The goods of big businesses with dubious ethics change over time, but the dream of huge profits that we know today is probably the same one that animated slave traders just a century and a half ago. Until well into the 19th century there were people who were taken against their will from the coasts of West Africa to the south of the American continent, whether or not they passed through the slave markets of some Spanish or Portuguese city, and who were disembarked in Buenos Aires or Montevideo, as they had done before in the Caribbean.
“In 1886, a decree anticipated the suppression and freed the last 25,000 slaves of the Kingdom of Spain,” states José Antonio Piqueras, in his recent book Anti-slavery in Spain and its adversaries (Catarata Publishing House). “Spain would become the last country in Europe, the penultimate country in the Western world, to abolish slavery,” he adds.
The traces of this trafficking permeated every corner of the geography of America, although on both sides of the ocean there continue to be those who deny the colonialist processes and even the blackness that runs through their own veins. Hence the value of rescuing testimonies from those who dare to recognize themselves as Afro-descendants in a country like Argentina, where even today one hears that “Argentines are all white” (in reference to the European origins of the immigration of the 19th and 20th centuries).
One of these records is that of the documentary filmmaker Paul Caesar (Buenos Aires, 1962), who has just released his film Macongo, the African Córdoba (available in web platforms), about the heritage of Africa in that rich Argentine province. With this title, the director begins a series of films that will address the issue of the footprint of the Atlantic trade in people in different regions of what was the territory of the viceroyalties of Peru and its subsequent split, that of the Río de la Plata.
“Over four centuries the Spaniards introduced more than 2.3 million enslaved Africans to America,” Piqueras points out in his book, where he states that “the Silver river It banned trafficking in 1812 and kept it tolerated in later years.”
The professor, who directs the UNESCO Chair on Slavery and Afro-Descendancy, highlights the temporal discordance of abolitionism in the different colonial powers, since these ideas—whether due to moral imperative or social pressure—gain weight, in the 18th century, among the authorities. in France, Great Britain and the United States. Meanwhile, “the slave economy takes off in the Spanish Caribbean” and “in the valleys near Lima, and the demand for slaves for agriculture and livestock in the Río de la Plata increases.”
The factor that does slow down new arrivals to the Spanish colonies is intrinsically linked to racism, even at the cost of damaging the obtaining of dividends. As an example, the speeches recorded in the minutes of the time are enough. For example, José Mejía Lequerica, deputy for Quito, warned in the Spanish Cortes meeting in Cádiz, in March 1811, that “the situation in many provinces of America was precarious due to the high number of slaves that were introduced, thereby calling attention to the social and racial imbalance that was occurring,” according to Piqueras. He did not call for the abolition of trafficking, since that was “a business that requires meditation, pulse and judgment” so as not to harm the interests of the slave owners, but he did call for moderating the introductions so as not to continue contributing to the darkening of the skin of the populations. or to the joint lifting, as deduced from their allegations. Remember that the colonists—both French and Spanish—had taken good note of how far any revolt could go, starting with the slave rebellion of the Cayman Forest, in the Saint Domingue colony, in August 1791, which laid the foundations for Haiti’s declaration of independence in 1804.
Natives with African names
“Mestizaje was what made the Afro-descendant resident ‘disappear’, in the beginning, from the sight of others and confused that mestizaje with the native peoples to forget (or pretend to forget) something as shameful as the enslavement of one human to another. ”, points out, for his part, the director Pablo César, consulted by email.
In reality, this miscegenation that contributed to lightening skin in South America also occurred when the enslaved escaped from their employers and went to live with the natives of the original peoples, as explained in the film. Macongo. This coexistence gave rise to mythical figures who, in the popular imagination, transcended as indigenous people rather than as Afro-descendants; This is the case of Indio Bamba, as recognized by the historians whom César interviews in his documentary.
Everything seems destined to eliminate the word “slave” from conversations about Argentine history. The only exception has been the caricatured blackness of 19th century domestic workers in textbooks or school events in which scenes of Creole heroes (white and trained in Europe) are represented. Hence César’s statement, who has made nine films in co-production with African countries: “I felt the duty and also the passion to show everything I was discovering about the silence about African roots in my country.”
We asked this director about what is most unknown regarding the enslaved people in the Río de la Plata. We have “a great debt to the African population
for the artistic, cultural, religious and educational legacy; from the famous asado, through various musical genres such as malambo, zamba, chamamé, candombe from the River Plate, Cordoba and Santa Fe, to the famous tango (with an accent on the final ‘o’ in its Yoruba version). Also in religious syncretism” (that of their ancestral spirits with virgins and other saints that they adopted in the new continent). The documentary filmmaker remembers that Viceroy Francisco J de Elío went so far as to “prohibit ‘the tangos of the blacks’ (a mixture between habanera and candombe), in Montevideo at the beginning of the 19th century.”
The Africans who lived in that colonial society were also the builders of the cities and some of their descendants would have become important political figures, as confirmed by the nicknames of some of them, such as that ‘Doctor Chocolate’ with which the opponents They named Bernardino Rivadavia, first president of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, in 1826. “We have Afro heroes who were sifted through the whitening scanner of those who wrote history, including the father of Argentine education, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (whose maternal surname was Al Bin Racin, clearly Moorish and converted into Albarracín), or Cayetano Silva, composer of the March of San Lorenzo, who they did not want to bury in the police cemetery ‘because he was black,’ says the director. The curious fact is that Argentina gave that military march to Germany and later this was part of the musical band that accompanied the entry of Nazi troops into Paris in 1940.
The rooms of the Society of Jesus
Officials of the Spanish crown often arrived at their new responsibilities in the viceroyalties with enslaved people in their service. We know this from documentation from the 17th and 18th centuries that has survived to this day. But where did the large consignments of human beings come from? “A minority came with their masters because, towards the 16th century, there was already a population of about 100,000 enslaved Africans in the Iberian Peninsula, according to research by the Spanish historian Jesús Cosano Prieto, but during the next 350 years transportation was direct. from Africa to South America, especially from Luanda (Angola), some with a stopover in Brazil, in a business initially monopolized by the Portuguese,” says César. Shipments were also managed from Cádiz and Seville.
Regarding the circuits and destinations, the director of Macongo recommends stopping “in the chapter The Atlantic Trafficking from the book Africa in Córdoba by the Argentine historian Marcos Carrizo.” It also indicates that “religious orders such as the Society of Jesus and the Franciscans established centers of economic production in the ranches they managed, such as La Candelaria, from where the moving story of the slave boy Dionisio arises, told in the film by the researcher Josefina Piana”, which introduces the issue of the prices of people, depending on whether or not they were injured, or whether they were traded individually or by family unit.
“The Jesuits were the largest slave company in South America” in the 18th century, asserts, for his part, Carlos Ferreyra, director of the Estancia de Jesús María of the National Jesuit Museum, who points out that “there is no good slavery”, although in Argentina one hears that on its soil Africans were not treated like on the plantations of Haiti or Brazil.
With no room for “moral comfort,” in Ferreyra’s words, the film attempts to recover—through testimonies from current managers of the spaces that served the Jesuit missions and people of African descent—daily life in those farms that were institutions. of evangelization and agricultural production. In fact, in those places, production did not stop with the expulsion of the Jesuit order, around 1770, since the Royal Board of Temporalities took charge of its administration.
In this transfer, as well as in subsequent sales or auctions of the properties, the inventories included the slaves. The sites do not forget: in that region of Córdoba surrounded by mountains, even today, the rural workforce is in charge of Afro-descendants, although some of those interviewed acknowledge that in their families the word “slave” is carefully avoided. As much as they avoided naming them in the population censuses of that young State that was Argentina at the end of the 19th century.
In Buenos Aires, “the slave trade had its nerve center on the grounds of the current Retiro train station, where the newly arrived Africans remained until they were transferred to their new masters,” says Pablo César. Just over 700 kilometers from there, the mountains of Córdoba, high and inaccessible, were the final refuge of deserters, freedmen (children of enslaved mothers) and maroons who fled from their bosses to hide eternally in their ravines.
Those who survived slavery, after its abolition, in those southern lands, nourished the first lines of the armies, as human shields in wars such as that of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870), between Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. Despite so many unjust deaths, the dream of whiteness was never fulfilled in South America, which is why memory continues to make its way into the skin of Argentines.
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