What has emerged from my
ethnographic material is that the combative representation the inhabitants
of La Toma have of themselves is rooted in the troubled past of their
ancestors, who had to struggle for land from the time they were brought to
the New World as commodities at the beginning of the seventeenth
century. It is then upon those historical facts and invented traditions
(Hobsbawm: 2000) that the people of La Toma vindicate their habit of
struggling for the attainment of their rights.
In agreement with those statements, we will attempt to provide a
reflection about blackness in Colombia, differentiating between the
manner it is promoted by the government through the law’70, and the way
it is advanced by the communities throughout their everyday practices.
1.5. A Structural Overview
This thesis is divided into six main parts that coexist interdependently
and are sorted in the following manner:
7
See
https://www.dnp.gov.co/Portals/0/archivos/documentos/DDTS/Ordenamiento_Desarrollo_
Territorial/3g04CNCONPES2909.pdf (accessed June 3th 2012).
14
The first part includes the introduction to the object of study, the
research question, the hypothesis (chapter 1), the theoretical background
(chapter 2), and the methodology used in this thesis (chapter 3). The goal
of this opening is to provide the reader with a clear idea of the object of
study, the way the latter has been approached and thus the objectives that
we want to achieve in this work.
The second part of the thesis (chapter 4) offers a historical
introduction to our field of study. In the first part of this chapter (4.1.) we
will discuss the spatial dimension of our case study, while in the second
part (4.2.) we will focus on its cultural dimension. This historical part is
necessary to comprehend, on the one hand, the political and economical
dynamics prior to the present mode of mining, and on the other hand to
understand the multiple identity reshapings that have led to the current
representations.
The third part (chapter 5) exposes the representations of
development as settled by the State. In the first part (5.1.) we will offer an
analysis of our case study by dint of political ecology, while in the second
part (5.2.) we will discuss the manner national identities are constructed.
This third section displays the primary and secondary consequences of
mega-projects like that of the Salvajina dam, and also illustrates how the
Colombian State attempts to unify its citizens under the same imagined
community despite acknowledging the ethnical diversity.
The fourth subdivision (chapter 6) is a response to the third and
therefore exposes the representations the studied community has of itself
and its own ideas of development. In the first part (6.1.) we will analyze
the local process of territorialisation, and in the second part (6.2.) we will
relate it to that of the construction of a ‘new’ ethnicity. This chapter
examines the core of the empirical work accomplished on the field and
elucidates the tactics used by the community to face the river diversion.
15
Finally, the conclusive fifth section of the thesis (chapter 7) offers a
multidimensional synthesis of the results of the research, reflecting on
identity in relation to the geographical space and its historical aspect. Here
we will reveal the various subjects defining the local territorialisation
process and contextualize their places and spaces, while concurrently
unveiling their temporal dimension. The final chapter (8) will respond to
the research question and demonstrate the veracity of the hypothesis,
thus facilitating the reader in his/her synthesis process.
In addition to that, the sixth part of the thesis is visual, i.e. in this case
the documentary ‘Tierra Negra⎯Journey into an Afro-Colombian territory’
(‘Tierra Negra⎯Viaje en territorio Afro-Colombiano’) that can be found
attached to this thesis. This fifty-six minutes film in Spanish with English
subtitles has been directed and produced by myself (alias Attilio Oscar
Mina). The content of the documentary covers that of the written thesis,
and might be understood as the visual medium striving to enrich the
comprehension and the analysis of the object of study.
16
2. Theories and Practices: Towards a GeoAnthropo-graphy
Upon opening this new section, a necessary remark must be made:
this essay is based on an interdisciplinary approach linking two disciplines,
and three interconnected theoretical and methodological frameworks. The
two disciplines are social anthropology and human geography; both are
communicating through an Anarchist and a Marxist approach, together
with a third learning procedure, i.e. visual anthropology.
As mentioned in the proem (I) of this thesis, a clear distinction
between the two disciplines will not be possible, nevertheless we might
arbitrarily assert that from a social anthropology perspective we will focus
on the processes through which identity is socially constructed, while from
a human geography point of view we will stress the territorialisation
process in its spatial dynamics.
Since the community of La Toma defines itself as an ethno-territorial
community, the link between the two approaches appears to be obvious.
However, it will be interesting to understand how and why ethnicities and
territories are constructed, and under what circumstances.
Why three different perspectives to analyze a single case study? And
particularly, together with visual anthropology, why and how to link an
Anarchist with a Marxist approach?
The relevance of this thesis resides in its globalism; in other words,
we may find analogous problematics⎯river diversions or the construction
of
dams
at
the
service
of
capitalist
accumulation
generating
dispossession⎯all over the world. Yet, if we accept that such problems
cannot be defined as merely local or purely global, I argue that depending
on the focus we want to accord to a specific object throughout our
17
research, we should be allowed to choose the perspective that most
emphasizes our object of study.
In our case, visual anthropology is what gives us, first and foremost,
the capacity to show and thus focus on aspects related to the field that
might not appear in the written thesis (see following section 3.1); and
second, it provides the opportunity to share our research with the studied
community, as a counter-gift, as well as with other different places, so as
to spread solidarity with people fighting against mega-projects that
threaten their cultural integrity and their capacity to sustain themselves.
Besides visual anthropology, if I were to summarize the perspectives
used in this thesis using a single theory, this would be anarchosyndicalism, which is based “[…] sur les enseignements du socialisme
libertaire ou anarchiste tandis que son mode d’organisation est en grande
partie hérité du syndicalisme révolutionnaire” (Rocker 2010: 107). In fact,
“[…] l’anarchosyndicalisme s’organise selon les principes du fédéralisme,
selon la libre association pratiquée de bas en haut; il place au-dessous de
tout le droit à l’autodétermination de chacun et ne reconnaît d’autre
entente organique que celles fondées sur les intérêts communs et les
convictions partagées” (Ibid.: 116). Nevertheless, at least for the
theoretical introduction of this thesis, we will step back and discuss
Anarchism and Marxism in a separate manner to highlight where and why,
from my personal point of view, neither of these two theories, if taken
separately, are sufficient to analyze the case study presented in this
thesis.
Under this angle, Anarchism is used to support positive statements
explaining everyday practices, costumes, and the organizational structure
of the community vis-à-vis the State.
18
On the other hand, Marxism is used in a normative sense, especially
in regard to explanations of global level⎯these being economical or/and
historical.
2.1. Enduring Marxism
To understand the dynamics that are today present in the Colombian
Northern Cauca, we need to search for explanations in the historical
process of colonization⎯also historical materialism (Marx: 1990)⎯that
has completely transformed the pre-colonial Colombian society (Frank:
1969; Galeano: 2007). This epoch of transition from a mercantile political
economy (Weaver: 2000) to the capitalist mode of production, relates to
the rise of systemic cycles of accumulation expanding through global
networks of capital accumulation (Arrighi: 2010). From the late sixteenth to
the early nineteenth century the triangular trade gave birth to the Atlantic
world, and thus a first, true, global economy (Weaver: 2000). This trade
connecting Europe, Africa, and the New World was based on the
exchange of commodities, mainly cash crops and human beings⎯namely,
slaves.
According to different scholars (e.g. Wallerstein: 1999; Braudel:
1982), the sixteenth century therefore corresponds to the first phase of the
history of the capitalist world-economy, the latter developing in three
principal moments (Wallerstein: 1999): 1450-1650 is the period of the
original creation⎯also primitive accumulation (Marx: 1990); during that
time capitalism develops in Europe and in parts of America. The second
period, 1750-1850, defines the ‘great expansion’, i.e. links the RussianOttoman Empire, South and South-East Asia, West Africa and the rest of
the Americas. Finally, the third period, 1850-1900, is that of the last
expansion, which encloses East Asia, Africa and Oceania.
19
Arrighi (2010) completes Wallerstein’s argument while asserting that
the starting point of capital accumulation and financial expansion is to be
found
in
thirteenth
century
Italy.
Here,
the
first
centers
of
accumulation⎯the city-States⎯were cooperative, and division of labor
existed
between
commercial
and
industrial
activities.
Regulatory
relationships occurred among members, whose profits were shared
between each center in proportion to the contribution to the overall
expansion of trade (Marx: 1990).
With the expansion to the New World, new centers of accumulation
were opened. However, capitalism being based on endless accumulation,
a structure in which sovereign States were linked in an inter-State system
was required to encompass even the more reticent States under the same
economic model (Wallerstein: 1999). Accordingly to that, Europe created a
constellation of world peripheries (Frank: 1969), facilitating the trade of
commoditized natural resources (Wolf: 2010). In later stages of the
development of capitalism, i.e. the British Systemic cycle of accumulation
(Arrighi: 2010) beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, the whole
world was finally included in the capitalist economic-system (Arrighi: 2010;
Wallerstein: 1989, 2011b). Here particular States emerged, absorbing and
redirecting peripheral contradictions to the core, thus acting as peripheral
zones for core countries and as core for the surrounding peripheries
(Wallerstein: 1976), therefore downgrading other States to peripheries of
the peripheries (Ibid.: 2011a).
Although Wallerstein situates Colombia in the global peripheries (cf.
Goldfrank: 2000), I do argue that in reason of the economical role played
by the country as sub-continental core, or at least as peripheral reference
for the US core, Colombia might be seen as a semi-periphery.
Nevertheless in this Latin American Republic⎯be it semi-periphery or
periphery⎯western hegemonic powers endure in a process initiated in
20
eighteenth century England (Marx: 1990), i.e. the commodification and
privatization of land through the forceful expulsion of the peasant
population. This process however was not restricted in space and time,
but expanded with the spatial enlargement of the system of capital
accumulation (Arrighi: 2006), conforming into what Harvey (2003) defines
as ongoing capital accumulation by dispossession.
This ongoing mechanism (Harvey: 2003) entails mega-projects⎯like
the Salvajina dam or the eventual diversion of Ovejas⎯that are
intrinsically displacing (Gellert, Lynch: 2003) and are thus the genesis of
today’s struggles in the Afro-descendant community of La Toma.
To wholly comprehend this problematic, in our investigation we will
refer to an approach, i.e. political ecology (Paulson et al.: 2003), capable
of binding the pressure of production on resources to social relations
(Watts: 1983), of relating land degradation to social marginalization
(Blaikie, Brookfield: 1987), and of individuating primary as well as
secondary consequences of mega-projects (Robbins: 2004). We will
therefore emphasize the consequent dynamics of ‘de-‘ and ‘re-‘
territorialisation (Raffestin: 2012) taking place in La Toma, i.e. culture
experienced as the ultimate space to produce and organize (cf. Ibid.:
1988).
2.2. Why is Anarchism relevant?
The reason why this section is not titled ‘Continuing Kropotkianism’,
or ‘A Bakunian Theory’, can be summed up in a reflection of Bourdieu
reported by Graeber (2004) in his Fragments of an Anarchist
Anthropology:
“Pierre Bourdieu once noted that, if the academic field is a game in which
scholars strive for dominance, then you have won when other scholars
21
start wondering how to make an adjective out of your name” (Graeber
2004: 4).
Anarchism, contrary to Marxism does not answer to a single ‘fatherthinker’, but to a multitude of scholars who have attempted to theorize the
practices that may lead to a ‘new society’ based on horizontal structures,
as ‘real’ democracy ought to be8.
Yet, the ethno-territorial community of La Toma seems to offer those
possibilities through practices inherited from their ancestors, who were
brought to the New World in the form of commodities. An anarchist
perspective is in this case relevant for at least two reasons: first, the Afrodescendant identity which the people of La Toma refer to is not restricted
to a history or a territory defined by fixed (State-) national borders, but
rather to that of runaway societies in constant warfare against the colonial
authorities (Scott: 2009); second, the strategy of territorial selfdetermination (Ince: 2012) and part of the related tactics employed by the
community in their (re-) territorialisation process, are peculiar to that
theory of practice defending the idea that freedom must not be asked for
(Graeber: 2009), but conquered through the appropriation of the lived
space and its self-government (Rocker: 2010).
Moreover, I claim that the antithesis between the Afro-descendant
and the Afro-Colombian identity exemplifies the awakening of oppressed
people⎯through
a
self-referential
representation⎯withstanding
the
8
I agree that this statement might sound a bit simplistic, for if on the one hand anarchism
also arguably has its ‘father-thinker’, Proudhon⎯who first used the term anarchism in a
positive sense (Prudhon: 2007)⎯on the other hand Marx was also looking forward to the
same type of society, namely communism. It was therefore the scholars succeeding
these two thinkers that created such a difference in terms. However, this only reinforces
our point of view, i.e. a collective horizontally structured vision of revolutionary practices
differing from an also collective, but rather hierarchically structured perception of
revolutionary strategies (cf. Graeber 2004: 6).
22
political economy of the anarchist’s sworn enemy, i.e. the State (Scott
2012: 53).
In fact, the Afro-Colombian design is a government’s tactic willing to
include ethnical diversity within State borders, so as to accomplish a
homogenization strategy that has the objective of unifying the entire
population under the same imagined community for the purpose of the
capital accumulation (Anderson: 2006), a strategy that needs to be
explained.
According to Bakunin (2009b) the relationship between State and
society is an alienated one. Although the government wants to delude that
the State is a necessity to ensure the social order and the welfare of a
population within a defined territory, in reality it creates an apparatus⎯the
State⎯that justifies a condition of hegemony and subjugation (Ibid.). This
dual system prevents the dominated class from accessing the decisions
made by the ruling elite through a strategy⎯that of ‘democracy’⎯that
guarantees the reproduction of the dominant class (Chomsky: 1996,
1999). So-called ‘democratic States’ legitimate their status through the
right to vote, i.e. the right to elect the people who should represent the
masses in the political arena. Here the people or groups who wish to
obtain power are dependent on their finances (Ibid.: 2005a, 2006), a
simple but clear condition that involves equally simple consequences:
those who do not have the (financial) means will be always excluded by
the ruling elite, and whoever will be able to obtain the means from third
parties, will never be truly independent in his/her decisions (Chomsky:
1996; Bakunin: 2009a). Additionally, whoever is able to reach a position of
power for his/her ‘exceptional’ qualities might be corrupted by the system
(Bakounine: 2009a), or might have to make compromises to survive in the
neo-liberal world (Grugel, Riggirozzi: 2012), the penalty being political or
even physical annihilation.
23
Yet, the ability of the ruling elite in reproducing their economic
interests lies in its legitimacy, and consequently in the amplitude of its
electorate⎯its citizens (Hindness: 2000; De Genova: 2005)⎯and the
black people in Colombia are in this sense essential to secure that
legitimacy.
Although the ethno-territorial community of La Toma has never
defined itself as anarchist, in this thesis I claim that because of their
rejection of the State’s homogenization process, and because of the
source⎯i.e. the maroons⎯on which they based their own representation
and social organization, the community of La Toma seems to perfectly fit
the principles of anarcho-syndicalism.
2.3. Showing Black Emancipation
As a visual extension of this essay9 the author (alias Attilio Oscar
Mina) has directed and produced a fifty-six minutes long documentary,
‘Tierra
Negra⎯Journey
into
an
Afro-Colombian
Territory’
(‘Tierra
Negra⎯Viaje en territorio Afro-Colombiano’). The documentary has been
filmed during the five months of fieldwork in the Northern Cauca, except
for the interview with professor Angela Y. Davis that took place in Oakland
on July 2nd 2012. The editing has been done in Switzerland. The language
of the documentary is Spanish and English, while the subtitles are in
English, Spanish, French and Italian (only in English for the attached
version).
The documentary is situated in the frame of visual anthropology, an
ethnological field, which has fully developed in the last four decades
9
The DVD is attached to this thesis.
24
(Heider: 1976). Already in the first ethnological fieldwork researches
(Barnouw: 1974; Flaherty: 1922; Goncalves: 2012), photography and
footage were used for investigation purposes, and in 1939 Gregory
Bateson, together with Margaret Mead, developed for the first time a
concrete project where visual material was systematically used for the
observation of non-verbal behaviors (Jackins: 1988).
After those pioneering experiences, the use of film as a medium in
ethnological field-research increases, but the term ‘visual anthropology’ is
employed for the first time only in the seventies. According to Grimshaw
(2001), the term was formalized during a conference held in Chicago in
1973, followed by Hockings’s publication ‘Principle of Visual Anthropology’
(2009). In this period film is considered, above all, a field-research
method, which allows systematic data collection, and which serves as
demonstration of the results (Jackins: 1988).
During the nineties a new wave of interest develops, and several
publications on the topic appear. Young (2009) discusses the different
aspects that should be taken into account so that the filmed reality is
respected, while Grimshaw (2009) debates those features and relates
them to current considerations about authenticity in film. For Banks and
Morphy (1997) film is a medium that should no longer be used only as a
method for data collection, but rather as a tool through which the culture is
visually more construable (cf. Grimshaw: 2001). As a matter of fact,
“[Images] evoke the life experience of social actors, and also experiences
of fieldworks that always remain prior to anthropological description”
(MacDougall 1997: 264).
With the making of ‘Tierra Negra⎯Journey into an Afro-Colombian
Territory’ the intention has been, on the one hand, to demonstrate our
results (Jackins: 1988), and on the other hand to allow the analysis of
25
aspects that may elude written description (MacDougall 1997, 1998;
Banks 1997; Mead 1975), i.e. for example the relationship between the
researcher and the community, the way people interact with each other,
and their know-how in their working activities or other everyday practices.
26
3. What Anthropology and Geography Ought To Be
Before tackling the core subject matter of the thesis, in this chapter
we will shed some light on the procedures by means of which the social
reality has been approached⎯that is, the methodology.
As specified beforehand, the unconventionality of the present study
resides in the fact that it includes two separate, but nonetheless
intersecting fields of study: social anthropology and human geography.
Because of this particular approach, here we will initially expose some
methodological, theoretical, and personal considerations; we will then bare
the empirical obstacles that have characterized the field-study, and the
solutions adopted.
We open this section with a title borrowed from Kropotkin’s (1885)
geography Manifesto, in which one of the fathers of political ecology and
critical human geography (Jarosz: 2004) defends the idea that the study of
geography⎯and I argue that he most surely would have written the same
for anthropology⎯must be moved by the desire to understand other social
realities, so as to become a tool for the promotion of emancipatory politics
(Kropotkin: 1885). From his fieldwork in Siberia (cf. Gould: 1988), the
anarchist geographer comprehended that indigenous peoples generally
not only better know the world that surrounds them, but also have an
understanding of the equilibrium that binds all living beings. For Kropotkin,
in order to figure out the thought of an indigenous people and understand
their way of organizing their lived space, the researcher has to live
together with the studied community and partake in its everyday practices
(Gordon: 2007). However simple, this intellectual step slowly slung social
science out of the ethnocentric preconceptions, and opened the door to a
new methodological procedure, i.e. participant observation.
27
Following Kropotkin’s elucidation, in the Northern Cauca I used this
methodological practice for two related reasons: first of all, because the
people of La Toma have their own conception of space and a specific
representation of blackness that could have only been discerned by
becoming part⎯to the extent possible⎯of the community; and second,
because in order to be part of a social group that identifies itself with its
socio-economical activities⎯i.e. mining and agriculture⎯a necessary
condition is obviously to participate in such exercises.
A Singular Methodology: Distance with Proximity
Participant observation (PO) is a methodical approach of the
anthropological field research. It implies a longer stay in the field, during
which the researcher looks for a place in a group, and lives relatively in
proximity of the people in order to answer his/her research question as
‘closely’ as possible. Participation can cover a whole spectrum of different
engagements: it can be passive or active, marks in principle rather
inconspicuous roles, and implies in each case physical proximity and
social relations.
PO studies the situation locally, focusing on humans and their
relations among themselves, as well as in relation to the researcher, and
is thus not arbitrarily repeatable (Beer: 2003). The researcher must make
a split between proximity and distance, for PO means proximity while
observing from a distance. This method consists of contradictory
behaviors, i.e. attempting to act as someone belonging to the situation,
while at the same time maintaining the perception of an outsider.
PO is particularly important in the explorative phase (Ibid.), a)
because it is a preliminary stage to more systematic investigations, and b),
because it is used to get accustomed to the context and adapt to it.
28
Instead
of
drawing
individual
investigations
with
pre-formulated
parameters, exploration through PO makes it possible to find relevant
research questions on the go. Moreover, PO is also a means for the
evaluation
of
research
questions
that
have
been
formerly
considered⎯due to literature studies⎯at home: are the questions relevant
at all, and can they be examined? Do they still have to be modified?
Additionally, the openness of PO can also lead to a re-orientation of the
research should one be confronted with facts that appear suddenly to be
more important than the ones that were originally taken into consideration.
As Beer argues, PO is to be done also after the explorative phase, again
and again, because it enhances the examination, and the rewording of
research questions and of the aim of the research. In addition, PO is used
to pursue everyday social operational sequences, such as interaction
behavior of humans with work, the family, or at meetings.
The follow-up to the observations is another important step used to
adjust the subjective experience in discussions with the observed, their
knowledge and explanations (Ibid.). Generally, PO is also related to time,
i.e. one must decide when to use it purposefully, and thereby where one
wants to be and where not (to observe everything is impossible!).
Finally, one must take into account that the relationship between
researcher and investigated is central, but (nearly) always characterized
by power relationships and different interests. As Beer claims, here it is
requested of the researcher that he critically consider what the ‘observed’
is told; this means asking oneself to what extent the information received
by the ‘investigated’ is selectively or partially distorting the show (Ibid.).
Bourdieu, in his attempt to define the social world as a scientific
object, also theorized the above-mentioned reflection, introducing the term
of radical doubt (Bourdieu: 1992). With this concept, the French
29
sociologist alerts the researcher about the veracity of his acquired data,
suggesting an epistemological vigilance towards the questioned world
(Ibid.). Bourdieu pushes the researcher to relativize every experience:
each must be abstracted from its context and placed in the impartial frame
of the subject studied⎯it has to be objectified (Ibid.). Additionally, the
sociologist suggests the following step: the objectification of the
objectifying subject, or participant objectivation: “[…] the objectivation of
the subject of objectivation, of the analyzing subject⎯in short, of the
researcher herself” (Bourdieu 2003: 282). The investigator should hence
acquire a scientific⎯objective⎯distance from his field and from himself,
while simultaneously being a subjective actor in his own world, as well as
an interactive participant in the social world of his research. As Bourdieu
clears up, “[…] what needs to be objectivized, then, is not the
anthropologist performing the anthropological analysis of a foreign world,
but the social world that has made both the anthropologist and the
conscious or unconscious anthropology that she (or he) engages in her
anthropological practice [thus] her particular position within the microcosm
of anthropologists” (Ibid.; 283).
The empirical difficulty of accomplishing this task is the cause of
incessant critiques moved towards participant observation (i.e. Spittler:
2001), in spite of the fact that the latter likely remains the most used
method by anthropologists⎯myself included.
To plunge into a foreign environment, especially if it represents a
context completely contrasting to the one the researcher is used to, also
implies having a flexible attitude and a good dose of empathy toward the
object of interest (Fetterman: 2010). We must not forget that the field of
study is composed of people with feelings, emotions, and who not
necessarily wish to be the research material of some scholar coming from
30
abroad. The ethnographer must therefore not pretend to always agree
with the way things go⎯i.e. one cannot expect to be alone every time he
would like to, so to say. In this light, if he does not wish to appear
overbearing, but on the contrary to become part of the examined group,
he must be ready to relearn, re-socialize, or, paraphrasing Bourdieu, to
participate objectivating.
Indeed, it might happen that “[…] some ethnographers seek to do
field research by doing and becoming⎯to the extent possible⎯whatever it
is they are interested in learning about” (Emerson et al. 2011: 5). A
researcher studying shamanism may take drugs and get a new
perspective on reality while in a state of altered consciousness (e.g.
Narby: 2006), others participate in direct actions (Graeber: 2009), while
others still, as has possibly been my case, sympathize with the object they
are willing to study. In this case, the objectivation of the subject of
objectivation requires even more attention and a constant exercise of
positioning with respect to themselves and to the object of study. It is clear
that, although one may embrace the cause that one has been
investigating, the researcher, despite the fact that he or she may acquire a
major role within the group, will never ‘truly’ be a member of its target of
investigation. Nonetheless, I do argue that, primarily in respect towards
the people who⎯often voluntarily⎯dedicate time and attention to the
ethnographer, the fieldwork should not have as its only aim that of
contributing to an academic-intellectual debate that produces no beneficial
effect for the community that is being studied. On the contrary, engaging
in academia should mean putting oneself at the service of society, for I
agree that “[…] intensified networks of solidarity with those involved in
direct action on the streets may well be the future of radical geography
[and anthropology]” (Springer 2012: 1620). In this light the documentary
‘Tierra Negra’, besides being a visual analytical tool complementing this
31
thesis, also wants to be a counter-gift to the Afro-descendant people of La
Toma for sharing their time, availability and teachings.
3.1. Preliminary Choices
The reasons that have led me to undertake this fieldwork are
personal. The country, Colombia, is my land of origin⎯I have been
adopted as a child⎯and a place that I wanted to discover and get a
deeper understanding of.
The other motivation is the affinity with my interests in politics, in this
case related to the ongoing internal conflict that has plagued the country
for more than half a century. In this case, the intention was to comprehend
how rural communities might organize themselves politically in relation to
their territory, while living in the middle of an armed conflict and therefore
under the constant threat of forced displacements.
The choice to explore the Afro-Colombian identity has been even
more profound, for it relates to my personal investigation on identity.
Conscious of dealing with social constructs that for an anthropologist are
impossible to approach in an uncritical way, I was however persuaded that
this fieldwork would have been fruitful for my own understanding.
My preliminary knowledge of the topic of my research came from the
website of PCN (Black Colombian Communities Process), through which I
gained a certain degree of awareness about the specific problems
touching the Afro-Colombian communities: exclusion and marginalization
from society, but also the internal war often related to the natural
resources present in black territories10. In fact, the Afro-Colombian live in
areas where natural resources are abundant above and beneath the
10
See www.renacientes.org
32
ground, and the desire to exploit this environmental richness is the reason
why in those regions the armed conflict finds its highest intensity (Ross:
2004).
Besides those readings, my knowledge of the country was mainly
based on a first ‘touristic’ trip I had gone on some years earlier, and which
had not given me the possibility to see, and even less to live, the
Colombian conflict.
Finally, my language skills in Spanish were good enough to
communicate, but not enough to pass for a ‘true’ Colombian⎯a fact that
has often raised the identity question.
3.1.1. The First Contacts and the Initial Difficulties
The contact I used to refer to before my departure, as well as during
the first period in Colombia (summer 2009), has been the abovementioned PCN, an organization defending and promoting the rights of the
Afro-Colombian communities, and active on the ground through
workshops for the most part dedicated to the discussion and the recording
of collective memories11.
The first communication was carried out by e-mail, which has not
allowed me to establish a detailed correspondence. The reason was
simple: from my side I did not have any precise idea about the subject I
wished to work on, and the organization had no time for an exhaustive
correspondence. Moreover, because of the armed conflict and the
constant threats, particularly from the paramilitary pageantry, it remains
very difficult for organizations like the PCN to open its doors and reveal
delicate information to anyone not belonging to a restricted circle of
confidence.
11
In the course of this thesis we will explain with more clarity the role that the PCN plays
in the country, and through what principles.
33
In light of the above, the first difficulty I encountered upon arrival in
Colombia was to understand who my informants were, what the structure
of the organization was, and overall, where was I to conduct my research.
For this reason I have traveled with people of the PCN for various weeks,
following various meetings, conferences and workshops in different
regions of the Colombian Pacific.
In this first period I unquestionably had to incessantly objectivize
myself and the social microcosm where I have been socialized (cf.
Bourdieau: 2003), since the majority of the meetings I attended were
focusing on identity, and for my part, I was not even aware of what my
own was. Before flying to Colombia I was convinced⎯because of the
racism experienced in Switzerland, especially during my childhood⎯that,
as mentioned before, I would have been able to identify, at least in part,
with the Afro-descendants. Once I arrived in Colombia however, I realized
that being called negro in Switzerland had nothing to do with being a
negro in Colombia, for there I was seen as a mulatto, or a mestizo12. In all
those meetings, everyone had to present him/herself in front of the others,
by saying his/her name, ‘identity’ and the organization the person was
working with (for example by saying: “Hello, I’m Carlos, Afro-Colombian,
working for the PCN). Personally, I was not sure about any of those three
coordinates13.
However, after this incubation period, which has been emotionally
very exhausting, I finally got in touch with F.14, the person who hosted me
12
Historically, mulattos are those people of mixed black and white ancestry, while
mestizos are those of mixed indigenous and white descendants (Zermeño-Padilla: 2008).
However, in the common language in Colombia, mulattos are those with remarkable
African lineaments, but a lighter skin color, while mestizos are people who, like me, have
lighter skin, and less obvious lineaments.
13
For the record, I have different names in my Colombian and Swiss passports.
14
In this thesis all names of the informants (except for Angela Y. Davis who is a public
figure) will be made anonymous. This choice wants to guarantee a minimum safety to the
34
and became my main informant during the following months. The
timetable, as eventually carried out, can be found in Annex 1.
Can Trust Really be Won?
F. and her family immediately accepted me and tried to make me feel
at home; I however had to promptly realize that, concurrent to my
observations, the entire community of La Toma was observing me in turn.
Although for the first month I decided not to carry out ‘official’ interviews15,
I was nonetheless testing my informants through informal discussions
where I tried to assess what was happening in the region in relation to the
internal conflict16. For many questions the answers remained very vague,
or depending on the subject simply “Yo no se” (“I don’t know”). In general,
the two themes I could not approach were precisely the insurgency and
the paramilitary.
In reality, everyone told me stories about the massacres and the
people who got killed by the paramilitary forces, but as soon as I tried to
understand who they were and where they were, the interlocutors skillfully
changed the subject of the conversation. Nevertheless, on many
occasions I was told not to go to some places, absolutely not to show my
people who freely shared delicate information and opinions for which in Colombia they
could easily become targets of paramilitary groups (Chaverra, Petro: 2013). In case the
reader is interested in receiving more details about the informants, I will be happy to
collaborate and in particular share the fully transcribed interviews (in Spanish), as well as
their original audio and video components.
15
The difference I make between ‘official/formal’ interviews and ‘informal’ interviews is
that the former have been audio and/or video recorded, while the latter were summarized
in my field notes. The difference between ‘informal’ interviews and ‘informal’ discussions
or talk, is that the former were discussions with a particular person expert on a topic and
from whom I was trying to get some specific information, while the latter were everyday
talk from which, depending on the topic, an interesting aspect spontaneously emerged.
16
As in Bogotá (see the time table in Annex1) I told different people that I was going to
the Northern Cauca, many of them told me that I was ‘crazy’, for that was zona roja (a red
zone), meaning one of those areas in the country where the conflict had reached its
highest intensity (see maps in Annex 5).
35
camera, or to be wary of certain people⎯because everyone knew they
were paramilitaries, or at least were in contact with them. At night there
was no one around; sometimes we could hear explosions in the valleys
nearby, and it happened that people got killed. I remember that, after a
couple of weeks, I really thought about leaving the field, for I was afraid17.
As I decided to stay, I understood that if I wanted to do so, I had to
reconsider my participant observation in order to gain trust, and the only
way of doing so was to engage in the hardest work I have ever tried:
working in the gold mines. I was right, because from there, everything
changed.
That has been a turning point demonstrating how a physical
engagement in the work of a community can drastically change the social
dynamics within the frame of a research (e.g. Wacquant: 1989).
Immediately I was no longer perceived as a foreign scholar in search of
information, but as a friend, as ‘part of the family’. I was able to have
continuous informal talks during work, especially in the little moments of
relaxation, where people were approaching me and spontaneously
revealing their personal stories. Not only was I able to talk about
everything, but I also came to realize that the people who knew about the
project of the river diversion were those politically active in the community,
who knew the territory well, and who could help me with my research18.
17
In fact, the fear one learns to have of paramilitaries is different from any type of anxiety
one could face in other countries or even in Colombia’s big cities. For example, in Cali I
have been robbed and threatened with a knife, but that has been a moment and nothing
one can really get shocked by, while the constant threat of being kidnapped by
paramilitaries is different, for those people are trained to torture and kill in the most
horrible way, as the main goal of their murders is to terrify (cf. O’Loinsigh: 2002; Saab:
2009).
18
The only “collateral damage” has been that the work in the mine⎯the hardest work I
have ever done⎯cost me eight months of recovery and physiotherapy once back in
Switzerland. Nonetheless I was able to select my informants in relation to the topics of
my study, and because of the trust I gained, I was allowed to record and even to film the
interviews.
36
3.1.2. An Ethnologist on the Field
Probably something the young researcher does not know before the
first experience is that⎯more important than what has been read in all
books⎯the field is created by itself on the field. In other words, not only
ought the researcher to rearrange his goals and inquiring techniques in
response to the development of his objectives, but also according to the
object of study, which, being part of the social world, remains a variable,
unpredictable
field.
It
is
therefore
required
that
the
ethnologist
demonstrate a certain capability of adaptation and spontaneity when
making decisions, which often has to be done rapidly.
Again, here is where participant observation allows this flexibility, and
in the case of my study I integrated that with an interactive model of
qualitative method analysis drawn by Maxwell (2005), which has an
interconnected and flexible structure based on five components: goals,
conceptual framework, research questions, methods, validity.
In this framework, each of these five points answers a specific
question19, but all have to be seen as an integrated, interacting whole.
According to Maxwell, “Your research questions should have a clear
relationship to the goals of your study [while] the goals of your study
should be informed by current theory and knowledge, [and] your decisions
about what theory and knowledge are relevant depend on your goals and
questions. [Finally] the methods you use must enable you to answer your
research questions, and also to deal with plausible validity […]” (Maxwell
2005: 5).
19
The goals respond to: Why do you want to conduct this study, and why should we care
about the result? The conceptual framework to: What theories, beliefs, and prior research
findings will guide or inform your research? The research questions to: What specifically,
do you want to understand by doing this study? The methods to: What approaches and
techniques will you use to collect and analyze your data? And finally, the validity answers
to: How can the data support or challenge your ideas about what’s going on? Why should
we believe your results? (cf. Maxwell 2005: 4).
37
During my fieldwork, and particularly in the first month, I often had to
refer to Maxwell’s model in order to circumscribe my research question
and use it to organize the structure of the succeeding ‘formal’ interviews.
How Interviews Have Been Carried Out and Analyzed
As Blanchet argues, “[…] l’entretien, comme technique d’enquête est
née de la nécessité d’établir un rapport suffisamment égalitaire entre
l’enquêteur et l’enquêté pour que ce dernier ne se sente pas, comme dans
un interrogatoire, contraint de donner des informations.” (Blanchet,
Gotman 2007: 7). In the particular fieldwork of my research, trying to
minimize power relationships between investigator and investigated has
been a constant preoccupation, particularly in relation to the problematic
of trust. Of the seventeen ‘formal’ interviews I selected for the relevant
discussion content, seven have been carried out during the second field in
May 2013, while eight were conducted in the last month of the first field
period20.
On July 2nd 2012 I conducted an additional interview in Oakland
(California) with Angela Y. Davis, former Black Panthers leader, political
activist and professor at the University of California. This interview has
been filmed, and its whole transcription can be found in annex 421. This
interview has been made possible through the contacts the PCN had with
the African-American leader, since she had visited the community of La
Toma during the summer of 2011 and was therefore able to draw some
parallels between the Afro-Colombian and the African-American identities.
As a stimulating critique to this interview, it is interesting to note that in
many occasions the power relationships between investigator and
20
See timetable in Annex 1.
The interview with professor Angela Y. Davis has also been published and can be read
on
different
websites:
www.rebelion.org;
www.lahaine.org;
www.paccol.org;
www.seminario-alternativa.info and others.
21
38
informant were turned upside-down, as I often had to find a way to come
back to the topic I wanted to discuss22.
Of the other sixteen selected interviews, twelve have been recorded
on video, while four are only audio. Of the filmed interviews, five have also
been used in the documentary ‘Tierra Negra’ (logically together with that
of activist Angela Y. Davis)23, while the audio interviews are those that
deal with the more delicate passages of this thesis (see for example
chapter 5.2).
In general the informants have been divided into two categories:
those providing me data about the project of the river’s diversion, and
those who helped in the understanding of the identity issue.
For the first group, the informants have been selected through the
snowball sampling method (Maxwell: 2005; Blanchet, Gotman: 2007),
meaning that the first couple of informants supplied the contact for the
following ones, who were recognized as having participated actively in the
contestation of the project. As previously explained, because of the
delicacy of the topic, these interviews have been (audio) recorded⎯and
that only thanks to the trust I had gained⎯under strict anonymity, in
private houses, and without the possibility to film them. In all those cases
the possibility to carry out the interviews in private houses is what made
22
For example, professor Davis has brought up the entire discussion about the prison
system. Since I knew that for her activism she would have probably touched this topic, I
was nonetheless prepared and therefore able to maintain the conversation relevant to my
thesis. I must also point out that professor Angela Y. Davis accepted to be interviewed
only for her commitment with the community of La Toma, and therefore exclusively
because I declared that my thesis had to be intended as a contribution to the process
carried out in the community.
23
In the documentary we also see different ‘informal’ interviews, i.e. discussion coming
out spontaneously on various occasions (meetings, workshops, at work, etc.) when,
armed with my camera, I began asking some questions or simply filming the observed
activity.
39
the conversations possible, since, especially when discussing sensitive
issues, the place is of enormous significance (Fetterman: 2010).
The questions have been semi-structured (Maxwell: 2005; Blanchet,
Gotman: 2007), meaning that I had four main topics that I wanted to
touch24, unless I let my contact speak freely.
On the other side, for the second group of interviews, those
concerning identity, I chose my informants somewhat randomly (except
some with whom I also got in contact through the snowball method), and
the questions have also been semi-structured25.
In order to facilitate my examination, the seventeen selected
interviews have been codified following the steps for qualitative data
analysis sketched by Rückert-John (2013) and Mayring (2000). Once all
interviews were transcribed, I scanned the material, and through a
deductive category application (Mayring: 2000), I first decided which were
the pertinent categories for analysis, and then applied a different color to
each of these sets so as to code the relevant paragraphs according to
their topic groups. I later created a new “Word” document for any of these
categories, to which I copied the selected paragraphs, leaving a space for
additional comments26.
24
The four main topics were: The construction of the Salvajina dam and the changes it
provoked, the Ovejas diversion project, the organization of communities regarding the
resistance to the project, and the tactics of resistance.
25
In this case the four main topics were: The relation to the past (slavery), the relation to
the territory, the (self-)perception of the identity, and the reality of everyday life for black
people in Colombia.
26
See Annex 3.
40
3.2. Some Further Considerations
Three years after the first field, I drew some intermediate conclusions
in relation to the collected material and the elapsed time.
Concerning the data I had gathered, I had some rich and exhaustive
information about the history of the project of the river’s diversion, but less
about the identity and the relation with the territory. This was due to the
fact that, as I mentioned, by the time I gained the trust of the community
and was able to travel around making the interviews, my stay was already
coming to the end. That was not forcedly negative, as in fact during those
three years many things have changed. The risk of an eviction from the
land had been added to the problematic of the Río Ovejas because of an
illicit property act granted to Hector Sarría, a man who is well known for
his ambiguous relationships with the government (and presumably
paramilitary forces)27. In addition to this, in October 2012 a peace process
started between the Colombian government and the larger insurgency
group FARC-EP (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), an element
of great importance for the African-descendant community of La Toma,
since they inhabit an area in which the revolutionary forces are present28.
Ultimately, for what concerns my personal background, during the
years that passed I have been constantly active and engaged in the
Colombian political process. This has allowed me to obtain a certain
degree of legitimacy, as well as more privileges among my informants in
Colombia and in Switzerland⎯where I used to work with political
refugees.
27
For additional information on this topic visit
http://www.humanrights.de/doc_it/countries/colombia/afro_ashanti.html
and http://www.aidemocracy.org/students/the-gold-rush-and-its-effect-on-the-afrocolombian-community/ (both website were accessed on August 5th 2013).
28
See maps in Annex 5.
41
For all of these reasons, in April 2013 I undertook a second field of
two additional months, in the course of which I have finally been able to
collect the missing material and to witness the evolution of the ongoing
process in La Toma, which in those years ‘became’ an ethno-territorial
community.
42
PART II
“Des Arabes achetèrent ceux d’entre nous qui
paraissaient les plus fort. Ma mère, jugée bonne et
solide pour travailler, fut envoyée de suite en service.
Un Arabe cruel nous arracha notre pauvre mère,
sans que nous puissions même lui dire adieu.”
Histoire d’un esclave du Soudan, racontée par lui-même.
29
4. A Historical Introduction
In fifteenth century Europe, the Ottoman Empire was the major threat
to Christendom, its elite, and the governing powers who, like the Spanish
Crown, were not able to directly access the network of land and sea paths
which, connecting West, South and East Asia with the European world,
became known as the silk road. As a design to overcome this lack of
commercial opportunity, and to convert more people to the institutional
beliefs of the Church, the ambitious idea to find a way to Asia by
navigating West fit perfectly into the European plans.
On the twelfth of October 1492, some Taínos30 were absorbed in the
routines of their daily life, which mainly consisted of fishing and self29
Alexis, M.G. (1892). La Traite des Nègres. Paris, ch. Poussielgue et Procure Générale:
167-168.
30
The Taíno were the first inhabitants of the New World to have contact with the
Europeans. At the time of the Spanish arrival to what are now the Bahamas, their
population was between one to three million. The majority of them were living in the
Grater Antilles, while places like Barbados or Bermudas remained mostly uninhabited.
The name Taíno⎯meaning good, noble people⎯was given to them in describing a
population with similar language⎯the Arawak⎯and culture. The ancestors of this
Caribbean people are supposed to be originally from what is today known as Venezuela
and its neighboring region, probably migrating to the big Caribbean islands, passing by
today’s Trinidad. They were also the most developed ethnic group, with deep knowledge
of agriculture; in fact, they were already cultivating most of the New World crops, such as
corn, fufu, chili pepper, and even tobacco. At the same time they were great seamen.
Their canoes⎯that had no sails⎯could transport up to fifty people, and during the first
years of the conquest, they were guiding the Europeans everywhere in the Caribbeans.
43
subsistence agriculture. Looking toward the horizon, they suddenly saw
three strange, huge canoes with sails approaching. Probably they were
not aware that all of their families, friends and loved-ones were to
disappear within the following three generations.
On the other side of the ocean, slavery had existed long before
Prince Henry the Navigator was able to travel further south than Cape
Bojodor; but from the middle of the sixteenth century up to the end of the
nineteenth century, the slaves who survived the atrocities of the middle
passage found themselves in a new environment, working under masters
that, contrary to the African ones, treated them worse than beasts.
Today, the descendants of these slaves live everywhere in the
Americas⎯some of them in the verdant landscape of the Colombian
Northern Cauca.
Neither the Native Americans nor the African slaves accepted being
submitted without upholding a proud resistance⎯if necessary, until their
death. Nowadays, the African-descendants living in the community of La
Toma are facing the threat of the diversion of the Río Ovejas, but like their
ancestors taken away from the black continent, they will not submit to
foreign powers without resistance and without proving their commitment to
their ancestral land.
4.1. Different Meanings of Gold
Money, power, and the wealth of a few, very few, nations on earth, is
related to the historical dispossession of workers of their land. In Latin
Bartolomé De las Casas, from his arrival in the New World in 1502, used to describe the
Taínos as lovely people, which in reality was more of a stereotypical portrayal. In truth,
they were in constant warfare with their enemy from the Lesser Antilles: the Caribs
(Knight: 2012; Keegan, Carlson: 2008).
44
America, the depletion of natural resources as a manner of capital
accumulation is a phenomenon that goes back to the time of the conquest
and the day that the Taíno population ceased to cultivate tobacco for their
daily use, and began growing crops⎯while subjected to the most inhuman
conditions⎯on a large scale for the European market. Therefore, to
accurately
read
the
problematic
concerning
the
Afro-descendant
community of La Toma today, it is essential to position it in its historical
and geographical context. Besides the electricity that the Río Ovejas
generously furnishes to its people through the little Gelima plant, the
territory supports the community living along the riverbanks with another
resource, one that can neither be eaten, nor⎯as the people in the area
know well⎯can buy happiness: gold.
The history of this metal is one of the oldest and bloodiest stories
relating the human being to a commodity. As Eduardo Galeano reminds
us, with the gold extracted in Latin America it would have been possible
to⎯literally⎯build a golden bridge connecting the New World with Spain,
and, he adds, a second one could have been built with the bones of the
people who died in the mines (Galeano: 2007). But how did it happen that
gold, tobacco and sugar became so important for the sixteenth,
seventeenth, and eighteenth century European States? The mercantile
political economy
31
of the time was based on the exchange of
commodities⎯goods produced to be sold at the market⎯which were
traveling, mainly by water, throughout the triangular trade route linking
Europe, Latin America (then North America as well), and the African
continent. This trade was characterized by the exchange of arms, slaves
and drugs32: from the Americas, the European powers33 were importing
31
Which is not to be understood as a mode of production, since a mode of production is
“the social organization of production” (Weaver 2000: 11) and not simply the policy of
merchandise exchange.
32
We are speaking here primarily about soft drugs, like tobacco and sugar.
45
primarily tobacco, sugar (which in the seventeenth century became the
New World’s major export) and its derivatives (like molasses and rum); in
exchange, the Americas were getting manufactured goods and luxury
objects. On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, the Europeans were
receiving spices, gold and ivory from the African continent, while exporting
guns, (processed) cotton, cloths, and rum. Finally, if the Africans were not
importing much more than rum from the Americas, they supplied the New
World’s plantations with a labor force of an estimated number of ten to
twelve million slaves (Ibid.)⎯while feeding the Atlantic sharks with at least
another million of human bodies, many of them women. Here it must be
highlighted that in what is also known as the slave trade, the African elites
of the time were playing an active role (Weaver: 2000). In fact, the ‘real’
colonization of the African continent only began in the nineteenth century,
when sugar importation from the New World decreased in importance, and
African raw materials became fundamental in supplying the European
industrialization.
Yet, just as saying that two molecules of hydrogen attached to one of
oxygen does not explain what water is about, likewise, enumerating the
exchange of some commodities does not give the true sense of what
mercantilism meant for other economic indexes, namely: the people. As a
matter of fact, this trade also meant an aggressive and deadly intrusion
into worldwide small self-sufficient economies, and as Frederick Weaver
better explains, “European Mercantilism’s potent combination of merchant
capital and political power was fully capable of directly organizing the
production of commodities by mobilizing labor in whatever mode was
33
In the sixteenth century the Spanish crown was the only power controlling the New
World (with the exception of present day Brazil, which was under the domain of Portugal),
but in 1640 the Dutch Navy entered the Eastern Antilles, and from that moment the whole
geo-political situation changed.
46
expedient to realize the market potential” (Weaver 2000: 12). It is in this
way that the labor force, and the capital that subsequently allowed for the
primitive accumulation and the progressive development of the old
continent, were acquired through the exploitation of Indigenous Peoples
and African slaves (Frank: 1969).
In order to better explain the representation the African-descendants
in today’s La Toma have of their way of sustaining themselves through a
working activity transmitted by their enslaved ancestors (subchapter
4.1.3.), and therefore to capture the vital importance of the Río Ovejas, we
will now briefly consider three preliminary questions. In section 4.1.1 we
will answer the following query: where did the yellow blood of Latin
America’s veins go? And why was gold so important for the
conquistadores? In section 4.1.2 we will clarify how it happened that the
people of La Toma are able to exchange gold with money in order to
sustain their daily life. These queries allow us not only to contextualize the
antecedents of today’s mining exploitation, but offer a historical
comparison that serves to highlight the contrast between the meaning of
gold in the mercantile political economy, in the capitalist mode of
production, and in the subsistence economy carried out by the miners of
La Toma.
4.1.1. Gold as Fetish
First things first: contrary to what would appear to be obvious, the
metals⎯gold as well as silver⎯extracted in the New World’s mines
contributed to the enrichment of Europe only indirectly. In fact, “[…] most
of the gold ended up in temples in India, and the overwhelming majority of
the silver bullion was ultimately shipped off to China” (Graeber 2011: 309).
If during the entire Mongols period paper money used to be the currency
47
of exchange in China, from the fifteenth century, due to miners’
insurrections around the country34, the Ming dynasty had to abandon its
idea of suppressing the informal silver-based economy and instead
recognize it as the ‘new’ official currency (Ibid.: 2011). For this reason, it
has been the Chinese insatiable need of silver for the coinage of its
money that has absorbed the overexploitation of the Latin American mines
for over three centuries. Hence, the birth of the Atlantic world and its
triangular trade must be inserted in a universal context: one of a real, new
global economy. Indeed, the exchanges between the European, the
American, and the African continents cannot be comprehended separately
from their indispensable fourth element: Asia⎯the real one, not the one
that a Genoese catholic mapmaker thought he had discovered. Moreover,
as Graeber highlights, the “Asian trade became the single most significant
factor in the emerging global economy, and those who ultimately
controlled the financial levers⎯particularly Italian, Dutch, and German
merchant bankers⎯became fantastically rich” (Ibid. 2011: 312).
Secondarily, the gold fetishism of the conquistadores had a reason
that goes beyond the beauty of this element: they had to pay their debts.
Upon arrival to the New World, their everlasting desire of promptly
becoming⎯materially⎯rich urged them to immediately spend everything
that came into their pockets, and thus they soon ended up in debt. The
case of Hernán Cortés perfectly exemplified the character of the European
conquerors. As the memoirs of his companion Bernal Díaz del Castillo
testify: “He began to adorn himself and be more careful of his appearance
34
In reality the story is much more complex than this, but the meaning does not change:
silver was used in the informal⎯illegal⎯economy, while paper money was the official
currency. When the government decided to shut down the illegal mines, the miners
organized several⎯successful⎯revolts around the country, thus forcing the government
to take other measures, including the legalization of the mines. For more details see
Graeber (2011).
48
than before. He wore a plume of feathers, with a medallion and a gold
chain, and a velvet clock trimmed with loops of gold”; but more relevantly,
he continues: “However, he had no money to defray the expenses […] for
at the time he was very poor and much in debt, despite the fact that he
had a good estate of Indians and was getting gold from the mines” (Bernal
Díaz, in Graeber 2011: 316). This anecdote is not meant to be an overly
simplistic explanation of what the Conquista was all about, but it is needed
to clarify two points.
First, it shows how gold played a central role in the way some people
became rich, lived above their means, and then appealed to the yellow
metal again in order to pay their debts and finance more expeditions. And
furthermore it makes “[…] absolutely clear that, by his activity, man
changes the forms of the materials of nature in such a way as to make
them useful to him” (Marx 1990: 163)35.
Second, it makes it clear that neither gold nor silver reached the
pockets of European common people. As a matter of fact, even the gold
that actually arrived and stayed in the Old Continent was used to pay the
expenses of those who were indirectly engaged in the depredation of the
discovered world, like Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor who “[…]
himself was deeply in debt to banking firms in Florence, Genoa, and
Naples” (Graeber 2011: 319)⎯debatable institutions that preceded the
function of today’s Swiss banks.
About five-hundred years later history seems to remain unchanged:
the gold extracted in Colombia is exported⎯among other things⎯to
increase the profits of producers and investors that see the country as a
35
My own reading of The Capital has been based on its Italian version (Marx: 2009), but
for the quotes I have relied on the English version edited by Penguin Books (Marx: 1990).
49
unique opportunity for gold exploration36, and to pay off the debts of a war
that is financed mainly with drug trafficking and the gold trade37.
Before considering the meaning of gold for the people of La Toma,
we will now try to sum up the significance of gold in the market economy
in order to answer a third remaining question.
4.1.2. Gold in the Economic Theory
How is it that the people of La Toma are able to exchange gold with
money in order to sustain their daily life? And why do they need to first sell
the gold to buy Colombian pesos rather than barter it directly with food?
First of all, it should be taken into account that “[…] gold confronts
the other commodities as money only because it previously confronted
them as a commodity” (Marx 1990: 162). Said otherwise, before assuming
its money form, gold had the same arbitrary value of a t-shirt or a hat, and
it is only through time that it gained the monopoly of a general social
validity. It is for this reason that the valued metal “[…] acts as a universal
measure of value, and only through performing this function does gold, the
specific equivalent commodity, become money” (Ibid.: 188). The miners in
the Northern Cauca have nowadays the possibility to sell their gold at the
Sunday market simply because the money⎯now in the form of Colombian
pesos⎯they are buying “[…] is the measure of value as the social
36
“Colombia provides a unique opportunity for gold exploration” is the first sentence one
can read on the website of Continental Gold
http://www.continentalgold.com/English/investors/why-colombia/default.aspx (accessed
th
on October 16 2012), one of the many companies active in Colombia, while Anglo Gold
Ashanti, probably the major investor in the country with the Swiss Glencore-Xtrata,
presents itself on its website as a partner in sustainable development
(http://www.anglogold.com/subwebs/informationforinvestors/reports10/sustainability/sdth
partnering-colombia.htm, accessed on October 16 2012).
37
See for example the online article on the website of ASK (Arbeitsgruppe SchweizKolumbien)
http://www.askonline.ch/themen/wirtschaft-und-menschenrechte/bergbaund
und-rohstoffkonzerne/gold/goldrausch-und-kriegsfinanzierung/ (accessed on April 2
2014).
50
incarnation of human labor [and] it is the standard of price as a quantity of
metal with a fixed weight” (Ibid.: 192). Put differently, every peso bought
by the Afro-Colombians actually embodies two functions: (i) the intrinsic
value of the commodity, “namely labour-time” (Ibid.: 188), or the
“objectified human labour” (Ibid.); and, (ii) the price⎯the number of
pesos⎯required to obtain a certain amount of gold⎯“itself a product of
labour […]” (Ibid.: 192).
The reason for which the daily sustenance of the people of La
Toma has to be paid in the Colombian currency is granted by the
economic history of mankind. Contrary to what many economists like to
think, this history begins with what we now call virtual money⎯or ancient
credit systems⎯, which only much later developed into coins, whose use
“[…] spread only unevenly [and] never completely replacing credit
systems” (Graeber 2011: 40). At the beginning money really was made
out of gold and silver⎯as seen in section 4.1.1. But as money became a
creation of governments, this ruling elite had to maintain the monopoly of
the exchange value and prevent ordinary people from coining it on their
own⎯something that for centuries would not have been such a difficult
process.
Consequently,
the
contents
of
coins
underwent
a
metamorphosis, turning from a value based on true metallic substance, to
the one of an IOU 38 . In its new form of fetish, money has now the
capability to express a price⎯that is “the money-name of the labour
objectified in a commodity” (Marx 1990: 195-196). And as Marx explains,
“[…] hence, instead of saying that a quarter of wheat is worth an ounce of
38
IOU is an abbreviation for “I owe you” and represents the acknowledgment of a debt.
For example if a friend gives me a paper where he wrote that he owes me something of
the value of a t-shirt in exchange for a t-shirt I want to sell him, this paper become an
IOU. If now I want to swap this piece of paper in a mall for another t-shirt, probably the
salesman will laugh at me. But if my friend gives me a paper that has a general social
validity⎯which normally has printed the face of someone who has launched a war on
one side, and on the other side has written twenty dollars⎯the salesman will be happy to
accept my offer. It is in this way that money can be seen as an IOU.
51
gold, people in England would say that it was worth £ 3 17s. 10 ½d” (Ibid.:
195), or in today’s La Toma, if I remember well, about 2,000 Colombian
pesos.
After World War II and the Bretton Woods Conference, “[…] the
U.S. dollar became the new key currency and was made convertible to
gold at $35 an ounce, and exchange rates were to be fixed in terms of
U.S. dollars” (Weaver 2000: 103). Additionally, “[…] the rules of the gold
standard require that gold be the ultimate medium of international
exchange and that a nation’s money supply be directly linked to the
volume of its gold reserves” (Ibid.: 102). Yet, after 1999 no country uses a
gold standard anymore, but the Washington Agreement on Gold signed by
the European Central Bank with other national banks declares that gold
will remain an important element of global monetary reserves39.
In La Toma the amount of gold that can be exchanged for a
determined number of pesos at the Sunday marketplace is nonetheless
settled in U.S. dollars, since the Colombian pesos are themselves bound
to the rate exchange in U.S. currency. Hence, the U.S. dollar fixes the
quantity of gold that can be traded for pesos, as well as the number of
pesos that are needed to obtain a U.S. dollar. Said more simply, the
amount of gold that the Afro-descendants need to extract⎯through their
work⎯in order to obtain their daily food is fixed within the ephemeral
boundaries of the financial, political, and economic worlds, where the price
can be severely manipulated. But let’s try to be more precise and in step
with time. On Wall Street, the New York Comex exchange trades and, as
denounced by Roberts and Kranzler (2014), manipulates gold futures. In
addition to that, according to the two economists, the Federal Reserve
(Fed) manipulates the price of gold, which is fixed everyday in London
39
The Washington Agreement on Gold can be read on the website of the World Gold
Council (www.gold.org), a market development organization for the gold industry.
52
from 10:30am to 15pm by Barclays, Credit Suisse, UBS, Deutsche Bank,
Bank of Nova Scotia, HSBC, and other market makers known as ‘bullion
banks’ (http://www.lbma.org.uk/pricing-and-statistics) 40 . Another article,
showing evidence of the manipulation of the gold price in fifty percent of
occasions between January 2010 and December 2013 by the bank estate,
appeared in a Financial Times article on February 24th 2014 and was
removed a few hours later (Durden: 2014). Yet, those manipulations are
widely appreciated by States who are able to buy gold at artificially low fiat
prices (Ibid.) as in the case of Iraq, which in March 2014 has bought thirtysix tons of gold, more than what was bought by Italy and France combined
in 2013 (Bellomo: 2014). Finally, the ones suffering from the manipulations
made by bankers with the tacit support of the States are the collectivities,
and once more, the ancestral miners of La Toma.
4.1.3. Gold in the Field Practice
Far away from the numbers moving on a computer screen or those
printed on the Wall Street Journal, there is the real, heavy work,
characterizing gold extraction, whose history goes back at least six
centuries (Prem: 2000). When Cortés penetrated the capital of the Aztec
Empire Tenochtitlán, his major joy was due to the gold he could observe
shining everywhere (Ibid.). Of course this gold was not extracted by the
ruler of the city, Moctezuma II, but by Aztec slaves. From one slavery
society to another, the art of finding gold was handed down by the New
World’s indigenous peoples to the Africans, becoming part of the identity
40
Despite the fact that today the gold market is worth about 20 billion US dollars, its
value is established according to a protocol that dates back to 1919, when the market
was much smaller and market operators met in the office of Rothschild in the London
‘City’ (Napoleoni: 2014). Although the mechanism changed, it still dates from 1968 (Milici:
2014). In addition to those market makers, the price of gold is influenced by many other
economic, financial, political, and speculative elements.
53
of the community of La Toma. The passage from gold as an ornament, as
it was for the Aztec, to its use in currency exchange as practiced by the
ancestral community (or in other words, from a general form of value to its
money form), finds its elucidation in Marx’s Capital41. Yet, for the longterm inhabitants of the Northern Cauca, gold extraction never had as main
goal that of being a source of surplus-value; rather, selling the precious
metal at the Sunday market has been the only way for them to afford their
basic needs. Likewise, that explains why capitalist economy did not
develop on the basis of commercial peasant farmers since, as Taussig
argues, “[…] to some extent the peasants […] were neither easily able nor
zealous in expanding a surplus. Without the clearly drawn lines of private
property in the modern bourgeois sense, they were refractory to the
financial institutions and inducements that met and attracted the ruling
classes” (Taussig 2010: 71).
What is then the meaning of the precious metal for the African
descendant communities in today’s Northern Cauca?
41
By general form of value is meant that worth which is given to a commodity by arbitrary
perception. Let us explain it in today’s perspective: if my friend Manuel really likes my tshirt and I decide to swap it with his hat, this means that for me, the (general) value of my
t-shirt is equivalent to his hat. Evidently, “[…] the universal equivalent form is a form of
value in general. It can therefore be assumed by any commodity” (Marx 1990: 162). This
is to say that if Manuel for some reason is really attached to his hat, but in its place offers
me a Bob Marley CD, if I like the idea, nothing prevents me from accepting this new offer.
By doing it this way, the value of my t-shirt can thus pass from the equivalent of a hat to
that of a CD, and so on to any other commodity. In reality, since Manuel is my friend, I
could simply give him my t-shirt as a present acknowledging his friendship as being worth
more than any t-shirt, but since for the majority of people on earth friendship is not yet a
commodity, the example would not fit. Now, if a Bob Marley CD, because of the meaning
his music had and still has in the construction of the African, neo-African, and African
American identities (Savishinsky: 1998) were all of a sudden universally recognized as a
means of exchange, it would gain a general social validity, or to use Marx’s words, it
would become socially interwoven, and therefore assume the form of “money commodity,
or serve as money” (Ibid.). However, instead of Bob Marley’s music, it is another
“particular [commodity] which has historically conquered this [the one of money form]
advantageous position: gold” (Ibid.).
54
Neither the back pain nor the sweat paid per every gram subtracted
from Mother Earth can be perceived while sitting in the British Library.
What we nevertheless owe to Marx is that he has been able to describe
the elements that bind man [das Mensch] 42 to his work. First, as he
describes, “[…] apart from the exertion of the working organs, a purposeful
will is required for the entire duration of the work. This means close
attention. The less he [the worker] is attracted by the nature of the work
and the way in which it has to be accomplished, and the less, therefore,
he enjoys it as the free play of his own physical and mental powers, the
closer his attention is forced to be” (Marx 1990: 284).
In the days I spent working in the mines of La Toma, I realized how
the purposeful will, when it means the ability to buy the daily food, is not
simply a requisite, but the source of energy for the exertion of the working
organs. Even for the strong Afro-descendant miners⎯women and
men⎯accustomed to the reality of the mines, remaining attracted by the
nature of the work requires more than physical will. Hence, to maintain
high attention during the extraction of the raw material43, the people of La
Toma appeal to another powerful source of energy: mutual aid.
The mines in this ancestral territory are in fact organized through a
collective system of sharing of means and labor-force, known as la minga.
This method of work symbolizes the heart of the spirit of solidarity that ties
the communities around the area. Basically, the system is presented as
follows: each family group is working in a specific place along the Río
Ovejas, a place that will change as soon as the site has been exploited.
To be more precise, what the miners do is they dig holes along the river
42
This clarification is essential not simply to avoid sexism, but for a much more evident
reason: in the Afro-descendants communities of the Northern Cauca, women work in the
mines side-by-side with men, sharing the same efforts, and at the end of the day, the
same profits.
43
For Marx, a raw material “[…] is an object of labour […] which counts as raw material
only when it has already undergone some alteration by means of labour” (Marx 1990:
284-285), as in the case of the “ores extracted from their veins” (Ibid.: 284).
55
margins, momentarily diverting the course of the water through craft-made
barriers. After a couple of weeks the holes become too deep and the
barriers too weak to ensure a safe extraction. At this point, the miners free
the river, and they start the same work at another site. Since this activity is
organized among the entire community along the seventeen kilometers of
the Ovejas, there is no competition for the ‘best’ hole, or at least nothing
that cannot be reasoned out with a discussion.
In the extraction of gold, it often happens that large boulders must be
displaced or that the members of a family for some reason are absent for
a couple of days. In this case, people from a different family group move
to the site where more arms are needed, or the ones who find themselves
in a small number join for a short period with a larger group. For the Afrodescendant communities the meaning of la minga goes beyond the
boundaries of the practical-material necessity that characterizes the
capitalistic mode of production. In fact, it is thanks to this collective system
that the people maintain a constant social interaction among the different
family groups, reinforcing ties of friendship and solidarity, sharing gossip
and news, and above all, preserving a form of organization that goes back
hundreds of years44.
44
The mining activity along the river can be better discerned thanks to the documentary
‘Tierra Negra’, which particularly in this case offers a vision of aspects that may escape
from the written description (see chapter 2.1).
56
People collectively working at Ovejas (Bernasconi, 2009)
Furthermore, along the Río Ovejas, besides shovels, pickaxes, and
buckets, the only instruments of labor working without a “human-engine”
are small gasoline pumps. These serve to drain from the holes the water
that enters during the night. As Marx points out, “[…] instruments of labour
not only supply a standard of the degree of development which human
labour has attained, but they also indicate the social relations within which
men work” (Marx 1990: 286). And he continues, “[…] among the
instruments of labour, those of a mechanical kind, […] offer much more
decisive evidence of the character of a given social epoch of production
than those which […] serve only to hold the materials for labour […]”
(Ibid.). The Afro-descendants in the Northern Cauca simply cannot afford
to buy any instrument that would allow them a larger gold extraction. In the
meantime, it is the absence of greater machinery that guarantees an
environmentally sustainable exploitation of the territory, while preventing a
mode of extraction that would lead towards the destruction of the fragile
equilibrium of one of the world’s regions with the richest biodiversity
57
(Galeano: 1998). Moreover, due to the constraints of machinery, the
people working along the local river obtain from their land only what allows
them to earn the daily bread45⎯or in this case, rice46. In order to extract
more gold and thus earn more money⎯or in Marx’s words, acquire the
surplus-value⎯the African descendent miners would have to gain access
to better machinery, or ‘simply’ work more. As a matter of fact, “[…] the
surplus-value results only from a quantitative excess of labour, from a
lengthening of one and the same labour-process […]” (Marx 1990: 305).
Now, the everyday life in La Toma starts at around six in the morning, and
the work in the mines at seven⎯or an hour earlier for the ones who are
responsible for pumping the water out of the holes. Except for the lunch
break⎯which can last from thirty minutes to an hour, or a bit more,
depending on the working process, and more importantly on how people
are feeling⎯the work continues uninterruptedly until five or six in the
evening. It is indeed easy to empathize with why the idea of working
longer does not even enter the minds of the Afro-descendant miners. It is
not to say that they would not like to earn something more, but they care
about their health and above all, by doing so they do not owe anything to
anyone.
Returning now to the point of departure, a consequence of the
diversion of the Río Ovejas would surely be a forced displacement. In fact,
45
Put in Marx’s words, they create value without the process of valorization, which is “[…]
nothing but the continuation of the former beyond a definite point” (Marx 1990: 302). To
be more precise, Marx states that “[…] if the process [of creating value] is not carried
beyond the point where the value paid […] for the labour-power is replaced by an exact
equivalent, it is simply a process of creating value; but if it is continued beyond that point,
it becomes a process of valorization” (Ibid.).
46
Bread is in fact a luxury food that can only be bought in the city of Cali. It is
nevertheless true that the type of bread that is eaten in the US or in Europe does not fall
within the culinary culture of the region. Although it is appreciated when someone who
returns from the city can bring some of it, in the kitchens of La Toma it can be easily
replaced by the Colombian arepas.
58
by abandoning their territory, the people of La Toma would open the door
to firms willing to make profit47. This is the case of the firm of Mister Hector
Sarria, or on a bigger scale, the multinational corporation Anglo Gold
Ashanti.
As a matter of fact, one side of the coin menacing the future of the
community of La Toma is the property act that Ingeominas48 arbitrarily
accorded to Mr. Sarria without consulting the inhabitants. This act was
ratified even though the businessman was under questioning for money
laundering49. But the dubious legality of the act is due to the fact that in
Colombia, if a land is recognized as ancestral territory, the Law 70 (Ley
70)50 provides the rights to prior consultation (Consulta Previa)51ensuring
the participation of the communities in any decision-making regarding the
territories concerned. Thanks to his act, and hidden behind the Colombian
police forces, in 2011 Mister Sarría tried to gain access to his supposed
property, but through direct action⎯in this case carried out in the form of a
blockade of the main road⎯the community of La Toma achieved
defending their territory from the eviction52.
On the other side of the coin we find the multinational corporation
Anglo Gold Ashanti. At the moment this corporation is acting discreetly,
assuming the form of a shadow-actor, and no official documents can
prove the interest of the international firm in the Afro-descendant territory.
47
It is assumed that within the territory there is not only gold, but also other more
valuable minerals such as platinum and uranium. Again see for example the page of
Continental Gold (www.continentalgold.com).
48
Ingeominas is the Colombian Institute of Geology and Mining
(http://www.ingeominas.gov.co/).
49
th
See http://www.corporacionsembrar.org/?q=node/37 (accessed on July 14 2012).
50
The law’70 provides the mechanism by means of which Afro-descendant communities,
at least in the Pacific region, may collectively title their land.
51
The Consulta previa entails the consultation and participation of local communities in
the design, approval, implementation, and evaluation of development projects that could
affect them and their territories.
52
See
http://www.elespectador.com/impreso/politica/articulo-266920-consulta-deth
minorias, (accessed on July 14 2012).
59
However, the community’s suspicions relate to the fact that some
representatives of the corporation have been seen photographing the
area. Moreover, the different exploitation sites that Anglo Gold Ashanti
owns around the country make obvious its relationship with the Colombian
Government.
Mr. Hector Sarria, as well as the multinational corporation, knows
perfectly that their machinery is a means for producing surplus-value and
that “[…] by shortening the part of the working day in which the worker
works for himself, [their machinery] lengthens the other part, the part [the
worker] gives to the capitalist for nothing” (Marx 1990: 492).
The project of the river’s diversion maintains therefore a high risk of
forced displacement, and implies the threat for a mining activity that
considers gold as mean of subsistence instead of a creator of surplusvalue. The process of dispossessing the workers of their land (Marx: 1990;
Harvey: 2003) generates uneven global developments that not only impact
the balance of the world economic system, but also engender the
disintegration of small-scale local self-subsistence economies such as that
of the miners of La Toma. Before going through the history that has led to
the current Afro-descendant identity (chapter 4.3.), and to what therefore
explains the meaning allocated to gold by today’s La Toma miners, in the
next subchapter (4.2.) we will describe how the capitalist mode of
production operates in Colombia, and specifically in the Afro-descendant
territories.
4.2. What the Pachamama Never Wanted
Land has never been taken away from the workers for the common
good, but following the interests of an elite.
60
The case of La Toma exemplifies ongoing dynamics that are taking
place in space and time throughout the world since the fourteenth, the
fifteenth, and particularly the sixteenth centuries (Marx: 1990).
The dispossession of the Afro-descendant inhabitants of their
ancestral territories belongs to the category of “[…] those movements
when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their
means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labor-market as free,
unprotected and rightless proletarians” (Ibid.: 876). Generally, the benefits
produced by the dispossession of land and the accumulation of natural
resources in form of commodities are gathered within particular territories,
geographical as well as virtual. As Wallerstein points out, “[…] historical
capitalism has involved a monumental creation of material goods, but also
a monumental polarization of rewards” (Wallerstein 2011a: 72), and he
adds, “[…] the geography of benefits has frequently shifted, thus masking
the reality of polarization” (Ibid.). However, before better analyzing the
logic of the ongoing primitive accumulation and its consequences in the
Colombian Afro⎯descendant territories, a few clarifications are required.
Primarily, the deprivation of the workers from their land must be
read as a product of the capitalist system (Arrighi: 2010; Harvey: 2006;
Wallerstein: 2011b). The dispossession is perpetrated to allow the
accumulation of capital by means of the overexploitation of land,
resources, and particularly, of labor⎯power. This brings us to the second
point that must be stressed: the difference between capitalism and
territorialism.
As Arrighi (2010) underlines, capitalism only cares about land as a
source of surplus⎯value⎯thus being totally detached from the capacity of
61
reproduction and the ecological margins of the Pachamama 53 ⎯while
territorialism manifests its power through the possession of land. More
specifically, “[…] in the territorialist strategy, control over territory and
population is the objective, and control over capital the means, of state⎯,
and war⎯making. In the capitalist strategy, the relationship between ends
and means is turned upside down: control over mobile capital is the
objective, and control over territory and population the means” (Arrighi
2010: 35). In Colombia territorialist powers⎯the landlords⎯and capitalist
powers⎯multinational corporations⎯play around the same table using
different, yet interconnected strategies wherein the local people struggle
for survival.
The goal of this subchapter (4.2) is therefore to inquire behind the
process of ongoing capital accumulation, stressing the way it affects the
economy, the environment, and the people of the Northern Cauca.
4.2.1. Capitalist Contradictions
In the prelude of this chapter we have acknowledged that the
expropriation of the peasants of their lands is a practice that, according to
Marx, started on a global scale in the sixteenth century. As has been
discussed in section 4.1, it is effectively to that time that we can date the
sprout of the Latin American underdevelopment. The Conquista has in fact
been a systematic dispossession of territories and resources of people
who, all over the Americas, used to live in a profound harmony with
nature. Their agricultural production, as well as their hunting and fishing
activities, on the one side were not harmful for the delicate equilibrium that
binds every living being on earth; and on the other side, were not meant to
53
Pachamama is the way indigenous peoples of the Andes call Mother Earth, hence
emphasizing the fact that our planet is indeed a living being, and should therefore be
treated with due respect.
62
nourish people outside the area where the goods were produced. With the
capitalist world market (Wolf: 2010), this balance between earth and man
was broken to allow the establishment of a system where, to resume it
with the words of Eduardo Galeano, “España tenía la vaca, pero otros
tomaban la leche”54 (Galeano 2007: 40).
As Wallerstein reminds us, the formation of this new system was
made possible only through “[…] the widespread commodification of
processes⎯not merely exchange processes, but production processes,
distribution processes, and investment processes […]” (Wallerstein 2011a:
15). The chains of this new capitalist world market have then materialized
in commodity flows that, perpetrating and supporting an unequal
geographical distribution, have brought to the development of a center of
accumulation⎯the core⎯as opposed to a center of exploitation⎯the
periphery. The relationship between the core and the periphery is however
political (functional) and not geographical55. As a matter of fact, through
the lens of a macroeconomic analysis, the uneven relations created by the
metropolis⎯satellite structure (Frank: 1969) can be read as the reason
leading to the dependency of the Latin American subcontinent from its
European counterpart56. Simultaneously, a microeconomic study is what
consents the comprehension of the complexity and the contradictions
hiding behind the logic of the capitalist market. Capitalism’s development
54
“Spain had the cow, but others were drinking the milk” (Translation by the author).
In this sentence I use the term geographical within its morphological meaning. By this, I
am arguing that the periphery is situated in the place where a relevant number of people
can be exploited for the production of goods needed to nourish the core. Therefore the
distance between these two ending points of the chain is not⎯or is less⎯determined by
the morphological circumstances given by the territory, but on the contrary is given by
political decisions linked to the process of capital accumulation. In fact, it is only
throughout the capitalist world market that the periphery found itself at the other side of
the world in relation to its core. In the Aztec Empire for example, the periphery was not
far away from the metropolis.
56
In the metropolis the prices for the export and the import of commodities⎯from and to
the periphery⎯are set. In the core the manufactures and the raw materials are
elaborated to be later sold back to the periphery⎯at the price elected by the
metropolis⎯as finished products.
55
63
not only created peripheries within its very core (Wolf: 2010), but also
cores within its very periphery. It is therefore the bi-dynamical structure of
the metropolis-satellite that, as soon as it had acquired a continental and
global spatiality, has shaped the geographical distribution of people
throughout the Americas57.
Yet through the metropolis-satellite dynamic, other capitalist
contradictions emerged58.
First the competition between actors playing at the same side of the
economic field: all around the New World rivalry was the sleeping lion
hidden under every agreement signed among European States, for every
power “[…] preferred to increase their share of a smaller global margin
rather than accept a smaller share of a larger global margin” (Wallerstein
2011a: 17). This was true during the colonial time within the coreperiphery reality, as it is today between States and supra-state entities.
The competition in the post-modern world is played in the field of States
within an interstate system (Ibid.: 1999), where multinational corporations,
as well as those States assuming the role of platform where the capital
accumulates and rests from its long predatory journey around the globe59,
57
For example the cores of the Inca and the Aztec Empires were both⎯Cuzco as well as
Tenochtitlán⎯a landlocked metropolis, and it is only with the arrival of the Europeans
that the centers along the coast have gained such importance.
58
To be precise, “[…] the capitalist mode of production may be dominant within the
system of capitalist market relations, but it does not transform all the peoples of the world
into industrial producers of surplus value” (Wolf 2010: 297). Hence, the commodities
exchange characterizing the economy of the capitalist world market of the sixteenth,
seventeenth and the first three quarters of the eighteenth centuries must be read as “[…]
a vast network of mercantile relations anchored in non-capitalist modes of production,
[the latter] not com[ing] into being until the latter part of the eighteenth century” (Ibid.:
298). Wolf emphasizes on this point in opposition to the models of Wallerstein (2011a)
and Frank (1969) who, he states, “[…] not only have […] defined the European search for
wealth in the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries as capitalism pure and simple; for
them, the whole world and all its parts have become similarly capitalist since that time”
(Wolf 2010: 297).
59
An emblematic example of a State known for its role of vouchsafe for capital
accumulation is Switzerland. To visualize the ethically disputable and geographically
64
battle against weaker peripheral States whose only defense often remains
their permeable sovereignty60.
The second elementary capitalist contradiction is that of the
ongoing capital accumulation itself leading to an ongoing commodification
and production heading towards the necessity of an increasing number of
purchasers (Wallerstein: 2011). The incongruity lies in the system’s
requirement of reducing the cost of production, therefore diminishing the
distribution of wealth and indirectly lowering the number of possible
costumers (Ibid.). However, what Wallerstein does not mention, is that
again, these processes took place at different scales, the purchasers
being the inhabitants of the global peripheries as well as of the local ones.
Finally, under these ongoing capitalist paradoxes, “[…] individual
entrepreneurs found themselves pushing in one direction for their own
enterprises […], while simultaneously (as members of a collective class)
pushing to increase the overall network of purchasers […]” (Ibid.: 17). As a
result of those controversial processes, the primitive accumulation of the
people without history (Wolf: 2010), perpetrated worldwide by the
European metropolis through its American satellites along the age of
historical capitalism (Wallerstein: 2011a), has produced a geo-economic
unbalance between these two continents. The creation of a “[…] historical
level of wages which have become so dramatically divergent in different
zones of the world-system” (Ibid.: 32) is what has accelerated the ongoing
accumulation by dispossession which, in Colombia, has materialized in
disproportional economic power that this little State has on a global scale, suffice it to
imagine that one third of the raw materials in the world passes⎯if not physically at least
virtually in the form of money and trade agreements⎯through the thirty kilometers
separating the city of Geneva from the one of Lausanne (Allen: 2011).
60
As a matter of fact, “[…] no modern state has ever been truly inwardly sovereign de
facto, since there has always been internal resistance to its authority. […] Nor has any
state even been truly outwardly sovereign, since […] strong states notoriously do not fully
reciprocate recognition of the sovereignty of weak states” (Wallerstein 1999: 60). The
same logic reproduces itself at every scale⎯national, regional and local⎯where
capitalist actors compete against each other for the maximization of profit.
65
projects like the construction of the Salvajina dam and the discussed
diversion of the Ovejas River.
In the coming section we will deepen our understanding of the way
the process of expropriation of people of their land for the purpose of
wealth accumulation affects the inhabitants of the Northern Cauca and
their environment.
4.2.2. The Ongoing Accumulation of Internally Displaced Persons
The Afro-descendant community of La Toma is contesting the
diversion of the Río Ovejas mainly because it has already witnessed the
effects of the construction of the Salvajina dam. As a first impact, the latter
not only has entailed a hydroelectric power plant, but much more evidently
the creation of a lake which, as mentioned in chapter 1 (section 1.3.),
covers an area of twenty-three kilometers in length, with a width of fourhundred meters and a depth of a hundred and fifty meters. Under this
mass of water used to run freely the Cauca River, one of the most
important Colombian water-flows61. At the margins of what used to be the
river before being imprisoned, lived thousands of Afro-descendants and
Indigenous
communities
who
were
forcedly
displaced
(Villalobos
Avedaño: 2009). The dislocation of people in Colombia⎯mainly Afrodescendants and Indigenous⎯unfolds at one of the highest rates in the
world, with at least ten-thousand Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in
61
The Río Cauca, from its sources in the southwestern part of the country, pours for 965
kilometers before joining the waters of the Río Magdalena. The two rivers continue
traveling together for another 750 kilometers, until eventually they disperse in the
Caribbean Sea. Deplorably, the violent reality of the country wants that⎯against its
will⎯the river is at the same time a natural cemetery, a fact admitted by Hebert Valoza
García⎯an ex-paramilitary commander⎯and acknowledged by the population of the
Northern Cauca. Near the town of Suarez there is in fact a bridge where, for many years,
the paramilitaries have stopped and killed hundreds of people, throwing them afterwards
directly into the river (Duran Nuñez: 2008, article online).
66
2010, according to the United Nations Refugees Agency (UNHCR) 62 .
There are two interconnected causes for this enduring human tragedy63: a
direct one⎯the war⎯and an indirect one⎯the ongoing accumulation by
dispossession. The latter has no regard for any preexisting equilibrium
tying natural elements and mankind; in fact, its driving force leading to the
amassing of capital “[…] disturbs the metabolic interaction between man
and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent
elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it
hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility
of the soil” (Marx 1990: 637). The distortion of the balance that maintains
the use of the land eco-sustainable is what⎯echoing Marx⎯Foster (2008,
2007) defines as the metabolic rift.
But what happened to the people who were forced to leave their
home to allow the production of electricity? And how is the Salvajina
affecting the everyday life of the ones who remain?
According to the UNHCR 2012 operation profile on Colombia, the
majority of the about four millions of national IDPs (cumulative since 1997)
had moved from the countryside⎯where the war on natural resources
manifests its most bloody and brutal face⎯to the major urban
62
See UNHCR 2010 report on Colombia http://www.unhcr.org/cgibin/texis/vtx/home/opendocPDFViewer.html?docid=4dfdbf5b16&query=colombia%20IDP
th
%202010 (accessed on July 14 2012).
63
If the reader is willing to understand the meaning of this calamity beyond the numbers
furnished by the UNHCR, she/he must be aware of the way this displacement took place
in most of the cases. As an Afro-descendant woman told me in an informal discussion,
“Imagine one day being in your kitchen preparing dinner, and suddenly begin to hear
gunfire close to your house. After a sleepless night passed between tears and prayers on
the background of explosions and continuous shooting, you hear knocking at the door.
You open and find yourself face to face with a paramilitary, who tells you that you have
two hours to leave your house if you cherish the life of your family. Thus, without having
the time to realize whether you are in a nightmare from which you are unable to wake up,
you pack as quickly as possible your⎯few⎯more precious belongings, and join the river
of people who, between the tears, are experiencing the same fate” (Field notes,
th
Yolombó, July 29 2009).
67
agglomerations. In the Northern Cauca, the preponderance of the Afrodescendants who had to abandon the submerged riversides of the Río
Cauca went in search of a new start at the margins of a new flow, the one
of the incessant number of proletarians forced to sell their labor-force in
the slums of the city of Cali. Here, the displaced miners and peasants,
“[…] will be converted into a body of men who earn their subsistence by
working for others, and who will be under a necessity of going to the
market for all they want […]” (Dr. R. Price, in Marx 1990: 887).
Furthermore, in addition to their lack of (institutional) education, the urban
newcomers have to face the problem of racism which, in Colombia,
determines who will be the first to contract a job. To those who are
discriminated for the most fruitful opportunities, all that remains is often the
human ability to cling to the capacity of surviving under the most difficult
circumstances. Hence, the women are left with the prospect of selling their
body for the momentary pleasure of some horny Colombian man, or in
many cases some tourist in search of exoticism and a story to tell once
back home having a beer with his friends. For men, the solution may
frequently be to resort to the deadly world of drugs and crime. The most
common outcome of these choices happens to have its end behind the
bars of a prison, a place that, as black political activist Angela Y. Davis
reminds us, “[…] serves as the space to warehouse those who have
become so superfluous in a capitalist society” (Angela Y. Davis, Interview,
Line 188, Oakland, July 2nd 2012).
In Colombia, prisons are fast becoming the government’s favorite
choice when it comes to solving its internal problems. At the margins of
Agua Blanca, one of the most unfavorable neighborhood of the city of
Cali⎯where probably the majority of the displaced people form La Toma
end up living⎯the biggest Colombian penitentiary will soon be built thanks
to US funds (Chatha: 2012). The inhabitants of the shiny new prison will
68
be for the most part blacks and indigenous, so the parallel between the
prison-industrial complex and slavery has no reasons to astonish. Both
are an industry where the profits are made on the shoulders of people who
already belong to the most vulnerable fringes of society and where
racism⎯as well as sexism⎯happens to be the drawing power.
As Angela Davis reflects: “Given the parallels between the prison and
slavery, a productive exercise might consist in speculating about what the
present might look like if slavery or its successor, the convict lease
system, had not been abolished” (Davis 2003: 37) 64 . Centuries ago,
enslaved Africans had to face the dispossession of their motherland, and
only after hundreds of years were they able to access new lands where to
build their home and (re-) create cultural and economical activities. It
seems paradoxical that their descendants have not yet come to a peaceful
era. Divided by the flow of history and united by the same unfortunate
destiny, the black people of La Toma and their ancestors meet again in
today’s struggles, as in the case of the battle against the diversion of the
Ovejas River.
In the following section, reflecting what has been described in
subchapter 4.1, we will outline a brief history of the process of
enslavement that has characterized the four centuries of post-Conquista.
Our attention will turn in particular to the maroon societies, communities of
rebel slaves on whose features is constructed today’s Afro-descendant
identity (which will be analyzed in subchapter 6.2).
64
For her political activism alongside the Black Panthers Party, Angela Davis has lived
the experience of being constricted behind bars and is therefore familiar with the
backstage of the penitentiary system. Her reflection on this topic in relation to Colombia
can be read in the full interview in Annex 4.
69
4.3. The Long Way from Negro to Afro-Descendant
As in section 4.1 we saw the way gold entered the global economy,
with the aim of understanding what is happening today in La Toma, now
we will cover the road that has led to the current concept of Afrodescendant. The objective is not to retrace a general history of slavery,
but rather to grasp what lies beneath the creation of this new identity.
However,
since
the
contemporary
Afro-descendant
social
construction⎯all identity being socially created (e.g. Anderson: 2006;
Gellner: 2006; Hobsbawm: 2000)⎯is principally grounded on historical
features that are themselves rooted in the time of slavery, the first part of
this chapter will necessarily embrace the period when Africans were
forced in chains all around the New World.
As a matter of fact, we agree with Almario (2002) when he states that
the process that has led to the present ethnicity had to pass through two
major steps: desesclavización (emancipation) and territorialización
(territorialisation) 65 . In addition to this, the ‘new born’ ethno-territorial
community of La Toma demonstrates that the entire Afro-descendant
experience is the result of a collective process or, as Almario adds, “[…]
can be explained that the process of ethno-genesis of the black, seen as a
social-historical construction also implies a social construction of territory
in a collective experience which starts under enslavement and
consolidates in freedom, in interaction with the state and other ethnic and
social groups” (Almario 2002: 47).
The goal of this historical introduction will therefore be to bring to light
the attributes to which the current black population seems to refer to while
65
The process of territorialisation will be discussed in depth in subchapter 6.1, while the
dynamics that have brought to emancipation are the subject of the present section.
70
describing itself, as well as to show the collective development and
choices that have been made in the construction of the present ethnicity66.
We will then attempt to discern the reason for the selection of some
specific features, and try to see how those characteristics influence or are
influenced by the daily lives of the African-descendant living in the area of
La Toma. These clarifications will facilitate the understanding of the
representation that the African-descendants have of themselves (see
chapter 6), and how this diverges from the definition of Afro-Colombian set
by the dominant class (see chapter 5).
4.3.1. Two Ongoing Processes: Slavery and the Libertarian Project
As beforehand debated, the fifteenth century can be considered as
marking the birth of the Atlantic world, as well as the beginning of a true
global economy, based on a triangular trade where the products
exchanged were different drugs and raw materials, as well as humans
being barbarously enslaved. To be exact, the first Africans were brought to
the Americas by the Spaniards in the middle of the sixteenth century, after
the European diseases had annihilated the indigenous people and new
labor force was required (Thornton: 1998).
But what was the profile of the Africans torn from their motherland?
How were they spread out over the American continents? How did the
middle passage influence the lives of millions of people? And finally, how
could facts that have occurred hundreds of years ago possibly have an
influence on today’s discussion about identity and ethnicity?
66
Here Almario (2002) proposes a connection between ethnicity⎯or identity⎯and time.
According to the scholar, if an ethnicity maintains itself in time and in relationship with the
surrounding political space, it might be understood as a ‘cultural nation’ (Nación cultural).
This topic will be evoked and further discussed in the section dedicated to the State
(section 5.3).
71
As just mentioned, the return to those queries will be useful to later
(in chapter 6) grasp the reason that lead the African-descendants to refer
to some specific features rather than others in their identity design.
The Inaccessible African Continent
While not much is known about various parts of the black continent,
a lot of documents do testify to the relationships existing between the
European powers and the western African kingdom. Contrary to common
belief, this part of the world was not populated by savages living in social
chaos, but by highly organized cultures, although without a State. The
work of Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, who differentiate those societies into
two types, ought to be mentioned here. Their first group is composed of
strongly individualistic and libertarian segmentary societies (cf. Fortes,
Evans-Pritchard, 1964: 256). The social structure of those cultures,
despite the fact of being deprived of any judiciary or legislative organs,
“[…] is far from being chaotic. [For] it takes on a stable and coherent form,
which could be called an ‘ordinary anarchy’” (cf. Ibid.).
The second type of society described by the two authors
corresponds to the category of kingdom. It is a form of nation
corresponding to a centralized power built on alliances within different
clans and answering to a common king. It was the case of the Zulu nation,
which was “[…] an ensemble of population swearing alliance to a common
chef (the king) and occupying a defined territory” (cf. Ibid.: 25), but also
that of the kingdom of Congo under Alfonso I. This monarch who reigned
in the sixteenth century, for example seized a French ship and its crew in
1525 because it was trading illegally on his coast (Thornton 1998: 39).
This anecdote supposedly demonstrates that at the time of the
invasion of the Americas and in the centuries that followed, European
72
powers were never able⎯and probably never had the interest⎯to
physically conquer the African continent. As a matter of fact, as is argued
by Thornton, “Africans were active participants in the Atlantic world, both
in the African trade with Europe (including the slave trade) and as slaves
in the New World” (Ibid.: 6-7). At that time, along the Congolese coasts,
the kingdom of Alfonso I could count on a strong navy defending the
seaboards. His realm was effectively secured by an army, which had
navigation skills and knowledge and, above all, was not scared of the
European forces. As is stressed by Thornton, “[…] not only did the African
naval power make raiding difficult, it also allowed Africans to trade with the
Europeans on their own terms, collecting customs and other duties as
they liked” (Ibid.: 39). For all these reasons, the first Portuguese-African
slave trade was done between partners, i.e. associates of equal military
and economic power. That remained more or less the case even when, in
the middle of the seventeenth century, the Dutch took the monopoly of the
exchange by displacing the Portuguese. In general, despite the growing
European economic and military influence⎯and the settlement of various
religious missions over time⎯, the African continent remained untouched
until the end of the nineteenth century, and particularly the middle of the
twentieth century, time of the real African colonization 67 . Before that
moment, as emphasized by Thornton, “Africans controlled the nature of
their interactions with Europe. Europeans did not possess the military
power to force Africans to participate in any type of trade in which their
leaders did not wish to engage” (Ibid.: 7).
Furthermore, it should not be forgotten that the institution of slavery
was already present in the African continent, though functioning in
different forms. On the one hand labor was more important than land
67
A colonization that became fundamental when the European powers began to lose
their hegemony in the South-American continent because of the beginning of the various
wars and revolutions for independence.
73
because of the absence of private property upon territory⎯that was
corporate ownership (cf. Ibid.: 74); on the other hand, the way slaves were
treated and perceived in Africa was very different from what was done in
the old continent. As Thornton further explains, “African slaves were often
treated no differently from peasant cultivators, as indeed they were the
functional equivalent of free tenants and hired workers in Europe” (Ibid.:
87).
Finally, it must be acknowledged that the majority of the slaves
were people captured in the various wars between African kingdoms and
clans, hence, a great number of Africans who reached the American
coasts used to be warriors, or had at least some military skills. These
capabilities are what has allowed several slaves to rebel and establish
self-sufficient communities, mainly hidden in the mountains. As we shall
see in the next pages, it is on these societies that the Afro-descendant
identity is built.
Before moving on to this topic, we nonetheless have to spend some
words on the amplitude of the slave trade, so as to understand the reason
of the identitarian claims of today.
The “Africanization” of the Americas
When the first Africans crossed the Atlantic Ocean, few indigenous
people were left. The ones who had not died from European illnesses, or
who did not accept to live as slaves, were dying upholding a proud
resistance. Faced with these confrontations, the Spanish were drawing up
laws allowing them to indiscriminately kill Indians of every age in the
middle of the sixteenth century. As is testified by the defender of the
Indian cause, Bartolomé de Las Casas, the colons “[…] gettavano dentro
[nei fossi], fin tanto che gli empivano, le donne pregne, e di parto, i
74
fanciulli, i vecchi, e quanti ne potevano prendere […]. Ammazzavano tutti
gli altri con lanciate, e coltellate […]. Continuarono questa beccaria circa
sette anni, dal 1524 fino al 1531. Da qui si faccia giuditio, quanto numero
di gente haveranno distrutto” (Las Casas 2006: 69) 68 . However, the
Spanish Main69 of the New World did not dwindle until 1640, when the first
Dutch navy entered the Eastern Antilles, transforming the whole geopolitical situation. Until that date, the Spanish domination was undeniable
all over the Caribbean Sea.
With the Spanish hegemony in decline, different kinds of colonies
began to proliferate under the control of the newer western powers in the
Americas. While the Spanish had settler colonies⎯the most apparent
example being Santo Domingo, the oldest city in the New World founded
in 1502⎯the other European invaders were not concerned with religious
missions 70 ; rather, their colonies were based purely on (monoculture)
exploitation. The multiplication of tobacco plantations first, and sugar later
68
“Nay they threw into them Women with Child, and as many Aged Men as they laid hold
of, till they were all fill'd up with Carkasses. It was a sight deserving Commiseration, to
behold Women and Children gauncht or run through with these Posts, some were taken
off by Spears and Swords, and the remainder expos'd to hungry Dogs, kept short of food
for that purpose, to be devour'd by them and torn in pieces. They burnt a Potent
Nobleman in a very great Fire, saying, That he was the more Honour'd by this kind of
Death. All which Butcheries continued Seven Years, from 1524, to 1531. I leave the
Reader to judge how many might be Massacred during that time” in
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~twod/latam-s2010/read/las_casasb2032120321-8.pdf
th
(accessed April 5 2014).
69
Here, the term Spanish Main is used to define the coastal region going from Florida
down to the British Guyana (except the coast of the French Louisiana and the British
Belize), an area where the Afro-Caribbean culture remained dominant to these days. The
Spanish also controlled vast parts of the southern continent, except for Brazil, which was
granted to the Portuguese by Pope Alexander VI through the Treaty of Tordesillas
(1494), which drew a longitudinal line dividing the newly discovered lands and granting all
the territories west of this border to the Spanish, and east to the Portuguese.
70
Not to forget that one of the three main reasons for the Spanish arrival on the other
side of the Atlantic Ocean was the desire to spread Christianity, which at that time was
under Muslim threat; the other two motivations were Muslim control over the Silk Road,
and of course, the search for fame and fortune already discussed in the first chapter.
More generally, it can be argued that the Spanish idea was to recreate a “New Spain”
overseas, and that is also why the Spanish military elite and aristocracy were sent to the
Americas.
75
(in the seventeenth century), coincided with the rise of the mercantilist
period
(mostly
developed
in
the
eighteenth
century)
and
the
aforementioned triangular trade. For the Africans, this stage meant a
massive exportation of people in chains to carry out the harshest work in
the field.
With the majority of the native population dead, the “African slaves
were therefore at the center of the conquered part of the emerging new
Atlantic world” (Thornton 1998: 140). During the mid-seventeenth century,
especially all around the Caribbean71, the new labor force suddenly grew
to outnumber not only the indigenous residents, but also, more
significantly, the European population. Africans rapidly became the only
contacts for many colonists in the New World, and often played the role of
allies against the natives in the European wars, as well as the role of
intermediaries (Ibid.). So even as slaves and subject to the racial
hierarchy of pigmentocracy, Africans started to have an undeniable
influence among the people living in the Americas. In the Spanish
settlements slaves were used principally for the construction of roads and
cities (as was the case in Santo Domingo), so the first Africans arrived in
the Spanish colonies only in the middle of the sixteenth century⎯more
than fifty years after the arrival of the three caravels. On the other side, the
remaining European crowns did not wait that long, and between the
seventeenth and nineteenth centuries around ten million slaves entered
the New World72. We can therefore assume that the “African slaves were
71
This was so because the majority of the indigenous people who survived the various
diseases lived up in the mountains, especially in the main continent, all over the Andean
cordillera.
72
For increased clarity, a brief description of the different plantation societies present in
the New World should be provided.
In the Spanish ones, fifty percent of the inhabitants were whites (mainly Spanish), twentyfive percent were free people of color (FPCs)⎯mainly mulattos⎯and only the last quarter
was constituted by black slaves (Knight: 2012).
Meanwhile, the other colonies were not conceived in order to reproduce any type of ‘new
European country’. These plantations were controlled by managers and overseers,
76
subject to European cultural norms, but this allowed the Africans to
influence those norms as well” (Ibid.: 141).
Slaves played thus an active role in the creation of New World
societies73, a fact that has been denied for centuries and that is still at the
center of debates crucial for the future of the people of African descent in
the Northern Cauca. Those discussions are namely at the origin of the
differences between the identity management sought by the ruling class
and the ethnic claims advanced by the communities; two points of view
that will be analyzed in detail in chapters 5 and 6. However, before moving
on we will dedicate a few more pages to the maroon societies,
communities of rebel slaves on which, as was said before, the current
Afro-descendant identity is built. We will then conclude this part of the
historical introduction (chapter 4) by presenting the maroons and
contextualizing the specific processes of ethnic mingling, i.e. syncretism
and creolization, that occurred among those communities. This passage is
of considerable importance if one is to realize the historical complexity
preceding the Afro-descendant identity, and thus understand how ethnic
groups (re-) appear in response to national policies that are willing to deny
mostly living in the cities or in the “Mother city”, the Metropolis. The population was
composed of eighty percent black slaves, ten percent FPCs (also predominantly
mulattos), and ten percent white people (Ibid.). Contrary to the Spanish colonies, here the
whites were not a homogeneous group, but people of different origins (nationalities),
languages and religions. The hierarchical structure based on skin color (pigmentocracy)
was therefore much more complex. Moreover, as a consequence of the greater number
of (white) Spanish colonies, the latter⎯except for the ones lost in treaties⎯remained
under Spanish domain until their independence. It is also interesting to underline the fact
that in these colonies, the language has remained Spanish. This is due to the fact that,
being situated on the biggest islands from the Greater Antilles, these settlements also
had the largest populations.
The British as well as the French colonies on the other side were characterized by
continuous shifts in power, a phenomenon that led to the birth of different Creole
languages, which are a mix between a deep structural and grammatical level of African
languages, and a superficial upper level of European vocabularies. The same process
can also explain the variety of religions present in the Caribbean area. In the ancient
Spanish Main, Christianity has persisted through time, while in the other regions are
present different Afro-Christian religions, as well as neo-African ones⎯like
Rastafarianism in Jamaica, or Voodoo in Haiti (Ibid.).
73
See for example the case of Haiti in Stafford (1987).
77
the diversity among those groups, as in the case of the Afro-Colombian
design.
The Maroon’s Heritage
What has the black population in Northern Cauca retained from its
ancestors?
T., an Afro-descendant who I interviewed in La Balsa, a little town
situated one hour away from La Toma, was not the only one who
answered this question by bringing to light an interesting point:
"[…] When I read about why we, black people, are the way we are, I
mean, the emotional behavior of black people regarding the various social
dynamics. Where black people have been submissive, but at the same
time, have developed a libertarian project of life called cimarronaje
[marronage], which is a political project. Then there is a space in which
you can find the submissive and the rebel" (T., Interview, line 933, La
Balsa, August 13th 2009)74.
The submissive attitudes and emotional behaviors, possibly inherited
from slavery, will be recalled in subchapter 5.3.4, for now we will
characterize the historical pillar on which the Afro-descendant identity is
built: marronage75.
74
All interviews have been entirely transcribed in their original language i.e. Spanish
except for that of professor Angela Y. Davis. Only the paragraphs selected and used as
quotes in this thesis have been later translated into English by the author. Whenever
possible, in the translation I tried to follow the original version. However, to facilitate the
understanding, many times the structure of the sentences has been changed. Still, their
sense has never been altered or changed. For further details refer to chapter 3.1.2.
75
According to T. the word marronage comes from the Spanish cimarrón, meaning a wild,
aggressive bull that ran away. However, the etymology of this word has different although
analogous interpretations among blacks in Colombia.
78
This libertarian project, as T. defined it, was the final goal of a
resistance, which was instituted on three methods: day-to-day resistance
(i), rebellion (ii) and escape (iii) (Mintz, Price: 1976).
Domestic slaves typically applied day-to-day resistance that
required a certain power in plantation societies, something the field slaves
did not have. This method of day-to-day resistance (i) was based on
strikes and, alternatively, petit-marronage, meaning an escape for a
limited time. The second technique, rebellion (ii) was more controversial,
for ‘real’ rebellion hardly ever occurred, except in the case of Haiti, the first
successful social (black) revolution in the New World. Therefore, this
method was more similar to the third one, escape (iii). The purpose of the
latter, the actual marronage, was to create independent communities like
the well-known San Basilio de Palenque near Cartagena or the Quilombó
in Brazil. Here the runaway slaves built thousands of interconnected
villages in the Amazon defined by Thornton (1998) as grand-marronage76.
But why is such an emphasis given to the maroon societies? As in
the case of T., every time I heard people from La Toma or other
neighboring communities mention those ancient African rebels, a proud
feeling rose from their words. My impression has been that this emotion is
associated with the freedom the maroons had been able to achieve, a
liberty which today’s Afro-descendants refer to while talking about their
territories and the right to self-determination. Yet, something even deeper
ties the people of La Toma to their forefathers.
The African-born slaves⎯also known as Bozales⎯were those who
predominantly instituted the maroons’ societies. In other words, they were
76
It is interesting to note that sometimes, the fugitive slaves joined the native populations,
with whom they had constantly shifting relationships⎯sometimes fighting hand to hand
against the Europeans, at other times against the indigenous, joining the European
mercenaries. It also happened that those run-away communities were regrouping in other
countries, ensuring the bases for new, free, Afro societies.
79
at the bottom of the hierarchy of plantation life, so freedom shone as the
only way out; their conditions were so bad that they had nothing to lose,
and any possible hope for improvement was acceptable. Although the
government fervently denies the existence of a racist society, the
black⎯mostly rural⎯communities are always in the lowest rank of the
social pyramid, which apparently does not differ a lot from the ancient
pigmentocracy system. Similarly to their ancestors, who were forced to
work in the gold mines and the plantations, the inhabitants of the Northern
Cauca also have nothing to lose. The self-determination of their territory is
in fact the only conceivable solution for a better quality of life. For this
reason the inhabitants of La Toma, analogously to their ancestors, aim to
obtain autonomy in the exploitation of their mines, their farmhouses, and
more generally, their territory.
As said beforehand, the bozales were frequently militarily trained
(Mintz, Price: 1976) and were thus able to survive in those unknown lands,
also by means of techniques they learned from the Natives. Even though
they were living in a constant state of warfare (Ibid.), the maroons used to
remain in contact with the outside world for food, manufacturing, or other
necessities77. Finally, in many cases those fugitive groups tried to reinvent
a sort of Africa, especially through various religious beliefs and practices.
That was possible since they had no master and therefore had time to (re)
create culture. Those practices have led to the intermixture of languages,
religions, and traditions, i.e. ‘cultures’, the outcomes of which are explored
hereinafter.
77
Analogous attitudes among maroon societies were found in South-East Asia (cf. Scott:
2009).
80
Between Syncretism and Creolization
The comprehension of the processes of syncretism and creolization
is a prerequisite to any discussion about ethnicities of African descent.
The development of the cultural and territorial (re-)identification in the
community of La Toma, as will be debated in chapters 5 and 6, expresses
that complexity.
In general, syncretism defines a mix between two or more different
cultures, while creolization is a word used only while speaking about the
Caribbean. The process of creolization affects three different areas:
language (a), where the first creolization took place (!); the geographic
place of birth (b), and syncretism (c).
In the first case (a), a creole language is but a pidgin composed of an
upper level of a native European language⎯the vocabulary⎯and an
African underlying structure⎯the grammar (Thornton: 1998). Normally,
creole languages may be found in former English and/or French colonies
since, on the one hand, the white population was less than ten
percent⎯versus the Spanish colonies with more than fifty percent of white
people. On the other hand also because those colonies were more
dynamic and saw continuous shifts of power⎯from English, to French, to
Dutch, and so on⎯in opposition to the Spanish ones, which for the most
part remained under Spanish jurisdiction until their independence. In spite
of this, some arguably ‘intact’ African languages are still present in the
music, and in the surviving maroon communities.
In the second case (b), creolization occurred through the interchange
of (black, but not only) people born in the Caribbean and the Bozales
leading to the creation of fictive kinships (Knight: 2012).
Finally, syncretism (c) was the result of a mixture between African
and European cultural elements, such as religions, food, clothing,
hairstyles, pottery, etc. Creole aesthetics and arts are still very important
81
in present day societies because they are easy to appreciate and adopt.
One of the reproaches advanced by today’s African-descendants against
the Colombian government is in fact the attempt to reduce their negritude
to mere folklore78.
In any case, whatever effort to recreate an African world could not
have resulted in anything else than creolization, for there is no known
example of a single African tribe that managed to unite and reconstitute
itself in the New World79.
Instead, as will be analyzed in the next chapter (5), it is the
(Colombian) State that attempts to simplify the syncretism and creolization
78
This problematic is also shown in the documentary ‘Tierra Negra’.
On this subject it is enlightening to mention the contrasting position of two American
scholars: Franklin Frazier (i), an African-American writing during the forties, and Melville
Herskovits (ii), a white (Mintz, Price: 1976). Because Frazier (i) was writing in the social
context of the American segregation, his opinion was following the political agenda of
anti-segregation⎯structured upon a Marxist analysis. His idea is known as the
deculturation hypothesis: the middle passage created a deep amnesia in the slaves’
minds, hence, the Africans living in the Americas created a culture that cannot be linked
to their African past. For the scholar, the Africans arrived with the Europeans, and just
like the first white immigrants are today’s Americans, the early slaves are today’s Afro (or
African) Americans.
On the other hand, Herskovits (ii) supported the idea that the slaves retained their
cultures across the Atlantic, and this culture can be observed in today’s New World in
cultural habits like music, food and other various social behaviors.
Between these two positions we find that of Mintz and Price (1976), according to whom
the Afro-American culture was created in the New World. However, they argue, an
African heritage can be observed in various neo-African beliefs. For example various
African societies had the credence that illness and misfortune were caused by witchcraft,
while other groups believed it was provoked by the will of ancestral spirits. In both cases
illness and misfortune responded to the intentions of higher invisible forces, i.e. a deep
structural level of beliefs on which neo-African societies developed new unique ways of
dealing with adversity.
In contrast, Thornton finds homogeneity within the African slave population. His
hypothesis rests on the fact that slaves mainly came from three African regions: Upper
Guinea, Lower Guinea, and the Angolan coast (cf. Thornton 1998: 189). This is not
entirely misconceived, as there were indeed some homogeneous ethnic groups, like for
example in the case of Suriname’s plantation of La Plata.
Between these four points of view, what remains certain is that slaves created similar
groups to the various African nations and Kingdoms, with fictive kinships (of capital
importance in African societies) and analogous social structures.
79
82
processes by reducing them to homogeneous cultural groups such as the
Afro-Colombian. This ethnical oversimplification causes two main
problems: first (i), it transfigures the historical-cultural reality of the African
continent by implicitly affirming the existence of a ‘single Africa’ constituted
by a unique cultural group, and therefore legitimates discourses of cultural
imperialism; and second (ii), it makes cultural diversity illegitimate, causing
the denial and subsequently the disappearance of ethnic groups inside the
national borders.
83
84
PART III
“Debbe pertanto uno principe non si curare della
infamia del crudele per tenere e’ sudditi sua uniti e
in fede: perché con pochissimi esempli sarà piú
pietoso che quelli e’ quali per troppa pietà lasciono
seguire e’ disordini, di che ne nasca uccisioni o
rapine; perché queste sogliono offendere una
universalità intera, e quelle esecuzioni che vengono
dal principe offendono uno particulare.”
Niccolò Machiavelli
80
5. The (Il)legitimacy of the State, or why Some
Ethnicities Disappear
I remember that as I was once sitting near the Salvajina Lake, reading
Crime and Punishment, I began to think together with Rodion and
Dostoevsky. I thought about the reasons that might justify a crime, like the
one of Napoleon and his army, of Rodion against the pawnbroker, and the
one of the Colombian State and multinational corporations against
peasant populations. Rodion was persuaded that for a higher, noble goal,
even the worst type of crime could be justified. Nonetheless, he was also
convinced that the purpose of such a criminal act must have been a
common and collective good, something that is highly questionable in the
case of economic growth driven by politics of capitalist accumulation.
80
Machiavelli, N. (1995[1517]). Il Principe. Torino, Einaudi: 109. “Therefore a prince, so
long as he keeps his subjects united and loyal, ought not to mind the reproach of cruelty;
because with a few examples he will be more merciful than those who, through too much
mercy, allow disorders to arise, from which follow murders or robberies; for these are
wont to injure the whole people, whilst those executions which originate with a prince
offend the individual only” in http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1232/1232-h/1232-h.htm
th
(accessed April 5 2014).
85
The aim of this chapter is therefore to analyze how Colombian
political economies are arranged, and how they implicitly display the
representations of development as settled by the State.
We will first (5.1) expose an examination of our case study by dint of
political ecology, then we will identify the spatial-economical conditions
required for mega-projects to be implemented, and their (in)consideration
for the environment and the local communities living in the areas where
these projects are established. Subsequently (5.1.2), we will present the
primary and secondary effects of mega-projects, and list and discuss the
four stages that led to the construction of the Salvajina dam and the
project of the Ovejas diversion. In the second section of this chapter (5.2)
we will initially (5.2.1) study the reason national identities are socially and
politically constructed⎯why? Then (5.2.2) we will grasp the manner
through which these identities are settled⎯how?⎯and analyze their
relation to the State’s politics of development.
That will allow us to understand why ethnic groups may disappear,
and comprehend how these policies generate a response of autodetermination through ethnical and cultural emancipation, as will be
presented in the following chapter (6).
5.1. A Political Ecology of “Third World” Development
Before embarking in the heart of this chapter, it is necessary to
specify that the policies related to the idea of ‘development’ adopted in
Colombia follow the economic ‘vision’ of the IMF, the World Bank, the US
Treasury and other government institutions tied together by the so called
‘Augmented Washington Consensus’, which is a further step of the
previous Washington Consensus of 1989 (Priewe, Herr 2005: 274-275).
The latter is a term that “[…] express what […] the lowest common
86
denominator of policy advice by Washington-based institutions [would be]”
(Ibid.: 275). Now, this common denominator, known in economic theories
as neoliberalism, in its practices “[…] were never about institutional retreat
or the subordination of public and private actors to the discipline of
disembedded markets, but precisely involved the creation, legitimation
and consolidation of new institutional capacities and mechanisms of
control” (Konings 2012: 85-86). As we will see, it is at the dawn of this
political-economical frame that the Salvajina and the Ovejas project have
been created, and it is under those mechanisms that they were developed
and that the Afro-Colombian identity has been conceived.
What we will see in this subchapter is how such politics are
implemented on the field. The reason for a political-ecological approach is
exactly the need of a political ecology rather than an apolitical one; that is
“[…] the difference between identifying broader systems rather than
blaming proximate and local forces; between viewing ecological systems
as power-laden rather than politically inert; and between taking an
explicitly normative approach rather than one that claims the objectivity of
disinterest” (Robbins 2004: 5). As we are witnessing in the case of La
Toma⎯which again is just a single example of a global problem⎯the
construction of the Salvajina dam has generated consequences on
different geographical and temporal scales. We will see in the next section
of this chapter (5.1.2.) that the dam has engendered a chain of negative
effects
on
the
communities
that,
besides
being
environmentally
visible⎯the twenty-three kilometers long artificial lake⎯are also socially
and politically invisible⎯or less obviously perceived. Yet, where political
ecology differs from other approaches is precisely in the capacity of
identifying primary (direct) as well as secondary (indirect) effects (Gellert,
Lynch: 2003), whereas without an eye on the political part, the link
87
between those secondary effects and the cause would not be understood
as such.
If we first have a look at the ecological side of a mega-project like the
one of a dam, it is easy to see how landscapes are entirely transformed,
submerged, the path for migratory fish blocked, downstream flows
changed, etc. (McCully: 1996). Reservoirs are not simply filled with water,
but have first to be cleaned, which means the vegetation must be cut and
natural barriers⎯like boulders⎯must be blown up. Not only are the
pollution levels engendered by the use of explosives and huge machinery
normally underestimated⎯if not totally ignored⎯but, contrary to popular
belief, it becomes ever more obvious that hydropower is not such a clean
energy source as was thought. Many studies show that hydroelectric
dams release massive amounts of methane, which can be more
detrimental to the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. This means
hydroelectric dams often have higher GHG81 emissions than burning fossil
fuels and other energy producing techniques (Graham-Rowe: 2005)82. In
general, primary effects are easier to predict (Gellert, Lynch: 2003).
Although typically known in advance by the corporations engaged in the
construction 83 , they might not be transparently communicated to the
people that will be directly affected by the projects. Many of the megaprojects such as the Salvajina dam, or bigger ones like the Chinese Three
Gorges or the Brazilian Itaipu dams⎯the two largest dams ever
built⎯have been conducted during the second half of the twentieth
century, which could indicate two things: (i) the absence of legal tools
protecting indigenous communities and their environment, since the ILO
81
Greenhouse gases.
See also Fearnside (1995).
83
Which for the most are using “[…] heavy equipment and sophisticated technologies,
usually imported from the global North and require[ing] coordinated flows of international
finance capital (Strassman, Wells: 1988)” (Gellert, Lynch 2003: 16).
82
88
Convention 169 and the Law’70 have been both set in force in 1991 and in
1993; and (ii) the lack of a massive communication and awareness
campaign that has become possible only at the end of the past century
with wider access to internet84. From what I could experience through my
field, I can assert that especially this second point has drastically changed
the capability of government and international corporations to rapidly
implement mega-projects while avoiding indigenous resistance. That can
be observed in the case of the Ovejas River diversion, as well as in the
more dramatic case of the Monte Belo dam in Brazil, where the
indigenous people managed to push their struggle on different scales, and
thanks to the web, to link and organize an opposition to the project
together with the North American Occupy movement85.
Finally, large dams are typically constructed in places inhabited by
small communities, leading to social and political problems that go deeper
than what appears at a first glance. As Gellert and Lynch (2003) argue,
“Mega-projects are spatially situated and inherently displacing” (Ibid.:
204), meaning displacing a ‘pristine’86 environment as well as the people
inhabiting the area. While in the last section of this chapter the people of
La Toma will be testifying the way such displacements happen, here some
general preconditions for those projects will be examined.
84
Nonetheless, it must be recognized that Internet is not yet available everywhere,
particularly in the global South.
85
To better understand the present day resistance against the Monte Belo project, as
well as the damages caused by the Three Gorges in China, where a million people have
been displaced, and finally those caused by the Itaipu dam constructed on the borders
between Brazil and Paraguay, the following articles might be helpful: Burke (2012),
Descola (1994) Fearnside (2006a; 2006b), Hall and Branford (2012), Gunkel (2009),
Vajpeyi (1998). Moreover, those other three cases, more known than the one of the
Salvajina for their dimensions, allow a larger understanding of global policies of energy
production and show⎯once more⎯how the capitalist economic development of a
country weighs on the shoulders of peasants and generally poor people living in rural
areas.
86
The adjective pristine is here used in quotation marks to remind that the idea of
‘wilderness’ is itself socially constructed, a point that will be deeper explored hereafter.
89
Peripheries of the Peripheries
Probably the first precondition for a mega-project to take place is the
site where it is to be built. Curiously, it does not matter if a dam is
constructed in the global north or in the global south, it will always be
situated in a peripheral area in order to produce energy for a core. That is
the case of the New Croton reservoir providing water to the city of New
York (Weidner: 1974), the Hoover dam built to allow the incredible water
and energy consumption of Las Vegas (Dunar, McBride: 1993), the Three
Gorges dam providing electricity for the Chinese city of Shanghai (Wu et
al.: 2004), and so on.
As has been considered in chapter 4.2.1, from an economical point of
view, peripheries are the places where the material creation that sustains
the
core
is
produced
(Wallerstein:
1976),
while
translated
into
geographical 87 terms, they often correspond to the rural areas⎯where
only small communities are living⎯or places of a supposed ‘wilderness’.
Many political ecologists argue however that what is understood as
‘pristine’ environment⎯the wild⎯for the common sense does not exist in
itself, or at least it is not deprived of social and political sense. As Robbins
claims, “[…] the environment is neither a malleable thing outside of human
beings, nor a tablet on which to write history, but instead a produced set of
relationships that include people, who, more radically, are themselves
produced” (Robbins 2004: 209). For example, many African national parks
where the West searches for wilderness are nothing but ancient hunting
grounds belonging to the old colonies which, once the country had gained
its independence, have been transformed into natural reserves with the
purpose of maintaining control over such areas, and deny access to
87
In the sense of ‘spatial’ or ‘morphological’.
90
indigenous people to whom the territory always belonged (Neumann:
1997). That demonstrates that not only is the concept of nature embedded
with political ideologies of domination (Bridge: 2007), but also that the idea
of science itself masks the fact that “[…] the claim to be ethnically neutral
and ideology free is itself an ideological claim” (Harvey 1974: 155-156).
This means that if a place is not officially recognized as being inhabited, or
happens to be scientifically defined as an area to be protected or a
dangerous place to live in, the government has the capacity to⎯politically
as well as physically⎯create ‘natural limits’ that are used to “[…]
legitimate regressive social policies that deny rights and freedoms to less
powerful groups, that curb redistributive ambitions, and which regulate
social behavior in the name of saving the earth” (Bridge 2011: 315).
Yet, considering the Salvajina and the Ovejas project, we find a
perfect illustration of the intersections within global and local peripheries,
and the manner in which political discourses about ‘wilderness’ and
‘natural limits’ are applied.
Cali, the capital of the Cauca Valley Department (Departamento del
Valle del Cauca)88, with over three million inhabitants, is the third major
Colombian city, and because of its geographical position at a hundred and
fifteen kilometers from the Pacific Ocean and Buenaventura⎯the major
Colombian port, as well as one of the major ports of Latin America⎯is
also one of the principal economic centers of the country⎯a semiperipheral core. A couple of hours away from Cali lies the Northern Cauca,
its periphery, and it is here that the Salvajina dam has been built in order
to provide part of the electricity required to the functioning of such a
metropolis. As has been discussed in the introduction, the dam also does
the interest of international trade (for around thirty percent of the electricity
88
See map in Annex 5.
91
is sold to the neighboring country of Ecuador [Villalobos Avendaño:
2009]), and of national landlords owning the hectares of land downstream
of the dam (Ortega et al.: 2006). The trade of the energy produced by the
dam follows governmental neoliberal policies dictated by the logic of the
markets89. These, according to the neoliberal model, should tend towards
an equilibrium, but “[…] since markets are constantly in motion, the idea
that there is ever an equilibrium position of rest is clearly not plausible”
(Karagiannis et al. 2013: 15). In addition to that, politicians “[…] move the
economy away from equilibrium in both realms and increase the
probability of asset bubbles, which are fundamentally something that
should never occur in a self-equilibrating system” (ibid.), but happened in
Colombia at the end of the nineties (Villar, Rincón: 2000), with the costs
falling on society. Yet, I argue that by being a rural area occupied in its
majority by ‘poor’ black communities, the municipality of Suárez⎯where
the community of La Toma is located⎯happened to be a place that
perfectly fit the interests of capital accumulation by dispossession, and on
which it is possible to blame the failures at the communities’ expense. The
Salvajina was therefore built on this precise site not simply because of the
ideal morphology of the landscape, but also because of the capacity to
which the project has passed, thus the way the government and the
corporation in charge of the construction were able to bypass the people.
In the site of the Salvajina, as in many other places all around the
Pacific coast (Escobar: 2003), schools are lacking or cannot face the
increasing demand engendered by the growing number of students, which
translates into a deficiency of education, hence an overall ignorance
(Ibid.). By ignorance is meant the fact of ‘not knowing’, which in other
89
The energy produced in Colombia is sold on the stock exchange. Again, I also received
this information from my informants.
92
words means that the State’s actors or big corporations can get around
people, implementing mega-projects without the inhabitants being
completely aware of the implications that such a project may have for their
territory. They do this by presenting the advantages (working opportunity,
‘development’, etc.), but not the negative effects, or they get around it
promising solutions that never arrive. As we will later see in different
interviews, an argument often put forward by national and international
producers, investors and politicians, is that it is only thanks to the
economic progress given by mega-projects that a local/regional
development may be possible. What these economic and political actors
however neglect to mention is that “A market system, however inventive,
is not self-regulation. It does not add up to a socially defensible allocation
of either private income or public investment. It does not efficiently or fairly
distribute certain necessary social goods, like education or health or roads
or research spending” (Kuttner 1992: 262-263). In more simple words,
even a multimillion profit does no guarantee a development if not
accompanied by the political will of public/social investments.
As we will see in the following chapter 6, after the enforcement of the
new Constitution, in the last two decades the people of La Toma have
gained a certain awareness, as well as legal tools⎯the law’70⎯to protect
their territory. Still, in the coming pages we will display how in our sense
these projects are established in marginal/peripheral regions not simply for
the morphological conditions, but for the linkage between different
precarious environmental and social factors.
Environmental Racism: Where Nature Matters…Less.
If we analyze the Colombian case, we witness how blackness,
poverty, lack of education, illiteracy, violence and environmental
93
degradation⎯i.e. environmental racism⎯converge into specific regions of
the country⎯such as the Northern Cauca⎯that happen to be the same
where mega-projects are built, and where in consequence violence often
spreads (Grajales: 2011). In the specific, of the about twenty-thousand
inhabitants of the Salvajina area, 55% are of African descent, while 36%
are indigenous and mestizos (Villalobos Avendaño 2009: 11), thus
ethnicities discriminated by the national hegemony. Particularly, the
Pacific Colombian coast (Asher, Ojeda: 2009) illustrates what in political
ecology is defined as the degradation and marginalization thesis (Robbins:
2004), that is, the way an environmental system⎯the one of La Toma so
to say⎯changes in its relationship with the inhabitants, who pass from a
sustainable, small scale, local exploitation, to a state of overexploitation
dictated by the assimilation of the territory into dynamics of regional,
national, and especially global economies and markets. Of course, the
overexploitation of the land does not ‘simply’ mean the destruction of the
environment, but also the reduction of resources that have previously⎯in
the case of La Toma for centuries⎯supported the life of entire families.
Moreover, as Robbins asserts, “[…] sustainable community management
is hypothesized to become unsustainable as a result of efforts by state
authorities or outside firms to enclose traditional collective property or
impose new/foreign institutions” (Robbins 2004: 131).
In the region of La Toma we witness a structural State’s absence in
the support of all kinds of infrastructures thought for a social, cultural and
economic development, while large investments are made for the
consolidation of a military presence, in order to maintain the necessary
social control⎯through repression and threats⎯for proceeding in the
construction of the discussed projects. Furthermore, those dynamics are
neither only specific to the Latin American continent, nor to the southern
hemisphere, but if examined internationally, “[…] the same domestic
94
pattern of disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards and
degradation exists worldwide among those who are nonwhite, poor, less
educated, and politically less powerful” (Alsont, Brown 1993: 179).
In Colombia, as well as other ancient New World colonies, the white
privilege has its roots in the time of slavery when, as we have seen in
chapter 4.3, society was divided between whites, people of color, and
blacks. Although in the course of centuries the mixture among different
ethnicities has been so strong that it would be unreasonable⎯if not simply
stupid⎯to identify something such as a ‘white race’, or a ‘European’ one,
the advantages that have characterized the Spanish colonizers and their
descendants for hundreds of years have been maintained through time,
and still define who has access to education, work, healthcare and a
decent environment, and who doesn’t⎯i.e. blacks and the indigenous
people.
Moreover, with the passing of time, this differentiation among
societies has found a geographical constellation at different scales⎯going
from
urban,
to
regional,
to
national⎯where
racism⎯thus
white
privileges⎯can be spatially defined. As Pulido argues, “This process
highlights not only the spatiality of racism, but also the fact that space is a
resource in the production of white privilege. Indeed, neighborhoods [as
well as regions] are not merely groupings of individuals, homes, and
commerce, they are constellations of opportunities with powerful
consequences, for both the recipient and non-recipient populations”
(Pulido 2000: 30).
A., an Afro-descendant professor who had to leave his town and
region in order to be able to study, impeccably expresses what Pulido
means by constellation of opportunities at different scales. Concerning the
95
spatiality of racism throughout the country, he first explains the reason he
had to move to the capital:
“I am from Guapi, from Guapi in Cauca which is a municipality located in
the extreme south of the country, it is a municipality completely, say we
are 95 to 98% descendants of Africans, (this) municipality lacks everything
right? All one has is hope! […] there one cannot study, because there was
really only […] basic education, but I wanted to go to university, so I had to
come to Bogota to study at the university” (A1, Interview, line 25, Bogotá,
September 20th, 2009)
When asked about the relation he was seeing between the access to
certain opportunities and the fact of being black, the answer was even
more elucidating:
“[…] This country is a country that has built the basis of being centralized
and therefore has poor people on the fringe, and those poor people do
not have possibilities or (the state) did not want to offer development
opportunities. The same happens in the cities; Bogota for example, is a
city where its major urban facilities are found in the northern side, and in
the south side you find the least urban equipment. And those are
intentions, are, let’s say political proposals of the governments [...]. You
move around here in Bogota and you say: where are the worst services to
be found? Any type of service, you find it in the south! And where will you
find the black (people)? In the city´s most poor neighborhoods. Because
the Black (people) [...] have been discriminated against, four centuries as
slaves, and after being freed from slavery they were subjected to
conditions of marginalization. It means they do not have the possibility of
development, nor their regions, or themselves when they move (to
another region). For example, I have made an entire career as a teacher,
but I am still black, I am still being discriminated against, I am still
96
excluded in this country, it means we do not count; we are counted by the
number of votes we represent” (Ibid., line 42)
Indeed, the process of environmental (-spatial) racism plays on
different levels in constant interaction. On the national scale people are
displaced from rural regions that are rich in natural resources, and forced
to move towards urban centers. Here, people like A. who were used to
living on small, self-sufficient agriculture, and for the most part lacking any
higher education, are forced into the position of working poor, thus
experiencing the way urban racism is exerted. The absence of
opportunities, and the difficulties encountered in the cities, is what keeps
those who are displaced at the bottom of society, while at the same time
guaranteeing
the
reproduction
of
class,
ethnical
and
gender
discrimination.
In the natal territories, environmental racism does interweave with
politics of enclosure that have as secondary effect the rising scarcity of
natural resources90. Those insufficiencies, particularly in food, affect the
social equilibrium of mutual aid societies and generate conflicting
situations among different members or groups, gender, class or ethnicity
(cf. Robbins 2004: 173). The remaining resources, not yet in the hands of
the State or of national and international firms and corporations, constitute
a chance for local elites to fortify advantageous relationships with these
powerful actors91, allowing the creation of new spaces of exploitation that
diverge from one another in size and capacity of absorbing the new mode
of exploitation.
90
For this topic the article of O’Connor (1989) furnishes an interesting elucidation of how
the lack of resources is related to uneven development and environmental racism.
91
See article on the dismissal against the former Suárez mayor:
http://www.elpueblo.com.co/elnuevoliberal/otro-alcalde-del-norte-del-cauca-fuedestituido-inhabilitado/ (accessed on March 3th 2014).
97
For the dissimilar mode of how State authorities conduct their policies
of exploitation through accumulation by dispossession, it has become
obvious for political ecologists to emphasize “[…] that the state⎯in
resource management and in general⎯is far from unitary or coherent in
its goals and actions (Moore: 1993; Regan: 2000)” (Mc Carthy 2002:
1288).
In the case of La Toma, the presence of the State is overall military
and oppressive. Using the presence of the insurgency as an excuse, the
government pretends to secure the area by increasing the military forces
that at the same time are functioning as backup for the installation of
foreign companies and support in case of previous explorations on the
territory.
Military base la Salvajina (X, 2009)92
As many people of La Toma told me, explorations of the region
happened and continue to happen in form of more or less secret visits
92
This picture of the military base situated upon the Salvajina dam is illegal. In Colombia
to be caught photographing a military base may mean being suspected of terrorism and
therefore risking going to prison. We however insert this photo in the thesis as evidence
of our intentions.
98
around the territory, where people are questioned and materials are taken
without many explanations. Normally, young or older people are
interviewed about the mining activity, while politicians are paid to provide
information about land and properties. Also, often scholars are paid by
corporations in order to investigate about the resources, a fact that
generates a general mistrust among the communities against any
foreigner asking a lot of questions⎯as was my case. The outcomes of
those illegal investigations are reports that are sent⎯or sold⎯to
governmental actors preoccupied with privatizing the richness of the land.
Nowadays, the discourse used by the State and its business partners
as an excuse to implement their politics of privatization, is what may be
translated into the conservation and control thesis (Robbins: 2004), which
is a process where “[…] local systems of livelihood, production and sociopolitical organization [are] disabled by officials and global interests seeking
to preserve the ‘environment’” (Ibid.: 173), while as a strategy to discredit
the inhabitants, the local ways of production are suddenly “[…]
characterized as unsustainable by state authorities or other players in the
struggle to control resources” (Ibid.). The same idea of environmental
protection is more and more promoted by powerful NGOs whose
discourses on environmental protection produce categories of knowledge
(cf. Ribot, Peluso 2003: 169). The State and its allies later use those ideas
of an eco-friendly management of the territory in order to better appear
when facing international pressures. However, their use of the term
‘environment’ refers to a supposed balance between economy and
ecology, meaning that a project might be considered sustainable if its
profits reach an economic value that is measured as equivalent or
exceeding that of the destruction/loss (Kirsch 2010: 90-91). States and
companies therefore “[…] use […] the term ‘environment’ strategically [to]
99
refer to a location or place rather than [using it in] the ecological sense of
the term” (Ibid.: 90).
Still, what is happening with the mining activity in Colombia these
days is an ancient history that can be observed all over the globe. The
analogous example of the Congolese coltan’s exploitation (Harden: 2001),
as well as many other cases around the world (e.g. Brunnschweiler, Bulte:
2009; Le Billon: 2001), illustrate how precious minerals can determine the
history of a country, and might often kill the one fighting for justice.
Moreover, when talking about environmental protection, one must not
forget the driving force of all processes of enclosure, which is capital
accumulation that in the case of exploitation activities perfectly illustrates
“[…] how geographies and histories of investment in a particular place are
connected to non-place-specific trends, such as the volatility of commodity
prices, the availability of project finance, or inter-firm competitive
strategies” (Bridge 2007: 79).
Finally, as will be testified in the next section of this chapter, the ones
suffering the consequences⎯primary and secondary⎯of mega-projects
like the Salvajina dam remain the inhabitants, whose voices are hardly
heard. And while microclimates are changing, food begins to run out, and
people are forced to move out of their land, State actors still prefer to “[…]
attribute environmental degradation to over-numerous commoners rather
than their own policies and exploitation, or social breakdown to insufficient
rather than excessive privatization” (Lohman 2005: 96).
100
5.1.2. The Other Side of the Development
The degradation of the land around the artificial lake of the Salvajina,
besides being produced by humans, is also socially damaging, for all
kinds of social problems related to the scarcity of resources are worsened
in case of a limited land capability93 (Blaikie, Brookfield: 1987).
This last section of chapter 5.1 is therefore devoted to testifying how the
Salvajina came to be the problem that is currently affecting the inhabitants
of La Toma. This will help to understand how States and other actors
desirous of wealth accumulation are entering territories of natural
richness, while adopting strategies of misinformation, manipulation,
corruption, and, in the Colombian case, threat and violence.
Phase I: Promises of Development. How to Build a Dam, and Not
Give a Dam to the People.
The first phase started in the eighties with the construction of the
dam, which has been achieved in nineteen eighty-five. At that time, not
only were big dams considered one of the best solutions for development
(Altinbilek: 2002), but also the conditions for the realization of such a
project were facilitated by two factors: first, the sharing of information,
news and knowledge through the internet was totally retrograde if
compared to today. As heretofore discussed, Internet became largely
accessible only during the nineties, and in the southern hemisphere
particularly at the beginning of the twenty-first century. For this primary
reason the chances of knowing about other analogous situations in the
world, and therefore the consequences caused by such mega-projects,
93
The term capability is here used because: “When land is degraded, it suffers a loss of
intrinsic qualities or a decline in capability. [Nonetheless] this term is not one within the
economic literature. It is, however, in modern agronomic literature with something like the
sense, which is required. As a first step towards clarification, degradation is defined as a
reduction in the capability of land to satisfy a particular use” (Blaikie, Brookfield 1987: 6).
101
were strongly limited. Said differently, the international awareness that
Internet consents⎯in this case through email and Skype⎯allowed on the
one hand the community of La Toma to invite a public figure such as
Angela Y. Davis to visit them, and on the other hand myself to interview
her in Oakland. Also thanks to the Internet, the documentary ‘Tierra
Negra’ will soon be available for free in the whole world, consenting
scholars as well as other communities to become aware of what is
happening today in Colombian Northern Cauca.
Second, as different informants testified, in the juridical context
previous to the Colombian Constitution of 1991 there were no laws to
apply in order to prevent the State from entering the territories and
changing their landscape without consulting the inhabitants.
I have to admit that, while questioning the people about the history of
the Salvajina, it has been hard to obtain many stories about the time of the
construction of the dam, on the one hand because of the temporal
distance, and on the other hand because for many people remembering,
or talking about the issue, means recalling times of suffering and death.
As A., an old man from the village, was evoking with a sweet, somber
voice:
“No well (…) you know that those people came and already said they
would make a lake and a dam there, and one did not know, because I
worked too, all that time, there at La Salvajina, because to me, I was
working there, because I liked working wood very much (…) yes? Then
they took me there as a carpenter; I worked there for three years, but no,
they paid very poorly. And so there, it is over now; they already filled the
lake and well, the mosquitos came and nobody could sleep at night, […] it
was an epidemic that damaged all of this, one harvested cacao before,
now, nobody harvests cacao, and all of this was damaged by the lake (…)
102
that is the reason why we are suffering now, you can find plantain but it is
scarce, now look how that farm looks like, all leaves are fallen, because
that lake harmed us all very much […]”
(A3, Interview, line 127, La Toma, May 19th 2013)
And as soon as I asked about the people⎯of course many were
friends of his⎯who were living in the submerged area, the voice became
more melancholic, and the words fewer:
“Well, look, many received money for their plot, many were paid; many
people had their farms taken? Many were paid and many were not, that is
lost. […] They had to leave to, many people are in Cali, over there in
Santander, because they had to detach from their property, because the
lake took them away, the lake, […] some are, well, they are working in
agriculture now – as I say again – it does not compensate because the
cold is extinguishing everything again. You see plants of coffee rising,
which are already dry, meaning there is no hope. Yes, [the Salvajina]
affected all of this, all of this territory” (Ibid., line 155)
As A. explains, no one was asked about the necessity of such a
mega-project, and even worse, no one in the area was really aware of the
implications and the consequences the dam would have on the
communities. The government simply paid the people to leave the farms
that had sustained them for centuries, and sold the project as jobs
opportunities for the entire region⎯neglecting to mention that the jobs
would last only a couple of years and that the artificial lake would
completely change the local/regional environment.
Moreover, the diversion of the Ovejas River was not mentioned at the
time when the Salvajina was under construction, although, as different
people involved in the process revealed to me, it was already mentioned
103
in the in documents describing the whole process, which of course were
hidden from the communities.
Furthermore, once the project of the diversion became public
knowledge, the means to block it were limited because of the restricted
access to information and the impossibility to engage at other levels as
previously discussed. However, as explained by P., another community
leader of the region, through a popular mobilization the people managed
to block it:
“[In this phase] prior to the issuance of the law 70 [...] the advantage we
took was the ability of political mobilization within the assembly of the
department of Cauca where there were some friends; we were able to
hold a meeting with the departmental assembly in Suárez, where with the
participation of the community, a discussion took place, achieving the
project of diversion of the river Ovejas to be overthrown. Why do I say it
was overthrown? Because the three mayors who were involved in the
process [...] the agreement authorizing the deviation had already been
signed at that moment and we did not have the legal tools we now have
as an ethnic group…” (P., Interview, line 24, La Balsa, August 11th, 2009)
As a result of the lack of information and communication, as well as
the absolute disinterest of the State regarding the consequences the dam
would have induced in the region, as A. and P. testify, the inhabitants
began to discover the real problems only after the filling of the lake. In
parallel, for what concerns the river diversion, the way the information was
hidden and the people corrupted highlights once again the Machiavellian
logic applied by the State and its allies. Finally, as P. testified, even once
realized the environmental and cultural damage caused by the dam, it was
only through the entry into force of the new Constitution of 1991 and the
related law’70, that the people of La Toma and its surroundings were able
104
to approach the difficulties caused by the project and the discussion about
the Ovejas River diversion from a new perspective, and armed with new
legal tools.
Phase II: The Law’70. Between Hope and Violent Disillusion.
I remember how over and over again, during the months I spent
traveling around Colombia (see timetable in annex 1), as I came to
discussions about the role and the difficulties faced by Afro-descendants, I
got used to hearing about the over-celebrated law’70 (which will be
discussed and analyzed in the coming section 5.2.2), i.e. a mechanism
ensuring that local communities are entitled to a consultation before any
project is put in place in their territories. However, not everything that
shines is gold, and the Colombian black miners know that better than
anyone.
Even though different actors implicated in the process told me how
the whole procedure of resistance against the river diversion radically
changed with the possibility to apply this law, as we will see hereafter, a
discrepancy emerged between the ideal of an innovative law, its drafting,
and especially its application. For this reason, the case of Northern Cauca
is a wonderful exemplification of the repercussions this new law had on
the Afro-descendant, yet Afro-Colombian communities94. In the following
pages we will demonstrate how under the water of the Salvajina lie at
least twenty years of exhausting battles, infinite meetings, constant
threats, and overall, the corpses of dozens of people whose only blame
had been that of loving their river and trying to protect it.
In accord with the law’70, preliminary consultations on the topic of the
Ovejas River were organized. However, the latter occurred in the following
94
In chapter 5.2, while discussing the birth of the Afro-Colombian identity, we will explore
the difficulties the people had to face in the drafting of the law, and especially the efforts
and complications that came with the integration of the transitory article 55.
105
manner: first of all, the community had to struggle in order to include some
of its members in the process, for the government and the firm controlling
the dam at that time⎯the CVC 95 ⎯tried to prevent the people from
defending their own interests. As C. describes:
“[...] At that moment, the communities demanded the study of
environmental impact; paid by the company [...] the CVC, was paid or the
Ministry, as it was the governments, the ministry of mines and energy I
believe, paid INGESAM96 to do the study, but we required that INGESAM,
among the team of people who would be doing the study, have people of
the community. [...] So engineers, social workers, working hand in hand
with the people delegated by the community for that, and at the end came
out the study, which said the environmental impacts are these, the social
impacts are these ... and how was this achieved? [...] It was made by
holding meetings informing communities: (saying) look, the river will be
diverted, it will be diverted by so many kilometers, how do you believe this
will affect your life? How do you think this affects your productive activity?
First making a diagnosis of what there is here in... for example in
Monchique, so, what's in Monchique? There is this, this and this (listing)
... a common stock of what, was done there, so, if the river is diverted,
How do you believe that the deviation of the river will affect what is right
now? These were the things we then built with the people.” (C., Interview,
line 92, La Balsa, August 11th 2009)
The outcome of this process did reveal that of the over thirty-five
impacts the river’s diversion would have generated on the territory, only
95
The Regional Autonomous Corporation of the Cauca Valley (Corporación Autónoma
Regional del Valle del Cauca), see also chapter 1 section 3.
96
INGESAM LTDA is a consulting engineering organization founded in 1976 to provide
consulting engineering services in the areas of civil, sanitary and environmental
engineering, including laboratory and monitoring services to both the public and the
private sectors, locally and in the international markets (see their website:
www.ingesam.org).
106
one would have been beneficial: the generation of temporary work during
the period of the construction of the tunnel. But when the time came for
the firm to meet the community, something happened:
“[...] Then had to meet the CVC and the community to make the decision
whether the diversion will or will not take place, but the community was
already clear that it would not; when the company realizes that, they
decide to leave the space, meaning: as if we were both here and we were
to hold a dialoge, but you see me in advantage and you go. So there was
no signature for there was nobody with whom to sign...” (Ibid., line 138)
Since the CVC refused to admit their defeat in front of the community
and therefore abandoned the river’s diversion, the government forced the
project in a position of archive-active, which meant that it could have been
recovered any time the CVC felt ready for a second try. The firm suddenly
adopted a new strategy, carried out on two different fronts:
“Then the government ordered to file away the project because it was
inconclusive, until they had other conditions to do so, then that company
begins flirting with communities, to give them ‘projectives’, to organize
parties, to fund gifts for children, to (...) well yes, sort of buying the
community and then you say! Well, it is working very well! How could we
deny development? Then they begin to divide us, yes? Because some
are for it, while some are thinking that the detour is inconvenient, and in
2005 the diversion project is resumed” (Ibid., line 182).
But since the resistance of the community was nonetheless
particularly strong, another informant97 explained to me how a new difficult
97
Several times during the interview the informant reminded me that he/she wished to
remain anonymous, and that if my interview came in the wrong hands, it would have
meant his/her death.
107
situation began to arise in the region, while at the same time the Salvajina
passed into other hands:
“No, it was already the company, that was (...) the paramilitaries arrived
here in 2000, and by then it was already a private company called the
EPSA having an alliance with the Union FENOSA, it is to say, a
partnership between the EPSA, the Pacific Power Company and Unión
Fenosa, which is from Spain, so, by (year) 2000 the company had been
sold to Union Fenosa and EPSA and in 2001 the paramilitaries arrived.
[Those facts are related] because when the paramilitaries came, so did
the military bases; leaders began to be pointed at, began to attend the
community meetings, began to threaten; we believe that it was in order
to weaken us. In 2005, after five years of that behavior, the company
passes the bill again” (X., Interview, X, line 175, X, 2009)
The result of the unequal power relationships, linking the Cauca
River and its ancestral inhabitants in opposition to the Salvajina and its
potent owners, has been dramatic:
“[...] Well, in the Naya [massacre], we believe there were about 110
[dead], here we believe there were about 220, here at La Balsa. That is
why people were gathered and murdered here in La Balsa, to be thrown
into the river, for the bridge facilitated their work; afterwards they (the
dead) were brought in vans and jeeps from Suárez, from Buenos Aires to
be thrown into the river. That was hard, very hard in this community”
(Ibid., line 250)
The processes here have been in some way summarized, and the
wave of violence that has struck the communities touched by the
construction of the Salvajina has been only vaguely mentioned. In reality,
during the long interviews I had with the people who have been or still are
108
directly involved in the process of resistance against the Ovejas diversion,
I came to understand that what has been resumed in these pages is
nothing but the tip of an enormous iceberg of deceit and violence.
Nevertheless, what stays in these pages shows how the application
of a law in theory is not necessarily possible in reality, especially if there is
an intention of the power mechanisms capable of generating violence to
prevent the application of that text and endure in ongoing practices of
capital accumulation by dispossession.
We will conclude this subchapter by mentioning briefly the present
situation experienced by the inhabitants of La Toma three decades after
the construction of the dam.
Phase III: The State Brought the Dam, the People Pay the Costs.
As described, the history of the Salvajina is embedded in dynamics of
global capitalism that in Northern Cauca have managed to displace
thousands of people and alter an ecosystem as old as its inhabitants,
while at the same time enforcing a cycle of violence from which politicians,
entrepreneurs and multinational corporations are now generating profits.
Yet, the production of electricity, still entirely in the hands of privates, has
become unaffordable for the African-descendants, who in Suárez are
facing constant problems in paying their bills:
“[…] And they [the private firms] put the electricity…At that time for those
who were near here, they would buy them with the benefit of energy. No,
and that has been worse, the ones who are late to pay, the fee will go up,
it goes up so that many people here can not pay for that energy, for the
debt is of millions, because they have not been able to pay. For instance, I
could not pay this month; hence next month will come with a penalty fee.
So, if you paid $20.000 before, now, $50.000 will arrive, so you say: "But
109
how?" And in three months the fee has risen to an amount you have not
been able to pay” (A3, Interview, La Toma, line 137, May 19th 2013)
In other words, what has been sold as ‘profit for the people’ in reality
has manifested as additional costs, and a consequent dependence from
private firms and the State through the accumulation of debts.
This last section (5.1.2) was here to demonstrate how the other side
of development⎯the one experienced by the local populations⎯is often
only visible thanks to the study of the secondary effects enhanced by a
political ecologist approach, the latter proving how the Salvajina dam and
the project of the Ovejas diversion fit the neo-liberalist project. As a matter
of fact, “[…] it has been part of the genius of neoliberal theory to provide a
benevolent mask full of wonderful-sounding words like freedom, liberty,
choice, and rights [and development (!)], to hide the grim realities of the
restoration or reconstitution of naked class power, locally as well as
transnationally, but most particularly in the main financial centers of global
capitalism” (Harvey 2005: 119).
In order to maintain its semi-peripheral position in the world
market and aspire to a future upgrade, the Colombian State cannot
afford to lose the monopoly in regions where, due to environmental
racism and therefore a situation of social marginalization, the
inhabitants could organize themselves and disturb the capitalist
project. For this reason, in the eyes of the government, the idea of a
nation in which every ethnic group could identify itself seems to remain
a great strategy functional to the capitalist accumulation. To
incorporate the local communities in the national ideal, besides using
words like ‘development’, the government had therefore to resort to
110
different political tactics, in this case a major one being the
construction of a ‘new’ identity.
5.2. The Great Illusion of a National Identity
To understand the reason of the emergence of an Afro-Descendant
ethno-territorial community, one must first recognize the dichotomy on
which this community is built. In this case the antagonist figure that
through its policies enforces a homogeneous model of identity against
which the people of La Toma have reacted, is the Colombian State.
At the beginning of this chapter (5.2.1) we will therefore analyze the
emergence of the modern State and the prerequisite for its existence, i.e.
the national identity. Then (5.2.2) we will plunge into the Colombian case
by considering the celebrated new Constitution of 1991, and especially the
renowned law ’70, in which the people of African descent are not only
taken into account, but also supposedly favored and privileged by special
attentions accorded to their territories and cultural traits. Here we will
analyze how the Colombian black national identity is constructed through
the law’70, stressing the reason and the possible consequences this might
have, i.e. the disappearance and the (re-) appearance of ethnic groups.
5.2.1. What is the Reason for a (State) National Identity?
An evolutionary reading of history wants to lead us to believe that the
appearance of the modern State, in the course of the nineteenth century
(Hobsbawm: 2000), is the summit of the political development of man,
where the State becomes “[…] the complex of institutions by means of
which the power of the society is organized on a basis superior to kinship”
111
(Fried 1967: 229) 98. However, while in the previous chapter we showed
that behind the capitalist accumulation of the State lies the dispossession
of the people of their land, in the present one we will expose how behind
the ‘basis superior to kinship’ does not lie the ‘power of the society’, but
that of an elite organized in response to the dictate of the capitalist
economy. This political/economical elite bases its power on the monopoly
of the physical force, be it ‘legitimate’⎯the army or the police⎯or
illegitimate⎯paramilitary forces often protected and/or produced by the
State itself, as in the Colombian case99. In reason to that, “The hegemony,
in this past century, of the nation-state as the standard and nearly
exclusive unit of sovereignty has proven profoundly inimical to nonstate
peoples” (Scott 2009: 11). ‘Nonstate’ peoples that, we argue, were not
only maroons’ societies in Southeast Asia (Ibid.) or in the New World, but
are also those who nowadays are not citizens (De Genova: 2002, 2005,
2010), or who don’t feel like being part of the nation.
98
In his work, “The Evolution of Political Society” (1967), Fried offers a synthesis of the
evolution of mankind from Stateless societies to the ones with a State. The anthropologist
suggests that this evolution took place in four steps: first came the egalitarian societies,
which, for their apparent simplicity, had no political instruments establishing determined
hierarchies. At the second step we find the rank societies that are the ones “in which
positions of valued status are somehow limited so that not all those of sufficient talent to
occupy such statuses actually achieve them.” (Ibid.: 109). A step further for Fried come
the stratified societies, “in which members of the same sex and equivalent age status do
not have equal access to the basic resources that sustain life.” (Ibid.: 186). Finally, Fried
defines two types of State societies, the pristine and the secondary ones. In his analysis,
the anthropologist is somehow near to Wittfogel and his “hydraulic theory”, arguing that a
State’s mechanisms are those able to guarantee an equitable distribution of the
resources, and therefore a strong central State apparatus is inevitable (Wittfogel: 1977).
However, for Fried the distinction between the pristine and the secondary States
societies is a matter of time. In fact, he argues, the pristine societies disappeared long
ago, probably in the late Neolithic, while the secondary ones are a much more recent
phenomenon, for “All contemporary states, even those that seem to be lineally
descended from the states of High antiquity, like China, are really secondary states”
(Fried 1967: 231), because “At the time of emergence of the earliest known Chinese
state, perhaps 3’500 years ago, the Near East had already known some 1’500 years of
state organization” (Ibid.: 234). Concerning this topic other interesting points of view may
be found in Claessen, Skalník (1978).
99
See http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/08/alvaro-uribe-accused-paramilitaryties (accessed on January 19th 2014).
112
The importance of the national identity lies in the need of the State’s
elite to legitimize its economic policies that, as seen in the previous
chapter, are often supported by projects carried out in socially marginal
areas. Contrary to Fried’s affirmation, these economies do not give the
impression of being beneficial for the society, but instead “Du point du vu
théorique, il semble, au contraire, évident que plus un Etat s’étend, plus
son organisme devient complexe et par cela même étranger au peuple; en
conséquence, plus ses intérêts s’opposent à ceux des masses populaires
[…]” (Bakounine 2007: 244). To resolve this dichotomy between the elitist
interests and that of the people who, though citizens (Torpey: 2000), only
absorb the cost of the hegemony in power, the government is forced to
institutionalize its discrimination towards marginal members. This
process⎯the citizenship⎯authorizes the State “[…] to keep the poor in
their place and, by promoting discrimination against the foreigner, […] to
offer some benefits even to the poorest of citizens who remain at home”
(Hindness 2000: 1496). Nevertheless, the simple legal belonging to the
State might not be sufficient to promise a loyalty towards the nation, and
that is why a new sentiment, that of a national identity, needs to be
constructed.
If now we try to seize the intention behind the notion of an identity
that wants to regroup thousands if not millions or even billions of people
under the same characteristics, as the case of the nation-State, we first
need to understand the concept of nation, or to be more precise, the
processes leading to a political or a cultural nation (nación politica and
nación cultural):
“[…] It is convenient to use distinction [...] between cultural nation and
political nation. The first one exists when aside of ethnicity there is a historical
continuity in the perception of the territory as their own and therefore
peculiar⎯for the territory is no longer a primarily geographical fact of space but a
113
historic and symbolic (territory). If, in addition, the global sector or ethnic group
has self-consciousness of ethnicity and claims the right to decide their economic,
political and cultural interests, we are facing an ethnic group which is not only a
cultural nation but also a political nation, whether they are or not unstructured on
one state and is in possession or not of self govern areas more or less broad.”
(Moreno [1991] in Almario 2002: 47)
Anderson deepens the case of the political nation with a State
structure by postulating that nations are nothing more than limited,
sovereign, imagined, communities (Anderson: 2006): limited “[…] because
even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human
beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations”
(Ibid.: 7); sovereign “[…] because the concept was born in an age in which
Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the
divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm” (Ibid.); and imagined as
communities “[…] because, regardless of the actual inequality and
exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a
deep, horizontal comradeship. [And nonetheless] it is this fraternity that
makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of
people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings”
(Ibid.). Yet, if we consider this last point, it seems clear that dying for
something⎯like
one’s
own
country⎯also
means
to
die
against
something⎯like another country. In this case we understand how the
otherness is constructed on negative stereotypes invented to generate the
only sentiment able to move human beings against other human beings:
fear. As a matter of fact, through different strategies, such as the
legitimate use of the physical violence, this is exactly what the constructed
concept of Nation-State achieved in time.
Actually, from personal to collective visions, the otherness has
always been created, fashioned and imagined, in opposition to a self⎯a
114
better or a more rightful one100. “L’altérité c’est la condition de l’autre au
regard d’un soi” stands in the dictionary of geography and societies (Lévy,
Lussault 2003: 58), and in fact, one of the first writings acknowledging this
aspect is Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes, where the author imagines
being a Persian traveler visiting France and, for probably the first time,
gives a description of the French world seen through the eyes of a
foreigner (Montesquieu: 2001).
The idea of national (State) identity is not only founded on a personal
dichotomy within different members of mankind, but finds its existence in a
spatial collective identity “[…] qui prend la forme d’un ensemble de
discours, de représentations et de pratiques normatives du bon usage de
son espace par un groupe donné” (Lévy, Lussault: 2003: 481). It is later in
this given space⎯the territory⎯that the State pretends to build the
imagined Nation-State, which can be resumed as a theory of political
legitimacy that demands that ethnic boundaries do not cut across political
ones.
Yet, it must be highlighted that not all Nation-States define
themselves through the same traits, and while sometimes these are for
example the diversity between rural and urban, or a religious belief, often
the major trait through which a Nation-State constructs⎯or has
constructed⎯its identity is language. According to Anderson, the capacity
of
speaking
a
common
language,
beyond
allowing
people
to
communicate, also gives a feeling of belonging to something unique, or
better said, to something different from something else. Nonetheless, such
a language can only exist if it is deliberately diffused on a mass-scale, or
put differently, if there is the need of someone who not only has the will,
100
Except in cases like the one of Rousseau, who recognizes the other⎯his bon
sauvage⎯as a more noble and more fair creature, for, he argues, the people living in a
state of nature are the ones who retained a most gentle character by not being
contaminated by the materiality typifying Western societies (Rousseau: 2011).
115
but especially the power, to initiate such a project. Moreover, as Anderson
points out, a simple will is not enough to spread a language to such an
extent: the factor that has consented some languages to spread over
countries has been the invention of print. Along with that, Anderson
continues, the ability to print would have never been enough without the
mass production of books stimulated by capitalistic print companies
(Anderson: 2006). It is in this way that capitalism finally helped printlanguages to influence the national perception in three different ways: (i)
by “[…] creat[ing] unified fields of exchange and communication below
Latin and above the spoken vernaculars.” (Ibid.: 44); (ii) by “[…] giv[ing] a
new fixity to language, which in the long run helped to build that image of
antiquity so central to the subjective idea of the nation.” (Ibid.); and finally
(iii) by “[…] creat[ing] languages-of-power of a kind different from the older
administrative vernaculars.” (Ibid.). For all these reasons, contrary to what
might be the common belief, “[…] from the start the nation was conceived
in language, not in blood […]” (Ibid.: 145).
Finally, if a common language has been⎯and continues to be⎯a
major tool to unify people by offering a common understanding, it is at the
same time a way to promote collective beliefs with which people ought to
identify, thus feeling they belong to a mutual space of shared practices
and representations. Yet, the disadvantage of written texts, be these
books or texts of law, is precisely their relative permanence (Scott 2009:
227). In fact, they not only give fixity to language, but may also replace
oral stories that for centuries have been the only cultural vectors, and
since “[…] the ability to read and write is typically less broadly distributed
than the ability to tell stories” (Ibid.: 230), they may also reset cultural traits
by imposing a single hegemonic reading⎯as is the case of the hereafter
discussed Afro-Colombian identity.
116
5.2.2. How to Write a ‘Beautiful’ Constitution
The title of this section does not mean to be negatively sarcastic, but
wants to be more of a reflection on a somewhat general constant, that is,
the discrepancy between what is stated in a text of law, its promotion, and
its application. Of course I am not saying that the creation or the
development of a document envisioning the empowerment of human
rights is something undesirable. On the contrary, it is something laudable,
and the effort of the people who have been spending nights working hard
on the arrangement of such papers⎯like some Afro-descendant friends
who, for the making of the Law’70, spent weeks working without a break,
living with more than ten people in a small, cold room in Bogotá⎯should
be applauded. Although anarchists strongly claim that there is no need for
the power structure of the State, for societies have always been able to
organize themselves independently (e.g. Reclus: 1991), they are also
capable of pragmatism. As stated by Bakunin (2009a: 74), it is certainly
better to live under a Republic than under an authoritarian State, be it a
monarchy or a dictatorship. The rejection of the State as a theoretical
conception therefore does not mean its denial in the practice, and neither
the refusal to improve its laws if this may lead to the improvement of living
conditions of a million, a hundred, or even only ten people.
The Colombian State, despite the intersection of cultures on its
territory, decided not to abandon the idea of Republic, of the State of right
(Estado de derecho), and of a national identity. Because of the
impossibility of coherence in such a variegated land, the ‘new’ Constitution
of 1991 emerges as a solution for homogenization including diversity⎯i.e.
multiculturalism. However, as Taylor points out “Il existe un autre
problème grave avec la plupart des politiques de multiculturalisme.
L’exigence
péremptoire
paradoxalement
⎯
de
jugements
peut-être
de
devrait-on
valeur
dire
favorables
est
tragiquement
⎯
117
homogénéisante” (Taylor 2009: 96). That means, as the scholar suggests,
that the criteria by which the other is considered always hide a judgment
of value, which is most of the time paternalistic and hegemonic (Ibid.).
After having discussed the reason for a national identity, thanks to
the contribution of the people who have been working on the drafting of
the Law’70 and its Transitory Article’55, we will now illustrate the
backstage of the process that resulted in those texts, and will thus display
how the Afro-Colombian national identity came into being. These
witnesses are here to testify how what the State celebrated as a
progressive text, was in our opinion a hegemonic political strategy to calm
the masses that had awakened after centuries of submission.
You got the Law’70, don’t ask for more!
Probably the first thing that should be said about the law’70 concerns
its position in the Colombian juridical landscape. When in 1991 the new
Constitution saw the light, it was publicized all over Latin America as the
most modern and advanced text of law in the whole sub-continent, the
reason being that it was the first Constitution embracing the rights of those
minority groups who were living at the margins of society, thus the
indigenous and the black communities. In reality, that was not completely
the case, for the entire text was written without consulting the
communities, and although it included the voices of those who were most
in need of some special attentions, at the same time it excluded their
participation, exposing once again the structural racism that since the
sixteenth century has been oppressing the native people and those
brought to the New World in chains. By the way, as M., a national leader
118
of the PCN 101 told me, the new Constitution appears under particular
circumstances, which are worth mentioning:
“There was much dissatisfaction due to political corruption in Colombia
[...], but let's say there was a major disagreement and those who
invigorate this are mainly student and youth sectors, they were the ones
who started this whole process [and] that say: we need a new
constitution! There was the situation of the M19 who had laid down their
arms, then as they also participated in that scenario, these armed groups
facilitated the opportunity to participate in the political struggle, because
there all political and social forces of Colombia are called; when the
indigenous (people) arrived there was an election, we as a black
community had not arrived. […] I was not present, I find myself in the Afro
process precisely because we must recognize that in Colombia a few
afros, especially at that time 20 years ago, 25 even 15 years ago was
embarrassing to be black, to be black was only to have the tradition and
history of being a slave. This whole new process of recognition of the
rights of black communities has sparked consolidation and pride in being
black, I think that is a great achievement that has had the law 70 […] I for
example did not identify myself as afro, I simply identified as a woman of
popular sectors and worked hard as I say with the themes of liberation,
then a meeting took place, at that time I was young!, a youth and
constitution encounter just occurred; the constitution was already out (to
the public); that was in 91 [...] and [...] Because I was part of a national
coordinating team of a youth movement organized by the liberation of
theology, I met afro colleagues and speaking of the same theme, [...] so
they call my attention, they convene me, they start telling me about the
afro, I did not even know the transitory article 55 existed at the time; they
showed it to me, for me the constitution was the possibility of overall
101
The Black Communities Process (Proceso de Comunidades Negras), see chapter 3.1
and 3.1.1.
119
citizen participation, but does not specify (rights) for afros” (M., Interview,
Cali, line 131, May 17th 2013)
Otherwise said, the Constitution of 1991 has been painted as
something revolutionary for being a text incorporating popular participation
as a fundamental right, while at the same time the involvement of the
society remained exclusive for those who already were politically
organized and somehow recognized by the State.
Yet, before coming to the transitory article‘55, attention must be paid to
another significant characteristic of Colombian society, which is hidden in
the beforehand quoted words of M. and that should not be neglected:
structural racism. Although this thematic has already been tackled, and
will again be throughout this work, here it will be linked to the emergence
of the law’70. As M. was arguing, it “[…] was embarrassing to be black, to
be black was only to have the tradition and history of being a slave”. As a
matter of fact, in a similar way to what happened with the abolitionist
movement during the sixties in the United States, or in the Antilles with the
achievement of Aimé Césaire 102 , in Colombia it was only after the
discussion of the law’70 that blackness started to be considered as
something one should not feel ashamed of. However, even though the
perception about being black has probably changed during the last ten to
fifteen years, I argue that this law failed to set the conditions so that not
only the skin color stops being an object of discrimination, but also⎯to
paraphrase Fanon (1971)⎯that people with black skin do not need to
wear a white mask anymore. The entry into force of a law on blacks was
not in fact, in my opinion, to be read as an act that may lead to
emancipation, which for the etymology of the term should mean the
102
As Fanon argues, “[…] jusqu’en 1940 aucun Antillais n’était capable de se penser
nègre. C’est seulement avec l’apparition d’Aimé Césaire qu’on a pu voir naître une
revendication, une assomption de la négritude” (Fanon 1971: 124-125).
120
liberation, the independence, the autonomy from a cultural model⎯the
white mask⎯and that on the contrary, the State does not want to change.
Let me be more specific: by white mask I do not intend the skin color, but
the model that this implies, i.e. the (western) homo oeconomicus.
Moreover, through the Colombian Constitution we discover how
behind the dominant discourse of the State hides a process that is
analogous to the one of the Ovejas diversion. The first draft of the
Constitution did not include an article regarding the Afro-Colombian, but
only stated⎯through the transitory article’55 103 ⎯that in the two years
following the coming into force of the Constitution, a law would have been
submitted. The latter would have probably never been possible without the
pressure⎯through direct action⎯of thousands of activists from every
region and the collaboration between indigenous and blacks 104 . Even
though the transitory article’55 might be seen as a little victory for the
African descendants, the fact that the upcoming law’70 was not included
in the Constitution from the beginning was nothing but a first⎯legal⎯trap
set by the government. In fact, as M. continues explaining to me:
“[…] The transitional Article 55 was in fact a complicated and highpressure thing. I think it was my second or third time in Bogotá, but for
103
To read the transitory article’55 (in Spanish) consult the website of the Colombian
constitution of 1991
(http://www.constitucioncolombia.com/disposiciones-transitorias/capitulo-8), while for the
text of the law’70 translated in English refer to the following page:
http://www.benedict.edu/exec_admin/intnl_programs/other_files/bc-intnl_programslaw_70_of_colombia-english.pdf (both accessed August 7th 2013).
104
Relationships based on solidarity between blacks and indigenous people are quite
common in Colombia. Sometimes⎯as in the case of Northern Cauca⎯that is related to
the territory, where both communities face the same problems vis-à-vis the State; other
times I tend to agree with Fanon and Hegel when saying that: “[…] le nègre […] se crée
un racisme antiraciste. Il ne souhaite nullement dominer le monde: il veut l’abolition des
privilèges ethniques d’où qu’ils viennent ; il affirme sa solidarité avec les opprimés de
toute couleur. Du coup la notion subjective, existentielle, ethnique de négritude
« passe », comme dit Hegel, dans celle⎯objective, positive, exacte⎯de prolétariat”
(Fanon 1971: 197).
121
many people it was their first time. We made a very strong and very
important march, because the government´s deadline to regulate law 70
was almost overdue, and so we made a process to pressure the
government, we made a campaign… called marconis… I do not
remember, we called it that way, there was no internet at that time, at least
not over here, and so there was an international company for people to
send messages on paper, and the ministry of the interior, which at the time
was the ministry of government, was invaded, demanding that they
recognize and regulate that law, that transitional article in order to approve
any law; then we also marched, in Buenaventura we marched down the
bridge el Piñal and stopped the transit of vehicles for two or three hours,
and as you know Buenaventura is Colombia´s main port, then we did with
police onboard and everything, but what I really want to tell you is that
nothing has been easy; the government here says: yes, we will do (a
specific) something! And forget!” (Ibid., line 341)
Finally, after two years of hard work in limited conditions, a law
acknowledging the rights of black Colombians was written, and for the first
time a text of law addressing the communities was conceptualized by the
communities themselves, responding to what may be portrayed as a
bottom-up process.
The law’70 therefore states the following principles:
•
Recognition and protection of ethnic and cultural diversity, and equal
rights for all cultures that compose the Colombian nationality.
•
Respect for the integrity and dignity of the Black Communities’ cultural
life.
•
Participation of the Black Communities and their organizations,
without detriment to their autonomy, in decisions that affect them and
in those that affect the entire nation in conformity with the law.
•
The protection of the environment, emphasizing the relationships
established by the Black Communities and nature. (Ch.II, art. III)
122
Moreover, the law defines the black community as:
“[…] the group of families of Afro-Colombian descent who possesses its
own culture, shares a common history and has its own traditions and
customs within a rural-urban setting, and which reveals and preserves a
consciousness of identity that distinguishes it from other ethnic groups.”
(Ch.I, art.II, pto. 5)
As I could discuss with some people engaged in writing the law,
some suggested that the law’70 obtained two major results: the
recognition of the Colombian African descendants as an ethnic group, and
consequently as people having rights to collective property over their
land105. But who are the Afro-Colombians?
The law’70 defines the Afro-Colombians as a “[…] group of families
of Afro-Colombian descent […]”. It is therefore questionable whether the
descendant of this group dates of July 20th 1810, the date when in Bogotá
was declared the independence from the Spanish crown, and thus the
birth of the Colombian Republic. Clearly this would exclude the possibility
of being able to report back to a past that goes beyond the existence of a
territory called Colombia, and consequently seems to deny any link with
the African continent and the middle passage. Moreover, the law
continues stating that this “[…] group of families […] possesses its own
culture […]”. But if this is a single group of families having a single culture,
bearing in mind that slavery in Colombia was (officially) abolished in 1852,
is it then the culture of slavery to which the law refers?
Probably not, but if the afro community is not an imagined one, or the
fruit of the political project of an elite in power, then⎯according to what
the law states⎯it is a homogeneous group of Colombians whose skin
105
See ch.III, art.IV.
123
color led them to have traditions and customs in common.
I tend to believe that, on the contrary, the Afro-Colombian identity is
nothing other than the homogenizing plan of the government to include
diversity in its political project, which has as sole purpose a national unity
that can contribute to capitalist accumulation. Through the national
identity,
even
the
deprivation/dispossession
of
people
of
their
natural/economic/cultural resources should then be accepted as a
necessary evil for the development of the country. To avoid that the blacks
doubt the economic policies of the government through Dostoyevskian
considerations, the State appropriates the blackness by inserting it in its
alienated imagined community106.
Finally, if we really have to accept a law defining black
communities⎯something that should be up to the communities to
decide⎯I would like to sketch an alternative based on the description the
community paints of itself. I therefore propose to define the black
106
To enforce this abstract model of blackness, once (arguably) weakened the role of the
Catholic Church, which often had the function of centralizing beliefs into a single official
thought, a new from of religion has entered Colombian society: sports. As Hobsbawm
describes when talking about England, “[…] the adoption of sports, and particularly
football, as a mass proletarian cult is […] obscure, but without doubt [….] rapid”
(Hobsbawm 2000: 288). In Colombia, in every newspaper, not to talk about television,
where it seems that the whole country nourishes itself with soccer and soap operas, the
most evidenced news are the ones related to sports. The reason of this focus has again
to be reminding to the political strategies of homogenization and search for a national
unity. Effectively, “[…] middle-class sport […] combine[s] two elements of the invention of
tradition: the political and the social” (Ibid.: 300). The political, because it is through sport,
especially soccer, that the⎯white⎯hegemony in power provides the image of a nation
not just capable of integration, but proud of its diversity. That is why the blackness in
sports is highlighted and glorified as a symbol of overcoming racism and discrimination,
while outside the sports fields, the game of racial exclusion is far from over.
The social, because the tricky part of this massive misunderstanding is that it is so
fostered that black people might identify themselves with celebrated players, and
therefore consider that everyone could potentially be able to attain a higher position in the
stratified⎯through the division in seven different levels (estratos) going from the poorest
one, to the richest⎯Colombian society. However, this apparent social mobility remains
circumscribed only to what concerns sports, or other cultural activities such as music; and
furthermore, it does not show that in average, for every man⎯not to forget gender
discrimination (!)⎯who sees his dreams come true, at least many thousands of Afrodescendants will never overcome their structural poverty.
124
communities living in Colombia as:
“[…] the groups of families of African descent who possess their own
cultures, share common histories and have their own traditions and
customs within different rural-urban settings, and which reveal and
preserve a consciousness of identity that distinguishes them from other
ethnic groups.”
Nonetheless, additionally to the definition of Colombian blackness,
subsequent struggles were to be undertaken by the people who in Bogotá
had to force the government to stick to its word. The activists had to arm
themselves with patience and prove all their organizational skills, since in
the new articles every word had a battle of its own. A speaking example
that can illustrate these difficulties may be the following statement of the
law:
“In order to receive awardable lands as collective property, each
community will form a Community Council as its internal administrative
body whose functions will be determined by National Government ruling.”
(Ch.III, art.V)
In reality, such an administrative body has always been present in
the black communities, whose territories were already self-defined and
collectively organized. But in order to make use of the law’70, a formal
step was necessary:
“[…] The Community Council is an ethno-territorial organization where we,
after several years of struggle and through Law 70 and Decree 1745, have
realized that there is a figure that supports what we were doing: defending
the territory. So that is why we formed as Community Council after (year)
2000” (L., Interview, La Toma, line 6, May 20th 2013)
Before the year 2000, a political group was already defending the
125
community from foreign as well as national exploitation, for the richness of
the territory of La Toma has never ceased to make the profit seekers’
mouths water. As L. continues:
“Of course, because there had always been an organization that was in
charge of leading the community, to do the actions of territorial defense,
making the demand for rights. That has always existed” (Ibid., line 16)
According to L., what has changed with the law is that, as people
having rights to a collective property over their land, the inhabitants of La
Toma were now able to demand a consultation before any attempt to
divert the river.
Furthermore, those Councils not only already existed, but also had
their specific names that were for the most part palenques, or maroon’s
councils. These names were decided within the communities, and were
inspired by the ancient African rebels who fought for their freedom. In this
sense,
there
were
names
referring
to
the
libertarian
gestures
accomplished by the African ancestors (see chapter 4.3).
Once again, the new definition of Community Council is not an
inclusive but an exclusive one. As it states, the Council should be a “[…]
internal administrative body whose functions will be determined by
National Government ruling”. In this sense, the government misleads the
communities with the illusion that they can holder collectively their own
territories and therefore be rulers of their lands, whereas in reality, first,
they force the communities to rethink and restructure their socio-political
organizations, and second, they determine the very functioning of the
emerging organizations. In other words, the government includes the
socio-political structures of the communities under State’s rules, while
excluding the same communities from their own way of organizing
themselves.
126
The law’70, and more generally the new Colombian Constitution of
1991, promoted all over the Southern hemisphere as the most advanced
text in the field of human and minority rights, is then nothing but a single
example
expressing
the
necessity
for
a
State
to
face
its
internal⎯ethnical⎯complexity, showing that when a (legal) door needs to
be opened, the wish is to close it again as fast as possible.
Now, to conclude this chapter, let’s try to provide an answer to the
following question: what are the actual consequences of the law’70?
The hypothesis I defend is that the law’70 has at least two sideeffects: (i) it denies the ethnic complexity by building a social group that
fits in a class struggle between an hegemonic and a subordinate one; yet
(ii) it inserts racism in the class struggle, causing the black dominated
group to see as only solution for the improvement of its social condition to
join the hegemonic one. Returning to the metaphor of Fanon, it means
that many black people seem to see as a solution to their problems that of
wearing the white mask and thus becoming the homo oeconomicus
capable of escalating the capitalist hierarchy 107 . The Afro-Colombian
identity allows then the possibility to ‘remain black’ while denying the
African past and therefore avoiding the risk to link to an even ‘lower’ class.
This mechanism gives the government a failsafe: if an ethnic group
wants to exit from its state of subordination to enter the dominant class,
the government is aware of the fact that this will never be possible, for the
whole series of structural political, economical, and social filters is built in
such way that only an absolute minority could change its status, and it will
therefore be guaranteed that the latter respects the power relations in
107
It interesting to see how the government present the law’70 on its website from a
paternalistic point of view, where it states that the intention is to help and ameliorate the
conditions of the black populations
(https://www.dnp.gov.co/Portals/0/archivos/documentos/DDTS/Ordenamiento_Desarrollo
th
_Territorial/3g04CNCONPES2909.pdf, accessed on July 4 2012).
127
place. Clearly the risk is that the subjugated group can come together as a
class and promote a revolution in the Marxist sense of the word,
something that would lead to a reversal of roles, but not of the
structures⎯not in a first time at least. This risk does not seem possible in
Colombia today because, it must be remembered, the hegemonic group is
backed by the economic and military power of the US, who will defend
their interest of core over a semi-periphery by any means necessary
(Chomsky: 2005a, 2002).
The law’70 therefore created the impression of allowing the
government
to
homogenize
its
citizens,
thus
legitimizing
the
disappearance of other world ethnic groups in response to capitalist
needs.
But what if in reality it is sufficient to exit from this discussion of classes so
dear to Marxism to accept the fact that the Afro-descendants are skillful
enough to govern themselves without the need of the State? What if
against the affirmation of the government ‘You got the law’70, don’t ask for
more’ the communities respond ‘We don’t ask, we take!’?
In fact, it seems to me that in the Colombian case, the government’s
strategy to keep its hegemonic power failed in the tactic. Although the
African-descendants are living at the margins of society, inhabiting the
most poor and rural areas of the country, they were nonetheless
experienced enough to notice the misstep and organize their resistance.
Once aware of the weak point of the antagonist power, the black
communities adopted the same legal strategy in planning⎯again in their
history⎯a proud counter-move. In this case, the process of (re-)
territorialisation leading to the foundation of the ethno-territorial community
of La Toma was not to be stopped.
128
PART IV
“The hope of community is in people deciding
important matters for themselves.”
Paul Goodman
108
6. The Political Legitimacy of the Community, or
why Some Ethnicities ‘(Re) Appear’
In response to the previous chapter, the present one aims to examine
the core of the empirical work accomplished on the field. After having
demonstrated why State policies do not apply to the observed reality, here
we will expose the reaction of the oppressed people, hence illustrate their
tactics⎯their everyday practices of resistance against the State⎯within
the strategy of auto-determination. The latter has as objective the free and
peaceful enjoyment/control over the living space by the Afro-descendant
ethno-territorial community.
In order to convey the representations and the discourse that the
community of La Toma has of itself and its own discernment about
development (6.3), in the first part of this chapter (6.1.) we will analyze the
local process of (de-) and (re-) territorialisation, while in the second part
(6.2) we will relate this process to the construction of a ‘new’ ethnicity and
highlight the practices that enhance said ethnicity.
To resume, this chapter elucidates the tactics employed by the
community to face the Ovejas River diversion.
108
Taylor, S. (ed.) (2010). Drawing the Line Once Again. Paul Goodman Anarchist
Writings, Oakland, PM Press: 81.
129
6.1. Processes of Territorialisation Beyond Statism
In general scholars agree in viewing processes of territorialisation
as being connected to practices of de-territorialisation, which are
somehow logically followed by those of re-territorialisation (e.g. Turco:
2007); it is an ongoing progression that Raffestin defines as TDR:
territorialisation, deterritorialisation, reterritorialisation (Raffestin 2012:
129). In this thesis we define two cycles of territorialisation functional to
the comprehension of our object of study. In the first image below, we
display a micro-cycle of territorialisation defining the process involving the
community of La Toma.
Salvajina Re-­‐ Ethno-­‐territorial Community of La Toma t De-­‐ State and Paramilitary Violence Micro-cycle of Territorialisation (Bernasconi, 2014)
130
We argue that the construction of the Salvajina dam has caused a
deterritorialisation of the area that has been followed by a period of
violence, where the inhabitants had to ‘restructure’ their community, while
at the same time facing the difficulty of not being able to meet because of
the threats of the paramilitary forces active in the region. After this period,
which lasted a bit more than a decade (see chapter 5.1.2), the people of
La Toma were finally able to initiate a process of reterritorialisation, the
manifestation of which is the ‘new’ ethno-territorial community.
In the following second image we present a macro-cycle of
territorialisation that illustrates the mechanism with an emphasis on the
identity component.
Middle Passage Re-­‐ Afro-­‐descendant Identity T De-­‐ Maroons Communities Macro-cycle of Territorialisation (Bernasconi, 2014)
131
Here we claim that the deterritorialisation process has been
caused by the enslavement of human beings, who were then exchanged
as commodities throughout the triangular trade, thus the middle passage.
The later uprising of maroon societies, which inspired and gave birth to the
present Afro-descendant identity, followed the Atlantic exchange, which
began in the sixteenth century redefining economic boundaries on a global
context.
Literature on globalization tends to reposition hierarchies between
the local and the global as a consequence of flows of capital, goods and
information that are increasing in mobility over networks which are always
more freely crossing the boundaries of the State (Cox: 1998, Sheppard:
2002). The globalization of capital has reasserted the supremacy of places
that are now becoming more and more powerful in the world’s economic
system (Taylor: 2000). The⎯economical⎯deterritorialisation of the States
is what increases the possibility for the local to upscale in a constant
process of rescaling (Swyngedouw: 2004; Kelly: 1999), that sometimes
ends up in dynamics of reterritorialisation. These supra-national flows are
merely economical⎯thus virtual⎯and of goods, and contrary to what
Storper (1997) argues, the phenomenon of globalization has absolutely
not increased the movement of people across State borders; on the
contrary, it has increased the control over national borders and
strengthened politics of exclusion that lean towards the consolidation of an
overall panopticon. In this light, the critiques of Elden become pertinent
when he states that many geographers are ‘missing the point’ while talking
about globalization as a deterritorialisation process (Elden: 2004), for in
his eyes the concept of territory precedes the one of State (Ibid.). For the
same reason he emphasizes that territory must be first understood “[…] as
132
a historically and geographically specific form of political organization and
political thought” (Elden 2010: 757-758).
Nonetheless, I choose to approach the uprising of the afrodescendant territory of La Toma from an anarchist geographical (cf.
Springer: 2012) and anthropological (cf. Graeber: 2004; Scott: 2009)
perspective, the whole process of territorialisation being⎯at least in its
conception⎯independent from the statist authoritarian discourse of
physical bordering, and the anarchist approach being what “[…] affords us
tools for conceiving of territorialisation as a potentially liberating practice”
(Ince 2012: 1653).
Indeed,
the
territorialisation
process
of
the
Afro-descendant
community is an ongoing process that involves people, space, time, and
everyday practices and activities influencing and being influenced by the
whole territorial construction. Those activities, as will be discussed in the
following section (6.3.4) dedicated to what is called ethno-education or
self-education (etno-educación or educación propia), are influencing the
process by promoting practices that strengthen the relationship of the
inhabitants to their land, encouraging deeper awareness of the manterritory relation. Contemporaneously, these same activities are generated
by the territorialisation process, which itself constantly requires new
practices and understanding.
Deterritorialisation Throughout State and Violence
In Colombia, outside of big cities where the State’s institutions are
more or less present, many regions are left to their own destiny; a fate that
most of the time is tainted by civil war and aggressive capital exploitation.
The area of La Toma is one of those places where it is said that the first
time a child meets the State, it is not through its schools, but through its
133
army and helicopters. Here, contrary to the Hobbesian (2000) ideas of wild
humans fighting against each other, people free from any social contract
(Rousseau: 2006109) with governmental institutions used to live in peace,
practicing solidarity without the supposed order allegedly made possible
by the State110.
As a matter of fact, the problems arose with the civil war, when the
insurgency group FARC-EP began to challenge the hegemony of the
Colombian State in the region, recommending a more equal distribution of
the resources. To avoid any misunderstanding it must be specified that, as
many inhabitants who wish to remain completely anonymous told me, first,
the insurgency has never attacked the community and second, the
problems are caused by the army representing the aggressive arm of the
State. Moreover, the real problems related to violence, threats and murder
first arose in the region of La Toma with the issue of the Salvajina, where
political
economies
of
dispossession
altered
the
political
social
relationships of mutual aid in use around the ancestral territory for many
hundreds of years.
For J., a young inhabitant of La Toma who has been practicing the
mining activity since his childhood, that is still difficult to accept:
“[...] One feels very sad, and most of all very sore, truly from the heart,
one cannot see how the people who have the power to mandate over
109
To be more correct, Rousseau’s famous argument is that the contrat social is what
allows and guarantees society’s interchange with the State, avoiding the overall decisions
of a monarchy. However, for the romantic philosopher, in the state of nature people were
living more happily because of the absence of rules and order, or in other words,
because of the absence of politics. This is completely erroneous, and anthropology and
geography–starting with Kropotkin and Reclus–are here to demonstrate that: Anarchism
is order and organization!
110
To avoid any misunderstanding it seems important to specify that our goal is not to
paint La Toma as the Rousseaun savage society, for even in La Toma there have been,
and always will be, problems within the community. However, our point is that these
matters can be resolved (even violently) by the community itself, without resorting to an
external authority.
134
people can do this, sacrifice the lives of people, the coexistence, take
their territory away for their own pockets’ benefit, because it is (for their
own) personal (benefit) to bring multinationals to come and exploit our
resources wanting to, as if, they wanted to take us out of the way, seeing
that currently gold mining is viable, but through gold other metals become
available, such as uranium, silver, copper. We are rich, but we are not
specialized in mining, we do it to get our sustenance, but we do not know
what other materials, we have not done the, the (...) how could I tell you?
We have not done the (...) the preliminary studies [...]” (J., Interview, line
353, La Toma, August 25th 2009)
The point raised by J. is here to testify that politics of displacement
that seek a more lucrative exploitation of the natural resources, are
ongoing processes that will never be stopped unless the ancestral
inhabitants gain control over their territory. With the advancement of
science and the innovation of technologies, the search for gold and silver
is now extended to new resources that not only rural communities would
be unable to exploit, but whose extraction would also implicate techniques
hazardous for the environment and its inhabitants. Additionally, contrarily
to gold or emeralds, the exploitation of materials such as platinum, copper,
or others, would not allow the people to be main actors in the economic
chain, for none of these elements could be directly sold at the
marketplace⎯not to speak of the material impossibility of the extraction
activity.
As J. just argued, and as has been stated on numerous occasions
throughout this essay, the search for gold in La Toma relates to
agriculture, and both are activities that have as primary objective the
attainment of self-sufficiency.
135
From an anarchist perspective, producing autonomously is the key
for a sustainable life in a given territory (Kropotkin: 2010). In this sense,
production must not simply be understood as an activity generating
monetary income or alimentary subsistence, but also as a social activity
inducing people to gain awareness about their resources, while at the
same time reinforcing social relationships within the community and the
same family structures. As F. states:
“One cannot simply stay being a lawyer, talking about peoples rights,
without being capable of producing one’s own family nourishment” (F.,
Interview, line 104, Cali, May 17th 2013)
In the following section (6.1.2.) we will come back to this subject
while discussing the particular mode of farming characteristic of the
African-descendant communities. Here, what is interesting for the present
argument is to recall that, unlike the conception of self-production
undertaken by black communities, the way the State assumes its role of
guarantor for the survival of the nation is visibly not based on the same
collective ideal. Actually, the mode of production defended by predatory
capitalist corporations is not taking into account the reproduction and
preservation of the environment (see also chapter 5.1.). Since the State
maintains its position on what concerns the national political economy, the
ancestral communities have no other option but to organize themselves to
contrast this governmental view. As T. testifies:
“The relationship managed simply is the relationship which is managed at
a political level, because the ones who are at the head (top) of the state,
the leaders, have only showed interest in the capital, and that
transnational capital which arrives in the country is simply to usufruct the
natural resources of the region against any idiosyncrasy, against every
136
natural heritage and against an entire community which has been working
with the environment, has been organizing, which has been working as a
family and primarily has been working in an organized way to provide a
responsible management to their habitat. The national government,
consequently, is not in favor of the community organizing but based on
what autonomy is, where the folks or the ethnic minorities are, based on
the national and international legal framework, allows through different
resolutions, through different agreements, through different proceedings
such as the agreement 169 which states that the ethnic mining or tribal
peoples of the world have the right to self-determination, to generate the
development we want for ourselves, without expecting for a transnational
to tell us how to live our lives and what we must do with our heritage, then
based on that right of self-determination, we, the leaders, as well as
community of base organizations, have supported the community to
jointly, as a team, defend the only heritage we have, that is a natural
heritage which is the territory.” (T., Interview, line 395, La Balsa, August
13th 2009)
L., who sees the struggle for a sustainable exploitation of the natural
resources as a long-standing fight, echoes this opinion. For this leader,
the entire community is now determined to safeguard what has been
achieved during hundreds of years of incessant battles, and possibly
enforce the persistence in the ancestral territory:
“[…] State policies are policies of dispossession. So the government is
interested, the government plays to pull people from the territory, for
what? To free the path for the multinationals, because the fewer people
there are, the less resistance there is (...) But fortunately for the people
who have gone out, gone back, the people who are in the colonies are
ready for battle. So for us, we say that this fight is one of a long breath…”
(L., Interview, line 352, La Toma, May 20th 2013)
137
The people who had to leave, and yet were able to come back to the
communities, are the same who now participate in the process of
reterritorialisation. Rejecting the common definition of a territory as ‘an
area of land under the jurisdiction of a ruler or state’, it is fundamental to
emphasize that for the African descendants of La Toma, the space where
they have been living for centuries has always been rich of significance.
Still, the values accorded to that piece of land stem from a process
unfolding in space and time, where the sedimentation of cultural traits and
activities
has
shaped
and
continuously
remodeled
the
territorial
conception.
Yet, before the violent intrusion of the State, the symbols and values
accorded by the community to their territory didn’t need to be justified or
invented; they were simply perceived as an extension of common feelings
of belonging to a place rich in natural resources, where people used to live
together, sharing the same commercial activities that for the most part
were related to agriculture and especially the production of coffee⎯until
the construction of the Salvajina. Nevertheless, behaviors of solidarity and
sharing have always characterized those ancient African settlements.
Moreover, the kind of agriculture practiced by the communities being
based on subsistence, it has never damaged the environment.
Actually, one might say that in the people’s mind, the concept of
State has materialized with the dam, as well as with the thousands of
hectares of land taken away from the communities to be transformed into
what is known as the green desert, which is the concatenation of
enormous plantations of sugar cane that have monopolized the
landscape, going from the municipality of Suárez to the margins of Cali. It
is for those reasons that in general, when asking people about their
relationship with the State, all answers converge towards the same idea:
138
“[… ] The truth is that state policies have been arbitrarily trampling
communities. Thing to be worried about, because it is known, if one does
not take action (one) ends up having to leave the territory, since, the large
locomotives, including mining, is one of the ones which tends to make our
communities or the natives of our to community disappear in order to
allow the multinationals to come and take possession of all the wealth we
have in the territory; that is one of the main reasons why, today, we are
concerned about defending the territory, because without the territory, we
will be nobody, so whilst today our grandparents, our great grandparents,
our ancestors, have fought for us to rejoice in that territory, well we also
have a very big responsibility to leave our children a commitment, that
they can use the territory; it is then important, it is important to fight so
that tomorrow (in the future) our children can have a place to enjoy this
beautiful territory we have….” (E3, Interview, line 7, La Toma, May 22nd
2013)
In military strategies (e.g. Guevara: 2010), it is well known that in
order to build up comradeship in an army, it is fundamental to present the
image of an enemy from whom to distinguish oneself, hence recognize
oneself as belonging to a group. In this sense, nationalism has always
been erected upon wars against a barbarian, violent, less educated (and
even better if of another skin color) oppressor.
For its politics of displacement driven by strategies of capital
accumulation by dispossession, the Colombian government perfectly
achieved what most probably has never been its⎯official⎯goal, i.e.
strengthening entire communities against the State. However, by
constantly chasing people out of their land, and perpetrating politics of
environmental racism, the government generated the insurrection of
communities, which have found themselves forced to unify their efforts in
139
order to resist, with the only objective of being able to live where they had
been living for the last four centuries.
After the time when people were forced into chains, the Africandescendants of La Toma always had to fight in order to stay alive away
from their mother continent. Of course, as we already mentioned, it would
be wrong to believe that the black communities are groups of people living
in harmony and love, sharing a common life without any internal troubles.
Communities are not ‘pure’, for people, independently from their origins or
place of living, are themselves different, thus often contrasting each other.
Discussions, disputes, fights, and even murders are not absent in La
Toma. Nonetheless, recalling the leading thesis of this work, I do argue
that what most ties the people of La Toma and the surrounding
communities together, is the everyday resistance against the State. To put
it otherwise, I believe that without the State’s aggressive intrusion into the
territory, the generation of violence, the displacement of people, and the
destruction of the environment, hardly would the black inhabitants live in
such a strong cohesion among each other.
As explained in the previous chapter (5.1.2.), the violence
engendered by the State in Northern Cauca hardly finds an equivalent
among other communities. When in the year 2000 the Salvajina was sold
to the EPSA (the Energy Enterprise of the Pacific), the company working
in partnership with the Union Fenosa (the other Spanish corporation),
paramilitary forces invaded the region111. Yet, although it has been difficult
until today to fully prove it in front of a court, it is a certainty that the figure
hidden behind those armed groups was Alvaro Uribe, the Colombian
president himself. From the nineties until the year 2005, when those
111
In general the paramilitary forces are private armies protecting multinational or
transnational corporations like Coca-Cola or Nestlé. What characterizes these armies is
the brutal way of killing people, for the real objective is not to kill, but rather spread terror.
140
groups were supposedly demobilized, a group called Aguilas Negras
(Black Eagles) has generated terror all over the region of La Toma.
Without delving deeper in this delicate topic, the reason why the
communities living in the area have developed a structural mistrust
against the State is pretty much obvious, the paramilitary forces being
nothing but an unofficial arm of the government.
To foment the skepticism against the Colombian political power, it is
of course not less relevant to mention the process of environmental
destruction perpetrated by multinational companies throughout the
country. In the case of La Toma, the inhabitants know well that the
territory attracted the interest of Anglo Gold Ashanti, which after
conducting some secret, as well as illegal, investigations on the minerals
present in the soil, remains attentive to the evolution of the Ovejas
diversion project.
The
Salvajina
has
already
completely
transformed
the
microenvironment surrounding the area: the weather has changed, coffee
cannot be cultivated anymore, while other plants are difficult to grow.
Fishing in the region has become more and more difficult, for many fish
have disappeared, especially because unable to return to their sources.
With the generation of violence, the corruption⎯if not the threatening
or the murder⎯of community leaders, the destruction of the environment
and consequently of the resources available for the people, the State has
been able not only to deterritorialise an existing territory, but also to
empower the revolt of a community against itself.
For centuries, the African-descendant inhabitants have lived in the
region without the necessity to prove their conception of territoriality, nor
their⎯humanly natural(!)⎯ability to govern themselves, without the need
141
of fixed hierarchical structures of power that have the monopoly of
violence over people. Again, there is no need for a State so as to have
order in a society, and the Afro-descendant communities living in the
region have always been able to survive and organize themselves without
the need for external authorities. Still, to be more precise: the people of La
Toma do not define themselves as anarchist, and in point of fact, they
have often wished to count on the help of the State, be it for schools,
hospitals, roads, commercial exchanges, etc. Even so, with its politics of
aggression, the government has been able not only to ruin the relationship
with people that today see the State as an enemy112, but has also forced
communities to reterritorialise the territory they have been threatened of
losing.
112
E., a young leader does elucidate my point: “[...]One feels that this device we call
State should create possibility for people to live in better conditions today, but if you see
that increasingly norms are being made, and that these norms always go against the
rights, each time they are violating the rights of communities, then one says that
ultimately the State (...) is not even recognizing the rights we have today as communities,
[...] on the other hand are always creating rules that go against our rights, so finally one
says that the state is not there to protect, the State is there to usufruct all these rights,
and that all this wealth at the expense of the same work, the same ethnic groups, the
communities, their greatest interest is that the poor continue to be increasingly poorer
and the rich increasingly richer, and that the multinationals generate for them major
dividends, for those are the most desirable for the State itself. So, today we can not say
that the state, uh, is in defense of the communities, today we have to organize a strike to
be heard, today we have to close hospitals and roads so that we can be heard, and so all
those rights enshrined in the Constitution are violated by the State itself, at the hand of
the same leaders, then one does not see where one can say that the state is helping our
th
communities improve their quality of life.” (E2, Interview, line 325, La Toma, May 14
2013).
Even more radical is the position of E(3), an older leader who has been active in the
communities his whole life and has a clear idea of how the State foments what has been
previously defined as environmental racism: “The State, that is the main enemy, because
the state is the one that gives power to transnationals to do what they are doing in this
country, spatially, Anglo Gold Ashanti, is a company that has over thirteen million
hectares concession, but then we will see what sectors are handed over and most of
these areas are concessions in indigenous towns and communities of afro-descendants,
raizales or palenqueras (...) is where they have been given the power to their
exploitations of open-pit mining, as they are doing with oil exploitation, is almost always in
places where disadvantaged communities are” (E3, Interview, line 143, La Toma, May
nd
22 2013).
142
For anarchism might be understood as an ethical discourse about
practices of political action (cf. Graeber: 2004), we will now analyze the
pillars upon which the territorialisation process is built.
First we will determine what representation the people of African
descent have of their own territory, and how this picture is linked to a
collective imaginary of what is recognized as an ancestral land. Second,
and this will be the topic of the second half of this chapter (6.2), we will
see how this discussion relates to a process of self-identification. As will
be elucidated in the next chapter (7), the outcome of this combination
between space and identity is a self-defined ethno-territorial community.
6.1.1. Territorialisation of a Lived Space
A
geographical
space
becomes
a
territory
following
the
accumulation of cultural symbols resulting from the⎯cultural as well as
economic⎯activities carried out by the community living in that given
space (Caldo: 1996; Gatti: 2013; Pollice: 2003).
Those symbols are for the most part unconscious, in the sense that
they are produced by the community, but without a conscious intention of
constructing collective values. As a matter of fact, the symbols with which
the inhabitants upholster their inherited territory are fashioned by their own
activities. The latter are nothing else but the repetition of gestures, habits
and ways of conceiving space, which have been maintained through time.
Yet, all those behaviors and ways of understanding the working as well as
the recreational activities, find their significance in an African past, which
is tied to a collective memory now in the process of being regained.
The land becomes territory through the values that the members of
the community accord to the place they are living in. For instance, this
process is feasible when the land has acquired a particular connotation in
143
the mind of the people in reason of their affective attachment, which is
often the result of the productive activities that take place on the land.
Once the land has gained a specific meaning, the identity can be
delineated. Furthermore, according to Pollice (2003) a difference can be
drawn between geographical and territorial identities. According to the
scholar, a geographical identity is “[…] an external representation with
merely descriptive and/or interpretative scopes” (Ibid.: 107), while a
territorial identity, as is the case of the Afro-descendants of La Toma, is an
identity that emerges from a self-referential process where the people,
acknowledging the significance the land has for their own existence,
culturally and spatially embrace it.
As mentioned, a land might acquire a particular value in people’s
minds because of the activities that take place on it, but this can also
happen for emotional⎯normally historical⎯reasons, e.g. the case of the
Holy Land for the Jewish people before the creation of the State of Israel.
What is peculiar in the case of La Toma is that in the cultural construction
of this Afro-descendant territory the two reasons seem to match. In fact, if
on one side the attachment to the territory is due to the activities practiced
by the community, on the other side the emotional relationship has
historical origins.
For what concerns the activities done on the territory, they can be
classified as either commercial or cultural. As the latter will be discussed
in the next sections of this chapter (6.2 and 6.3), we will now consider only
the
two
main
commercial
occupations:
mining
and
agriculture.
Nevertheless, here an elucidation is vital: the distinction done between
commercial and cultural activities is not always applicable indistinctly. As a
matter of fact in this ancestral territory both mining and agriculture are at
144
the same time profitable⎯subsistence⎯enterprises, as well as traditional
cultural vehicles.
As seen in the historical part of this work (part II), the search for gold
is strongly related to the territory and its richness. Contrarily to capitalist
modes of production, as political activist Angela Davis testifies after her
visit in La Toma, “[…] the mode of mining that the people, the women and
the men, engaged in is also respectful of the earth, it does not destroy the
earth, it does not destroy the beauty of the landscape” (Angela Davis,
Interview, line 48, Oakland, July 2nd 2012). As L. explained to me, the way
people understand this activity diverges from the perspective of capitalist
exploitation. As a matter of fact, there are three major ways of mining for
producing profit: large scale mining, medium scale, and small scale. What
differs between these three models is the size of the excavation, which
goes from hectares of land and holes going three or four hundred meters
deep, down to relatively small exploitations (see images here below).
(Ancestral mine, La Toma, Bernasconi, 2009)
(Large scale mining, web 2012)
However, the common denominator is that all three types of
(industrial) mining have as declared goal that of creating profit, which is to
be reinvested in the production of capital surplus. As L. clarifies while
145
elucidating the difference between those modes of mining and the
ancestral one:
“[...] Because for us the concession is that, it is better for us to have the
mine there, for the mine to produce, rather than extracting all the gold
from a mountain at once. So the concession made by the small-scale and
large-scale mining is to excavate the gold from one mountain at once; but
that does not apply to us!” (L., Interview, line 122, La Toma, May 20th
2013).
Effectively, the logic behind the ancestral mode of mining is not of
producing
profit,
but
of
having
a
parallel
income⎯alongside
agriculture⎯that can be used to purchase needed things like working
machinery, food that cannot be locally produced, or simply a new pair of
boots. The difference between industrial/capitalist mode of mining and the
ancestral one is therefore not a question of scales, but of conception. The
people of La Toma (self-) sustain themselves through agriculture, while
the mining activity serves as additional revenue and/or an assurance in
time of necessity, as a kind of ‘natural vault’113 .
Regarding agriculture, the connection to the land is even stronger;
not only because of the logical importance the soil has in this activity, but
mainly for the role this practice has had throughout the history of black
communities in Northern Cauca. When in the seventeenth century the
Africans arrived in the territory, they were bound in chains and forced to
work in the gold mines. However, especially with the official abolition of
slavery (1852), the territory underwent a transition towards the agricultural
113
Of course this does not stop some inhabitants from wanting to become rich through
the mining activity, and therefore see the latter as an industry or a firm. As we mentioned
several times, communities are not homogeneous. But in this case, the collective
exploitation of the territory allows precisely to avoid that an individual take precedence
over the community.
146
activity (Mina: 1975). Even if that process did not happen overnight, the
Africans, already expert in mining, quickly gained an expertise in
agriculture, which was already practiced, but was secondary to mining. In
point of fact, the abolition of slavery did not mean that the slaves-drivers,
owners of mines and land, left their properties in the hands of their ancient
servants. On the contrary, the landlords fostered the transition of the
African descendants from miners to campesinos (farmers)114.
With the acquisition of freedom, the ancestors of today’s black
communities gained the possibility⎯throughout the nineteenth and the
twentieth centuries⎯to finally buy the mines and the land they were
working on, and once obtained their freedom, agriculture quickly became
the most effective way to affirm their emancipation, hence the possibility to
be self-sufficient and to independently produce the food necessary to
sustain their life.
I therefore argue that it is exactly because of the perception the
community has of the mining activity and of agriculture that the value
accorded to the their work is linked to the landscape and highlights the
importance of taking care of their mountains and rivers. In other words, the
values accorded to nature are not simply associated to a⎯somehow
subjective⎯beauty of the panorama, but to the importance it has as a
source of food and income, the relationship between people and ‘nature’
therefore being not only conceptual, but also physical.
114
It is interesting to see how the names of the ancient landlords of the region can be
found again among African descendants who supposedly were submitted to slavery in
those properties. As has already been mentioned in this essay, in the area of La Toma
we can find people whose names refer to their ancient masters, like Marquez, Gomez,
Gonzales, etc. and others whose names remind of their African roots, like Lucumí,
Carabalí, Ararat, Mina, etc. To be more precise, even those names are somehow
artificial, for they were also given to the Africans by⎯probably also African⎯masters
who, to facilitate their bureaucratic tasks, were naming the slaves by their places of
origins, linguistic groups, and so on.
147
Bringing emphasis to the emotional reasons connecting the African
descendant communities to their territory, as previously said, the
explanations are historical. Because of slavery, thousands of Africans
arrived to the Northern Cauca in the course of three centuries. Far away
from their homeland, once slavery had been abolished, the people used
their knowledge in mining to obtain the gold necessary to buy the lands
where they were living, and were thus able to auto-sustain themselves.
Because of the tremendous efforts and the blood that had been shed to
gain the ‘new home’, I do suggest that away from the ‘mother continent’,
for the people of African descent the land assumed a romantic value,
affirmed over time through a constant process of re-appropriation.
Again, if we take the physical space of La Toma, one sees how for
many centuries the territory has been the center of an almost
uninterrupted process of deterritorialisation, thus reterritorialisation. If we
agree that a physical space becomes territory because of its relation with
humans only if and when the inhabitants accord to their lived space a
specific value in connection to their activities (Caldo: 1996; Gatti 2013;
Pollice: 2003; Raffestin 2012), we also have to agree that this ongoing
phenomenon is connected to unending power relationships.
Since the territorialisation process is an interaction between space
and identity, the identity being nothing but the construction of a self in
relationship to a other, we might also argue that the greatest changes in
the territorial conception have taken place during more or less forced
contacts between different cultures and ethnicities.
According to Turco (Turco: 2007; Turco in Pollice: 2003),
territorialisation might be analyzed as a process composed of three
different stages: denomination, reification and structuring. In the first
148
phase “[…] territorial identity acquires a strategic value as it gives meaning
and motivation to the ‘denomination’, regarded as the result of a ‘symbolic
control of space’” (Pollice 2003: 108). Taking the case study of the
community of La Toma confronting the diversion of Ovejas, we argue that
the denomination stage took place with the advent of the law’70, when
blackness became a legal tool and the Afro-Colombian identity was
strategically adopted in connection to a given geographical space. The
denomination stage is also the moment when a society acknowledges the
characteristics of the territory it is living in, hence the physical, economical
and moral properties⎯the resources⎯or to use Turco’s expression, it is
when the community takes ‘intellectual control over the territory’ (Turco:
2007).
In the second phase, reification, the identity becomes the instrument
that allows the community to gain a ‘practical control’ over space. For
Turco “Reification implies a strong territorial identity, and at the same time
reification can be a mechanism for strengthening identity sense and the
factors that contribute to increasing this sense” (Pollice 2003: 108). This is
the stage when a society takes practical control of the space by physically
transforming it according to the conception the people have of their own
territory (Turco: 2007). Seen from a macro point of view, that is the case of
the agricultural and industrial revolutions that have transformed the
relationship of entire societies with their territories. In La Toma, those
changes have happened in past as well as in present times. In the past,
the material transformations of the land in function of the values accorded
to it consisted in alterations of the landscape to facilitate the mining activity
first, and the agricultural one later⎯including the construction of a railroad
in the twentieth century, now in disuse. In the last twenty years a new
transformation
occurs:
the
re-appropriation
and
the
consequent
reinforcement of the material space now collectively seen as an ancestral
149
one. More precisely, on one hand there is a struggle to win the recognition
of the ancestral mode of mining as being a legitimate one, thus the
fortification and the defense of the space used for this activity; on the other
hand, there is the transformation of the agricultural space. As a matter of
fact during the last couple of years the community has promoted different
projects to revalorize the soil and readopt what has been known as the
traditional farm (finca tradicional)⎯see succeeding section 6.1.2.
Finally, the last stage in the process of territorialisation identified by
Turco is the structuring. Once gained the intellectual and the practical
control over the territory, the “[…] structuring can be actually exercised
only within territorial contexts in which identity has a structuring value, so
that identity can direct collective acting and modify the territory according
to self-referential mechanisms” (Pollice 2003: 108). As example of an
achieved structured territory Turco (2007) suggests the State, which of
course is not the conclusive ambition of the territorialisation process that is
taking place in the Northern Cauca. Not only “[…] the idea of territory,
imbued as it is with undertones of statism and authoritarian control, is
anathema to most anarchists […]” (Ince 2012: 1646), but the process of
de-/re- and territorialisation happening in the Colombian Northern Cauca
seems to demonstrate how the State happened to be more of a ‘territorial
trap’ (Agnew: 1994) into which the communities should, sooner or later,
reorganize their geographical and anthropological space.
In conclusion, it is exactly in the intellectual, practical and sensible
control of the lived space that the Afro-descendant community of La Toma
is (re-) defining a space based on a borderless territory, rather than one
with frontiers, and on a collective, anti-capitalist space, rather than an
individualistic one.
150
6.1.2. The Opposition of Spaces: Collectivity versus (the State’s)
Individuality
As has already been said in other places in this thesis, none of the
Afro-leaders of the community of La Toma have ever identified themselves
as anarchists. That would be also difficult not only because anarchism is
seldom, if ever, part of school programs⎯and that is probably a worldwide
assumption⎯, but also because it is pretty much impossible to find any
anarchist books in Colombian libraries. If we agree with Élisée Reclus
when he claims that “[…] si l’anarchie est aussi ancienne que l’humanité,
du moins ceux qui la représentent apportent-ils quelque chose de
nouveau dans le monde” (Reclus 2011: 36), it is then not astonishing to
find anarchist scholars among geographers and anthropologists. Of
course, from the nineteenth century onward, it has been the privilege of
those two approaches to discover and study cultures that have been living
and politically organizing themselves in the absence of the State, but
nevertheless, not all non-western societies espouse the anarchist cause.
The antagonistic relationship with authoritarian structures and
hierarchies is an attitude normally embraced by societies that are living
under the oppression of a usually small and⎯whether directly or
indirectly⎯violent elite, or by those⎯barely findable⎯which have never
experienced domination.
In regard to the process of territorialisation however, the control of
the lived space by the people of African descent is structured on behaviors
and shared values that deliberately go against statist ideologies.
First of all, as we asserted many times, and as a community leaders
testify, the State is generally seen as an opponent of economical and
cultural development:
151
“The State, that is the main enemy: the State; because the State is what
gives power to transnationals to do what they are doing in this country,
[...] so, we will see in which sectors are authorized [the land to the
multinationals] and most of these areas are authorized on indigenous
lands and communities of afro-descendent, raizales or palenqueras (...) is
where it has given them the power to do their exploitations of open-pit
mining, as they are doing with the oil exploration; it is almost always in
places of disadvantaged communities.” (E3, Interview, line 143, La Toma,
May 22nd 2013).
Second, if we delve deeper into the progression through which the
community appropriates the ‘anthropized space’ (Gatti: 2012), we discover
how the latter reflects dynamics of collectivity and mutual aid.
According
to
Turco’s
(2007)
territorialisation
stages,
in
the
denomination and the reification phases the community assigns values
and shapes the territory according to its own perception of the space. In
this sense, the territory is constructed not only through collective actions
aimed at the achievement of a common good, but also in antithesis to the
hierarchically structured space of the State. The search for autonomy by
the communities in the territorialisation process is not new for social
science, nor is it distinctive of anarchist studies; during the seventies
Raffestin already defined ‘human territoriality’ as “[…] the ensemble of
relations that societies, and consequently the humans that belong to them,
maintain, with the assistance of mediators, with the physical and human
environment for the satisfaction of their needs towards the end of attaining
the greatest possible autonomy allowed by the resources of the system”
(Raffestin 2012: 129). Yet, where the approach might differ, is in the way
that the autonomy is sought, or, in the case of anarchism, taken. To
exemplify this proposition it is worth recalling the concept of direct action,
adopted in anarchist literature to define a specific course of action (e.g.
152
Graeber: 2009). In simple words, direct action defines a way of obtaining
something that for a given people is a right, without the intermediation of
third parties. For example, if the inhabitants of a neighborhood do not
have access to electricity, instead of beginning an exhausting bureaucratic
procedure with local, regional, or national authorities, they simply find the
way to⎯’illegally’⎯connect their homes to the city power lines. And that is
exactly what is going on in the debated Afro-descendant territory, where
the community is organizing the living space without the mediation of
external institutions. The re-appropriation of the ‘traditional farm’ is an
example of a collective effort wishing to bring alimentary self-sufficiency to
the community. This kind of autonomous practice, as Ince (2012) notes,
“[…] incorporates a range of spatial relations of differentiation, collectivity
and negotiation that, since they are not mediated or regulated by external
institutions, make space for the immanent intermingling of these relations
through everyday practice” (Ibid.: 1654).
Cultivating
Autonomy:
An
Ethnography
of
Reterritorialisation
Practices
During my stay in the community I had the chance to experience the
management of a collective space through everyday practices. In the
following paragraphs we will consider the example of the finca tradicional
(traditional farm). The traditional farmhouse, as L. clarifies, “[…] has eight,
ten products that are the essentials: so we're talking about coffee, sugar
cane, bananas, fruit, corn, beans, legumes, breeding” (L., Interview, line
105, La Toma, May 20th 2013).
153
(Traditional farmhouse [Finca tradicionál], Bernasconi, 2009)
The particularity of this farm is that it contrasts with the capitalist
mode of production: the main goal is not of generating profit through the
sale of products grown with the only purpose of entering the market; on
the contrary, the traditional farm exemplifies the transformation of space
for a common good: self-sufficiency⎯with regard to the State. The ‘moral
economy’⎯to adopt Scott’s expression (1976)⎯behind this way of
farming is the one of collectivity, meaning the capacity of production of
food for the survival of the family, the latter understood in its broader
sense. As Scott emphasizes, “[…] the distinctive economic behavior of the
subsistence-oriented peasant family results from the fact that, unlike a
capitalist enterprise, it is a unit of consumption as well as a unit of
production” (Scott 1976: 13). The economic behavior embraced by the
African-descendants towards agriculture is thus the same as the one
adopted towards the mining activity: ‘better everyday a bit, than everything
today and nothing tomorrow!’ Otherwise said, the logic of this
commercial/cultural activity is the one of a long-term strategy of
sustainable production.
Because of the balanced use of the soil and the variety of the
154
products that are cultivated in this particular farmhouse, the risks taken by
the black peasants in this activity are also very little. Similarly to peasants
in Southeast Asia (Scott: 1998, 1990, 1985), the people of Colombian
Northern Cauca prefer to assure a smaller surplus, thus minimizing the
risk in the production, rather than suddenly face scarcity because of an
attempted overproduction.
With regard to the environment, the traditional farmhouse follows
criteria that are fitting to what may be described as an eco-friendly
exploitation (Mollison, Slay: 2007). Although the soil is already very rich,
thanks to the ethno-educación (ethno-education) project, various meetings
are organized in the community to teach people of all ages how to prepare
good manure and how to best take care of the soils 115 . The multiple
products grown in the farm for example, not only maintain the soil rich in
organic material (Ibid.), but also prevent the erosion of the land during
heavy rain periods. The agricultural project undertaken in La Toma and
the surrounding area also demonstrates how people have the tools and
the expertise to teach and learn, or in other words, to share knowledge,
without it being institutionalized. It is also meaningful to indicate that what
rallies the community around this mode of farming is the fear of ending up
as cultures that are depending on the State’s market logic, of which coffee
is an impeccable illustration. As many people told me, during the
seventies the entire region has been pushed to produce this plant 116 ,
which at the time was a major export of Colombian agriculture. With the
construction of the Salvajina however, the climate changed drastically,
and in a matter of a few decades coffee disappeared from the region. The
115
In the annexed documentary ‘Tierra Negra. Journey into Afro-Colombian territory’ one
can see how those activities are organized and how people taking care of teaching not
only are not ‘professional’ peasants, but neither are paid for their work. Those engaged in
the community understand the importance of this work and voluntarily partake in the
process of promoting self-sufficiency.
116
A railroad had been constructed at that time to facilitate the transportation of coffee
and establish a connection with the national and international markets.
155
railroad fell into disuse, the capitalist interests left, and the inhabitants
found themselves cut out from the network that connected them to the
national economy.
Another important aspect that characterizes the traditional farmhouse
is the independence people have towards their work. Although for the little
experiences I personally have in agriculture117 I can confirm that it is a
heavy activity, it makes an enormous difference if this activity is practiced
under the directive of a landlord or independently. In fact, the Africandescendants are free to leave their work at any moment, for a short break,
or for many days if the conditions allow it. We might say that the hours of
work needed for the maintenance of the traditional farmhouse vary from
six to eight hours a day.
Those hours are split between sowing, irrigation, harvesting and
maintenance of the soils; this last activity is the most demanding because,
the soils being very rich, it is not possible to leave them without the
necessary attentions⎯cutting and cleaning⎯for more than a week.
Moreover, since the traditional farm is related to a family unit⎯that can
regroup between three and fifteen individuals⎯the hours of work must be
divided between all members. Assuming that not everyone dedicates the
same amount of time to agriculture, we can estimate that in average, a
person in La Toma dedicates four to five hours a day working in the farm.
Pertinent to this point is the study done by Kropotkin (2006) on agriculture
in nineteenth century France, where he claims that if the activity in the
field were focused on the consumption rather than the (over-)production,
the peasants would gain hundreds of hours every year, which “[…]
117
Generally to understand what someone’s profession is, the easiest thing to do is to
look at his/her hands, and in my case, they definitely do not look like those of a peasant.
Nonetheless, I had the precious chance to experience agriculture while working in the
sugarcane and orange fields in Cuba, by milking cows and goats in the Swiss alps, and
of course, by collaborating in the traditional farmhouse in the community of La Toma.
156
deviendraient des heures de récréation, passées entre amis, avec les
enfants, dans des jardins superbes, plus beaux, probablement, que ceux
de la légendaire Sémiramis” (Kropotkine 2006: 280).
What must be added to this point is that the traditional farmhouse has
been retrieved in recent times after having been abandoned. Originally
every family unit had its farm, but the work was shared among the
community through a principle called mano cambiada (exchanged hand):
one or two members of every family were working together on a single
farm for a day a week, alternating days dedicated to the farm, and days
devoted to the mining activity. Normally the people worked in the family
farmhouse on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and on Tuesday,
Thursday and Saturday in the mines. Then, when in the eighties, nineties
and at the turn of the century the scrapers entered the territory, many
people almost completely abandoned agriculture to go working in the gold
mines everyday. The only ones who persisted in agriculture were the old
people, and as soon as they died, the traditional farms also began to
disappear.
Another major consideration that must be brought to light while
discussing the traditional farmhouse, regards the importance it has on
gender relationships within the community.
Just like the mining activity, agriculture in La Toma also remains an
example of gender equality. In every family unit all members participate in
this activity in relation to their physical capacity. The labor division for
agriculture is based upon the individual possibility to work, and in this
sense the main partitioning of the working hours is established depending
on the age. In general, young people are forced to dedicate an hour to
working in the field before going to school, usually meaning between five
o’clock and six-thirty in the morning, and possibly a couple of hours after
157
school. Normally it is rare to see any adolescents that are happy to
dedicate themselves to those chores. However, because of the awareness
programs promoted by community leaders devoted to the territory, even
teenagers understand the significance that working the land has for the
sustenance of their family.
Women, on their part, are omnipresent in the traditional farmhouse.
While it cannot be said that agriculture is an activity reserved to female
members of the community, it must be acknowledged that they are the
driving force of this particular type of farm. Since in Colombian society it
remains much easier for a man to find a job, if a working opportunity
appears in town or even in the department’s capital Cali, in most cases
men are the ones profiting from such opportunities, a fact that
consequently accords women a higher degree of control in the fields.
However, when using the word ‘fields’ it must made clear that we are
talking about areas that go from several square meters up to, very rarely,
some dozens. But even if the surface is that big, it does not change the
way the soil is cultivated, for in any case the principle of having a variety of
different essential products is applied. Unlike the mining activity, traditional
agriculture seems to be less threatened by the capitalist mode of
production, probably because of the smaller economic interests capitalist
enterprises have in it, but possibly also because of the morphology of the
region.
The relationship between environment and gender equality has been
mentioned by Angela Davis, who calls for the preservation of an
alternative way of agricultural⎯and mining⎯exploitation. As she states
“[…] now, new capitalist modes of production call for the destruction of the
land, the destruction of the landscape⎯and at the same time, it is an
assault on women who have engaged in the other mode of production, a
more respectful, more environmentally sustainable mode of production.
158
So, I suppose what one can say is that the struggle for gender equality is
also a struggle to save the environment and I think that it is important for
us to see how these struggles intersect. If we can succeed in defending
women’s right to work and the mode of production that women and men
and children engage in, we also save the earth for future generations […]”
(Angela Davis, Interview, line 51, Oakland, July 2nd 2012).
The struggle for gender equality would save not only the
environment, but also, I argue, important ancestral knowledges. In fact,
what I noted during my collaboration in the farmhouse is that women⎯and
women only, or almost⎯, besides the basic products already mentioned,
are also dedicated to growing medicinal plants. This commitment is the
result of a knowledge that is transmitted orally from one generation to the
next one, and that at present time is an integral part of the everyday
practices of reterritorialisation118.
We said before that although the traditional farmhouse does not
follow the capitalist mode of production, it does not mean that the
production isn’t capable of creating a surplus. Sometimes, depending on
the season, there are fruits or vegetables in excess of the community’s
capacity to consume them, and although a part is sold at the Sunday
market, the Afro peasants remain teem with an overproduction difficult to
sort.
Again, the sense of belonging to a collective space and identity might
surprise the ethnologist analyzing the economic behavior adopted by the
inhabitants of La Toma towards agriculture. Various ideas have been
considered, but the one that has won the widest consensus and for which
118
In reality it is not completely true that only women have access to knowledge of
medicinal plants. However the traditional knowledge regarding the ability of preparing
remedios (remedies) is commonly associated to witchcraft (la brujería), and men simply
prefer not to mingle in this type of affairs, which could harm their reputation.
159
the people are now seeking funds, again reflects the logic of mutual aid.
The project, promoted especially by young women, is to sell the excess to
the families living in the city of Cali. As we have already mentioned before,
many hundreds of people have moved to the departmental capital, in part
because of the construction of the Salvajina, and in part because of the
job opportunities that the city offers. For practical and economical reasons
many family units coming from the region of La Toma are now living in the
same Cali neighborhood of Agua Blanca. In the two weeks I spent in that
district, there have been four homicides. At night I was not able to go out
by myself, and during the day I was not allowed to go further than a couple
of streets from my house, because various gangs were controlling
different parts of the area. The services⎯hospital, schools, etc.⎯in that
neighborhood are bad⎯when working at all⎯and the mothers are
constantly afraid of letting their children go out, even if it is for going to
school119. Because the access to good quality food is problematic, various
young women are searching for funds in order to rent a place in Agua
Blanca where to sell the products grown in excess in La Toma at a friendly
and affordable price. This project has two parallel goals: on the one hand
helping the families living in Cali to have an easier and reasonably priced
access to healthy food, and on the other hand, to maintain and valorize
the relationship of the forced emigrants to their mother soil.
Finally, what we see in the ongoing territorialisation process of La
Toma is the appropriation of the lived space, which is constructed on the
intermingling between two spaces, the individual and the collective, and
where the individual is functional to the collective one. The traditional
119
A sad anecdote involved F.’s six-year-old granddaughter: one day, while she was
going to school, she was caught in crossfire between opponent gangs; a bullet reached
her head and violently took her young life. Her mother went crazy and never recovered
from that shock.
160
farmhouse illustrates in fact how an individual space⎯the house⎯is made
available to a collective one⎯the community. Even though the house only
arguably fits the description of a place that can be entirely separate from
its surrounding space, it is nonetheless true that in the discourse and the
practice, the people of La Toma think collectively also when talking about
their personal space. The piece of land where the farm lies might belong
to a single person, but the products cultivated there nourish the family in
its broadest sense, and if possible support the neighbors and other
members of the community. The work around the farmhouse is also
organized collectively, and generally reminiscent of the minga⎯the
cooperative understanding of work and space⎯which, as it is for the
mining activity, characterizes the Afro-descendant communities in their
everyday practices.
The point we are making here is that the reterritorialisation of La
Toma not only is a collective process, but also, on the one hand, an act
resulting from the competition against the deterritorialising force of the
State, and on the other hand, a process producing a network of parallel
development at different interconnected scales.
After a brief discussion about the features with which the Afrodescendants define their own identity (6.2), in the third section of this
chapter (6.3) we will describe the (re-) appearance of the ‘new’ ethnoterritorial community of La Toma.
6.2. Processes of Ethnical Emancipation Beyond Nationalism
Through the lenses of political ecology we have seen how the
Colombian State has been the principal cause of the deterritorialisation
process described above. Still, since the other side of the territorialisation
161
coin relates to identity, the next pages somehow reply to what has been
stated in chapter 5.1, and are therefore dedicated to revealing how the
Afro-descendant communities want to be independent from the State also
in their ethnical (re-) construction.
Here, the first point to clarify is that quantitatively in Colombia the
Afro-descendants constitute between ten and twenty percent of the
population120. However, qualitatively speaking, not many people identify
themselves as such. The reason for this is the stigmatization fueled by the
government through the media, thus radio, television and its soap operas,
and last but not least, through the church. In this sense, as A., a professor
in Bogotá elucidates:
“[...] Being afro is not having black afro skin, it is to think of freedom, to
have dreams, to build a nation!” (A1, Interview, line 75, Bogotá,
September 19th 2009).
In light of the above, we may argue that the process of
territorialisation has to also pass through a process of de-ethnification and
re-ethnification, where it is repetitive but necessary to underline that the
latter contrasts with the nationalist project promoted by the Nation-State.
As has been thoroughly explained in the previous chapter, the latter
advances in fact a model of homogenization that, as E. explains, follows a
simple logic:
“[…] Because the government is increasingly making laws that are
always thought to gather us, corner us and finally manage all the ethnic
120
See http://www.minorityrights.org/5373/colombia/afrocolombians.html (accessed on
March 4th 2012).
162
groups in this country with one hand […]” (E2, Interview, line 319, La
Toma, May 14th 2013).
Yet, before investigating the different ways and configurations the
African-descendants have adopted to politically organize themselves
against the hegemony of the State, we have to clarify a second point that
is in a way related, and better specify⎯by adding the ethnical
component⎯what has been said about territorial borders (see chapter
6.1.1.).
As stated earlier, the black communities do not see their boundaries
as fixed lines traced to mark who belongs to the territory and who, on the
contrary,
should
rather
be
forced
outside.
Indeed,
their
own
representation, free from immovable frontiers, is nothing but another
heritage coming from a past of rebellion and battles for freedom, when the
(neo) African ancestors shaped their territory according to different logics:
“[…] Since the moment kidnapped (people) were brought to us in these
sectors, a Palenque was created […]. Well, this palenque, a libertarian
palenque and well (…) the eradication of this palenque was precisely
here, eh (…) because of all this was called Gelima (…) Gelima (…) was
one of the palenques which converged with the palenque of the
macheteros from, from Patia, because this was a path (rough path)
where the transit from Cartagena, Cauca, Norte del Cauca could be
made and the journey through here was on foot, Popayán and gave
space to get to Ecuador. Meaning this was the only journey (path) there
was, and so (…) for a long time the main mines were located in this
sector, meaning, […] most mining was done in this area (…) and from
here, how can I tell you, our eldest with that were able to flee, go into the
jungle and (…) for a long time, then they started doing their libertarian
part. [(/): is that why those palenques were not defined territories…?] no,
they had (…) the entire Norte del Cauca until Patía and part of them,
163
were the ones who started fleeing very fast, they fled to Ecuador, it was
not just a territory like, eh, (…) a cord, a cord from the Norte del Cauca to
Ecuador. The one which was much more centered was San Basilio de
Palenque, because that really was, because since the beginning they
sought their liberty and were libertarian.” (E2, Interview, line 239, La
Toma, May 14th 2013).
The idea of territory is thus not focused on exclusion and defined
frontiers, but instead on an unspecified strip of land. Since the slaves were
escaping following improvised maps⎯like the ones in the hair (see
6.2.1)⎯and encountering unknown places, the reference points were for
the most part related to rivers, mountains, and particularly the three
Andean cordilleras 121 . We can consequently assert that the spatial
conception of territory the black communities have, is also part of the
cultural features inherited from their African ancestors in their quest for
freedom⎯hence in the fulfillment of their libertarian project.
What is curious about this subject is that a similar cognition of
borders was present in Africa before its colonization. Here, the different
kingdoms and tribes inhabiting the continent did not have territories
demarcated by imaginary lines. The power exercised in a territory by a
king progressively got weaker as one moved away from the center of the
kingdom. In this way, between one realm and another there was always
an area that could be defined as ‘belonging to no one’, where neither the
power of a kingdom, nor that of its neighbor, was truly in force (Calchi
Novati, Valsecchi: 2005). These areas should therefore be understood as
permeable
zones
of
exchange
rather
than
places
of
separation/demarcation.
121
In Colombia the Andes are divided into three parts and traverse the country from
south to north. They are therefore known as the western (occidental), the central
(central), and the eastern (oriental) cordilleras.
164
Hereafter we will now display other (cultural) features inherited by the
maroon societies on which the Afro-descendant identity is constructed.
6.2.1. Maroon Features in Today’s Afro-Descendant Identity
As discussed in chapter 4.3, the heritage of the maroon societies
converges in various characteristics that shape today’s Afro-descendant
identity. Henceforth we will expose the main features I was able to register
in the discourses the black inhabitants used to have about themselves. In
addition to the desire for freedom, the maroon paradigm is thus centered
on four main aspects: (i) the importance of family and community in the
social structure; religion (ii), which, although seemingly Catholic, remains
impregnated with ancient African behaviors; the hairstyles (iii), and finally,
perhaps the oldest African features that have persisted up to now: music
and dance (iv). We will then come back to the way work is organized
around the mines, the meaning of gold, and that of the Ovejas River,
which will lead us to the point of departure and of arrival of this thesis, i.e.
the emergency of the ethno-territorial community of La Toma.
To understand the importance the family (i) covers among the black
communities and the way it is structured, a speaking anecdote is the way
babies are taken care of. It is very common in Colombia⎯and not just
within black communities, as the white hegemony like to stereotype⎯for
young women to get pregnant from men that later leave them, as F.
testifies:
“Well, because my father at first did not recognize me as his daughter, my
mother raised me on her own, as she did with my brothers. Over there
most women, even myself, are the head of the family because the men
165
do not assume their responsibility, therefore women had to raise their
children and my mother had to do so, and I have had to do so with my
two sons…” (F., Interview, line 32, Cali, May 17th 2013).
In those cases, for a young girl, especially if black⎯or
indigenous⎯the task of bringing up a child by herself becomes particularly
difficult. For girls living in big cities, where the family structure has already
been broken, the charge is sometimes so heavy that the only solution
remains to commit the child to some institution122 . However, for women
still living in rural areas, as in the case of F., the family⎯in its largest
sense⎯becomes of major importance. The grandmother, the aunts, the
sisters, everyone will help in raising the child. The youngest members of
the community, for example, sleep in hammocks while the relatives are
working in the mines or in the farms. Clearly this solidarity between
members of the same community might be intended as a logical human
behavior, but in the case of the African-descendants, this is also related to
a past of slavery, when children born in the mines or the plantations were
raised by the entire community.
Concerning the second feature, religion (ii), I have to admit that I
have not been able to investigate the topic as thoroughly as I would have
liked, but nonetheless I witnessed some interesting dynamics. As has just
been described in section 4.3.1, the phenomenon of syncretism is also
present in the world of beliefs. Since Colombia belonged to the Spanish
Main, Christianity⎯in its different forms⎯has remained the common faith.
At least officially, people celebrate the Virgin as well as Christmas, thus
122
In many cases, what happens is the following: the bienestad familiar (a kind of
institutional family welfare service) retains the child until the young mother can prove she
has a regular job. Most of the time those women end up in prostitution and are never able
to get back their precious. The child will then enter in international networks of adoption
and will be forever separated from the biological mother.
166
the birth of Jesus, which sometimes is seen as merciful and friend of the
poor, and sometimes as condemning and punishing the blacks 123 . In
practice however, mourning may indicate how the Afro-descendant
communities have an own representation of Christianity. When a person
dies, the celebration consists in nine days of mourning, nine days during
which all the relatives⎯and the community in general⎯bestow the
deceased by visiting her or his house. Differently from what one might
think, it is a time of merriment, for the people need to accompany the
departed in the world of the dead to the rhythm of dances and music.
Even more intriguing for what concerns the relationship with the
African past, is something that happened in a secretive part of the black
communities. By chance I heard two women discussing about brujería
(witchcraft), and only because they both knew me and trusted me they let
me into their conversation. I came to know that witchcraft is one of the
inheritances left from the time of slavery, but just as it has been during the
centuries when black people used to be forced in chains, it still remains
something that is practiced secretly and that no one speaks of. Not
everyone believes in it, but everyone fears it, and generally it is what
people turn to when everything turns bad⎯or strange⎯and no other
solutions are available.
123
An anecdote exemplifying the vision of a god condemning the people happened to me
one day with F.’s youngest son. Discussing about history I realized that he did not know
about the evolution of the species, and believed that human beings are descended from
Adam and Eve. As I asked a bit more about what he knew, I discovered that his
uncle⎯an evangelical Pastor⎯also taught him that black people are poor and living
miserably because of their being black, which was a punishment from God. As I asked F.
about her opinion on this topic, she told me that those ideas were more common than
what I could possibly imagine. As I do believe in participant observation and in the
interaction between the anthropologist and its field, I then shared with F.’s son and his
best friend all I knew about the history of the evolution of human kind, not forgetting to
mention that poverty and injustice seem to me, at least in my eyes, creations of people
and not of God.
167
In my particular case I discovered124 that an old woman in the village
used to secretly receive people from the community and was reading their
past, present and future for free125, and prescribing remedies against evil
eyes, misfortune, or simply giving away advice for particular situations.
The hairstyle (iii) is once more related to the African past, and the
various haircuts that nowadays are seen as something purely esthetical
had in reality practical reasons.
Before the arrival to the New World, different tribes in the African
continent were distinguishing themselves by means of particular haircuts,
tattoos, scars, etc. (Froebenius: 2013). Some of those traits have survived
the middle passage, but new hairstyles were created on the other side of
the Atlantic Ocean, and again, that had to do with the rebel maroons.
There were two major reasons for the new haircuts: drawing maps and
hiding seeds.
Drawing maps because the hairs were used to physically model
charts with the escape route and indicate the points where the rebels
would later meet. Since the insurgents were sometimes running away in
little groups at different times, it was important to have some reference
points in common. Yet, while that practice is probably more a myth or
something that has been seldom adopted, the necessity for the escaping
slaves to mask the assurance of a future life has definitely been a more
usual practice.
In this case, the hair was arranged in a way that made it possible to
hide relatively small quantities of seeds, which would later be used to plant
124
I have to admit that I was truly surprised, because that happened during my second
field, and although I discretely investigated that topic for many months, I never found out
anything since then.
125
This fact is significant, because as I could learn⎯also in Cuban santería⎯if a person
offers her or his knowledge in exchange of money, many times it is the case of an
impostor rather than someone with real magical knowledge.
168
the guarantee of sustenance in a foreign land where the Palenque would
be founded.
(Bernasconi, 2009)
Finally, the major carriers of African traditions to the Americas were
certainly dances and music126.
The first African rhythms were more classifiable as chants rather than
proper music. In fact the initial beats were created during the middle
passage127 and during the work in the fields and mines. Those chants
126
Of course at the time of the Spanish conquest and before the arrival of the Africans,
the indigenous peoples already had developed their particular music. However, as an old
man explained to me in a long interview in Buenavetura with the Pacific Ocean as
background, “[…]The Indians was a very simple music, eh , reduced only to the music of
bells and whistles were those without melody, without, changing melody. Then, these
Indians had drums that had only one sound and drums which had not , eh ( ... ) had no
skin, but a hollow logs that beat against the ground produced fixed sounds ( ... ) were
indigenous drums and their music was usually wind-music with clay whistles that made
[... ] made their whistles and sounds, fixed sounds” (O., Interview, line 17, Buenaventura,
nd
July 2 2009).
127
I was told by my informant an interesting story on this subject: “There is a relationship,
there is a story of a Dutch captain, on the second trip they made filled with black (people)
( ... ) and that these blacks came to Haiti obeying the Spanish Crown and in Haiti they
received the Christian doctrine and learned to cross themselves () if not, without knowing
169
helped to alleviate the pains and the fatigues suffered by the slaves during
the inhuman working hours. I imagine that anyone who has ever worked in
agriculture could testify that singing is an enormous psychological help
against physical exhaustion, but what is more interesting in the case of the
African slaves, is that singing was also a way to communicate. In fact,
since the African people were coming from various kingdoms and regions
and were then mixed without regard for their cultural or ethnical
background, it was rare to find in the same field or mine many people
these things, they could not come to the territory of firm land, then on a trip that brought a
considerable amount of black (people) on a small boat ( ... ) eh, very small, well, not very
large and at that time, the first trips, the people, the negreros had no experience in
transporting people, so they threw them into the ships´ canteens, a few traveled sitting,
others lying, yes, then the ship took two months to arrive and the captain says that one of
the prisoners was sick, he had gotten the trots was vomiting and well, he was taken out,
the captain ordered to take that sick out of there for a baldeada, baldear means to bathe
him with sea water, so he (the sick) was pulled out there to the ship´s deck ( ... ) and the
sailors began to baldearlo, throwing water to clean him, when suddenly, a blow of waves
tossed the three men into the sea, and because the wind was blowing so hard, the boat
continued its route and they were left there, swimming, but the ones to survive were the
two sailors and the ship picked them up the next day ( ... ) because the captain did not
abandon them, but began to sail the boat around the sailors who were swimming in the
water and the next day, the captain asked: and the piece, where is it? The sailors said:
the piece drowned, so the piece was the slave who had drowned ( ... ) and the other
prisoners who traveled in the bottom of the ship, they noticed that the sick (prisoner) had
gone up to baldearlo, but never came down ( ..... 5) but never came down again, and
because they were placed across from each other they did not know how to comment or
say anything ( ... 5 ) but thought: if that was the fate that awaited them, they did not know
where they went or why. So, uh, suddenly in a corner of the ship's hold, someone made
(started) a rumor and said: (C) did three times, three or four times and at the fourth time
another answered: (C) the two began and suddenly another answered; among all, 7 of
them were from the same tribe, los ñáñigos, and the ñañigos, according to the story they
have, they have the power of handling melody. So through that melody they
communicated with other prisoners who were enslaved and held in another hold;
realizing as well, they were of the same tribe and were 7 in total, right? But the ones who
were not ñañiguos, who were from other tribes, who did not understand, began to move
their head, to shake their head and that night all of them started making the same noise, (
... ), and so the ñáñigos said: (C ) and those who were not ñáñigos said: (C ) and so they
remained until the next morning and that is how they arrived in Haiti ( ... ) yes, and none
of them arrived tired, not one arrived dizzy; and when they reached the dock, says the
captain, they looked at the houses as if nothing had happened to them, yes, so, the
sailors whilst this happened, were fuming, the European sailors beat them with a stick
(garotte), because they (the sailors) had not demoralized them (the slaves), and because
they did not see the prisoners die, they felt anger to see them singing like that. So, that is
one of the first songs brought by the Africans (…) and that song can be found or was
found in the rivers on the pacific coast in Colombia” (O., Interview, line 52, Buenaventura,
nd
July 2 2009).
170
having a language in common128, and it was consequently through those
chants that they were able to communicate⎯at least their feelings.
A real pan-African music however arose only in the nineteenth
century with the abolition of slavery, because until that moment, Africans
spent their life working in fields and mines, and their free time eating and
sleeping, so just rarely⎯at night⎯were they able to gather and practice
their traditions. Only once gained their freedom were the Africandescendants finally able to dedicate time to the invention of new rhythms
and the construction of new instruments.
One of the dances of this particular time was the juga, which is a
dance that has remained very popular among the Afro-descendant
communities, including La Toma. The juga is a collective dance, and is
normally
practiced
on
particular
occasions
where
the
entire
community⎯or a remarkable amount of people⎯is present. The dance,
which is considered a variation of the currulao129, consists in moving all
together in circle at the binary rhythm of drums and a chant, and the idea
behind this particular dance is the conquest of freedom130.
The dances and songs for freedom were a collective activity that,
among other things, were generating relationships of solidarity, thus
practices of mutual aid. As we will see in the following pages, those
behaviors have been retained to this day, and the everyday practices of
the people of La Toma are here to testify the significance of this heritage.
128
It should be enough to think that even today the African continent counts around two
thousand different languages⎯not considering the different dialects (see
th
www.africanlanguages.com, accessed June 26 2012).
129
The currulao is probably more known than the juga, and it is a characteristic folkloric
rhythm of the Colombian Pacific coast.
130
The image to retain is the one of a spiral that, like freedom, opens on itself and can
not be stopped. On the walls of Bogotá one day I also read: ‘La lucha es como una
espiral, se puede empezar en cualquier punto, pero nunca termina!’ ([revolutionary]
Struggle is like a spiral, it can be started at every point, but it will never stop!).
171
The Endurance of Mutual Aid Societies
The survival of the maroons outside the lands conquered by the
European invaders has been possible only through the building of
alliances and an organization centered on solidarity. When I discussed
with Afro-descendants about their own identity, they often referred to
activities, in particular mining, where solidarity and mutual aid were
constantly highlighted and indeed always reconnected to their ancestors.
While observing/practicing work in the mines along the Ovejas
River, my curiosity was often awakened by the way people were sharing
their daily work between family members, and also with neighbors and
friends. I remember different occasions when, early in the morning, I
would ask my hosts where they were going, and the answer often was “A
bit further up on the riverside today. Because they need help over there”!
The day I finally won the trust of my host family and was able to conduct
some interviews, I asked J., a young miner, what all this solidarity among
the miners was about:
“ This is a collective job carried out as a team. Assuming that you had
your chore and I had mine, if I find a big rock, you would help me, no?
Because if you helped me, I would return the favor, helping you in turn. If
you would not help me, I would not help you. Because truly one can see,
with good will, that teamwork is easier; I will help you, to make my job
easier and not more difficult; because moving a stone is easier if there
are ten, fifteen or thirty people. And that has always been a custom since
our ancestors, to work within the community and in teamwork, I mean, it
is a tradition!” (J., Interview, line 424, La Toma, August 25th 2009)
172
Thanks to J. and his brothers, over time I came to understand that
the entire mining activity was built on relations of mutual aid. However, this
reciprocity does not come out of nothing, but is grounded on a hostile
environment, strenuous work, and a total absence of basic state
services⎯except for the ones related to the monopoly of violence. As
Kropotkin argued at the beginning of the twentieth century, “[…] l’homme
est un produit à la fois de ses instincts héréditaires et de son éducation.
Parmi les mineurs et les marins, les occupations communes et le contact
de chaque jour les uns avec les autres créent un sentiment de solidarité
en même temps que les dangers environnants entretiennent le courage et
l’audace” (Kropotkin 2010: 30). Of course, as we saw in J.’s arguments,
helping others does not mean not having any personal interests, but
neither should that be understood as a pure materialistic calculation. Let
us better explain this.
Working in the mines, at least the way the Afro-descendants in
Northern Cauca do it⎯although the same could probably be said about
thousands of small-scale mines all over the country⎯implies a labor-force
that amounts to the combined strength of everyone’s arms. Thus,
depending on the size of the shaft and of the rocks that have to be
removed, every additional person represents a major contribution for a
deeper and larger shaft, which means a greater chance of finding the
precious metal.
The people who help in another tonga will be remunerated for their
work, and their help also guarantees that the day these people need a
favor, they will be able to count on someone else.
173
The tonga is the place where people bore a hole to extract the gold.
(Bernasconi, 2009)
In those isolated regions, this is a principle that goes beyond the
mining activity, and it seems to be a behavior that can be observed in
various everyday situations131.
Yet, in the mining activity, help is remunerated following laws that
do not seem to rest on mere speculation. First, every miner knows that the
search for gold entails a good dose of luck. As J. described to me:
“Many times, I can make more gold than somebody else, and some more
grams than somebody else and it is normal. Because gold is an art,
131
For example as with the use of motorbikes: since very few people own one, giving a
ride to someone looks like a kind of investment. But the meaning of this speculation is not
just a matter of having guaranteed a future ride, or an invitation to dinner, so to speak.
Given the lack of State facilities, the people living in those remote regions know that the
day they get sick, or have an accident, they will not be able to count on an ambulance
and might die without the help of their neighbors. In Colombia, many public institutions
are absent, deficient, underprovided; that is the case of healthcare, but also, for example,
of the public educational system. As Chomsky argues (2007), it is not a wonder that a
State, which prefers to invest billions of dollars every year to finance its war on terrorism,
drugs, and on everything that enables the trade of weapons as well as a military alliance,
does not have the capacity to improve other services that do not generate that amount of
money.
174
sometimes, a person can make fifteen, twenty grams, another one six,
seven, and one almost does not make anything. It is very usual and
common in the mining activity” (J., Interview, line 439, La Toma, August
25nd 2009)
Nonetheless, a distribution is done in a way that supposedly allows
everyone to get the ‘right’ remuneration, that is:
“[…] in mining bucket [en tarrao de mina]. It means that you help me and I
give you five or six buckets of good mine (land-mine). So, if you are lucky
you can make for yourself... as well as making more than myself in this
six buckets or five, you can make less, or you can make one part which...
which will be retributive to yours. Always when a person collaborates, one
tries to give this person the best for his work to be well rewarded. Do you
understand me? I mean, this is what it’s all about. That you helped me,
and I am doing as if, here [showing me an imaginary bucket] it looks very
good, that one is seeing that there is good gold, I will not give you from
here if there is none. I mean, I do not gain anything by it, I lose, because
the one who is up there is God, and God sees everything we do here on
earth. So, maybe one day this will be given in return to us: I take from
you, another one comes and takes from me. We have always handle this
ideal: One should never play or abuse other people`s work.” (Ibid., line
444)
In such a weighty work as the one in the mines we consequently
understand that mutual aid is an implicit code that generates, ties
together, and strengthens social relationships. People work the one next
to the other and try to adopt the most correct and truthful conduct,
especially in the sharing of the benefits, because in the long term, that is
what holds together the community structure and guarantees a collective
well-being.
175
In addition to that, the Ovejas River does not just provide the Afrodescendant communities with gold, but also⎯besides being a place of
leisure and relaxation⎯with nourishment. This, depending on the quantity,
could later be employed for alimentary or economical purposes.
For J., fishing is one of those relaxing activities that must be shared
with friends and, as in the case of mining, the earnings are always equally
distributed:
“We go and the one who catches, well, shares with all. It means,
everyone takes their fish home, and if there are more (fish) they are
peeled and equally distributed for everyone to take a piece, that is what it
is... we have always handled it like this” (Ibid., line 203)
Unlike mining or agriculture, fishing happens to be an activity
reserved to men. As I could observe, that is probably because, although
the fish may also be sold within the family or at the marketplace, fishing is
considered more of an enjoyment, a recreation, or a hobby rather than an
economical activity. As a matter of fact, when I was together with the
young men, I used to be invited to play football, or to go fishing. Again, as
J. and the other men told me, for most of the time the fish cut is consumed
together, sometimes even directly at the margins of the river.
Nevertheless, when the fishing has been particularly fruitful, the fish is first
shared with friend and relatives, and then sold within the community or at
the marketplace.
The diagram here below wants to illustrate the network of
connections spawned by the activities⎯mining and fishing⎯carried out
along the river. The dotted lines show the connections of social type, while
the continuous ones are of the economic type.
176
(Bernasconi, 2014)
Participative and collective behaviors distinguishing the Afrodescendant of La Toma are not something new or peculiar to this specific
community, for in the course of history, as well as at the present time,
many examples can be found of societies built around the act of giving
and sharing (e.g. Mauss: 2002; Clastres: 2011; Graeber: 2007).
The discourse of the black inhabitants of the Northern Cauca on the
subject of Afro-descendant identity, and hence their interpretation and reappropriation of maroon features, highlighted the two main activities
carried out in the territory⎯mining and agriculture. Considering also the
family structure, the religion (mainly the brujería), the hairstyle, and the
music, everything unites in very practical and material endeavors. I
therefore argue⎯and here lies the reason for an anarchist approach⎯that
177
the Afro-descendant identity, as settled by the ancestral communities, is
built on a representation of the maroon societies more focused on their
‘revolutionary practices’ than possible ‘revolutionary theories’. In fact, as
(State) national identities are handed down by printing capitalism and
written statements that bequeath imaginative patterns, the heritage
handed down by maroon communities to today’s Afro-descendants could
have not been transmitted if not through practices of resistance and selfsubsistence that for centuries have characterized the ancestors living
around the territory of present day La Toma.
6.3. The Afro-Descendant Ethno-Territorial Community of La
Toma
Having illustrated general considerations on the Afro-descendant
identity, we are now ready to focus on the criterions, hence the four main
pillars, on which the community of La Toma bases its project of ethnical
(and territorial) emancipation: the community, the Community Council
(consejo comunitario), the PCN (the Black Communities Process), and
ethno-education (ethno-educación).
6.3.1. The Community
For the people of La Toma, the meaning of community can be
resumed in three words: territory, autonomy, and solidarity.
The community is in fact the physical place where the people were
born, have grown, have socialized, or have, to echo Bourdieu, acquired
their habitus. The community ‘is’ the territory of La Toma, and
encompasses its hills, its trees, its dirt roads, and of course, its river. At
178
the same time, the community is also the people living in that territory,
meaning the different families, the friends, the lovers, and not least, the
passed ancestors.
However the community is not just a place, but also a space, of
interactions, of relationships, of interchanges. When the people of La
Toma refer to their ‘home’, they usually refer to the community since, as
we have seen, in the community one learns to think collectively. Still, this
does not mean to think of the other members as a kind of extension of
oneself, but on the contrary, it means to imagine oneself in one’s
individuality, but being a part of a broader system where every component
is in constant communication.
Furthermore, the community is also a discourse creating discourses,
on the community itself as well as on the ‘other’, on other places,
communities, cultures and representations.
Finally, the community of La Toma is that microcosm of historical and
cultural dynamics, which physically and corporally blends into its territorial
counterpart. As F. testifies, for her, but many other members could have
said the same, the community is:
“[...] Something very important is that people have had that spirit of
solidarity, to help each other to succeed (...) people here [in the
community] have always (...) have had that fighting spirit to defend the
territory and that has left a mark in my process of vindication and
reaffirmation of being, as well of what I am as a black woman of African
descent here in La Toma!” (F., Interview, line 48, Cali, May 17nd 2013).
Although, for its inhabitants, the community needs to be connected to
the entire world, it also needs to be autonomous in its process of
development. The process of consolidation with other communities
enables it to associate with the global practice of resistance, and to share
179
information and strategies. But for the community’s own survival, as
opposed to worldwide capitalist dynamics and the State’s threats of
displacement, as E. puts forward:
“[…] People have projected that we should constantly be doing security
production and sovereignty, but on the other side, projects are being
developed is this sense; and what we want is to strengthen these
dynamics. So whenever we fortify these dynamics of production, eh, we
will have much more autonomy within our territories and we will not be at
the expense of the governmental side, but we will be autonomous within
(our territories).” (E3, Interview, 377, La Toma, May 22nd 2013).
In this light, the beforehand-cited example of the traditional
farmhouse exemplifies this desire of individual, yet collective, autonomy
vis-à-vis the State and other actors of global capitalism.
Finally, solidarity seems to be the very essence of the community of La
Toma.
Although not all inhabitants are equally engaged in the community
process, all are ready to put aside personal rivalry for a common good.
The risk is otherwise of being ostracized, although without any sanctions
besides that of social exclusion. And for those who dedicate their life to the
protection of this territory, they are aware of the ancestral importance that
solidarity covers. As F. asserts:
“No, I think that solidarity is a natural instinct, is it not? To me that is a
natural human thing, that in all circumstances, even in the most
dangerous, we are risking our lives, be what it may, people are
supportive. And I believe that solidarity is what really builds a community
180
(...) and so, people as well (...) know that one has been working and
fighting to defend the rights of a group.” (F, Interview, line 205, Cali, May
th
17 2013).
Now, having understood how mutual aid acts as an engine for the
proper functioning of the community of La Toma, it is time to discover how
its political heart operates, and therefore talk about the Community
Council.
6.3.2. The Community Council
We have seen in chapter 5 that prior to the Law’70 there already
was a community political structure capable of decision-making and of
interacting with extra-community actors. This entity was organized in a
horizontal and democratic way, perhaps proving that 'real' democracy132 is
not necessarily a western product. Now, with the evolution in national
policy and the entry into force of the new Constitution of ’91, of the Law’70
and of the Decree 1745, this antecedent organization had to be
institutionalized. As E. explains, the Community Council was thus born.
That is:
“[…] The community council has a thousand three hundred and fifty
(1350) families; it has approximately seven thousand (7000) inhabitants;
eh, the dynamics of, to be part of the council needs only for the people
to want their territorial part, to do things as stated in the statutes, inside
the council itself. The other thing is to arrange time inside the council to,
be inside the dynamics, which belong to the council, within these
132
Here we argue that, in accord with e.g. Rocker (2010), Chomsky (2005b) and
Berkman (2010), ‘real’ democracy not only implies the possibility to vote (as it might be in
the over-publicized example of Switzerland), but to decide and openly discuss the
decisions themselves, hence not simply to accept decisions that have already been
made, or their alternatives. We leave aside the discussion about the unequal relations of
power that characterize all the so-called State democracies.
181
dynamics is the qualification of people so that there is an ethnic
territorial authority in the corresponding levels. The other thing is that the
community must remain informed according to the given situation
developed by the council.” (E2, Interview, line 408, La Toma, May 14th
2013).
While the Community Council of La Toma includes around seven
thousand inhabitants, the decisional power is logically delegated to a more
restricted group. This group is composed of people that are elected by the
Council and divided into two instances: one is the legal representative
(representante legal), which, as the name says, represents the legal body;
the other is the administrative or directive committee (junta administradora
o directiva). This second committee is the one that conducts the qualifying
examination (ejercicio de cualificación). The two instances might therefore
be described as the two political arms of the Community Council.
Moreover, the administrative committee is further divided into other
different committees. Here we find a first group, which is the elderly
committee (comité de mayores): its role is to solve the conflict situations
that originate in the Council. Again it is interesting to observe how in the
Community of La Toma, old age has a social status. Curiously, in many
countries of the African continent seniority is still a status. In Uganda, for
example, an elderly woman is always called 'grandma', even if with the
person there is no kinship. The same can be witnessed in the Africandescendant communities, where elderly people are often called abuela or
abuelo (‘grandma’ or ‘grandpa’) by the entire society. From the role the
elderly committee plays within the Community Council, it can be
understood how this ‘special treatment’ of old people is in fact an absolute
form of respect towards those who are believed to be wiser.
182
Next to the elderly committee we find a multitude of different
committees, each specialized in a given field. We therefore have the
health committee (comité de salud), the sports committee (comité de
deportes), the mining committee (comité de minería), the committee of
agriculture (comité de agricultura); this way, each committee has its own
responsibility, the sum of which converges in the development of the
Community Council.
As E.⎯at that time legal representative of the community⎯portrays:
“[…] In this way, well, it makes that this part of the communication flows
and that we can qualify ourselves, in the sense that, one the one hand,
the government granted us some laws and on the other hand, we have
to recognize ourselves as we are and thus we recognize ourselves as
we are – autonomous within the recognition that was given to us by this
side of the government.” (E2, Interview, line 142, La Toma, May 14th 2013).
In regard to the democratic process experienced in La Toma, the
Council⎯through the General Assembly⎯elects the various members of
the different committees every three years.
After a first term, if the community has appreciated the performance
of its own agents, the latter may be elected for a second time. If then a
representative wants to resign, this must also pass through the Council. In
short, the General Assembly is the absolute instance that approves every
election, as well as any resignation. In addition, La Toma is composed of
five hamlets (veredas), and for each hamlet, the Council elects one or two
representatives. Those delegates compose the directive committee, which
is therefore equitably composed by representatives of each hamlet, while
the legal representative may be one of any group.
183
If then the legal representative or any other delegate of a committee
does not do his or her job properly, the General Assembly may decide to
dismiss him or her at any time of the mandate.
While the community, in its political exercise, rests on the structure
of the Council, at the same time it remains active on the regional and
national levels through a network⎯or redes (Escobar: 2008) of
relationships.
Here the community can rely on specialists, such as lawyers, in the
management of legal issues concerning the Afro communities, and can
also count on the support of politicians and representatives in front of the
advisory committees at the national level. Furthermore, it can also refer to
a group of intellectuals supporting their political process⎯among others,
Arturo Escobar.
Generally, the African-descendants can appeal to a great number
of friends who put their own skills at the service the community, supporting
them in their processes of defense of the territory. All of this, by promoting
dialog, not violence, but if necessary, direct action.
Finally, the community Council, with its network of representatives
at all levels ensures its presence in the territory through a self-operational
structure independent from the State’s institutions. In this process of
emancipation the community promotes its own ethno-territorial policy,
which is autonomous and must/should be respected by the government
and its leaders. As T. remind us, this:
“Because as people we have some ancestral rights, but we also have
some natural rights which allow us to live in community. To recreate
spiritually and intellectually, that is why we defend the territory and we will
protect it any way we need to, it will always remain shielded, because for
184
us the most supreme (thing) is the territory. Free from multinationals and
its various external agents!” (T., Interview, line 445, La Balsa, August 13th
2009).
Still, to support the community Council in its process of political
self-determination, at the national level there is the PCN, an ethnicalpolitical organization that, as seen throughout this essay, was born in
parallel with the new Colombian Constitution.
6.3.3. The PCN (Proceso de Comunidades Negras)
The PCN can be seen as the greatest national ally of the La Toma
community. It is a political organization that works for the defense of the
ethnical and territorial rights of black communities in Colombia.
The name⎯Process⎯implies something that will always be under
construction, where there will always be some changes, going backwards
or forwards, and in the case of the Afro-Colombians, especially a return to
the⎯African⎯roots. Hence the process is always understood as
something moving back and forth on the line of history. As different
activists told me, they all felt and still feel in a permanent process of
construction, in this case, of black communities. During the nineties the
concept of African-descendant had not yet been coined, and surely was
not in use; for this reason, as I heard many times, when people of the
PCN were coming to the communities promoting the ‘new’ idea of
blackness, those from the rural areas used to refer to them as ‘the people
of the process’.
Concerning its composition, the PCN is structured through a
dynamic that allows it to be present throughout the country thanks to the
185
organization in palenques and working groups. The palenques are
organizational expressions of regional will consolidated in the territory, and
at the moment there are four: the Palenque Kosuto, which comprehends
three departments of the Caribbean coast; the Palenque El Kongal, to
which belong the rural and urban areas of Buenaventura; the Palenque
Alto Cauca, which circumscribes the area of the geographical valley of the
Cauca River⎯and to which La Toma belongs; and the Palenque Currulao,
which is in the department of Nariño, but is for the most part active in
Tumaco. In this last Palenque two community Councils belong to the PCN.
Additionally, there are various ‘working-groups’ that relate to the PCN,
although not being active members. Finally, there is also the team working
in Bogotá, which assumes more functions at the national level, such as
interaction with the Government. To ensure that all those ‘working-groups’
collaborate efficiently, there is also a team of national coordination (equipo
de coordinación nacional).
The PCN responds to five main principles, which are: i) the right to
be (derecho al ser); ii) the right to exercise one’s being (derecho al
ejercicio del ser); iii) the right to the space of being (derecho al espacio del
ser); iv) the right to the construction of one’s own future (derecho a un
opinion propia de futuro); and finally, a principle that dates back to 2007,
and which is the right to a historical reparation (derecho a la reparación
histórica).
The first of these principles, the right to be, has to do with the past
inability to be negro (black) in Colombia for, as M., member of the national
coordination unit, recalls:
“[…] That is an organizational political principle which defines us! The one
we are! The principle of being, and the right to be different in this country
legally recognized as multi-ethnic and multicultural, but that really does
186
not recognize many of these differences in the practice” (M., Interview,
line 59, Cali, May 17th 2013).
The second principle simply asserts that, being Afro also means the
necessity of being able to participate in the decision-making process on
the topics that affect the communities⎯for example the diversion of the
Oveja River.
The right to the space of being⎯the territory⎯is probably one of
the most important, and at the same time the one that has most generated
problems of threats and violence against PCN leaders.
Finally, the right to a future is what puts forward the idea that every
community should be able to improve its own ethnical and territorial
development, including the capacity to decide under which principles the
community desires to exist.
As a last point it is of capital importance to signal that the PCN, on
all of its levels and in all of its spaces of influence, is an active participant
in the process of ethnical and territorial emancipation of the black
communities. Indeed, the PCN has imposed itself in the Colombian
political constellation as an actor capable of dealing with the State and its
strategies of homogenization, going therefore against the idea of nationState, the latter being a solution that implicates policies of exclusion that
do not take into consideration the social, historical, and ethno-territorial
complexity within its borders.
As once again M. summarizes:
“[…] we are not the NGO which tries to work and accompany
communities, but (we) are the community! [...] and the thing is that for us,
PCN is a way of living, the PCN, of course! Is totally a political militancy
[...]” (Ibid., line 787).
187
The last and certainly main pillar on which the PCN, as well as the
community of La Toma, base the development of their ethno-territorial
construction is education, and in this case, their own, autonomous
education.
6.3.4. Ethno-education (etno-educación, or educación propia)
Ethno-education was born as a political project of ethnical
emancipation. It comprises not only the Afro, but also the various
indigenous peoples who inhabit Colombia. This, through a genuine multiethnic vision of society, and therefore also with the collaboration between
different communities in the various projects affecting the territory.
The basic idea is to recover the cultural past of the community, to
collectively build the present⎯and thus the future. Still, ethno-education
does not simply want to educate, but to trace a common path toward a
goal that must be useful to the community as a whole. As a matter of fact,
as T. explains:
“[…] The development level in the community is measured by the
education degree of its population, so from there the type of education
provided to the community will be fundamental in order for that
community to preserve their identity, belonging, territory, and recreate its
world view.” (E1, Interview, line 498, La Balsa, August 15th 2009).
Again here we can find the idea of autonomy, in this case in the
search for an educational model that wants to recover the ancestral
cultures instead of replacing them with uniformity.
The above-mentioned importance of the elderly is therefore
paramount in this educational project that turns to the recovery of
188
traditions, be these economic activities, cultural, recreational, celebratory,
or others.
For these reasons, the process of ethno-education begins in
elementary school, with the goal of already teaching the children to know
their history. This does not however mean promoting a romantic vision of
the past, but accompanying the young in their growth process, which
should not rely only on their present, or on models imported from the west.
In this way, the child who wants to dance the juga or play the marimba can
do it, but the one who aspires to become a doctor or a lawyer, can do it
too,
though
without
the
need
to
pass
through
a
process
of
socialization⎯the governmental school⎯that blots out its identity.
Ethno-education is imparted in the various territories, so that in those
inhabited by ancestral communities⎯in our case afro-descendants⎯its
young members may grow up knowing their past and also reconsidering
their relationship to the territory.
This historical reconstruction is done through various projects, such
as⎯among other things⎯the viewing of documentaries133.
In this sense, as T. continues to explain:
“[…] The ethno-education is a tool that provides a bridge between the
traditional and the scientific world, that bridge between the traditional and
the scientific is what we call ethno-education, and from there, we try to
strengthen dynamics, where the child loves the territory, where the child
considers the territory as his/hers, where the child says “I am territory”,
and where the boy and the girl, from then on, can be able to recreate
their world view, their culture, and most of all, be able to recreate their
133
From here the idea of making ‘Tierra Negra’, which wants to be a useful counter-gift to
the community.
189
love for life in the territory […].” (T., Interview, line 800, La Balsa, August
13th 2009).
To come to this understanding it is necessary for a child to see her or
himself as a human being, an individual, but along with this also to learn to
feel as part of a group. With the passing of the years this group will
become community, and therefore a political libertarian project, in which
the young will be able to identify their own life’s project inside their own
territory.
In addition, the logic of ethno-education is also to provide a learning
process that considers ethnicity in a historical-global context, so that the
young may be able to grow in autonomy in its microcosm, while at the
same time considering their being as ‘human’⎯thus universal.
Furthermore, ethno-education is concerned with emancipating the
black from its inferior status promoted mainly by the mass media, and
developing an independent space in which the young African-descendant
can feel proud of themselves in their ancestral land.
And last but not least, this educational process ensures a fair space
of action for women, who, after being excluded from almost all historical
processes⎯not only Afro⎯here willingly become protagonists.
Ethnical Emancipation Is Gender Emancipation
Even though only now does the gender-study issue appear in a
title, the attentive reader should have easily realized that women are
among the main actors in the entire process of territorial selfdetermination. In fact, the documentary 'Tierra Negra' shows how women
are leaders in the project of Afro emancipation.
190
However, in Colombia as in other places, it is not surprising to find
out that the leading role of women is often not acknowledged by the rest of
the society: Colombia⎯as already mentioned several times⎯remains a
strongly sexist, machista, and male-dominated country. Moreover, due to
the structural racism, the position of the black woman in society is the
most marginal and precarious one.
In particular, young black women who need to move to the city for
economic reasons are often forced to work in family-houses, where they
undergo constant humiliations and exploitations. Therefore, many of these
women play the roles of those on the edge of society, but this also
because it has been society itself to teach them that⎯black⎯women are
not capable of assuming other roles.
As Angela Davis insists, while analyzing the role of women in social
movements in the US:
“[…] if one looks back at the history of the U.S. to the era of the
emergence of the Black Panther party and the fact that women played an
important role then–of course, women are often erased from history, the
entire black movement is–in this country, is a movement that was led by
and inspired by women whose names are largely forgotten” (Angela Y.
Davis, Interview, line 470, Oakland, July 2nd 2012).
Although forgotten in history and marginalized in the political
processes of the national society, (black) women play very important roles
on the community level, and are empowered through their status of
mothers and ‘grandmothers’ (Rosero: 2012).
It is probably for these roles that women in the community enjoy a
certain respect. In their accounts, many women advance the view that
their ability to bring up several children on their own doubtlessly means
that they also have the capacity to lead their communities through the
191
various political processes. With time then, more and more young women
showed that being an integral part of the community was not only their
right, but also meant the duty to assume their responsibility for the
development of the community.
However, as Francía explains, that has not been an easy task, for it
means:
“[… ] a process involving decolonization of thought, by the people who
lived the processes of organization, ´uy´ people have many bad things
they imposed on us because it is, because that is what it is, that still
persists in our communities” (F., Interview, line 623, Cali, May 17th 2013).
In this frame, ethno-education began assuming a primary role in the
construction of a new identity⎯including the one of the ‘new black
woman’. Not only has the gender issue entered the schooling process, but
also it is the same women who promote this innovative form of teaching.
There is still a long way to go until true gender equality and social
appreciation are achieved, but ethno-education seems to have opened a
way for women of African descent to return to a role that has
often⎯although it is denied⎯already been ‘theirs’ over the course of
history: that of community leaders.
From the work that is done in relation to the land134 , passing through
the teaching of history, culture, and gender equality, many other ethno-
134
By the way, the documentary ‘Tierra Negra’ confers a perfect exemplification of the
manner those projects work: as one can see, not only does the ‘community teacher’
explain the importance of the soil by giving a lecture on its physical characteristics, but
the children get familiar with the topic by ‘doing’, which is something that, from my point
of view, is often missing in the mainstream western education models.
192
education projects could be here worth mentioning135; nonetheless, the
one we will now expose seems to perfectly fit to the framework of this
essay.
Toward Universities For and From the Peoples
The idea of national identity desired by the nation-State
presupposes a homogenization of the way of thinking, and implies that
society should learn what is ‘right’ (Foucalut: 2009b), learn to obey, to
identify with the national project, or in other words, to become 'good
citizens'. All of this is transmitted through a dominant model of education
that influences all stages of schooling, but finds its peak in the universities.
In Colombia the public universities are decaying, while the private
ones are expensive enough to include only the richest elite of the country,
thus automatically excluding the population of African descent.
In this light, ethno-education, in its project of emancipation, has the
goal of forming its own community leaders. Black people are aware that
even if a young person may be able to enter university, she will easily be
incorporated in a dominant model that is likely to take her away from the
community process.
The idea of educating the leaders in an autonomous way has
therefore the objective of reinforcing the relationship with the ethnicalancestral territory, and simultaneously of strengthening the community
fabric. Starting from the strictly hierarchical structures distinguishing the
universities, we perceive how the logic moving the customary academic
world is in fact different from the one structuring the community. The fear
135
One of these projects for example is called ‘educa un niño’ (educate a child), and has
the purpose of equalizing the school level of children living in rural areas, in order to offer
them the possibility to continue with their studies.
193
within the ancestral groups is of seeing their young people assimilate
those different ways of thinking and imagining society.
F., who thanks to a foreign scholarship is now able to study law,
makes evident the divergences she encountered when entering the
university, and the concrete risk of:
“[…] to end up serving a system and not being what one is, not being
what one is as a people, not being what one is as a community, but it
makes itself necessary because it is the only way to understand that
game of pieces, how it works, in order to somehow transform those
realities or to contribute to those real transformations. And me, I am not
thinking that I am studying law, that no, in order to be employed, to have a
nice car, a house, no, I do not care about that, I care about studying and
that what I study serves to warrant the existence of the people, the
existence of my community, the existence of mankind together” (F.,
Interview, line 118, Cali, May 17th 2013).
For all of the above reasons, through the process of ethnoeducation, the idea of creating a University for the peoples, imagined,
designed, and created by the peoples136, has been discussed within the
community. A university that is in this sense conceived as an alternative to
the State’s paradigms, and which proposes a new, autonomous model of
education.
Furthermore, ethno-education does embrace not only the Africandescendant communities, but, moved by the concept of mutual aid, all
those ethnical and social groups⎯pueblos⎯struggling to survive at the
136
Here it is necessary to mention that, as we did in the title, we used the word ‘peoples’
as a translation of pueblos. That is not entirely correct, for it does not reproduce this term
in its broadest and complete sense. As a matter of fact, in this precise context, when the
people adopt the expression ‘pueblos’ they mean the ‘ethnic’ and the ‘marginalized’
peoples, which needs its plural form, the ethnic groups not belonging to a single,
homogeneous classification.
194
margins of society, while at the same time inhabiting the territories that
attract the State’s capitalistic interests. This last point is effectively one of
the main reasons why this new university at the service of the peoples is
seen as necessary and urgent. As L. clearly explains, the Universidad de
los Pueblos will therefore be a place:
“[…] Where the experiences of the peoples are taught and where politics
is taught, the politics of the peoples, where one has that information as
much as politics, as much as legal issues and that allows to speak like a
professional, because even if one does not have academic recognition of
a university, but one has that bustle learned through years of struggle,
where one has to confront the academia and where one has to confront
the government and one has to confront oneself with all that world of
professionals that come with the multinationals, nonetheless, if one has
confronted it and one has won against it, it is because one is also a
professional. So, we need a way to validate that, and that is the proposal
to make an intercultural university of the farmer peoples, indigenous and
afro-descendants (…) what is being suggested is another model
(prototype)” (L., Interview, line 385, La Toma, May 20th 2013).
For the moment, the university is still in its conceptual stage, but the
various communities are showing outstanding organizational capacity and
cooperation. Many meetings have already been carried out and various
documents have been drafted through joint efforts and despite limited
economic resources.
As a concrete example of a project linked to the widest conception
of ethno-education, the Universidad de los Pueblos is therefore another
step towards ethnic and territorial emancipation vis-à-vis the State and its
policies that deny diversity, as well as social and cultural complexity. In
195
addition to all this, we have seen how ethno-education is imparted in
different places, at various levels, and how it interacts in various spaces.
In the next, final chapter, we will see how the whole process of
(ethno-) territorialisation of the community of La Toma heretofore
discussed follows space-time dynamics that should be addressed with a
multidimensional analysis.
196
PART V
“If you want people to remain simple,
shouldn’t you look to the ways of Heaven
and Earth?
‘Heaven and Earth have their boundaries
which are constant; the sun and moon hold
their courses in their brightness; the stars
and planets proceed in the boundaries of
their order; the birds and creatures find
their confines within their herds and flocks.
Think of the trees which stand within their
own boundaries in order”.
The Book of Chuang Tzu
137
7. Interdependent Places and Spaces of Resistance
We argued at the beginning of this study that the battle tackled by the
community of La Toma, in spite of being locally specific, needs to be
integrated in a global contest of struggle. If we now come back to the
project of the Ovejas River diversion⎯the spark that has ignited the
process of re-territorialisation⎯we see that it finds analogies in thousands
of other similar cases all over the world (e.g. Quinn: 1991; Smith et al.:
2000)⎯and therefore see that it’s a global phenomenon. Furthermore, this
particular problematic embodies power relationships involved on different
scales of influence, and generates a network of responses that implicate
multiple levels of analysis.
As last section of this essay, these final pages are an effort to
condense the variegated, howbeit correlated facets of this fieldwork. In
this attempt we propose to link social anthropology and human geography
in a multidimensional map that portrays the various subjects⎯human as
well
as
physical⎯that
are
defining
the
territorialisation
process,
137
Chuang Tzu (2006). The Book of Chuang Tzu, (Trad. By Palmer, M., and Breuilly, E.)
New York, Penguin: 113.
197
contextualizes their place and space, while contemporaneously reflecting
their temporal⎯and thus cultural⎯dimension.
7.1. Place, Levels, and History: a Geo-Anthropo-graphy⎯Part
One.
The purpose of the present passage is of course not to invent a new
field of study, nor to provide an elucidation about the multiple theories
debating the scales; on the contrary, the aim is to select some dominant
lines that can be related to the circumstances analyzed in the Northern
Cauca.
To link an anthropological approach with a geographical one implies
some methodological and theoretical exercises, which we will here try to
solve. Before beginning, it is worth to briefly recall what has been told in
the theoretical introduction of this essay (chapter 2): social anthropology
attempts to draw some general lines regarding humankind through crosscultural
comparisons,
beginning
with
an
emphasis
on
local
complexity⎯thus ethnography. On the other hand, human geography
wants to describe the condition of men (Mensch) on earth by focusing on
the relations between and across space and place. We agree that this
vision is somewhat stereotypical or at least simplistic, but it is nonetheless
necessary in order to schematize our proposal138.
A geo-anthropo-graphy would therefore designate a way to
determine an object of research from its local complexity and specificity
while integrating it in a broader sphere of comparisons, and at the same
time deducing its intersecting crosswise places and space.
138
This artificial separation between the two disciplines is also due to the academic
conditions this thesis needs to respect (see ‘Proem’, page I).
198
In our present exercise we will organize our research through a
process of sketching (see graphic below). We will investigate five specific
levels of study⎯the body, the local, the regional, the national and the
global⎯and we will try to relate them to specific places, or fields139. At the
same time, for each stage we will integrate a temporal dimension, which
will be used to provide historicity to every object discussed. It is important
to note that these levels must not be understood as hierarchical, for each
of them embodies power-relationships that are able to influence and are
being equally influenced by all other levels. In addition to that, we will later
expose different theoretical approaches concerning scales and networks,
and we will try to apply them to the places previously investigated while
additionally incorporating the temporal character.
Levels
Places
Historicity
Objects of Research
Body
(Black) Body
From ‘human commodity’ to
emancipation
Withstanding black
bodies
Local
Community
Political organization
Ethno-territorial
community
Regional
Caucan-Palenque
(de-) and (re-) territorialisation
process
Ring-zone of
networking
National
PCN
‘New’ Colombian Constitution
Ethnical resistance
Global
Neo PanAfricanism
Maroon uprising
Anti-systemic
movements
The first grade of investigation while examining the social world,
especially if considering the political-economical framework of global
capitalism, therefore happens to be the one in which we are all included:
the body.
139
Here, the word place is used to symbolize what in French would be defined as lieu.
Therefore the place is an ethnographic terrain of study⎯a fieldwork⎯inserted into its
physical and cultural context.
199
7.1.1. Withstanding Black Bodies
Levels
Places
Historicity
Objects of Research
Body
(Black) Body
From ‘human commodity’ to
emancipation
Withstanding black
bodies
Local
Community
Political organization
Ethno-territorial
community
Regional
Caucan-Palenque
(de-) and (re-) territorialisation
process
Ring-zone of
networking
National
PCN
‘New’ Colombian Constitution
Ethnical resistance
Global
Neo PanAfricanism
Maroon uprising
Anti-systemic
movements
The body is at the first level of every scale140, for it shapes every
scale, and is shaped by every scale.
It is enough to think of the world surrounding us to observe how the
form of things created by man is mostly modeled as a function of man
himself. From Da Vinci to Le Corbusier, it can be seen that architecture
itself is almost always born from the study of the human body.
Incidentally, if we wish to insert the body in its geographical-spatial
context, we observe how the latter shapes all scales, and is modeled by
all scales for its relationship with the capitalist mode of production141 . As a
matter of fact, and as properly articulated by Herod, “The relations of
globally organized capitalism […] shape the life possibilities of individual
bodies even as such bodies shape how globally organized capitalism
operates” (Herod 2010: 86). In other words, capitalism, through its cores
140
Although apparently making a distinction here seems tricky, we might consider the
human being as the place of study, and the body as the level where the body, now in its
‘place-form’, is fixed.
141
We argued in chapter 4.1, but it is worth recalling that we have a mode of production
when there is a combination between labor-force, means of production, and relations of
production (the private property); and when this combination has the goal of creating a
surplus (Marx: 1990).
200
and peripheries at every level (Arrighi et al.: 2011) decides where and
when people are needed, while at the same time it is the demography and
the social conditions of the same human bodies that fix, even temporally,
the capitalist interest.
The body-capitalism relationship stands on the ‘magical’ human
capacity to create value⎯for the capitalist⎯through its use-value, hence
in virtue of the consumption of its body (Marx: 1990). Yet, to have access
to an everlasting labor-force, it is necessary to constrain society in a
persistent state of needs, to control it, thus to control the human body.
This supremacy is foisted by the State by means of the bio-power
(Foucault: 2009b; Agamben: 2005), which is the indispensable element for
the reproduction of capitalism, since it is the capacity to insert or exclude
the human body from the productive system, and along with this, influence
the multiple demography (Ibid.). It is in this light that we situate the
interdependency between capitalism and bio-power, since “[…] les deux
processus, accumulation des hommes et accumulation du capital, ne
peuvent pas être séparés […]” (Foucault: 2009a: 275).
By integrating the temporal dimension we discover how the body⎯in
its ‘place-form’⎯of the African-descendant of La Toma, encloses an
ethnical and cultural historicity that differentiates it from all other bodies
present at the body, now in its ‘level-form’.
As has been examined in chapter 4.3, the black body of the people of
La Toma is the outcome of a historical process that started four centuries
ago in the African continent. Here, for a long time, the body was able to
freely exercise its socio-cultural activities, before being forced into chains
and becoming mere merchandise.
Through the middle passage, the bodies that survived the journey
over the Atlantic Ocean were for the first time deculturalized. Their ‘place201
form’ changed, and turned into objectified commodity⎯labor-force⎯even
though not yet at the service of a capitalist system that still had to develop
(Arrighi: 2010).
Later on, in the following centuries, the body mutated in consequence
of a variegation of cultural dynamics⎯i.e. syncretism and/or creolization
(Thorton: 1998; Knight: 2012; Minz, Price: 1976)⎯and in the meantime
began to break the chains in order to possibly regain its lost independence
(Almario: 2012).
At the present time, the black body of the African-descendant people
of La Toma initiates a new process of emancipation. On the one hand, the
black-female body, through engagement and acting in everyday practices,
genderdizes (Butler: 1990), or simply appropriates the place of the body.
On the other hand, the body’s ethnicity ceases to be constrained only to
its place⎯thus its ‘body-from’⎯but integrates and is integrated into a new
level, namely the local.
7.1.2. Uprising Communities as Centerpiece of the Local-Level
Levels
Places
Historicity
Objects of Research
Body
(Black) Body
From ‘human commodity’ to
emancipation
Withstanding black
bodies
Local
Community
Political organization
Ethno-territorial
community
Regional
Caucan-Palenque
(de-) and (re-) territorialisation
process
Ring-zone of
networking
National
PCN
‘New’ Colombian Constitution
Ethnical resistance
Global
Neo PanAfricanism
Maroon uprising
Anti-systemic
movements
202
As required by our fieldwork, for this second stage of analysis we
adopt the local as a replacement of a more common level, which is
normally the urban. The latter is in general a very contested level since,
especially if studied through a properly economic reading, the urban can
hardly be extracted from its global context. For this reason this level is
often considered as a network (Massey: 1993).
As we said, because of our object of study, we now replace the urban
with the local. In this case we circumscribe the local level as the space
where the black body builds and relates its process of emancipation, thus
as an area influencing and influenced by the body.
If we try to find an ethnographic place to fix at this level, the latter will
be the community, which in our case is La Toma. Yet, the peculiarity of the
community studied here, is of existing⎯among other things⎯also for its
relationship to the physical territory, and particularly in connection with its
river (Barker, Pickerill: 2012). For this reason, the community is not only a
place in whose space is enclosed the body⎯in its ‘place’ and ‘level’
forms⎯but also a physical landscape (Smith: 1984), objectified and thus
bearer of culture. In addition to that, it is once again of capital importance
to point out that the ethno-territorial place of the community is not defined
by rigid and physically static borders, but rather by smooth social
boundaries (Barth: 2008), and therefore in contrast with the immovable
concept of State (Ince: 2012).
As we have seen, in its socio-political structure the community is
composed of a Community Council, subsequently organized in a
constellation of committees, a legal representative, and a General
Assembly, which has the power of decision-making.
Finally, the affinity between community⎯understood as an ensemble
of individuals⎯and landscape inside the community as place, is given by
203
the two main activities carried out in the territory: mining and agriculture.
These everyday practices, as has been repeated several times throughout
this work, do not have the sole and primary goal of creating surplus, but
that of allowing the survival of the community in its broadest sense, and
are therefore structured upon logics of mutual aid (Kropotkin: 2006).
Again, we continue our methodological exercise, and now add the
temporal dimension to our place. What distinguishes the community of La
Toma is the fact of having a history with two different speeds: a recent
one, and another one that goes back in time.
The recent one is related to the new Colombian Constitution of 1991,
the Law’70, and the associated transitory article’55. As we have debated,
these constitute the juridical frame that opened a way for the community in
its legal and political action (Mosquera et al.: 2002).
In the longer term, the community has instead a parallel path to the
body it includes, and which it shapes and is in turn shaped by. The African
past of the community can be observed in the structure of its political
organization (Mina: 1975), which is configured horizontally, pursuant to
free association practiced from bottom to top (Rocker: 2010), but
according to ancestral logics. In the landscape, we also find a temporal
dimension for the way its physical form has been objectified and modeled
through everyday practices, in particular the mining and the agricultural
activities.
Eventually, the ongoing territorialisation process is the temporal
space, where the community joins as a place in which a physical and a
social component meet. Not only does territorialisation unify those two
components, but also it expands over time through a process of
continuous transformation and adjustment⎯namely deterritorialisation and
reterritorialisation (Raffestin: 1988).
204
In this relationship between bodies⎯in every form⎯and space, a
further process develops in the community, that of ethno-education, which
for its political, cultural, and territorial vision, accompanies us to the next
level of analysis, that of the region.
7.1.3. The Caucan-Palenque, a Microcosmos of Peripheries and
Cores
Levels
Places
Historicity
Objects of Research
Body
(Black) Body
From ‘human commodity’ to
emancipation
Withstanding black
bodies
Local
Community
Political organization
Ethno-territorial
community
Regional
Caucan-Palenque
(de-) and (re-) territorialisation
process
Ring-zone of
networking
National
PCN
‘New’ Colombian Constitution
Ethnical resistance
Global
Neo PanAfricanism
Maroon uprising
Anti-systemic
movements
The region is another controversial level, because in fact it stands
between the national and the urban, while when considering the local, the
region often replaces that latter concept. In general, in geography the
region is understood as “[…] des espaces supposés présenter une
certaine homogénéité constitutive [in our case cultural-historical], qu’il
s’agit alors de mettre en évidence, voire de prouver” (Lévy, Lussault 2003:
779). From this angle, the region can at the same time embrace a space
bigger than the one of the nation, especially for geography that less
considers the State (e.g. Reclus: 1875).
205
In our design, we incorporate the regional level in a context that is
located between the local and the national, i.e. between the community
and the boundaries of the Nation-State. Moreover, we conceive the region
as a political rather than a morphological level, and therefore as the space
where the community has its major influence.
The place as ethnographical object of study that we relate to this
level, in a similar way as has been done for the body, might also be
defined as region. In fact, we understand it as a kind of ring-zone
surrounding the community, where the latter associates with other
communities, building a network of political influence, for example through
ethno-education. However, to avoid the same epistemological difficulties
we experienced with the body, we will here call the region imagined in its
‘place-form’, Caucan-Palenque.
Yet, the city of Cali also belongs to this place, for we have seen in
this essay that it is common for the people of La Toma to find themselves
in this city, especially to search for job opportunities. The special
interconnection between the community and this major urban center is
proven by L.’s words:
“Cali has an affinity with this territory, therefore, one has to give Cali the
reports of what is being done here, and they give orientation (guidance) of
what, where to, this territory wants to be taken, because when we speak
of territory, even we have that particularity, that we say Cali is our capital
[…]” (L., Interview, line 439, La Toma, May 20th 2013)
Moreover, in the Caucan-Palenque is enclosed the Salvajina, since it
is clear that this dam has had an impact on the whole territory, in all of the
many aspects listed in the course of this essay.
Finally, we may also argue that for the economic interests correlating
206
the community with the city of Cali, the Caucan-Palenque contains in its
own space a periphery functional to a peripheral core (Wolf: 2010), the
entire Palenque being itself a periphery.
The temporal dimension of the Caucan-Palenque links this object of
study to a past that once again binds the various communities to a time in
which the black bodies were in chains and the autonomy was secretly built
in the mountains (Mina: 1975).
On the other hand, the landscape of the Caucan-Palenque has
undergone a process of deterritorialisation induced by dynamics of global
capitalism (Arrighi: 2006; Harvey: 2003), which has upset other cultural
and commercial dynamics that for centuries had characterized the region.
The construction of the dam has in fact, along with the imprisonment of
the Cauca River, turned the local communities upside-down, and therefore
prevented the development of a micro-autonomous-economic system
capable of a broader integration (Graeber: 2001).
Ultimately, in the process promoted by the ethno-education at the
level of the Caucan-Palenque, expressively through the exercise of
recovery of the collective memory (recuperación de la memoria historíca),
in the territory people are trying to retrieve all of those commercial as well
as cultural dynamics.
To help in this process, linking the regional and the national levels,
we find the Afro organization of the PCN.
207
7.1.4. Black Communities’ Processes in Neo Pan-Africanism Space
Levels
Places
Historicity
Objects of Research
Body
(Black) Body
From ‘human commodity’ to
emancipation
Withstanding black
bodies
Local
Community
Political organization
Ethno-territorial
community
Regional
Caucan-Palenque
(de-) and (re-) territorialisation
process
Ring-zone of
networking
National
PCN
‘New’ Colombian Constitution
Ethnical resistance
Global
Neo PanAfricanism
Maroon uprising
Anti-systemic
movements
The fourth level of investigation is the national one, but since its
interrelation with the fifth one⎯the global one⎯is congenital, these two
levels will be here treated in the same section.
The national level is the one of the State, and more precisely, that of
the Nation-State. As we have observed in the course of this work, this
fictitious idea⎯as Idealtyp (Weber: 1995)⎯has come into being as a
hegemonic space functional to a dominant class (Bakunin: 2009).
Whatever its evolution (e.g. Fried: 1967; Wittfogel: 1977), the union
under the same roof of State and nationalism (Gellner: 2006) has been
developed through the convergence of factors such as language and
religion (Gramsci: 2007), and a growing capitalism system, which has led
to the present imagined community (Anderson: 2006).
Furthermore, the Nation-State is a territory incorporating more ethnic
groups⎯often nations, even if not recognized as such⎯and its hegemonic
structure, as in the Colombian case, is built in such a way as to place each
of these groups at a certain level. As Wallerstein argues, “[the]
208
construction of peoples, or nations, has not been hap-hazard. Just as
states are placed in a hierarchy of power, reflecting a spatial hierarchy of
the production processes and of the concentration of capital in the worldeconomy, so peoples are located in a rank order of ‘superiority’ and
‘inferiority’ (Wallerstein 1982: 29).
Likewise, at the level of the global we have the world perceived
through its international connections, which are described with the most
common term of globalization. According to Flint and Taylor (2000), the
latter is formed by eight major interconnected dimensions: the financial,
the technological, the economical, the cultural, the political, the ecological,
the geographical, and the sociological.
At this level, capitalism interferes with the daily life of the people
(Harvey: 2006) in all of the above-mentioned dimensions. For this reason,
and as a resistance to that, different processes were born, and among
others, we may in particular define two anti-systemic movements: the
social movement of the working classes, and the movement of the weaker
people (Arrighi et al.: 2011)⎯into which the Afro resistance fits.
The place, which we position on the national level, is, as a matter of
fact, the PCN (Black Communities Process of Colombia).
This organization, described in chapter 6.2, has the peculiarity of
working at every level, while at the same time being part of every place
heretofore investigated. However, we shall situate the PCN at the national
stage,
because
of
its
structure
partitioned
in
different
regions⎯palenques⎯and its mandate of interaction with the national
government. The PCN, by representing an oppressed ethnic group that
goes against the homogenization program of the Nation-State, is
subsequently not simply a place at the national (State) level, but also an
209
antagonist to the same level where it is fixed.
At the global level, our ethnographical place of study will be the
African ancestry, or a possible worldwide African nation, which we might
understand as neo Pan-Africanism. By adding the prefix ‘neo’ to PanAfricanism I recognize the trans-national movement of unity and solidarity
among people of African descent snatched from their continent through
the process of slavery, but I emphasize on how the Afro-descendant
identity is built upon the maroons⎯thus already ‘creolized’ ethnic
groups⎯rather than on ‘original’ African societies. Additionally I argue that
neo Pan-Africanism might probably be seen as one of the beforehanddescribed anti-systemic movements. In fact, as Angela Davis reminds us
quoting W.B. DuBois now discussing Pan-Africanism:
“[…] many years ago when he [DuBois] was asked about pan-Africanism,
he said, ‘pan-Africanism can be a powerful force and it’s not simply
acknowledging our common ancestry in Africa but if we acknowledge that
common ancestry we also have to agree to engage in struggle, it has to
be an anti-imperialist pan-Africanism!’” (Angela Y. Davis, Interview, line
150, Oakland, July 2nd)
Yet, this desire to resist against the dominant hegemonies is at the
same time what unites our two ethnographical places in a temporal
dimension of resistance.
The PCN has a recent history, and as has been explained before, it
has been created contemporaneously to the new Colombian Constitution
of 1991, as a space of confrontation in which the various Africandescendant communities of the country converge.
On the other hand, although Pan-Africanism as an association was
born at the first Pan-African conference in London in 1900 (Shepperson:
210
1962), in its broader sense I argue that neo Pan-Africanism began with the
insurrection of the fist maroon societies.
In the New World, neo Pan-Africanism gives the black body its status
of social race (Cuche: 1981), located at the lowest rank of the racial
hierarchy in force in the plantation society (Thorton: 1998).
In its struggle against the mercantile political economy first, and the
capitalist mode of production later, (neo) Pan-Africanism assumes,
especially during the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, the role of a
space where the masses of⎯black⎯weak people congregate and
engage. Due to the various processes of creolization, this generates a
black trans-national nationalism, which once more demonstrates how
nationalism is a product of the New World (Anderson: 2006).
After having analyzed our five particular levels of study⎯the body,
the local, the regional, the national and the global⎯and conferred to each
of them a specific ethnographical place, as well as a temporal dimension,
we will now attempt to demonstrate how each of the discussed objects is
in reality related to all others through a spatial combination of networks.
7.2. Space, Scales and Networks: a Geo-Anthropo-graphy⎯Part
Two.
After having arranged what might be defined the anthropological part
of our argument, i.e. having demarcated each object of study with its
specific temporal dimension and having fixed each to its own level of
analysis, to conclude our work we must now add the spatial variable to the
set of anthropological objects. In other words, we have to attach a
geographic peculiarity to the anthropological, and⎯as a reflection of
211
perspective⎯vice versa, thus developing what we denominate geoanthropo-graphy.
To deduce the way every object intersects crosswise levels and
space, we propose to adopt three theories, which lead to a central
geographical concept, i.e. the scale. The three approaches we are about
to introduce are the following: space of engagement and space of
dependence (Cox: 1998); jumping scale (Smith: 1987); and glocalisation
(Swyngedouw: 2004).
Our exercise will be then to apply each of these theories to our
primary object of study⎯the ethno-territorial community of La Toma⎯and
therefore to determine how the latter is able to move inside its surrounding
space.
7.2.1. A Global Shield to a Local Territory
Cox (1998) realizes his theory by trying to answer the question of
what is the relationship between the politics of place and the scales. He
consequently assumes the idea that to a given problem there is not an
exclusive scale of response⎯the local cannot be purely local, nor can the
global only be global and so on. At this point, once understood that to a
problematic given at a local place does not answer only a local politic, Cox
proposes to differentiate the spaces where the problematic arises, hence
to distinguish between spaces of dependence and spaces of engagement.
For the scholar, “Spaces of dependence are defined by those moreor-less localized social relations upon which we depend for the realization
of essential interests and for which there are no substitutes elsewhere;
they define place-specific conditions for our material well-being and our
sense of significance” (Cox 1998: 2). For the author those spaces are
212
threatened by global dynamics, and for this reason the actors involved
“[…] organize in order to secure the conditions for the continued existence
of their spaces of dependence [and while engaging] with other centers of
social power […] they construct a different form of space which [Cox]
call[s] a space of engagement […]” (Ibid.).
In our specific case study, the ethno-territorial community of La
Toma, we assume as space of dependence the community⎯in its ‘placeform⎯itself. As a matter of fact, within the community there are social,
cultural, economical, and political relations that are specific to this place,
and without which the community could not possibly exist.
Additionally, the same (morphological) territory enclosed in this place
is what guarantees the material existence of the latter, especially by
means of the Ovejas River⎯our case study⎯and the two main
activities⎯agriculture and mining⎯that assure its self-subsistence.
Moreover,
one
must
not
forget
the
significance
that
the
temporal⎯cultural⎯dimension plays in this space of dependence, for it is
on its⎯anthropological⎯history that the community characterizes and
structures its own endurance.
As we have shown throughout this work, the survival of this Africandescendant community is threatened by the State’s capitalist politics of
development and multinational companies that, driven by logics of
accumulation by dispossession, are willing to extract and exploit the local,
natural and human resources.
To contest those global dynamics, and therefore secure their place of
dependence,
the
black
people
of
La
Toma
are
engaging
contemporaneously in different places at different levels.
213
At the level of the body, the community is engaged through a process
of collective ethnical emancipation, which at the same time includes the
emancipation of its female body.
At the local level, the place of engagement is the same process of
reterritorialisation, in which the community is involved through its political
reconstitution, and the various projects advanced by ethno-education.
At the regional level, the community of La Toma fraternizes and
gathers in a united front with the other communities affected by the
deterritorialisation of their ancestral space. This, by embracing the city of
Cali, but also by including their withstanding process in an inter-ethnic
dynamic, for example through the project of a University for the Peoples.
At the national level, the space where the community engages to
guarantee its survival is the PCN, an organization capable of directly
confronting its own level, i.e. the one of the Nation-State.
Finally, against the level of globalization, and thus that of global
capitalism, the community of La Toma organizes its resistance by
acknowledging its social ethnicity, and therefore engages in the antisystemic movement of neo Pan-Africanism, gaining international solidarity
and the support of ‘global activists’ such as Angela Y. Davis.
All these places of engagement at different levels are however
interconnected to each other, and in the defense of their own place of
dependence⎯the community with the flow of its river⎯the people of La
Toma engage in every place and at every level simultaneously, jumping
from one scale to the other, while at the same time maintaining the
connection with each of them.
For this reason Cox, noting that to a given problematic there is not an
exclusive scale of response, abandons the concept of scales, replacing it
with that of network, for, as he explains: “[…] our task is made much
214
easier if we liberate ourselves from an excessively areal approach to the
question. Spaces of engagement which have been the focus of discussion
of politics of scales are constructed through networks of association and
these define their spatial form” (Cox 1998: 21).
7.2.2. An Overall Pattern of Emancipation
In his analysis on the American suburbs, Smith (1987) focuses on
their spatial dynamic. He argues that by looking at the way the suburb
develops from an office tower at the center of the city, it may look like a
decentralization process. On the contrary, by looking at the same process
from a hot-air balloon floating over the city, it may seem as a centralization
process towards the economic center (cf. Smith: 1987). If this is right, it is
enough to change the perspective through which a problematic is looked
at to see different patterns, and it must therefore be accepted that there is
not a single appropriate scale of analysis (Ibid.).
What the author calls a Gestalt of scale, is then “[…] the way in which
different scales fit together to form an overall pattern and how looking at
them from different perspectives can result in very different understanding
of material reality” (Herod 2010: 56).
Again, by returning to our community, we recognize that, applying
Cox’s idea of places of dependence and engagement, the spatial network
in which the community moves, shifting through several places and levels,
needs to be looked at from different⎯although correlated⎯perspectives.
According to Smith, it is only in this ‘overall pattern’ that we might
comprehend the complexity of our study.
The employment of the temporal dimension, additionally, allows us to
observe the territorialisation process of La Toma on board of a hot air
215
balloon that, more similar to Jules Verne’s incredible machines, offers us a
perspective back in time.
7.2.3. The Glocal Community of La Toma
The last theoretical design we will insert in our exercise in the
production of a geo-anthropo-graphy, is the operation of rescaling
provided by Swyngedouw (1997).
The scholar develops his theory from the analysis of various banks
and firms bankrupting during the nineties. In all those cases, from the
collapse of the Orange County to the one of the Barings Bank
(Swyngedouw: 1997), the loss of billions of dollars enables a chain of
consequences that goes from the destabilization of the international
financial system, to the loss of thousands of jobs all over the world. For
the geographer, these examples “[…] illustrate how the ‘local’ and the
‘global’ are deeply intertwined. [And suggest] how local actions shape
global money flows, while global processes, in turn affect local actions.
[Thus how] the local and the global are mutually constituted […]” (Ibid.:
137).
Again, the author highlights the impossibility to adequately
comprehend an object of study on a single level of analysis, and therefore
advocates the desertion of static frameworks of investigation, be it ‘scales’
or even more limiting concepts as those of ‘local’ and ‘global’. In
accordance with this point, he suggests the term of glocalisation, which
refers “[…] to the twin process whereby, firstly, institutional/regulatory
arrangements shift from the national scale both upwards to supra-national
or global scales and downwards to the scale of the individual body or to
local, […] and, secondly, economic activities and inter-firm networks are
216
becoming simultaneously more localized/regionalized and transnational”
(Swyngedouw 2004: 25).
Once again, we have demonstrated in this work how the problematic
affecting the community of La Toma, from the threat of the Ovejas
diversion to the whole territorialisation process, is neither a local nor a
regional one, but embodies multidimensional power relationships
engaging in different places, levels and times, leading towards spaces of
uneven development.
217
8. Closing: Cheers for Black Anarchism or When
the Pawn Becomes Queen
“Ce qu’il est important de retenir, c’est que
l’organisation actuelle de la société est mauvaise ;
là-dessus nous sommes donc d’accord. Elle aboutit
à l’esclavage et nous trouvons qu’elle repose sur la
violence des gouvernements […]. Dès lors, qu’il soit
ou non difficile aux hommes de s’abstenir de
contribuer à l’œuvre des gouvernements, et que
l’avenir soit proche ou lointain, où le monde
recueillera les bons résultats de cette abstention,
tout cela est de peu d’importance.
Les hommes n’ont qu’un moyen de s’affranchir,
Ils doivent le prendre.”
142
Léon Tolstoï
We began this essay with a research question⎯why and how do
ethnic groups (re) appear?⎯and we have tried to answer through the
analysis of a particular case study, that of the African-descendant ethnoterritorial community of La Toma.
In the course of this work we have attempted to prove our initial
hypothesis, namely that the birth of those social ethnic groups is a
response to policies of dispossession enforced by the Nation-State in its
effort to fulfill the neo-liberal project. In the materialization of this plan the
State enters territories rich of natural resources and undertakes, in
collaboration with transnational allies, mega-projects that cause the
displacement of thousands of people. These processes generate a
transformation of the landscape, and along with that, the disintegration of
social structures, economical activities, and cultural dynamics. In other
words, they cause the disruption of previous relationships between the
142
Tolstoï, L. (1901). L’esclavage moderne. Paris, Éditions de la Revue Blanches: 150.
218
communities and their land, i.e. ancestral connections at the origin of
every territory.
Yet, while promoting these processes of deterritorialisation, States,
governments,
multinational
corporations,
international
financial
organizations, and other places of global capitalism, simply forget that
even the community may strive towards spaces of global resistance.
Hegemonic powers in fact neglect that a community is not a ‘local’ place
imprisoned on a ‘local’ level. On the contrary, to defend its autonomous
persistence in its ancestral territory, and therefore to protect the survival of
its river, the African-descendant people of La Toma show capacities of
engagement at every place and level.
Yuri Avernbakh143, former Soviet chess master, teaches that being
excessively sure of one’s own strategy may lead to committing foolish
mistakes capable of changing the fate of a battle from one moment to the
other.
Global powers fail to remember that, as a ‘pawn’ can become
‘queen’, through the ability to jump in space and time towards a
multidimensional network, the community is capable of transforming its
own place and possibly⎯as the unachieved project of the Ovejas
diversion testifies⎯change the fate of its own battle.
To conclude, we propose to sketch a multidimensional map (here
below), which should allow us to visualize what geo-anthropo-graphy
ought to be:
- The cubes represent the analyzed levels: the body, the local, the
regional, the national, and the global.
- The red figures are the five places that were taken into consideration: the
(black) body, the community, the Caucan-Palenque, the PCN, and Neo
143
Averbach, J., and Bejlin, M. (2002). Lezione di scacchi. Milano, RCS Libri.
219
Pan-Africanism. Chess pieces are used so as to reflect the title of this
conclusive chapter, but seeing how there are no hierarchical relations
between these places, it would perhaps be more appropriate to employ
more neutral figures, such as the geometrical shapes beneath.
- The cages that contain the figures on every level are a metaphor of the
historical dimensions relating the two components.
- The dark blue roots and the light blue arrows designate the spatial
networks that constitute the mutual influence between the local and the
global in the scalar sphere.
- In yellow is represented Smith’s conception of jumping scales, showing
how the same object can be studied from different perspectives,
depending on the position of the observer.
- Finally, the green arrows indicate the possibility that places have of
engaging contemporaneously at every level in order to defend their places
of dependence.
220
Geo-Anthropo-Graphy (Bernasconi, 2014)
221
We hope that this map can become a useful analytical tool for the
comprehension of other local⎯yet glocal⎯problematics. Additionally, the
documentary ‘Tierra Negra⎯Journey in Afro-Colombian Territory’ serves
as an auxiliary, more practical, tool, which it is hoped may be helpful in
two ways: on the one hand to facilitate the understanding of the
multidimensional way a local community might be threatened by the pillars
of capitalism and the political economies, as well as the homogenizing
plans of the State, but also to show the capacity of ethnic groups to be
active
participants
and
autonomous
decision-makers
within
their
territories; and on the other hand, to become a beneficial and functional
medium for the Afro-descendants of La Toma to strengthen and broaden
their scope of action in their future battles. In fact, as one of the fathers of
political ecology and⎯arguably⎯anthropology wrote a long time ago
while appealing to scientists:
“The most important thing is to spread the truths already acquired, to
practice them in daily life, to make of them a common inheritance. We
have to order things in such ways that all humanity may be capable of
assimilating and applying them so that science ceases to be a luxury, and
becomes the basis of everyday life. Justice requires this!”
(Kropotkin 2002: 265)
222
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242
Annexes
Annex 1: Time Table of Carried out Field Research (Ch. 3.1.1, page 35)
Annex 2: Interviews Files (Ch. 3.1.2, page 38)
Annex 3: Example of Deductive Category Application (Ch. 3.1.2, page 40)
Annex 4: Integral Interview Angela Y. Davis
Annex 5: ‘Google Maps’ and Thematic Maps of the Studied Area
Annex 6: Requisites of the Faculties of Arts and Humanities and of
Science (Proem, I, page II)
i
Annex 1: Timetable of Carried Out Field Research
Date
Activity
11th week: 31 August
12th week: 7 September
13th week: 14 September
First Field - 2009
Arrival in Bogotá
Meetings with PCN
PCN Activities
PCN Activities
Arrival in La Toma
Settling in
Visiting the Salvajina
Starting work in the
mines of Ovejas
Discovering the territory
Starting work in
agriculture
Starting work in the
(mountain) mines
Meetings with PCN
Activities at the Salvajina
Leaving the field
14th week: 21 September
Flight to Switzerland
2 July
Summer 2012
Interview with Angela Y.
Davis
st
1 week: 22 June
2nd week: 29 June
3rd week: 6 July
4th week: 13 July
5th week: 20 July
6th week: 27 July
7th week: 3 August
8th week: 10 August
9th week: 17 August
10th week: 24 August
1st week: 15 April
2nd week: 22 April
3rd week: 29 April
4th week: 6 May
5th week: 13 May
6th week: 20 May
7th week: 27 May
Second Field - 2013
Arrival in Bogotá
Starting work in
agriculture
Project finca tradicional
Work at Finca tradicional
Meetings with PCN
Back in the mines
Project Community
Library
Location
Bogotá
Buenaventura
Alsacia
La Toma
La Toma
La Toma
La Toma
La Balsa
La Toma
La Toma
Cali
La Toma
La Toma/
Medelllin/Bogotá
Oakland, California
Bogotá
La Toma
La Toma
La Toma
Cali
La Toma
Bogotá
ii
Annex 2: Interview Files
Nr.
Person’s
Name
O.
P.
Date
Place
Length
1
2
Audio
Video
A
A
02.07.2009
11.08.2009
Buenaventura
La Balsa
42m23s
1h12m36s
3
A
C.
11.08.2009
La Balsa
56m47s
4
A
T.
13.08.2009
La Balsa
1h59m40s
5
A
E.
1
15.08.2009
La Balsa
39m51s
6
V
J.
25.08.2009
La Toma
1h18m58s
7
V
Y.
17.09.2009
Medellin
46m09s
8
V
I.
19.09.2009
Bogotá
34m09s
9
V
A.
20.09.2009
Bogotá
54m15s
10
V
Angela Y.
Davis
02.07.2012
Oakland
California
1h02m42s
11
V
A.
2
11.05.2013
La Toma
53m38s
12
V
E.
2
14.05.2013
La Toma
1h02m17s
13
14
V
V
M.
F.
17.05.2013
17.05.2013
Cali
Cali
1h37m59s
1h16m12s
15
V
A.
3
19.05.2013
La Toma
43m43s
16
V
L.
20.05.2013
La Toma
54m37s
17
V
E.
3
22.05.2013
La Toma
51m58s
1
Discussion
Content
Music
Ovejas/
Territory/
Violence
Ovejas/
Territory/
Violence
Ovejas/
Territory/
Violence
Ovejas/
Territory/
Territory/
Mines/ Identity
Discrimination/
Displacement/
Identity
Discrimination/
Displacement/
Identity
Discrimination/
Displacement/
Identity
Resistance/
Identity/
Capitalism
Ovejas/
Territory
Ovejas/
Territory
PCN
Ovejas/
Territory/
Displacement
Ovejas/
Territory
Ovejas/
Territory/
Identity
Ovejas/
Territory
iii
Annex 3: Example of Deductive Category Application
Line
Interview
265
Yo: y una pregunta, seguramente usted ha escuchado
que hay o sea, que había y que sigue habiendo el
proyecto de desviar el río, usted qué…
270
275
280
285
AM: Ah sí, porque han querido, le digo aquí hemos tenido una
lucha brava con esa gente, porque a Ovejas también lo iban,
pero nosotros nos hemos opuesto y hasta actual nos
oponemos al que venga a pensar en el río Ovejas, aquí no lo
hace, porque aquí la gente para eso, todos nos unimos como
una sola personas y no, por lo menos todo este territorio de
aquí lo que es La Toma, Gelima y Yolombó, eso y por allá el
lado de Monchique, parte de Buenos Aires, eso la gente se
opone a no dejar desviar el río Ovejas, eso nos afecta mucho,
ahí si es cierto que tendríamos que desocupar esto.
Yo: ¿Qué significaría digamos, este lugar sin el río? ¿qué
significaría para usted?
AM: ay no, muy pésimo porque nos quitan ese río, pues no
(…) esto queda mejor dicho muerto. Ese río nos sirve mucho,
porque uno se levante siempre mira el río Ovejas, siempre se
distrae un rato (R) Y de ahí una persona por ahí enferma que
no pueda trabajar, siempre se levanta y mira para un lado y
otro y el río Ovejas hoy amaneció de tal forma, ayer estaba
en tal forma, hoy está en otra, de manera que está distinto al
día de ayer y por ahí uno se va distrayendo.
Code/Comments
RO (Resistance
against the
Ovejas Project)
C (Possible
Consequences)
C
T (Territory)
Relationship with
Ovejas
iv
Annex 4: Integral Interview Angela Y. Davis
Oakland (California), July 2nd 2012
Duration of the Interview: 1h02m42s
AD: Angela Davis
AB: Attilio Bernasconi
v
AB: Professor, during your stay in Colombia you met with several AfroColombian women. What have you learned from them, and what can they learn
from your life’s experiences?
AD: Well, I was invited to visit Colombia a year and a half ago by the Women and
Gender Studies Department at the Federal University in Bogotá. Amara Vivieras
invited me and my colleague Gina Dent to participate in a seminar on Black
feminism– Black feminism in the United States and Black feminism in Colombia.
In the Course of preparing for this trip I remembered a very emotional meeting I
had had previously with Francía Marquez who told me then about the struggle of
the people in La Toma, so they once again invited us to visit the community of La
Toma and to express solidarity with the struggle which was at that time a struggle
against Hector Sarria in the effort to evict people off land in which they had lived
for over 500 years. That was one of the most moving periods of my life, I thought
about it in connection with the struggles of Black peoples in the U.S. and it was
absolutely amazing to see people who had lived on the same land for five
centuries and who had retained the culture–we had a wonderful meeting with
people from the community and got to experience a lot of the music and the
dance and the children, it was so totally inspiring. And what was especially
inspiring was the role that women played in the leadership of that struggle.
Francía Marquez is an amazing leader, a young woman who has helped to lead
her community in the direction of victory and we also saw women minors, we had
the opportunity to visit one of the mines, and the women told us that they
engaged in mining just like the men engaged in mining, as a matter of fact, some
of them told us that they had learned mining when they were very young children.
I’ll never forget the woman who said, “mining is in my blood, I have known how to
mine since I was in my mother’s womb” and so it made us think about work and
mining in such a different way. I was totally impressed by the passion with which
the women express their love for that work and when I returned to the U.S. and
spoke to people in cities around the country I always brought up the issue of the
struggle of the people of La Toma for their land and for their rights.
vi
AB: You have been speaking about this working in the mine and the role of
women there. In the community of La Toma, women work in gold mines side by
side with men. They participate equally to the same hard work, sharing the same
efforts and the same benefits. In the last decades, with flows of capital arriving in
the region, small and medium enterprises, as well as large transnational
corporations, have begun to enter the region and impose new modes of
production. With the use of new forms of machinery, men are still employed, but
women have begun to lose their role, and are more and more forced to find other
jobs, often in the city, as domestic servants, or other underpaid works. What is
your reading of this phenomenon? How should women react to this? Granted
need for overall less labor, but how has it become gendered?
AD: Well, of course capitalism will exploit every human body for the purposes of
producing as much profit as possible and what one sees in La Toma–let me say
first of all, that I was so struck by the beauty of that land–we drove up a dirt road,
up around the mountain for an hour and a half or so, and once we got to the top
the vista was just so incredibly beautiful when we went to visit the mine, one
would never have know that there was a mine there, because the mode of mining
that the people, the women and the men, engaged in is also respectful of the
earth–it does not destroy the earth, it does not destroy the beauty of the
landscape. One would never have known that there was a mine inside this small
opening, now, new capitalist modes of production call for the destruction of the
land, the destruction of the landscape–and at the same time, it is an assault on
women who have engaged in the other mode of production, a more respectful,
more environmentally sustainable mode of production. So, I suppose what one
can say is that the struggle for gender equality is also a struggle to save the
environment and I think that is important for us to see how these struggles
intersect. If we can succeed in defending women’s right to work and the mode of
production that women and men and children engage in, we also save the earth
for future generations and we also respect the beauty of the earth.
vii
AB: Through which strategies can one possibly achieve this gender equality
even under new modes of production? Taking the example of La Toma, the
machines are probably the reason why men are still employed even though these
new machineries are not harder work than mining. So, to which strategies can
women keep their job even with the new machinery?
AD: Well, I think it’s a struggle that calls for multiple strategies. On the one hand,
job equity–and certainly we know that women are capable of operating machines
in the same way that men are. It’s very interesting, we can go back and find an
example from many, many decades ago during World War II when before the
actual war when women were barred from manufacturing jobs, especially jobs
involving automobiles and so forth. As soon as the war broke out, and the men
went to the front, there was this huge campaign persuading women to build
airplanes, right? [Laughing] It’s all about the way capitalists manipulate
ideologies for the purpose of producing more profit. But I think that in the 21st
century we have to be very attentive to the ways in which feminism has
encouraged us to think things together and to develop an intersectional analysis.
And not to focus simply on one issue, not simply to focus on women’s right to
produce with the aid of these vast machines but to challenge what the machines
are doing to the earth, and to challenge strip mining, and to point out that
progress does not always consist in more technologically advanced modes of
production, especially when they are used for the purposes of generating more
profit for the capitalist and they leave the people of that community even more
destitute. And they put women in a situation where they have to work as
domestic servants, one of the things that really impressed us when we were in
that area was that we saw the poverty in Cali we went to visit the, um, I can’t
remember the name of the community…
AB: Agua Blanca
viii
AD: Yeah! Agua Blanca, we went to visit Agua Blanca and we could see the
abject poverty, and it was clear that these were people who were pushed off their
land, these were people who might have been able to sustain themselves had
they not been forced off their land ultimately by large capitalist agro-business.
And we saw, of course, what people referred to as the green desert, the miles
and miles of sugar cane being produced so that people in the West can feel as if
they are doing a good job by using bio-fuel and of course this leads to assaults
on people’s ability to sustain themselves. What was so amazing about La Toma
was that there was a kind of integrity and even though there was poverty people
felt connected to their community and to their land, and to their history and to
their culture, and to their ways of sustaining themselves.
AB: Yeah, this is definitely true especially with this dignity people feel towards
their community. Continuing in this direction, through market capitalism, noncapitalism territories are forced to open not only to trade (which could be helpful)
but also to permit capital to invest in profitable ventures using cheaper labor
power, raw materials, and so on. From what you have seen and heard in La
Toma, how are these dynamics affecting the people, their culture and identity?
AD: Well, I think it’s a terrible assault on people’s culture and people’s right to
sustain themselves in ways that don’t depend on profit. And of course, when one
looks at the history of the U.S., and the assumption that capitalist markets have
gotten rid of poverty and then on the other hand when you look at Native
American communities, Indigenous communities that are experiencing some of
the very same issues as Afro-descendant communities and Indigenous
communities in Colombia. And especially around mining issues, when one looks
at how Indigenous people have challenged the mining of uranium, for example,
that is comparable to the ways in which people, Indigenous people in Colombia
and Afro-descendant people in Colombia have fought for their rights to the
minerals that under the soil. And of course capitalism will find all kinds of tricking
people and saying, “well, you may own this land, but you don’t own what’s
ix
beneath the land” and that’s absolutely ridiculous. And I think it’s important for
people in the U.S. to understand, especially given the emergence of Occupy and
the struggle against Wall Street and the financial agencies. It’s important for
people here to recognize how deterritorialisation is so connected with the global
juggernaut of capitalism and privatization and that is at bottom linked to the fact
that people here in the U.S. have lost their houses and have lost their jobs, so I
think it is really important for us to make connections between these struggles
that are global in nature.
AB: Definitely, I don’t know if you notice it but especially in the region of La
Toma, people really kept their culture. The latter comes directly from slavery, and
in La Toma people have still the names that they received through slavery⎯like
Lucumí, Carabalí,…and all names reminding to regions in Angola, and westAfrican regions. So, throughout which strategy people can possibly keep this
culture alive?
AD: First of all, I think people in La Toma are determined, their culture will not be
take away from them without a major, major struggle; and second of all it think it
is important for people in other places not only all over South America, but all
over the hemisphere and all over the world to stand together with the people of
La Toma. I know that I have spoken on many occasions about being so moved to
experience the culture of a people who have managed to retain their sense of
identity and their culture for many, many centuries. When you compare that to
what happened to people in the U.S. in the 1970’s and the late 1960’s, we had to
struggle to be able to call ourselves Black because Black was a term that Black
people did not even want to accept because it was so negative, and certainly not
African. So, It has taken decades and decades for people of African descent in
the U.S. to accept the fact that we are descendant from Africans. And certainly
certain parts of culture have been retained but the cultural genocide that
accompanied slavery, removed language and music and all kinds of other
cultural traditions, and by looking at the people of La Toma we see what we’ve
x
missed over the last 500 years. I think it is important to maintain that sense of
connectedness, and especially in the context of struggle. You know, W.B. Dubois
many years ago when he was asked about pan-Africanism, he said, “panAfricanism can be a powerful force and it’s not simply acknowledging our
common ancestry in Africa but if we acknowledge that common ancestry we also
have to agree to engage in struggle, it has to be an anti-imperialist panAfricanism” and I think the people of La Toma teach us today why it is so
important to engage in these struggles, and largely because they are under
assault by capitalist corporations and the juggernaut of privatization that has
afflicted so much damage on the planet.
AB:
Exactly,
this
ongoing
process
of
(capital)
accumulation
by
dispossession⎯as David Harvey would define it⎯continues to take place in
areas inhabited by ancestral populations, such as the Afro-Colombian, the
Indigenous Peoples, the American Indians in the U.S., etc. So, how does racism
link to this phenomenon (or is construct through it)?
AD: There are those who would argue that we’ve moved beyond racism and of
course many people argue that now that there is an African-American President
of the United States, we inhabit what they call a post racial society. But, as I have
said many times, quoting a prison who said, “one Black man in the White House
doesn’t mean there aren’t a million black men in the big house”, and the “big
house” refers to prisons. I think that in order to understand the way in which
racism continues to define our societies it is important to look at structural racism,
and not just attitudinal racism. Of course there are a lot of people who have racist
attitudes, but that’s not the most important thing. The fact is that racism is
entrenched in the social and economic structures. In the educational structure,
racism determines who gets to go to the university and, on the other hand, who
gets to go to the prison. While I was in Colombia I was impressed and very
saddened by the fact that the U.S. plays a major role in the production of
Colombian prisons. We got to visit a prison in Bogotá that was funded by the
xi
U.S.-A.I.D. We were also told about plans to build the largest prison in South
America in the area outside of Cali, I see the connection between
deterritorialisation, kicking people off of their land, preventing people from using
the means of sustaining themselves and their community that also protects the
land, that also protects the biodiversity of the land. On the one hand you have
those who want to steal the gold by destroying the land and then on the other
hand, you have those who want to make profit from the sugar cane to produce
the bio-fuel and all of this involves deterritorialisation, it involves pushing off their
land, people who historically have protected that land and once their pushed off
their land if there are no jobs–and there are none–the solution that’s offered by–
especially by the U.S., is these big shiny new prisons. The prison serves as the
space to warehouse those who have become so superfluous in a capitalist
society. I think it is so important for us to bring all of these issues together and to
develop global campaigns against deterritorialisation and against the mode of
mining that involves strip mining, and the mode of agricultural production that
completely destroys the land and that uses pesticides, it [the list] goes on and on
and on.
AB: Yes, that’s exactly the problem we see in Colombia with the palm-oil
plantations, which are everywhere now. So, you mentioned that during your stay
you had the possibility to visit Afro-Colombian communities in rural areas (like the
one of La Toma) as well as in urban one. What are the differences you have
noted? What is your impression about the way these communities have to
organize? How the rural-urban process divides/linkages in general?
AD: The divide between the urban and the rural is a historical divide. In
Colombia, as was the case in the U.S.–and we still have this urban/rural divide–
rural modes of living have been most under assault by capitalist corporations. As
societies impose cash economies–and one sees this all over the southern region,
people are no longer able to survive simply by growing their food and living off
the land. They are required to have cash, and in order to have cash they need
xii
jobs. Often times these jobs are not available, or if they are, they are jobs that
allow the capitalist corporations to reap the greatest amount of profit and so they
[the jobs] are about exploitation, they are not about giving people the means with
which to live decent lives. As a matter of fact, in South Africa right now, some of
the major problems that are confronted by South African have to do with that
urban/rural divide. And of course in the aftermath of the dismantling of apartheid,
people who live in rural areas were under the impression that it was going to be a
new day, so vast numbers of them left the country and went to the city, and in the
city there were no jobs, and there was no housing, and there were no schools.
And so what happens is that people often times resort to crime, because that’s
the only way they can imagine living. They resort to crime and then they are
criminalized and put in prison, and so you have this vicious cycle of
criminalization and imprisonment. This is one of the main challenges of the
current era–in Colombia and all over South America, but also in the U.S. When
people try to find jobs that are no longer available and they end up participating
in underground economies involving drugs and theft and they end up spending
the rest of their lives behind bars. This is why the struggle against the Prison
Industrial Complex is so central, not only in the U.S., but all over the world.
AB: And as a matter of fact in Colombia we have the problem of the production
of cocaine, which is sold to the U.S. basically, and it’s where [the trafficking] a lot
of young people ended up…
AD: Exactly, they have no other alternatives…
AB: So, thinking about this young people in the cities, most of them continue to
remain distant from these movements and from any political engagements. From
your experience with the Black Panthers Party and other organizations, through
which strategies can be won young people’s interest?
AD: That’s the question! [laughing] that’s the question… Sometimes it’s about the
moment, it’s about what sparks the imagination and creativity of young people.
xiii
Last fall with the eruption of the Occupy movement, huge numbers of young
people became involved. However, organizing is the key. My sense has always
been that you have to organize as if it were possible to build a vast, radical,
revolutionary movement. If it doesn’t happen today then the work still politicizes
people and perhaps lays a foundation for the next generation. But we have to act
as if it were possible to radically change the world. I think young people have the
inspiration, and the imagination, and the creativity to do that work. And not all
young people will be attracted to the movement, but that’s always the case. As
long as a significant number of people are reached and if they carry on the
struggle, I think that we’ve done our job.
AB: Just before we were talking about prisons, its construction, etc. So, you have
spent eighteen months in prison, Mumia Abu-Jamal is behind bars since thirty
years, and in Colombia, the PCN (Proceso de Comunidades Negras) leader Felix
Manuel Banguero was imprisoned last week on charges of being linked to the
insurgency. How can be enforced the security of Afro leaders?
AD: One of the things we can do is engage in the kind of organizing that does not
demonize people who are in prison. If one looks at a lot of historical struggles,
the movements have been organized behind bars. In the Palestinian struggle for
example, almost every Palestinian family has someone who has spent time
behind bars. But at the same time, I think it is important to create a kind of
peoples security, so that people who are engaged in the struggle are not subject
to the kind of horrendous repression. That happens by expanding the movement,
by developing more and more support; I think that’s the only thing we can do.
When I was in jail many decades ago–as a matter of fact, this past June 4th I just
celebrated the 40th anniversary of my acquittal, that struggle was won because
so many people all over the world felt connected to this campaign against
political repression and racism in the U.S. I think it’s important for us to develop
contemporary, planetary campaigns. Mumia Abu Jamal. It’s ridiculous that he’s
xiv
been in prison as long as he has, and regardless of whether people believe in his
innocence or not, and I am convinced that he is innocent of the charges, but he
spent over thirty years in prison so regardless, he should be free. He is someone
who has played such an important role in the campaign against the death
penalty, against the Prison Industrial Complex, and so many other issues. You
know, there was a time when we had a kind of internationalism that allowed us to
very quickly spread the word about people who had been imprisoned and people
who needed global solidarity. I am hoping that we can develop a 21st century
internationalism that will allow us to respond when people such as the leader of
PCN who was just recently arrested–placed behind bars.
AB: Yes, I was reading last month a book from Mumia Abu Jamal where he
explained how the Black Panthers through the influence of the writing of Franz
Fanon became an international movement and achieved international solidarity…
So continuing talking about prisons, how this “putting people behind bars” is
linked to racism? In Colombia the majority of the prisoners are Afro-Colombian,
here in the U.S. the majority of these people are African-American…so how does
racism link to this phenomenon (or is construct through it)?
AD: Absolutely, it’s really interesting–almost anywhere you go in the world,
regardless of what country you’re in, you find afro-descendant people behind
bars, people from Latin America–it’s always people we refer to in this country as
“people of color”. Whether you’re in France, or even Scandinavia, even in
countries that you consider to be white countries, you go into the prison and you
see that the people who are behind bars are people of color, Black people,
African descendant people. What’s also important to point out, is that this rise of
the Prison Industrial Complex has made imprisonment profitable. So, many of
these prisons are private prisons–even if they aren’t private prisons, they
outsource their services so that private corporations end up reaping vast profits
from the enormous numbers of Black people who are behind bars. Racism has
always been a source of profits, from the period of slavery–as a matter of fact, if
xv
you consider the emergence of capitalism in the world, the enslavement of
Africans played a large part in producing, what Marx called the “primitive
accumulation”, capitalism as we know it would have not been conceivable had
not it been based on the enslavement of Africans and the absolute robbing of the
resources of the African continent. I think that as we engage in struggles against
the Prison Industrial Complex today, we have to call attention to the way in which
racism is so thoroughly entrenched in the workings of these institutions–
especially in the U.S., but not only in the U.S., all over the world. As a matter of
fact, when you go into prisons–especially in the south, but also in other parts of
the U.S., you can see the impact of slavery, it’s as if these prisons have retained
the technologies of slavery, and the feel of slavery, and the smell of slavery. I’ve
been in prisons in Alabama and I would have sworn that I had been somehow
transported back in time. In Mississippi, Parchment…–in Louisiana, as a matter
of fact, when hurricane Katrina happened in 2005 many people were shocked
about the poverty there and they also learned that there were huge numbers of
Black people behind bars in some of the worst prisons in the entire world. So, I
think it really is important to place the struggle against the Prison Industrial
Complex; the global Prison Industrial Complex at the center of our campaigns
against capitalism and for peoples rights to their land and to jobs and to
education all over the world.
AB: We were saying before, that for example in Colombia prisons are heavily
supported by the United States…even with Obama as President, for the U.S.
foreign policy, unfortunately the Caribbean continue to be seen as the lake of the
U.S., and Latin America as its farm. Moreover, you mentioned before Palestine,
but in Latin America we used to say that Colombia is the “Israel of Latin
America”, because of its relation (subordination) to the rich Northern neighbor.
So how can people in Colombia facing this incredible hegemonic power, which is
the U.S.? Because, for example, the actual government in Colombia opened the
door for the de-penalization of drugs, but at the last Cumbre de las Americas
xvi
President Obama simply said that this was out of discussion. So, thinking about
prison, drugs, how can people in Colombia even imagine facing such a power?
AD: Yes, and considering the fact that the campaign–the so-called “war against
drugs” in the U.S., has always been a racist war. It’s been a war against Black
people and Latinos. As a matter of fact, the soaring numbers of people behind
bars are directly related to this so-called “war against drugs”. It’s a question of
shifting public consciousness, I believe…shifting consciousness so that we
understand that it is in the interest of the capitalist corporations, and especially
the pharmaceutical corporations, because there is a connection between the socalled “war against drugs” and the enormous profits that the pharmaceutical
corporations reap producing the same kind of drugs, right?
AB: [Laughing] Yes, Swiss corporations.
AD: Exactly! Exactly…So, I think that it requires a kind of ideological struggle and
campaign so that people can think critically and are aware of the stakes that the
government and the corporations have in the so-called “war on drugs”. It’s really
not about drugs at all; it’s about jobs, and it’s about profit, and it’s about finding
ways in which to create what have been called “moral panics”, because if people
are afraid of the impact of drugs, or if they have a certain idea about who the
drug users are and who the drug pushers are, then a kind of racist assault can be
organized on communities–Black communities and Latino communities. In the
U.S., it’s interesting that white youth do drugs and sell drugs as much as or even
more than Black or Latino youth, but if you look at who is in prison and who is
arrested and who bears the burden of that whole “war on drugs”, it’s racist–it’s
about Black people and Latino people.
xvii
AB: I was last months in New York, and for example, I realized how probably the
majority of the Colombian cocaine sold to the U.S. market it is consumed in
downtown Manhattan…
AD: Yes, yes, yes! And often times by very affluent white people, but they aren’t
the ones who go to jail, they aren’t the ones who are demonized and
criminalized. So, this is why I think it is so important to develop a consciousness
around race and racism and people don’t want to talk about racism today. They
think that if you talk about it, somehow or another you will conjure it up, right?
[laughing] but if you don’t talk about it there will be no way to eradicate racism
from our society. And, of course, it has the same impact all over the world, you
know, not just in the U.S.
AB: Michel Foucault use to say that “Justice is at the service of the police”. In
fact, States institutions are implementing control over citizens, migrations ⎯ like
the anti-immigration laws in Alabama and Arizona ⎯, and the freedom of
movement. Imagining moving towards the abolition of prisons, don’t you think
that we witnessing the creation of an open air Panopticon, and the establishment
of new legal form of segregation?
AD: Yeah, and I think that Foucault’s study of the prison is still very important
because he not only looks at the way in which the emergence of the prison is
very much liked to the emergence of capitalism and all of the technologies linked
to capitalism, but he points out that it’s not only about the prison itself–not only
about that institution, but it’s about the overall carcerality of society. In Palestine
for example, the uses of prison technologies and carceral technologies in the
larger community are so obvious with walls and check points. You see images of
occupy Palestine and you think you’re inside of a prison with the walls, and the
checkpoints, and the gun towers, and the barbwire, and the razor wire.
Unfortunately, what is happening in Palestine in such an obvious way is
happening all over the world in less obvious ways. The more we assent to the
xviii
further development of the prison, the more we are assenting to a kind of
panopticism of everyday life and the struggle for immigrant rights in this country,
as you were pointing out, absolutely is essential. It’s people from Mexico and
Central America who, again, have been totally demonized. Race and racism play
a role here because vast numbers of immigrants who are undocumented come
from Europe, but nobody ever stops people who look European to ask them for
their papers, and certainly not in the state of Arizona where the supreme court
recently affirmed that provision SB1070 that the police can ask people for their
immigration papers. I grew up in Alabama, and the Draconian immigration law
that was passed in Alabama, really reminds me of the era of Jim Crow, of the era
of segregation when I grew up–when Black people were not allowed to go into
this museum or to go into this library and were forced to live in segregated
communities, we went to segregated schools, we couldn’t even drink water that
white people drank. I see that much of this racism returning under the guise of
protecting the borders and I think that it is really important to link the struggle for
the rights of immigrants and undocumented immigrants especially who most of
whom come to the U.S. in search of a better life, and many of them come from
areas where the U.S. based corporations have destroyed their communities and
destroyed the possibility to sustain themselves–they have no other choice, they
have to come to the U.S., and then they come to the U.S. and they’re treated as
if they were demons. I think it is important to link the struggle for immigrant rights
in the U.S. and the struggle against deterritorialisation in places like Colombia;
and one begins to see that citizenship–it’s not about papers, citizenship really
ought to be about a commitment to create a better world. If you look at the
people of La Toma, if you look at indigenous people in Colombia who are fighting
for their future, and you look at people who end up crossing the U.S. border
because they have no other alternative-they cross the border in order to create
better lives for themselves and their families and they are also some of the best
citizens, compared to, you know, those who have papers, because they are
struggling for a future, they are struggling for a democratic future. They are the
best representatives of the struggle for democracy in this country–just as the
people of La Toma are the best representatives in Colombia.
xix
AB: Some last questions. In Colombia, and in Latin America in general, people
use to idealize the United States, its stars and its freedom. Everyone wants to
leave its country and go to the U.S., following dreams of becoming rich…and if
on one side very few people achieved their dream, it is also in the U.S. where
many black people for the first time face racism. Colombia is the Spanish
speaking country with the highest number of African-descendent, so people are
black between black ⎯and segregation is more linked to class than to skin
color⎯, but in the U.S. they realize what does it mean “being black”. So, what
can the Afro-Colombian movement learn from the American ones? And
especially, what can the African-American movements ⎯but also Occupy as you
mentioned⎯ learn from the Colombian one?
AD: I think that it is very important to establish links between our movements.
Given the globalization of capital, the only possibility of creating a better world,
creating a socialist world, will be bringing movements together and creating
global solidarities of our own, and I think that people in the U.S. have a great deal
more to learn from people who are struggling in place like Colombia than vice
versa. Of course, it’s unfortunate that many people around the world still believe
that the U.S. is a country where the streets are paved with gold, the land of milk
and honey…[laughing] all of those old stereotypical representations. Of course,
Obama participates in creating these images of the U.S. as being the most
important democracy in the world. I think it’s important for people to recognize
that we have a long way to go and what has been achieved thus far in the United
States of America is thanks to the struggles of oppressed communities… thanks
to the struggles against genocide that indigenous people have been carrying out
for many, many, many centuries… thanks to the struggles against racism, and
the struggles for class equality…the labor movement which has been under
assault enormously over the last period–especially since the 80’s, the
environmental movement, the movement against homophobia, you know, all
these are really important struggles that if we can say that there is a possibility
xx
for a democratic future in the U.S., it’s thanks to the people who have decided
that their individual fate is linked to the fate of larger communities. This is what I
think we can learn, also, from the people of La Toma, for example, who were
able to fend off, at least temporarily, the eviction attempts by the Colombian
government who were holding on to their land and to their culture and who give
us hope for different ways of living–ways of living again that respect the
environment and that are not so concerned with generating profit at the moment
that we give up any possibility of a sustainable future. And I think especially the
environmental movement should look at what’s happening in Colombia right now,
because they are those who suggest we buy cars that use bio-fuel, without
recognizing that we are participating in the worst kind of oppression of people
who inhabited that land where the materials for the bio-fuel are being grown. So,
I think that connections, links, intersections, are what we will have to understand
in the future and I think that all the political movements–the Occupy movement,
the environmental movement, the gay and lesbian movement, the movement
against racism, the movement for the right of the disabled–all of these
movements can be inspired by what is happening in Colombia today.
AB: Well, at the same time there is lots of positive coming out from the U.S. For
example people of my generation grow up reading about the black Panthers,
their struggle, and how they achieved to start providing security for the black
communities in Oakland, and later becoming an international movement. Now,
thinking back at Francía Marquez and all these women in struggle in Colombia,
what are some thoughts you would share with them to conclude?
AD: There is no doubt in my mind that Francía Marquez, who is one of the most
amazing young women I have ever met in my life, and the women of La Toma,
who we met during our visit there, inspire us in very profound ways. And I think
that if one looks back at the history of the U.S. to the era of the emergence of the
Black Panther party and the fact that women played an important role then–of
course, women are often erased from history, the entire black movement is–in
xxi
this country, is a movement that was led by and inspired by women who’s names
are largely forgotten. So, I think it is important for us to dedicate ourselves to
remembering the role that women played historically and pointing out that
Francía (Marquez) is inspiring another generation of young girls and young
women… and she has inspired many people all over the world, including people
here in the U.S., so we are dedicated to continued solidarity, whatever the people
of La Toma need, we will do our best to try to express our solidarity and to assist
them.
xxii
Annex 5: ‘Google’ Maps and Thematic Maps of Study Area
Map 1a. The Municipality of Suárez and the Salvajina Dam (google map)
xxiii
Map 1b. The Municipality of Suárez, Cali, and the Pacific Ocean
(google map)
xxiv
Map 2. The city of Cali (google map)
xxv
Map 3a. Areas of armed conflict
Source: www.ipnoticias.net [Accessed on March 3th 2014]
xxvi
Map 3b. Areas of armed conflict
Source: www.ipnoticias.net [Accessed on March 3th 2014]
xxvii
Annex 6: Requisites of the Faculties of Arts and Humanities and of
Science
xxviii
xxix