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Manuel Zapata Olivella, Racial Politics and Pan-Africanism in Colombia in the 1970s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2022

Laura Correa Ochoa
Laura Correa Ochoa*
Affiliation:
Rice University Rice Academy of Fellows Houston, Texas [email protected]
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Abstract

The First Congress of Black Culture of the Americas, held in Cali, Colombia, in August 1977 and organized by Afro-Colombian intellectual Manuel Zapata Olivella, was the first Pan-Africanist conference held in Latin America. This paper examines the obstacles Afro-Latin American activists faced in organizing a racially defined event and analyzes how they articulated their own interpretations of black radical politics. It shows that a Pan-Africanist event in Latin America had to account for ideologies of racial harmony and mixture. Observers throughout the region mobilized these ideas to discredit the First Congress as a racist and illegitimate threat to mestizo nationhood. Afro-Latin American activists used it as a platform to debate and denounce ideologies of racial harmony and mixture which many argued cloaked racism and impeded black mobilization. However, for many of the delegates engaging with black radical politics did not imply an absolute rejection of these ideas, but instead highlighted the varying ways in which Afro-Latin American activists understood and contested these concepts in the 1970s. Many Afro-Latin American delegates, even those who were openly critical of ideologies of racial harmony, called for multiracial forms of solidarity and expressed support for culturally mixed visions of the nation-state.

Keywords

Manuel Zapata OlivellaColombiaPan-Africanismracial harmonycitizenship
Type
Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 79 , Issue 3 , July 2022 , pp. 457 - 489
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Academy of American Franciscan History

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Alejandro de la Fuente, Vincent Brown, Paulina Alberto, George Reid Andrews, Bethan Fisk, Yesenia Barragan, Sarah Kennedy-Bates, Zannah Mae Matson, and Estefania Rueda Torres; participants of the Atlantic Workshop at Harvard University; and the anonymous readers and editorial board of The Americas, for their generous support and invaluable feedback on this article and other versions of this project. I am also grateful to Jairo Zapata, who kindly shared with me the personal archives of his father Juan Zapata Olivella.

References

1. I understand Pan-Africanism as the intellectual and political efforts to promote solidarity between people of African descent and fight the legacies of slavery, racism, and colonialism, and their contemporary manifestations.

2. Zapata was a physician, anthropologist, and prolific writer. From the 1940s, he was at the vanguard of struggles for racial justice in Colombia. He helped establish the Club Negro (1943), the Centro de Estudios Afro-Colombianos (1947), the Fundación Colombiana de Estudios Folclóricos (1973), and the magazine Letras Nacionales (1965). For some examples of his works exploring questions of race and diaspora, see He visto la noche (Bogotá: Editorial Los Andes, 1953), which is an account of his experience travelling to Mexico and the United States in the 1940s, and his epic black diasporic novel, Changó, el Gran Putas (Bogotá: Ministerio de Cultura, 2010). For other works by Zapata dealing with ideas about race, nation, blackness, and mestizaje, see ¡Levántate mulato! Por mi raza hablará el espíritu (Bogotá: Rei, 1990); La rebelión de los genes: el mestizaje americano en la sociedad futura (Bogotá: Altamir, 1997); and El árbol brujo de la libertad: África en Colombia—orígenes, transculturación, presencia (Bogotá: Ediciones desde Abajo, 2014). For a collection of some of his published materials, see Múnera, Alfonso, ed., Por los senderos de sus ancestros: textos escogidos, 1940–2000 (Bogotá: Ministerio de Cultura, 2010)Google Scholar. For secondary publications about Zapata's life and work, see Palacios, George, “De rebeldías y revoluciones: perspectivas críticas desde abajo y desde Oriente en el pensamiento de Manuel Zapata Olivella,” Estudios de Literatura Colombiana 42 (2018)Google Scholar: 117–138; Mara Veveros Vigoya, “Manuel Zapata Olivella (1920–2004),” in Pensamiento colombiano en el siglo XX, Vol. 3, Carmen Millán de Benavides, Santiago Castro-Gómez, and Guillermo Hoyos Vásquez, eds. (Bogotá: Universidad Javeriana, 2013); William Mina Aragón, Manuel Zapata Olivella. Un legado intercultural. Perspectiva intelectual, literaria y política de un afrocolombiano cosmopólita (Bogotá: Ediciones desde Abajo, 2016); Tillis, Antonio D., Manuel Zapata Olivella and the Darkening of Latin American Literature (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Jackson, Richard L., The Black Image in Latin American Literature (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Jackson, Richard L., Black Writers in Latin America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1979)Google Scholar; and Jackson, Richard L., Black Literature and Humanism in Latin America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

3. Lista de participantes, in Primer Congreso de la Cultura Negra de las Américas, UNESCO et al., eds. (Bogotá: UNESCO, 1988), 14–15.

4. “Circular anunciando la convocatoria del Primer Congreso de la Cultura Negra de las Américas,” October 12, 1976, in Primer Congreso, 3.

5. Manuel Zapata Olivella, “El Congreso de la Cultura Negra. Nueva era para la identidad de América,” in Primer Congreso, 19–21.

6. While non-black scholars such as Gilberto Freyre, José Vasconcelos, and Fernando Ortiz have received significant attention as prominent thinkers of ideologies of racial mixture and mestizaje, Manuel Zapata Olivella needs to be reconsidered as part of that intellectual tradition.

7. For a discussion on the historical and academic divide between an “Afro-descendant” Brazil and an “indigenous” or “mestizo” Spanish America, see Weinstein, Barbara, “Erecting and Erasing Boundaries: Can We Combine the “Indo” and the “Afro” in Latin American Studies?” EIAL: Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe 19:1 (2008): 129–144Google Scholar.

8. For detailed analyses of the intellectual and historical development of racial comparisons between Latin America and the United States, see Seigel, Micol, Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Beyond Compare: Comparative Method after the Transnational Turn,” Radical History Review 91 (2005): 62–90; Paulina L. Alberto and Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, ‘“Racial Democracy’ and Racial Inclusion: Hemispheric Histories,” in Afro-Latin American Studies: An Introduction, Alejandro de la Fuente and George Reid Andrews, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); and Andrews, George Reid, “Brazilian Racial Democracy, 1900–90: An American Counterpoint,” Journal of Contemporary History 31:3 (1996): 483–507CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Pierre-Michel Fontaine, “Transnational Relations and Racial Mobilization: Emerging Black Movements in Brazil,” in Ethnic Identities in a Transnational World, John F. Stack, ed. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981).

9. See Freyre, Gilberto, Casa-Grande e Senzala: Introdução à história da sociedade patriarcal no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Aguilar, 2000)Google Scholar; and Tannenbaum, Frank, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York: Vintage Books, 1946)Google Scholar.

10. For discussions on the Afro-Colombian movement in the 1970s from some of its founding activists, see Mosquera, Carlos Calderón, Política, economía e historia en la Colombia y el Chocó de hoy (Bogotá: Editorial Cosmos, 1972)Google Scholar; Juan de Dios Mosquera, Las comunidades negras de Colombia: pasado, presente y futuro (Medellín: Cimarrón, 1986); Amir Smith Córdoba, Cultura negra y avasallamiento cultural (Bogotá: Centro para la Investigación de la Cultura Negra en Colombia, 1980), and Visión sociocultural del negro en Colombia (Bogotá: Centro para la Investigación de la Cultura Negra en Colombia, 1986); and Valentín Moreno Salazar, Negritudes (Cali: Editores XYZ, 1995).

11. Andrews, George Reid, Afro-Latin America, 1800–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 183–186Google Scholar.

12. For a discussion on how the emphasis on Brazil came to be, see Tianna S. Paschel, “Rethinking Black Mobilization in Latin America,” in Afro-Latin American Studies: An Introduction, De la Fuente and Reid Andrews, eds., 222–263. While most of the scholarship on race relations has historically focused on comparisons between Brazil and the United States, similar arguments have been made about other Latin American countries. Notable examples of the scholarship that views ideologies of racial harmony as politically neutralizing include Hanchard, Michael, Orpheus and Power: The Movimento Negro of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil, 1945–1988 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Helg, Aline, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Marx, Anthony W., Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of South Africa, the United States, and Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Skidmore, Thomas E., Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; and Wright, Winthrop, Café con Leche: Race, Class, and National Image in Venezuela (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A more recent example for Colombia that builds on this academic tradition is Pisano, Pietro, Liderazgo político “negro” en Colombia, 1943–1964 (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2012)Google Scholar.

13. See for instance Nascimento, Abdias do and Nascimento, Elisa Larkin, Africans in Brazil: A Pan-African Perspective (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Abdias do Nascimento, Racial Democracy in Brazil, Myth or Reality? A Dossier of Brazilian Racism (Ibadan, Nigeria: Sketch Publ. Co., 1977).

14. For a discussion on the development of the term and concept of racial democracy, see Alberto and Hoffnung-Garsk, “Racial Democracy,” 277–287.

15. See for instance L, Paulina, , Alberto, Terms of Inclusion: Black Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century Brazil (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Ferrer, Ada, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999)Google Scholar; de la Fuente, Alejandro, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001)Google Scholar; and Lasso, Marixa, Myths of Harmony: Race and Republicanism during the Age of Revolution, Colombia 1795–1831 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16. For example, Darién J. Davis et al., “Pan-Afro-Latin African Americanism Revisited: Legacies and Lessons for Transnational Alliances in the New Millennium,” in Afrodescendants, Identity, and the Struggle for Development in the Americas, Bernd Reiter and Kimberly Eison Simmons, eds. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012), 22; Anthony Ratcliff, ““Black Writers of the World, Unite!” Negotiating Pan-African Politics of Cultural Struggle in Afro-Latin America,” The Black Scholar 37:4 (January 2008): 27–38; and Maguemati Wabgou et al., Movimiento social afrocolombiano, negro, raizal y palenquero: el largo camino hacia la construcción de espacios comunes y alianzas estratégicas para la incidencia poíitica en Colombia (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2012).

17. See Rentería, Carlos Alberto Valderrama, “La política cultural de la negritud en Latinoamérica: debates del Primer Congreso de La Cultura Negra de Las Américas, Cali, Colombia, 1977,” Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 26:1 (2021): 104–123Google Scholar. Silvia Valero offers an introduction that contextualizes the debates of the Congress in Cali and republishes documents from this meeting in her book “Los negros se toman la palabra.” Primer Congreso de la Cultura Negra de las Américas: debates al interior de las comisiones y plenarias (Bogotá: Universidad Javeriana, 2020).

18. Afro-Colombian mobilization during the constitutional debates of the 1990s contributed to black people being recognized as a distinct ethnic group for the first time in the 1991 Constitution and acquiring ethnic and territorial rights. Many of these rights are enshrined in Ley 70, or the Law of Black Communities. For an in-depth analysis of these processes and strategies of mobilization after the 1991 Constitution, see Paschel, Tianna S., Becoming Black Political Subjects: Movements and Ethno-racial Rights in Colombia and Brazil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For other texts about the social movements that emerged in the 1990s see, Oslender, Ulrich, The Geographies of Social Movements: Afro-Colombian Mobilization and the Aquatic Space (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016)Google Scholar; Asher, Kiran, Black and Green: Afro-Colombians, Development, and Nature in the Pacific Lowlands (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Restrepo, Eduardo, Etnización de la negridad: la invención de las ‘comunidades negras’ como grupo étnico en Colombia (Popayán: Editorial Universidad del Cauca, 2013)Google Scholar; Agudelo, Carlos Efrén, Multiculturalismo en Colombia: política, inclusión y exclusión de poblaciones negras (Medellín: La Carreta Editores, 2005)Google Scholar; Luis Carlos Castillo, G., Etnicidad y nación: el desafío de la diversidad en Colombia (Cali: Programa Editorial Universidad del Valle, 2007)Google Scholar; Escobar, Arturo, Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Quintero, Michael Birenbaum, Rites, Rights, and Rhythms: A Genealogy of Musical Meaning in Colombia's Black Pacific (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Dest, Anthony, “‘Disenchanted with the State’: Confronting the Limits of Neoliberal Multiculturalism in Colombia,” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 15:4 (2020): 368–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Important texts for understandings the politics of race and blackness in Colombia are Nina S. de Friedemann, De sol a sol: génesis, transformación y presencia de los negros en Colombia (Bogotá: Planeta, 1986); Peter Wade, Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia, Johns Hopkins Studies in Atlantic History and Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Peter Wade, “The Cultural Politics of Blackness in Colombia,” American Ethnologist 22:2 (1995): 341–357; Peter Wade, Music, Race, & Nation: Música Tropical in Colombia, Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); and Peter Wade, “Mestizaje, Multiculturalism, Liberalism, and Violence,” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 11:3 (2016): 323–343.

19. For general overviews of the emerging Afro-Colombian social movements of the 1970s, see Pisano, Pietro, “Movilidad social e identidad ‘negra’ en la segunda mitad del siglo XX,” Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura 41:1 (June 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: 179–199; Peter Wade, “El movimiento negro en Colombia,” América Negra 5 (1993): 173–191; and Wabgou et al., Movimiento Social. Some pioneering texts dealing with questions of race and Afro-Colombian mobilization from the 1970s center on the experiences and claims-making strategies of Afro-Colombian peasants from across the country. These include Nina S. de Friedemann, Villarrica. Una comunidad negra en el foco de un programa de investigaciones multidisciplinarias en desarrollo rural (Cali: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, 1974), and “Negros: monopolio de tierra, agricultores y desarrollo de plantaciones de caña de azúcar en el valle del Río Cauca,” in Tierra, tradición y poder en Colombia: enfoques antropológicos (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, 1976); Mateo Mina, Esclavitud y libertad en el Valle del Río Cauca (Bogotá: Fundación Rosca de Investigación y Acción Social, 1975); Michael K. Taussig, Destrucción y resistencia campesina: el caso del Litoral Pacífico (Bogotá: Punta de Lanza, 1978); Orlando Fals Borda, Doble historia de la costa: Vol. 1 Mompox and Loba, Vol. 2 El Presidente Nieto, Vol. 3 Resistencia en el San Jorge, Vol. 4 Retorno a la tierra (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2002).

20. See for instance Michael J. Turner, “The Road to Durban—And Back,” NACLA Report on the Americas 35:6 (May/June 2002): 31; Sueli Carneiro, “A batalha de Durban,” Estudos Feministas 10:1 (January 2002): 209–214; Mala Htun, “From ‘Racial Democracy’ to Affirmative Action: Changing State Policy on Race in Brazil,” Latin American Research Review 39:1 (2004): 60–98; and Romero Rodríguez, “Entramos negros; salimos Afrodescendientes,” Revista Futuros 2:5 (2004).

21. Although some of these texts do engage with Latin America in some form, the ideas and politics of Afro-Latin Americans, or how these play out in Latin American national contexts, are not the central concern and are not considered in a systematic way. See for instance Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Makalani, Minkah, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Robinson, Cedric J., Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Slate, Nico, Black Power beyond Borders (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ewing, Adam, The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and Changed Global Black Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014)Google Scholar; and Burnett, Carla, “‘Unity Is Strength’: Labor, Race, Garveyism, and the 1920 Panama Canal Strike,” The Global South 6:2 (2012): 39–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A notable departure from this trend is the recent book by Hakim Adi, which for example examines some of the ideas of Nascimento: Pan-Africanism: A History (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).

22. For examples of works about black diasporic politics in Latin America, see Frank Andre Guridy, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Solimar Otero, Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2010); Lara Putnam, Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); and James Lorand Matory, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

23. For a discussion of Senghor's Pan-Africanist politics in the 1970s, see Andrew Apter, “Beyond Négritude: Black Cultural Citizenship and the Arab Question in FESTAC 77,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 28:3 (November 2015): 1–14.

24. Manuel Zapata Olivella, “Negritud, indianidad y mestizaje en Latinoamérica,” Negritud 3 (May-July 1978): 18–19.

25. For an elaboration of his ideas of racial mixture, see Manuel Zapata Olivella, El árbol brujo de la libertad. África en Colombia: orígenes, transculturación, presencia: ensayo histórico mítico (Valle del Cauca: Universidad del Pacífico, 2002), 112.

26. Manuel Zapata Olivella, “Opresión y explotación del africano en la colonización de América Latina,” Revista de la Universidad de Medellín 22 (July-September 1976), in Por los senderos, 317.

27. Manuel Zapata Olivella, Editorial, Letras Nacionales 5 (November-December 1965), 19.

28. Manuel Zapata Olivella, “El folclor como afirmación de la nacionalidad,” Páginas de Cultura 16 (March-April 1967), in Por los senderos, 233–236.

29. A copy of Zea's intervention in Dakar was published in Latinoamérica. Cuadernos de Cultura Latinoamericana, a journal based at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Leopoldo Zea, “Negritud e indigenismo,” Latinoamérica. Cuadernos de Cultura Latinoamericana, 89 (1979). I consulted this publication at the UNESCO Archives in Paris (008 (=96: =97) NEG).

30. Zea, “Negritud,” 17.

31. Zea, “Negritud,” 13.

32. Peter Wade, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (London: Pluto Press, 2010), 15.

33. Zapata Olivella, “Negritud, indianidad y mestizaje,” Negritud 3 (May-July 1978): 18–19.

34. Wade, Race and Ethnicity, 40.

35. Zapata Olivella, “Negritud.”

36. For discussions about the role of cultural hybridity and racial mixture in the Négritude movement, see Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015), in particular chapts. 2 and 3. Also see Irina Dzero, “Meanings of Hybridity in Aimé Césaire's ‘Discours sur le colonialisme,’” French Review 85:1 (2011): 102–114.

37. From another version of Manuel Zapata Olivella, “Negritud, indianidad y mestizaje,” Revista de Historia 1:2 (July 1976), in Por los senderos, 295.

38. In the 1940s, Zapata developed a friendship with African American writer Langston Hughes. At the time, he reported that in one instance he told Hughes that in Colombia black people had “equal rights” and did not face forms of violence similar to black people in the United States. A statement that captures Zapata's shifting ideas about race and nation in Colombia and Latin America, it also underscores the ways in which these ideas in Colombia were being produced in dialogue with the United States prior to the 1970s. Manuel Zapata Olivella, “Langston Hughes, el hombre,” El Sábado, August 23, 1947. He also discusses his relationship with Hughes in He visto la noche (1953). In the publication of the documents of the Congress in Cali, Zapata paid homage to Damas and other Négritude poets. “León Damas, poeta de América,” in Primer Congreso, vii-ix.

39. Zapata Olivella, “Negritud,” in Por los senderos, 296.

40. Manuel Zapata Olivella, “De la universalidad a la presencia combatiente,” in Primer Congreso, 181–182.

41. Stanley Cyrus was one of the first editors of the Afro-Hispanic Review. His relationship with Colombia was tied to Afro-Colombian literature. He was the first to translate the work of the Afro-Colombian writer Carlos Arturo Truque, including Granizada y otros cuentos. Fabio Martínez, Carlos Arturo Truque: Valoración crítica (Cali: Universidad del Valle, 2014), 11–13.

42. At the time I consulted this archive in 2014, the material was in the process of being organized and re-catalogued. Letter from Manuel Zapata Olivella to Cyrus Stanley, May 13, 1977. Manuel Zapata Olivella Collections (henceforth MZO Collections), Vanderbilt University.

43. This lack of support is in some ways surprising, considering Zapata's role within the Ministry of Education. During his tenure at this ministry, he helped plan the First Congress of National Culture in 1966 and other important cultural events in the 1970s.

44. Zapata Olivella, “De la universalidad,” 181.

45. Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen.

46. Zapata Olivella, “Negritud.”

47. Letter from Manuel Zapata Olivella to Léon Goutrand Damas, July 29, 1977. Lista de invitados I Congreso de la Cultura Negra de las Américas. Letter from Manuel Zapata Olivella to Jorge Benhur, August 9, 1977. MZO Collections.

48. Various undated lists typed and in handwriting with the names of potential delegates to the First Congress of Black Culture of the Americas. MZO Collections.

49. Letter from Abdias do Nascimento to Manuel Zapata Olivella, May 1st, 1977. MZO Collections.

50. Letter from Mervyn M. Dymally, lieutenant governor of California, to the participants of the First Congress of the Americas, August 16, 1977. MZO Collections.

51. “Negros das Américas em congresso,” Movimento: Cena Carioca, November 1, 1976, 10.

52. Letter from Gerald L. Davis, May 11, 1977. Letter to Wilbert, J. Roget, May 19, 1977. Letter from James Early to Manuel Zapata Olivella, January 10, 1977. MZO Collections.

53. “A população negra dos EUA busca vínculos culturais na América Latina,” Diario de Pernambuco, March 16, 1976.

54. Letter from James Early to Manuel Zapata Olivella, January 10, 1977. MZO Collections.

55. See for instance Mauricio Archila, Idas y venidas, vueltas y revueltas: protestas sociales en Colombia, 1958–1990 (Bogotá: Centro de Investigación y Educación Popular, 2003); and Zamosc, León, The Agrarian Question and the Peasant Movement in Colombia: Struggles of the National Peasant Association, 1967–1981 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56. There is a growing body of historical work about Afro-Colombian mobilization since the first decades of the twentieth century. See Pisano, Liderazgo político; Francisco Flórez-Bolívar, “En sus propios términos: negros y mulatos y sus luchas por la igualdad en Colombia, 1885–1947” (PhD diss.: University of Pittsburgh, 2016); Orlando Deavila Pertuz, “The Battle for Paradise: Tourism Development, Race, and Popular Politics during the Remaking of Cartagena (Colombia), 1942–1984” (PhD diss.: University of Connecticut, 2019); Claudia Leal, Landscapes of Freedom: Building a Postemancipation Society in the Rainforests of Western Colombia (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2018); McGraw, Jason, The Work of Recognition: Caribbean Colombia and the Postemancipation Struggle for Citizenship (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Laura Correa Ochoa, “Black and Indigenous Entanglements: Race, Mobilization and Citizenship in Colombia, 1930–1991” (PhD diss.: Harvard University, 2021).

57. Moreno Salazar, Negritudes, 83–91.

58. Wabgou et al., Movimiento social, 100.

59. Amir Smith Córdoba, “Negritud, Cultura Negra y Avasallamiento Cultural,” Negritud 1 (November 1977-January 1978): 6. For scholarship addressing the fragmented geography of race and nation-making in Colombia, see Appelbaum, Nancy P., Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Muddied Waters: Race, Region, and Local History in Colombia, 1846–1948 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); and Peter Wade, Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Fisk, Bethan, “Black Knowledge on the Move: African Diasporic Healing in Caribbean and Pacific New Granada,” Atlantic studies (Abingdon, England) 18.2 (2021): 244–270Google Scholar.

60. “El movimiento de cultura negra con Ali,” Negritud (November 1977-January 1978): 3; “El director general de la UNESCO con el Movimiento,” Negritud (May-July 1978): 3.

61. Juan Zapata Olivella, “El color de una candidatura,” Presente, August 1977; “¿En 1978 mandato oscuro? Juan Zapata Olivella es un candidato oscuro, pero no un oscuro candidato,” Presente, June 1977.

62. Francisco Gómez Valderrama, “El Congreso de la Negritud,” Occidente, August 25, 1977.

63. Armando Barrameda Morán, “El candidato de la negritud,” El Heraldo, April 5, 1977.

64. Moreno Salazar, Negritudes, 3.

65. Medardo Arias S., “Amin es un redentor. Dice el presidente del Consejo Nacional de Negritudes,” El País, August 27, 1977.

66. Carlos Calderón Mosquera, “Notas del editor,” Presencia Negra, January-February, 1979.

67. “Habla el candidato de las negritudes,” El Espectador, May 1, 1977.

68. Moreno Salazar, Negritudes, 81.

69. “En Cartagena proclaman a Zapata Olivella el 29,” El Colombiano, April 28, 1975.

70. “Juan Zapata Olivella, Presidential Candidate 1978–1982,” The Chronicle, August 1977.

71. Moreno Salazar, Negritudes, 26.

72. Moreno Salazar, Negritudes, 13, 68.

73. “El indio,” Negritud 3 (May-July 1978): 8.

74. Raquel Kremnitzer, “Negritud y racismo,” Negritud 2 (November 1977- January 1978): 11.

75. Moreno Salazar, Negritudes, 65.

76. Moreno Salazar, Negritudes, 66.

77. Rosa Amalia Uribe, “Razón de ser del movimiento de cultura negra,” Negritud 2 (November 1977-January 1978): 29.

78. Moreno Salazar, Negritudes, 25.

79. Kremnitzer, “Negritud y racismo.”

80. Paulina L. Alberto, “When Rio Was Black: Soul Music, National Culture, and the Politics of Racial Comparison in 1970s Brazil,” Hispanic American Historical Review 89:1 (2009): 3–39.

81. The majority of Brazilian delegates were prevented from leaving the country when authorities refused to exempt them from an obligatory deposit for traveling abroad. The government tried to not appear to be flagrantly barring the delegation from a Pan-Africanist event, but since most delegates could not afford the fee, it was effectively a ban. “Problemas de delegação brasileira,” Movimento, February 25 -March 2, 1980, 10. After Colombia, the US official delegation was the largest one. It was primarily composed of intellectuals, many of them African Americans. Among them were poet-theorist Larry Neal, historian Zelbert Moore, and anthropologists Vera Green and Sheila Walker. Charles H. Wright, founder of the Museum of African American History in Chicago in 1968, also attended.

82. The four working groups were: Thought, Socioeconomic Structure, Production and Technology, and Ethnicity: Mestizaje, Castas and Classes.

83. James D. Henderson, “A Report on the First Congress of Black Culture of the Americas,” Nina S. de Friedemann Collection, Luis Ángel Arango Library, Bogotá, 3358–4259.

84. Peter Nares, “The Black Problem in Colombia,” The Chronicle, August 1977.

85. Eduardo de Oliveira y Oliveira, “De las afinidades electivas: etnia y compromiso,” in Primer Congreso, 28.

86. Nascimento, Racial Democracy, 83.

87. Manfred Rosenow, “Manuel Zapata Olivella: An Interview,” The Chronicle, August 1977.

88. Nascimento, Racial Democracy, 83.

89. Manuel Zapata Olivella, “El negro américano. Identidad negra en América Latina,” Seminario Cultural, August 28, 1977.

90. “Comisiones de Trabajo Recomendaciones. Etnia negra y mestizaje,” in Primer Congreso, 145.

91. “Filosofía y afectividad,” in Primer Congreso, 152.

92. Henderson, “A Report on the First Congress of Black Culture.”

93. Manuel Zapata Olivella, “Opresión y explotación del africano en la colonizacion de América Latina,” in Primer Congreso, 57.

94. Nina S. de Friedemann, “Etnicidad, etnia y transacciones étnicas en el horizonte de cultura negra en Colombia,” in Primer Congreso, 43.

95. “Filosofía y afectividad,” in Primer Congreso, 151.

96. “Comisiones de Trabajo,” in Primer Congreso, 145.

97. Rosenow, “Manuel Zapata.”

98. Oliveira y Oliveira, “De las afinidades,” in Primer Congreso, 25–29.

99. Henderson, “A Report on the First Congress of Black Culture.”

100. Nares, “The Black Problem.”

101. Seigel, “Beyond Compare.”

102. Nares, “The Black Problem.”

103. Henderson, “A Report on the First Congress of Black Culture.”

104. “Asamblea Plenaria: proposiciones, resoluciones y recomendaciones,” in Primer Congreso, 167.

105. “Comisiones de Trabajo,” in Primer Congreso, 146–147.

106. Henderson, “A Report on the First Congress of Black Culture.”

107. For an elaboration on the heterogeneity of Afro-Latin American political thought, see Frank A. Guridy and Juliet Hooker, “Currents in Afro-Latin American Political and Social Thought,” in Afro-Latin American Studies: An Introduction, De la Fuente and Reid Andrews, eds., 179–221.

108. Rosenow, “Manuel Zapata.”

109. Tenteenelaire is one of the racial categories or castas that emerged in the colonial period; it referred to a racially mixed person of African descent. This term is used recurrently by Afro-Ecuadoran writer Adalberto Ortíz Quiñonez in his 1943 novel Juyungo: historia de un negro, una isla y otros negros. Oswaldo Díaz Ortiz's presentation at the Congress analyzed this novel as a way to explore racial relations in Ecuador. Oswaldo A. Díaz, “Relaciones sociales dentro de una sociedad multiracial,” in Primer Congreso, 65–72. For an examination of Juyungo, see Ximena González-Parada, “Ecuadorian Blackness and the Poetics of Resistance and Solidarity in Adalberto Ortiz's Novel Juyungo,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Travesía [blog] 30:1 (2021): 61–74.

110. Nascimento, Racial Democracy, 131.

111. Ángel Romero, “Congreso de Negritudes enjuicia discriminación,” El Tiempo, August 29, 1977.

112. “Brasil negro não vai a Colômbia,” Versus 14, September 1977, in Afrolatinoamérica, Fundação Perseu Abramo and Soweto Organização Negra, eds. (São Paulo: Editora Fundação Perseu Abramo 2014), 21.

113. Nascimento, Racial Democracy, 83.

114. For a discussion on differences between racial politics in Brazil and Colombia, consider José Maurício Andion Arruti, “Emergencia étnica, conquista territorial y conflicto entre comunidades indígenas y negras em Brasil y Colômbia – notas exploratórias,” El Otro Derecho 26–27 (2002): 99–112; Peter Wade, “Brazil and Colombia: Comparative Race Relations in South America,” in Racism and Ethnic Relations in the Portuguese-Speaking World, Proceedings of the British Academy 179, Francisco Bethencourt and Adrian J. Pearce, eds. (Oxford and New York: Published for the British Academy by Oxford University Press, 2012).

115. For in-depth explorations about how the Brazilian state used Pan-Africanist and other international spaces to uphold this image, see Dávila, Jerry, Hotel Trópico: Brazil and the Challenge of African Decolonization, 1950–1980 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nascimento and Larkin, Africans in Brazil; Nascimento, Racial Democracy; and Seigel, Micol, Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

116. This was the case around the phenomenon known as Black Rio. In 1976, soul concerts organized by Afro-Brazilians spread across working-class neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro, sparking a national controversy. Whereas some on the left saw the genre as inauthentic, others on the right claimed it posed a threat to national security. Intelligence officers surveilled the activities of Afro-Brazilians participating in soul events and interrogated members of soul bands. Alberto, “When Rio Was Black.”

117. Colombian state authorities were policing and persecuting leftist activists across the country, including those in the peasant and trade union movements, many of whom were of African descent. Among these were Sancy Mosquera, a black activist from Chocó active in the Communist Youth (JUCO). In 1974, he helped organize the strike against the US-owned mining company Chocó Pacífico, and in the 1980s he established Afro-Colombian organizations in Bogotá. For evidence of the forms of state surveillance faced by Mosquera and other black activists from Chocó during the strike against the mining company see for example, “Informe al Departamento de Policía, Chocó, October 26, 1974.” Correspondencia del Departamento de Chocó, Ministerio de Gobierno, Despacho del Ministro, 1974. Box 65. Folder 2. Folios, 163–166. Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Bogotá, Colombia.

118. “Contra o racismo por uma nova história,” Versus 16, November 1977, in Afrolatinoamérica, Fundação Perseu Abramo and Soweto Organização Negra, eds., 25.

119. “Comisiones de Trabajo,” in Primer Congreso, 147.

120. Stella Pombo, “Congreso de Negritudes: solidaridad con hermanos africanos,” Occidente, August 27, 1977.

121. “Asamblea Plenaria,” in Primer Congreso, 165.

122. The proposals at the Congress echoed those put forward by the founders of the Teatro Experimental do Negro (TEN) like Nascimento and other Afro-Brazilian activists, starting in the 1940s. See Alberto, Terms of Inclusion, 163–178; 213–218.

123. “Filosofía y afectividad,” in Primer Congreso, 153.

124. “Asamblea plenaria,” in Primer Congreso, 166.

125. “Forma de dinamizar las conclusiones, recomendaciones y proposiciones del I Congreso de la Cultura Negra de las Américas,” in Primer Congreso, 173.

126. Gómez Valderrama, “Congreso de Negritudes.”

127. Raúl Echavarría Barrientos, “Negritudes,” Occidente, July 26, 1977.

128. Gómez Valderrama, “El Congreso de la Negritud.”

129. “Proposiciones finales, aprobadas en pleno,” in Primer Congreso, 178.

130. “Población negra reclama igualdad de derechos,” El Espectador, August 24, 1977.

131. “Homenaje al poeta Artel,” El País, August 16, 1977.

132. Olivella, Juan Zapata, Reseña de la primera candidatura negra de Colombia (Port-au-Prince: Xpress, 1985), 40Google Scholar. I consulted this book in the personal archive of Jairo Zapata, son of Juan Zapata Olivella.

133. Rosenow, “Manuel Zapata.”

134. Ángel Romero, “Congreso de Negritudes enjuicia discriminación,” El Tiempo, August 29, 1977.

135. Gómez Valderrama, “El Congreso de la Negritud.”

136. Cromos, “¿En colombia hay negros? Sí . . . y los blancos nos tienen jodidos,” August 31, 1977.

137. Gómez Valderrama, “El Congreso de la Negritud.”

138. Throughout the twentieth century, Colombian authorities did not systemically count the population numbers for Afro-Colombian and indigenous people, with population estimates fluctuating significantly over time. In the 1960s, the Banco de la República offered population estimates along ethnoracial lines. It estimated the indigenous population to be around 2.2 percent, the black population (negros) 6 percent, and the mulato population to be 24 percent. According to the 2018 national census, indigenous people account for approximately 4.4 percent of the national population and Afro- Colombians for nearly 9.3 percent. Yet, black organizations and international organizations have long disputed official figures for people of African descent and estimate the Afro-Colombian population to be closer to 26 percent. See Smith, T. Lynn, “The Racial Composition of the Population of Colombia,” Journal of Inter-American Studies 8:2 (1966): 213–35Google Scholar; DANE, “Población indígena de Colombia. Resultados del censo nacional de población y vivienda 2018,” September 6, 2019, https://www.dane.gov.co/files/investigaciones/boletines/grupos- etnicos/presentacion-grupos-etnicos-2019.pdf, this and other digital addresses in this note accessed April 3, 2022; DANE, “Población afrocolombiana, raizal y palenquera. Resultados del censo nacional de población y Vivienda 2018,” November 6, 2019, https://www.dane.gov.co/files/investigaciones/boletines/grupos-etnicos/presentacion-grupos-etnicos-poblacion-NARP-2019.pdf; and Morrison, Judith, “Race and Poverty in Latin America: Addressing the Development Needs of African Descendants,” UN Chronicle 44:3 (2007): 44Google Scholar, https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/race-and-poverty-latin-america-addressing-development-needs-african-descendants.

139. Important works about indigenismo in Colombia include Juan Friede, ed., Indigenismo y aniquilamiento de indígenas en Colombia (Bogotá: Ediciones CIEC, 1981); and Gregorio Hernández de Alba, “Teoría y práctica del indigenismo en Colombia,” Anuario Indigenista 25 (1965), 117. For a more recent study, see Troyan, Brett, “Re-Imagining The “Indian” and the State: Indigenismo in Colombia, 1926– 1947,” Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 33:65 (2008): 81–106Google Scholar. For works that explore the comparison between black and indigenous people in Latin America, see Peter Wade, “Afro-Indigenous Interactions, Relations, and Comparisons,” in Afro-Latin American Studies: An Introduction, De la Fuente and Reid Andrews; and Wade, Race and Ethnicity.

140. Gómez Valderrama, “El Congreso de la Negritud.”

141. See Lasso, Myths of Harmony.

142. “¿Dizque Amín llega de incógnito?” El País, August 26, 1977.

143. Manuel Martínez de Efe, “El Gigante Idi Amin ha llegado a comerse medio hipopótamo crudo,” El País, September 23, 1977.

144. Arias S., “Amin es un redentor.”

145. Cromos, “¿En Colombia hay negros?”

146. Arias S., “Amin es un redentor.”

147. Cromos, “¿En Colombia hay negros?”