Cultural Space of Palenque de San Basilio

Intangible

Theme: Slavery

Address

San Basilio del Palenque, Bolívar

Country

Colombia

City

San Basilio del Palenque

Continent

America

Theme: Slavery

Purpose of Memory

To keep alive the traditions, values and socio-cultural practices of the Palenquero people of San Basilio, and to honor the legacy of the black and Creole population that resisted the colonial period's slave regime in South America to found the first free town of the continent.

Public Access

Free

UNESCO Connection

On November 25, 2005, in its third proclamation, UNESCO declared by resolution the Cultural Space of San Basilio de Palenque as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity; and in 2008 inscribed it on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Location description

The village of Palenque de San Basilio, southeast of Cartagena (Colombia), was originally one of the fortified communities called “palenques” in South America and founded by runaway slaves as a refuge in the 17th century. Of the numerous palenques that existed during the colonial era, only the one in San Basilio has survived to this day, becoming a unique cultural space that encompasses social, medical and religious practices as well as musical and oral traditions, many of which have African roots. Among its various cultural particularities are the social organization of the community based on family networks and age groups, called ma-kuagro; the complex funeral rituals and medical practices that bear witness to the different spiritual and cultural systems of ancestral origin; and musical expressions such as the “Bullerengue sentado” and the “Son palenquero”, which accompany collective celebrations such as baptisms, weddings and religious festivals. An essential element of the Palenque de San Basilio Cultural Space is the Palenquero language, the only Creole language in the Americas that combines a Spanish lexical base with the grammatical characteristics of Bantu languages.

Historical Process
Memorialization Process

The formation of escaped slaves’ communities dates back to the presence of the Spanish in the Americas. The abuses, mistreatment, punishments and tortures typical of slave regimes forced slaves to hide and seek refuge in palenques, which were almost independent fortified settlements that were besieged and attacked by the authorities, although they were never able to destroy them completely. The ways of life and the social and religious organization of the people living in these communities were the result of a process of syncretism, combining African and Euro-American cultural elements that were built from the slaves’ experiences in the mines, on the large plantations and in the houses of the landowners where they worked and lived.

In the Archives of the Indies in Seville, Madrid and other Spanish cities, there are documents mentioning that since 1540 a large number of slaves remained fugitives and rebels in the mountains and other areas far from the colonial settlements of the then New Kingdom of Granada, the territory of what is now Colombia. These slaves who remained at liberty, generally in rural, wild or difficult to access areas, were known by the Spaniards and Creoles as “cimarrones” (maroons). When a significant number of them managed to escape and -after overcoming the difficulties of fleeing- sought refuge in areas of difficult geography, they found possibilities for survival. There they developed fortified settlements with palisades called palenques, in the same way that on the Atlantic side of colonial America were called quilombos: politically organized territories, usually located near water sources, arable land and spaces for animal husbandry. These palenques were exposed to constant sieges by the Spanish authorities, to the point that in certain periods they became true wars of persecution and extermination.

One of the main ports of entry of slaves into the territory of the New Kingdom of Granada was the city of Cartagena de Indias. The Africans kidnapped and enslaved in the Gulf of Guinea arrived in Cartagena usually to satisfy the demand for labor in plantations and household chores, as well as to replace in the bogue, haciendas, ports and mines the original populations decimated by the encomienda and by the taking of their women by the Spaniards. These slaves were usually introduced to the continent through the Magdalena River valley. Almost immediately, the first Palenquero settlements and escapes were recorded in the swamps near Canal del Dique, in the vicinity of the Montes de María. Already between 1570 and 1580, the maroons had established the Limón palenque in this area, considered the first to last over time and to concentrate a large number of people.

Another of the best known palenques -considered by the community of San Basilio as the origin of its locality- was established in 1603 in La Matuna, an area of swamps and thick, closed forests. The escape that gave rise to the latter was led in 1599 by Benkos Biohó, originally from the Bijagó Islands in Portuguese Guinea (today Guinea-Bissau), who was captured and enslaved along with his wife and children and sold in 1596 to Captain Alonso de Campos. Biohó led a rebellion of thirty slaves, including his family, all of them owned by the lords Juan Gómez and Juan Palacios, who went on the hunt with a contingent of twenty armed men. After defeating first these and then a second expedition of Spaniards in 1605, Biohó and his followers established the La Matuna palenque, naming Benkos “King of La Matuna”. Faced with the successive failures of the conquistadors to defeat the Palenqueros by force, a peace pact was signed in 1613, although the Spaniards betrayed their word, kidnapped the leader in 1619 and summarily executed him two years later. For his leadership and organization within the palenque, the configuration of successful forms of military resistance and for laying the foundations for political negotiation with the colonial administration, Benkos Biohó became a symbol of the struggle for the liberation and resistance of the kingdom of Granada’s maroon slaves.

Around 1633, three palenques were known in the Sierras de María: El Limón, Polín and Sanaguare. The Spaniards attacked El Limón and defeated the maroons, but most fled to the eastern bank of the Magdalena River, where they settled until 1655, when after a Spanish siege and territorial conflicts with members of the Chimila people they migrated to the western bank of the river; on their return to the Montes de María region they found some old palenques and established others. During the last quarter of the XVII century, the Montes de María palenques formed a federation and had 600 settlers whose leader was the maroon Domingo Criollo. In 1694 a Spanish attack forced them to disperse, after which they regrouped in the San Miguel Arcángel palenque, later renamed Palenque de San Basilio. The successive decades of insubordination and combat against the colonial authorities -whose persecutions, raids and attempts to quell the rebellions failed consecutively- together with the pressure of the governors of Cartagena forced the Crown to sign a Royal Decree in 1691 that granted freedom to the inhabitants of Palenque de San Basilio. In 1714 the settlement was legalized by the Spanish and took the present name of San Basilio de Palenque. Thus, more than a century before Colombia declared its independence and one hundred years before the beginning of the slave revolution in Haiti, the Palenque community of San Basilio became the first free town in the Americas.

San Basilio de Palenque is today a corregimiento of Mahates municipality, in Bolívar department (Colombia). Its community preserves an ethnic consciousness linked to the history of maroon emancipation that allows it to understand itself as a specific people, and which has led to institutional actions of affirmation and vindication as such. The Palenquero community began to organize in this sense between the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, both in the town and among the Palenquero diaspora, which together total around 30,000 people. Their efforts, especially of the young people of that time, converged in community work with the intention of recovering and consolidating the cultural heritage and preserving the integrity as a differentiated ethnic collectivity through the promotion of a different reading of history with respect to the institutionally established one, the valuation of their own traditions and customs, the defense of the language, traditional medicine and economic forms, rituals and the Palenquero funeral. This group of young people created the Cultural Association of San Basilio de Palenque with the purpose of recovering and strengthening Palenquero culture through periodic cultural events in the community such as Palenquero language, hairstyle and storytelling contests, among others.

In the same way, a process of political organization began in San Basilio de Palenque known today as Proceso De Comunidades Negras (PCN) with the purpose of vindicating the ethnic rights of Afro-descendants. As a result of this work, in 1998 a project was developed to include the subjects of Palenquero language, Afro-American history and Palenquero culture in educational establishments, a proposal known as the Ethno-education Program. These processes had already been strengthened with the enactment of 1993’s Law 70 (law recognizing the rights of black communities as an ethnic group), whose principles include the recognition and protection of ethnic and cultural diversity, the right to equality of all cultures that make up Colombian nationality, and respect for the integrity and dignity of black communities’ cultural life. This legal tool strengthened the cultural recovery work being carried out in Palenque, consolidating the levels of organization acquired to date, solidifying the ethnic and cultural identity and giving impetus to community cultural management. The presentation in 2001 of the Ordinance in the Department of Bolívar by which Palenque was accepted as an ethno-cultural territory was another important moment in the definition of a cultural safeguard plan promoted by the community.

On November 25, 2005, in its third proclamation, UNESCO declared by resolution the Cultural Space of San Basilio de Palenque a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, and in 2008 inscribed it on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The nomination process began in 2003 as a natural continuation of Palenquero efforts, especially by its youth, to recognize and strengthen their traditions. With the support of the Ministry of Culture and the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History (ICANH), a catalog of San Basilio de Palenque’s cultural practices was made possible. As a further result of this work, a Special Safeguarding Plan was presented in 2009, whose fundamental axes are the transmission of knowledge; identity, memory and territory; development, culture and autonomy; and dissemination and appropriation of Palenque’s intangible heritage.

The cultural space of the Palenque de San Basilio presents an intangible cultural heritage of great value as a unique testimony of a tradition linked to the maroon struggles for emancipation. Among its expressions are Palenquero, the only Creole language with a Spanish lexical base and grammar based on Bantu languages in the entire American continent; a sui generis social organization based on the ma-kuagro, age groups through whose membership acts as the framework for rights and duties of a specific individual in the Palenquero culture, through which community interest’s issues such as work routines, housing locations, births, marriages and deaths are processed, and where values such as honesty, solidarity and collectivity are perpetuated; and complex funeral rituals such as the lumbalú, consisting of songs and dances for the ritualization of melancholy and grief in the process of accompanying the mourning, with the involvement of all the inhabitants of the village and a duration of nine days and nine consecutive nights. In addition, there are traditional medical practices based on the knowledge of the natural environment for medicinal purposes, a unique cosmovision about the body and individual and collective behavior, and a body of ancestral knowledge that combines African legacy with Hispanic and indigenous traditions for the treatment of diseases. Finally, musical expressions such as the bullerengue sentado, the son palenquero, the chalusonga and the champeta criolla, involving particular instruments such as the marimbula and the guaracha and drums such as the pechiche and the timba, are also considered of great value.

Due to all of the above, the Palenque de San Basilio’s cultural space exerts a strong influence on the entire Colombian-Caribbean region and symbolizes the Afro-Colombian communities’ struggle for the abolition of slavery, ethnic vindication, coexistence and recognition of cultural diversity. Despite the importance and uniqueness of this heritage, phenomena such as racial discrimination, acculturation, forced migration and the lack of cultural transmission plans have affected the use of language continuity and the community’s own ritual, social and musical expressions to the detriment of the social and cultural stability of the community, reinforcing the importance of heritage safeguard plans.