Slowly, with steady steps, Baudilio Revelo Hurtado walked up the staircase to the graduate school of Cali, Colombia’s University del Valle, where Dr. Dario Henao Restrepo is the director. He was greeted with tenderness and affection by students in the course I was teaching about the African diaspora and Afro-epistemology.
His presence and thoughts were like a lullaby, and each phrase and prayer was full of wisdom. It reminded me of the role the Mandinga djeli play in the current Republic of Mali.
Baudilio is a criminologist and criminal lawyer by profession, but essentially, he is a leader in orality (the quality of being spoken or verbally communicated), of justice, and above all a defender of the ancestral language, to which he has dedicated a large part of his life, searching under the leaves, in the currents of the rivers, in the cries of the birds… for the African ancestral language.
In the Bambara and Mandinga languages, men and women of the committed word are called djeli. The French, when they colonized Africa, changed this name to griot. When I stayed in Bamako, Mali’s capital, in 2014, I visited the town of Djéné and other regions of this great country; I participated in births and funerals; witnessed musical encounters that used instruments like the balafon, the ngoni, and the kora; and saw that at the end of each oral testimony, djeli men and women told stories with ethical examples.
Baudilio listened as I spoke about the first human rights charter of humanity, known as the Kurukan Fuga or Mande Charter, written and implemented by the leader of the Mandinga territory, Sundiata Keita. Baudilio asked if this charter came before the French charter of the Rights of Man. Yes: The Mande Charter was an inter-ethnic peace agreement that declared respect for women, for water, and for prisoners of war. Keita wrote it in 1235 and it was declared a world heritage by UNESCO in 2009.
Baudilio, as a lawyer, said, “It is that Africa has given so much to humanity…yet the West pretends to erase its contributions in the field of law and wisdom and what you call Afro-epistemology.”
In his book “Ritos de orillas. Espiritualidad de las comunidades negras del Pacífico colombiano” (“Coastal Rites: The spirituality of the Black Communities of the Colombian Pacific”; prologue by researcher and Africanist Jaime Arocha Rodríguez), Baudilio wrote that “in the Chigualo, we come across several literary figures, the collective songs, riddles, couplets, stories, legends, cachos or jokes, sayings that resisted with dignity, and stood strong to prevent liturgical orality from disappearing or being erased by the forced displacement experienced when the bird of fear appears armed with machine guns.”
Despite the violence that Colombia has always experienced, orality did not disappear. Like a great djeli, it goes in search along the rivers, in the mountains, guided by the songs of the birds that leave traces with their plumage to guide the way.
Through his many years of life and experience, scholarly travels, legal battles, undying fight for ethical renewal, and revolutionary spirit, Baudilio has provided an example to follow.