Afro-Bolivians

[Moorbey]

Afro-Bolivians
A forgotten people in South Americas poorest country


Story and by Yasmin Khan

Twenty minutes up a jarring, narrow strip of dirt road
slicing though rainy-season mountain jungle grasses,
Giovanna Zabala hacks through tough sugar cane hide
with a wood-handled knife. She sits outside the
30-family community of Tocaña in the shade of her
“woman-made” lean-to—four branches supporting a rusted
corrugated roof perched between the dusty yellow road
and the drop off of a steep hill—waiting for a thirsty
customer to buy her sweet cane juice. The heavy smell
of wet grass and smoke from burning Bolivian
rainforest smothers the lean-to like a blanket. The
rasping of overheated crickets competes with the
sounds of Perey and Carlos, both five years old,
playing in the dust and sun. The boys periodically
stop to rake their nails over their arms and legs
covered in tiny bumps and itchy bug bites. Perey’s
right ear is bleeding from bug bites in two places and
there are open sores on his closely shaven head. His
oversized, once-white T-shirt hangs off his thin,
coffee-colored shoulders.

“There is a lot of racism here. I want people to see
my children as any other person, not as some strange
insect,” says the 26-year-old coca farmer, who was
trying her hand at selling cane juice for the first
time. “City people don’t know we exist.”

Giovanna is one of approximately 3,000 to 10,000
African descends living in Bolivia. The rough
population estimate is just one of the problems
plaguing Bolivia’s least recognized and most
discriminated- against ethnic group, one of 36
different ethnicities in South America’s poorest
country. Afro-Bolivian leaders are working to change
the dire situation of their people, who say their
communities sorely lack schools, health care,
infrastructure, and basic services such as electricity
and water.

Jorge Medina, director of the Afro-Bolivian Center for
Community and Development (CADIC in Spanish), in La
Paz, says lobbying for Afro-Bolivian rights to be
included in the country’s new constitution is an
uphill battle.

“The new (Morales) government was supposed to
represent all the communities that didn’t have a
voice. But it wasn’t that way for the Afro-Bolivians,”
says Medina, thumping his fist on his desk and leaning
forward in his chair. “For this government, Bolivia is
indigenous. They don’t recognize us because we came
here as slaves. But we worked day and night and now we
have an article in the new constitution that
recognizes us as an ethnicity of Bolivia.”

Medina’s 12th floor office window looks over the city
center and out onto the Andes Mountains that separate
chilly La Paz from the sub-tropical Yungas where most
Afro-Bolivians live. Posters of Che Guevara, Bob
Marley and King Pinedo—the Afro-Bolivian farmer-king
who lives in the Yungas—cover the walls. His two
teenage nephews, hip-hop rappers dressed in white and
green track suits, sit across from Medina and nod
emphatically at everything he says.

“People think that because we were bought here as
slaves from Africa, that we are not Bolivian,” Medina
says. “But we’ve been here 10 generations.”

Tens of thousands of African slaves were brought to
work in the silver mines of the southern city of
Potosi in the 16th century—one of the world’s richest
cities at the time. Many slaves died because of the
high altitude, bitter cold and brutal treatment. When
Spanish slave traders realized they were losing money
on their dying workers, they sold the slaves to
hacienda owners in the warmer, lower regions of the
Yungas. Roughly 17,000 Africans were sent to the
Yungas where they worked as indentured servants as
domestic help or in the coca fields, until the
Agrarian Reform in 1953.

The reform took the huge plots of land from the
Spanish haciendas and divided it among the poor,
mostly Afro-Bolivian workers. Since then,
Afro-Bolivian communities have been largely ignored by
the government.

Medina says he most pressing concerns for
Afro-Bolivians are the lack of education and health
care. Most young people leave the rural villages to
find work in large cities like La Paz and tropical
Santa Cruz. Most Afro-Bolivian communities have
schools, but no teachers or health posts but no nurses
or doctors.

“Our communities get teachers that are interns from
the high plains. They know nothing of our culture.
These are people who barely finished high school,”
Medina says. “We have bright students, but how are
they going to compete for jobs without an education?”

Parents in Afro-Bolivian communities say without trade
schools where students can learn skills to help their
communities, such as nursing and tourism, their
situation will never improve.

Lack of health care in impoverished Yungas communities
leave both indigenous and Afro-Bolivian poor
susceptible to diseases like tuberculosis, which
affect about 180 out of 100,000 Bolivians countrywide,
but hit people in the Yungas at the rate of 500 per
100,000 people. Afro-Bolivians are particularly
susceptible to Leishmaniasis, a deforming and
potentially fatal disease spread by insect bites.
Tocaña recently suffered a deadly wave of Hepatitis B,
prompting USAID to provide vaccinations and a
newly-built health post to the community.

“Children die of diarrhea. Many women die in
childbirth. Some communities have a health center
built by the government but there are no doctors, no
medicine,” Medina says. “It’s like having a car, but
no money for tires or gas. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“We are all of the Saya”

Martina Barra, a Saya dancer and activist for the
Afro-Bolivian people of the community of Chicaloma,
says that besides health care, education and
infrastructure, Afro-Bolivians need to preserve and
promote their culture, something that will eventually
bring recognition and money into Afro communities. The
Saya, Afro-Bolivian’ s signature drum music and dance,
is gaining popularity around the country.

“The Saya…we carry it in our blood. They can’t take
it away from us,” she says, sitting in the shade
outside her house. “I am proud to sing the Saya. I
know our brothers and sisters are proud to breathe
this music.”

Both children and adults dance the Saya, dressed in a
combination of Aymara and African clothes and using
only their voices and wood drums. Accompanied by
homemade drums, women spin in their white Aymara-style
skirts and petticoats. With a pastel blue shawl folded
over their right arm and a black bowler hat in the
other hand, the dancers sing about bringing their
African roots and rhythms to Bolivia.

Barra wants to translate the Saya lyrics into an
African language, saying that it was originally
African but her ancestors were forced to sing it in
Spanish. She and her neighbors want their children—and
all children in Bolivia ideally—to learn the history
of Afro-Bolivians. “It would be nice to work with an
African-American from the United States. We want to
hear how they fought for equality in the states. We
want to learn how to do that too.”

[BlkSpartacus]

Originally Posted by bigdaddiej

Afro-Bolivians
A forgotten people in South Americas poorest country


.

Barra wants to translate the Saya lyrics into an
African language, saying that it was originally
African but her ancestors were forced to sing it in
Spanish. She and her neighbors want their children—and
all children in Bolivia ideally—to learn the history
of Afro-Bolivians. “It would be nice to work with an
African-American from the United States. We want to
hear how they fought for equality in the states. We
want to learn how to do that too.”

The last two sentences really hit hard. It goes to show the impact that we over here represent to others throughout the world.