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At 15 years old, Rafael Ramos was already playing the drum with Totó la Momposina, the famous representative of Colombian Caribbean folklore in the world. His love for percussion brought him from home, but as soon as he could, he left his native Cartagena de Indias and moved to the Colombian capital to formally study the sounds and techniques of this instrument. There, however, he realized that in the academy there was only room to learn symphonic percussion. The music of his land was not studied. His friendship with the legendary San Basilio de Palenque musician Paulino Salgado Valdez, known as Batata, allowed him to mix the formalities of what he learned at the university with the rhythms that that old man had treasured for generations in his hands. From him he learned the ritual character of the drum that arrived in Colombia; With him he discovered that African ancestry that until now he had never mentioned in his music.
However, while Rafael was on his travels representing the flavor of his land, a regret saddened his singing. Those older men from the Colombian Caribbean who had bequeathed so much to the culture of music and from whom he had learned a mystique that seemed to elevate his proclamation to the sacred were dying. Little or nothing had been recorded of his teachings, his techniques and his stories, and his knowledge was lost with each death. When he was shaken by the news of the death of maestro Encarnación Tobar, 'The Devil', a drum legend who had no clear successor, Rafael knew that he had to return, break the disconnection that kept him from his territory and do something to maintain and take care of the culture of that drum that had given him so much.
This is how he founded the first version of his drum school in 2007. Without a headquarters and, in the shadow of any tree that could shelter him, Rafael began to call on young people who wanted to gain mastery in their hands to make good drums and at the same time serve as a living memory of the musical heritage that gravitated throughout the Caribbean. He created an itinerant school that acted as a bridge between tradition, invoking the knowledge of the teachers, and the academy, inviting teachers he had met in the capital. With the arrival of children and young people from various sectors of the city, especially the most depressed, he realized that this meeting around rhythms, the past and flavor seemed to acquire another relevance: it offered them another purpose of life.
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With moderate poverty figures climbing above 40% in the Cartagena population, many of the young people discovered in the drumbeat that they could have another destiny than selling sweets, dancing on the beaches or entering the sexual market that was devouring the city. . “The school, in addition, became a way to link them with the territory, make them value their traditions and the wealth of those lands that have slowly been capitalized by hotel projects and that, in a process of gentrification, have been erasing the characteristic features of the population that has lived there. Teaching the spirit of the drum was a way for the students to recognize the autonomy of their territory,” says Rafael.
Since it was free, young people came from many places, including two from La Boquilla, a fishing neighborhood with harsh indicators of extreme poverty. Waidis Ortega and Yoel Londoño soon learned and appropriated the drum. Then Rafael invited them to become teachers and start teaching the children of their community so that they could have their first income. “That was when I realized that the school not only had the purpose of maintaining the musical tradition, but that it could be a space for study, training, and community building that would help the youngest people transform their present,” he says. Raphael.
The school soon ended up moving entirely to the La Boquilla neighborhood and became Tambores de Cabildo de la Boquilla. With a call that led her to have more than 50 students per class, her great challenge was to find a productive model that would allow her to continue subsisting for free and employing the young people that she herself trained in music. For this, Rafael created two productive units: on the one hand, they created a drum class experience so that tourists visiting Cartagena could get to know the school, have the opportunity to play and learn something about this instrument that had arrived from Africa and at the same time could receive a concert from students from different courses at the school. In the midst of sessions of lots of dancing, joy and fun, this model made it possible for everything to happen in a safe and containment space, making it the tourists and not the young people who mobilized to have a cultural immersion.
These presentations brought so much recognition among the community that Tambores de Cabildo was summoned to play at the El Campín stadium, in Bogotá, at the opening of the 2011 Under 20 World Cup. “When the people of La Boquilla saw that their young people were representing them with music made them feel very proud and it was an incentive for more people in the community to get involved, we even managed to get the community to donate a lot where we could start building the school,” says Rafael, who remembers that something similar happened when the School teachers were invited to sing the national anthem during the signing of the Government's peace agreements with the FARC, in Havana, Cuba.
The other way to ensure that the school could keep its doors open was to call on another of the area's great cultural riches: food. The mothers of the students began to cook typical sweets, enyucados and cocadas to offer during the presentations and then to be able to supply other cultural events in the city. “The school became an effective way for the children and young people of those areas to strengthen the living cultural practices of their ancestral community, but also to appropriate their cultural rights, the right to education, to ethnic education, to be autonomous in their territory and also that there be productive inclusion: cultural employment based on the assets of the community to involve more members,” says Rafael, who has sought out other leaders of territories in Colombia so that the model of the school is replicated.
In the Montes de María, Bolívar, a town badly hit by the Colombian armed conflict, in La Guajira, where there are serious food supply problems and droughts, and in the San Andrés archipelago, which was badly hurt by the passage of the Hurricane Iota in 2020, Rafael has sought community leaders to replicate this model.
Around the cultural richness of each place, the drum, Wayúu weaving and calypso, we have sought to create new schools and that more than musicians, weavers or singers, they enable young people to have a meeting space, to be trained in leadership, In community exercises, recognize the greatness of the traditions, of their territory and, above all, see the possibility that the future has other more inclusive, hopeful and joyful nuances.
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