The Study of Racialism

anonymouse · Wizard Joined: 09 Oct 2007 {Posts: 602 }

San Basilio de Palenque Journal
A Language, Not Quite Spanish, With African Echoes

A dance troupe performed at an annual drum festival in San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia. The villagers speak what is thought to be the only Spanish-based Creole language in Latin America.

SAN BASILIO DE PALENQUE, Colombia — The residents of this village, founded centuries ago by runaway slaves in the jungle of northern Colombia, eke out their survival from plots of manioc. Pigs wander through dirt roads. The occasional soldier on patrol peeks into houses made of straw, mud and cow dung.

A Language With African Echoes

A student wrote an assignment on the board during a language class. The classes are part of an effort to preserve the unique local language, called Palenquero.

San Basilio de Palenque was founded by runaway slaves.

On the surface it resembles any other impoverished Colombian village. But when adults here speak with one another, their language draws inspiration from as far away as the Congo River Basin in Africa. This peculiar speech has astonished linguists since they began studying it several decades ago.

The language is known up and down Colombia’s Caribbean coast as Palenquero and here simply as “lengua” — tongue. Theories about its origins vary, but one thing is certain: it survived for centuries in this small community, which is now struggling to keep it from perishing.

Today, fewer than half of the community’s 3,000 residents actively speak Palenquero, though many children and young adults can understand it and pronounce some phrases.

“Palenge a senda tielan ngombe ri nduse i betuaya,” Sebastián Salgado, 37, a teacher at the public school here, said before a classroom of teenage students on a recent Tuesday morning. (The sentence roughly translates as, “Palenque is the land of cattle, sweets and basic staples.”)

Palenquero is thought to be the only Spanish-based Creole language in Latin America. But its grammar is so different that Spanish speakers can understand almost nothing of it. Its closest relative may be Papiamento, spoken on the Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao, which draws largely from Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch, linguists say. It is spoken only in this village and a handful of neighborhoods in cities where workers have migrated.

The survival of Palenquero points to the extraordinary resilience of San Basilio de Palenque, part of whose very name — Palenque — is the Spanish word for a fortified village of runaway slaves. Different from dozens of other palenques that were vanquished, this community has successfully fended off threats to its existence to this day.

Colonial references to its origins are scarce, but historians say that San Basilio de Palenque was probably settled sometime after revolts led by Benkos Biohó, a 17th-century African resistance leader who organized guerrilla attacks on the nearby port of Cartagena with fighters armed with stolen blunderbusses.

And while English-, French- and Dutch-based Creole languages are found in the Caribbean, the survival of one in the interior of Colombia has led some scholars to theorize that Palenquero may be the last remnant of a Spanish-based lingua franca once used widely by slaves throughout Latin America.

Palenquero was strongly influenced by the Kikongo language of Congo and Angola, and by Portuguese, the language of traders who brought African slaves to Cartagena in the 17th century. Kikongo-derived words like ngombe (cattle) and ngubá (peanut) remain in use here today.

Advocates for keeping Palenquero alive face an uphill struggle. The isolation that once shielded the language from the outside world has come to an end. Once three days by mule to the coast, the journey to Cartagena now takes two hours by bus on a bumpy dirt road.

Electricity arrived in the 1970s as a government gift in recognition of Antonio Cervantes, better known as Kid Pambelé, a Colombian world boxing titleholder who was born here. With electricity came radio and television. The schoolhouse, named in honor of Biohó, has an Internet connection now.

But Palenqueros, as the community’s residents call themselves, say the biggest threat to their language’s survival comes from direct contact with outsiders. Many here have had to venture to nearby banana plantations or cities for work, and then found themselves ostracized because of the way they spoke.

“We were subject to scorn because of our tongue,” said Concepción Hernández Navarro, 72, who survives by farming yams, peanuts and corn.

Only two of Ms. Hernández’s eight children live here; five are in Cartagena and one moved as far away as Caracas, drawn by Venezuela’s oil boom. “We have always been poor here,” she said in an interview in front of her modest house, “but our poverty has grown worse.”

If there is one blessing to this impoverishment, it may be that Colombia’s long internal war has largely been fought over spoils in other places, allowing teachers here to toil uninterrupted at reviving Palenquero since classes were introduced in the late 1980s.

Undaunted by the prospect of Palenquero’s disappearing after centuries of use, Rutsely Simarra Obeso, a linguist who was born here and lives in Cartagena, is compiling a lexicon. Others are assembling a dictionary of Palenquero to be used in the school.

The defenders of Palenquero view their struggle as a continuation of other battles. “Our ancestors survived capture in Africa, the passage by ship to Cartagena and were strong enough to escape and live on their own for centuries,” said Mr. Salgado, the schoolteacher.

“We are the strongest of the strongest,” he continued. “No matter what happens, our language will live on within us.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/world/americas/18colombia.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

MisterLawyer · Posted: Fri 19 Oct 2007 02:47 Post subject:

Palenque video, you can hear palenquero and they talk to Mr. Salgado from the article.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgzOlTAze3Q

Sankofa · Posted: Fri 19 Oct 2007 13:59 Post subject:

Great story! Thanks for sharing, anonymouse. I have never heard of these people before you presented this link. Thanks again.

MisterLawyer

Thanks for providing the video link! You can actually hear the fusion of Spanish and West African linguas in their speech patterns. Incredible. Thanks again.

anonymouse · Wizard Joined: 09 Oct 2007 {Posts: 602 }

An ex from Colombia told me about them but if I recall she said the language was also used in rural parts of the state of Chocó. Additionally her mother is an anthropologist who spent considerable time in the black and indigenous areas of Colombia and I talked to her as well. It was quite a learning experience for me.

G-Man · Moderator Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 2590 }

Aren't a good number of Colombia's salsa musicians from this area and the Caribbean coast?

MisterLawyer · Posted: Mon 22 Oct 2007 14:35 Post subject:

One that comes to mind is Joe Arroyo, from barranquilla, more or less in that area. One of his most famous songs is "la rebelion" recounting the start of a slave rebellion in the 1600's. However many, including grupo niche and grupo guayacan are centered in down in Cali.

Edit: Joe Arroyo originally from Cartagena, moved to Barranquilla at age 14.

G-Man · Moderator Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 2590 }

Thanks...I knew of Joe Arroyo, but I thought Niche and Guayacan's membership was primarily from the Choco. I guess I based this conclusion on the appearance of many of their members.

G-Man · Moderator Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 2590 }

MisterLawyer · Posted: Mon 22 Oct 2007 19:25 Post subject:

punjabtrini · Mentor Joined: 04 Sep 2007 {Posts: 253 } Location: USA

One of my favourite songs by Joe Arroyo!

BillyMadison79 · Experienced User Joined: 01 Mar 2007 {Posts: 133 }

From those pictures as well as images that I have seen on tv from the Black communites in Colombia, they mostly seem to be very dark with heavy SSA features and are not very mixed looking on average. Maybe it's because their community is isolated from the rest of the nation and miscegnation between the Africans and the Iberians/Amerindians weren't as strong as it was in other Latin American nations. Phenotype wise they look like one of the more unmixed looking Black communites of the New World.

These Colombian kids in the pic look they would look right at home in Haiti for example, that's how unmixed looking their phenotype is.

fwsweet · Posted: Sun 30 Dec 2007 11:13 Post subject:

BillyMadison79 · Experienced User Joined: 01 Mar 2007 {Posts: 133 }

I heard about the Gullah and how their European admixture is extremely miniscle and in some cases non existant since they weren't big on racial miscegnation.

fwsweet · Posted: Sun 30 Dec 2007 16:10 Post subject: