Colombia, the South American nation with the second largest number of people of African descent after Brazil, has citizens who can trace their origin to different African civilizations such as Kongo-Loango, Angola, Yoruba, Ewe-Fon, Mina, Carabalies (Efik-Efok) and Bambara.
This past Nov. 21 and 22, Colombia’s Observatorio de Discriminación Racial (Racial Discrimination Observatory/ODR) brought political, social and intellectual leaders of African descent from all over Colombia, the Americas and the Caribbean to the capital city of Bogotá, to take part in the II International Workshop on the History of Reparations in Colombia. The event was focused on examining the idea of reparations and looked at how the subject has been handled in different nations and by different ethnic groups throughout history.
Even though Africans and their descendants were kidnapped during the slave trade and enslaved by Europeans, they never stopped fighting for their freedom and against any form of oppression. For centuries they struggled against the old sugarcane planters and against forced labor in the gold and silver mines. There was always rebellion, including during the different battles of the Americas in the 19th-century Wars of Independence. Their desire to recover their African heritage is reflected in their current surnames: many Afrodescendants in Colombia, unlike in many other countries, have surnames that point to their African origins such as Mina, Matamba, Loango, Angola, Lucumi, Carabali and Huila, among others.
From their kidnapping in Africa, through their construction of liberated territories called Palenques, Afro Colombians have not stopped fighting for the conquest of territories as a form of reparative justice for their almost 400 years of enslavement. Afro Colombians still have possession of nearly 5 million hectares (almost 10 million acres) of land. But since the beginning of the armed conflicts between governments, guerrillas, paramilitaries and drug traffickers, these territories have faced the threat of massive displacements, forced disappearances of Black leaders, and massacres of entire families.
Blacks in Colombia are demanding the reclamation of their territories—they want to use them for sustainable ancestral African agriculture. They demand that neither fertilizers that contaminate Mother Earth nor agrochemicals/aerial spraying be used against coca cultivation. The earth is life, as is our access to water—it makes it so that the planet can live in the face of the threat of global warming and climate change.
Afro Argentinean journalist Federico Pita reports that at one point Vice President Francia Márquez Mina invited those attending the ODR workshop into her official private residence to conduct a more detailed analysis of the current global political situation and what the prospects are for reparations, racial justice and climate change policies that would benefit traditionally excluded communities.
Márquez, Pita noted, told the attendees, “When I said that I wanted to discuss the issue of historical reparations [when running for office], some people…told me, ‘No! Don’t put that discussion on the table, it will weaken your base.’
“The same with racism, when I put the issue of racism on the table people told me, ‘If you want to be in politics, there is no talking about racism.’ That was from my own people, it hurt me a lot. ‘Stop talking about racism because white people are not going to vote for us.’ I think that’s all wrong—when we put our issues out there, others support us. It was a surprise to me that the more I talked about racism, the more the young white people, the white people who mostly supported me, the more they told me, ‘You have to talk more about it.’
“…I say this to make the point that I don’t want to work on an agenda of racial justice and historical reparations just to create rhetorical messages, while our people are starving to death, while our people continue to suffer from conflicts. While our young people have no choice but to grab a gun and go to the bush. While our women, my sisters, continue to lose their lives. We are going to work on this. The discourse and the narrative are important, but we have to put it into practice, into action.”
Márquez announced that she would like to organize a World Summit of Reparations for next year, which would also take on the issues of saving the planet and demanding reparations for slavery and compensation for the contamination of Afro Colombian lands and waters in territories along the Pacific, and in Cauca, Cali Valley and the Caribbean.