ABSTRACT
In this text, Juan García Salazar and Catherine Walsh draw from and extend portions of their conversations begun a number of years ago about the sowing and re-sowing of knowledge and life in the communities of the Colombo-Ecuadorian region-territory of the AfroPacific. The conversation invokes and thinks with a third voice, that of Grandfather Zenón, considered the Grandfather of all those beings who reside in this territory. It is Zenón’s voice that expresses and brings to life the words, teachings, and collective memory of the elders past and present, and, in so doing, continues the ancestral plantings, giving meaning and force to the collective philosophies, knowledges, and memory that persist, resist, and re-exist in the AfroPacific and beyond in these present times.
RESUMO
Neste texto, Juan García Salazar e Catherine Walsh retornam e ampliam partes da convers iniciadoa há vários anhos atrás sobre semeaduras e re-semeaduras de conhecimento e vida nas comunidades do Afropacifico Colombiano-Equatoriano. A convers invoca e pensa com uma terceira voz o Vovô Zenón, considerado o vovô de todos os seres que residem neste território. É a voz do Zenón aquelea que expressa e dá vida às palavras, ensinamentos e memória coletiva dos mais velhos do passado e do presente. Ao fazê-lo, dá continuidade às semeaduras ancestrais, dando sentido e força às filosofias, conhecimento e memórias coletivas que persistem, resistem e reexistem no AfroPacífico e ainda mais nos tempos atuais.
RESUMEN
En este texto, Juan García Salazar y Catherine Walsh retoman y amplían partes de su conversación iniciada hace varios años atrás sobre la siembra y re-siembra de saberes y vida en las comunidades de la región-territorio colombo-ecuatoriana del Afropacífico. La conversación invoca y piensa con una tercera voz, la del Abuelo Zenón, considerado el abuelo de todos los seres que residen en este territorio. Es la voz de Zenón la que expresa y da vida a las palabras, enseñanzas y memoria colectiva de los y las mayores del pasado y del presente y, al hacerlo, continúa las siembras ancestrales, dando sentido y fuerza a las filosofías, saberes y memorias colectivas que persisten, resisten y re-existen en el AfroPacífico y más allá en estos tiempos actuales.
The elders are our witnesses
and from their word we have much to learn.
Abuelo Zenón (in García Salazar Citation2010, 15)
This text affords reflections on this continuity and relation. Written in two voices with the use of italics and non-italics to differentiate each,Footnote2 the text draws from, extends, and translates portions of our conversation begun a number of years ago about the sowing and re-sowing of knowledge and life in the communities of the Colombo-Ecuadorian region-territory of the AfroPacific (see García Salazar and Walsh Citation2017a). The conversation invokes and thinks with a third voice, that of Grandfather Zenón, considered the Grandfather of all those who reside in this territory. It is Zenón’s voice that expresses and brings to life the words, teachings, and collective memory of the elders past and present, and, in so doing, continues the ancestral plantings.Footnote3
Collective memory here is not an ephemeral account of the past, but an enduring register and construct that signifies, nourishes, builds, and sustains belonging, existence, and continuance as present with past (Walsh and Salazar Citation2015, 255). Collective memory is, in essence, collectivized knowledge, a knowledge that, as we discuss here, has lived roots in the territory-region of the AfroPacific, the land, “where we were brought against our will, by the ambition of others. But it is also the new land,” says Grandfather Zenón, “the land where we anchored our love for the motherland that remained on the other side of the sea, these hundreds of years before the birth of states, states that now order us to be what we never wanted to be” (in García Salazar and Walsh Citation2017b, 33). Today, this is a land where the pain of deterritorialization reigns; a deterritorialization that for Afrodescendant peoples of this region means the destruction of the ancestral intertwine of knowledge, land, and life.Footnote4
In 2018, researchers Michel Lapierre Robles and Aguasantas Macías Marín described the then-state of violence in this region, and specifically in the ancestral lands of the north of Esmeraldas (Ecuador),Footnote5 as the accumulation of the criminal extractive invasion of the last 50 years (timber, palm, and gold).
Illegality, threats and death are common practices for the irrational exploitation of natural resources and the expansion of the illegal economy. The environmental and humanitarian catastrophe encompasses the destruction of 60% of the forest cover, the voracious advance of large palm oil companies, the illegal trafficking of more than 40% of Afrodescendant ancestral lands, the consumption of water contaminated with pesticides and heavy metals for more than ten years and extreme poverty that affects 90% of the population. A perfect example of how the profuse and consented abandonment of the State, unbridled capitalism, crime, historical racism and the disinterest of society, aggravate the living conditions of indigenous and Afrodescendant communities. (Lapierre Robles and Marín Citation2018)Footnote6
1. On planting in and from ancestral territories
When we talk about planting, we are basically talking about the world of communities and ancestral territories; that is, of the traditions of the people of African origin who live in the ancestral territories. The concept of planting or sowing within this world of territory is vital. To live in the territory, you have to sow, you have to make Mother Earth produce in order to live. In essence, this is the same concept that is used to refer to cultural sowings.
To speak of cultural sowing is to speak of cultivating, of producing, of perpetuating the cultural seeds that the elders sowed and that endure to this day. This seed was so strong that the ancestral sowings of magical beings who govern the life and order of communities in this region, including the Tunda, the Bambero, the Riviel, and the Gualgura, still survive. The elders say that these magical beings were planted there in the territory, on what we refer to as “Mother Mountain,” so as to assure our cultural continuance; to order us to be who we are, what we were before, and what we are now.
Some argue that these figures are fictional, part of myth and folklore. However, our understanding is distinct. It is grounded in an ancestral philosophy of relational existence that is passed from one generation to the next; a philosophy-as-knowledge in which existence, in both a cultural and collective sense, is dependent on the co-relation of humans and non-humans, of tangible, intangible, and “magical” forces. The Tunda, the Bambero, the Riviel, and the Gualgura are, in this sense, beings that exist. Moreover, they have key pedagogical roles in maintaining collective well-being, balance in the rational use of natural resources, and knowledges of and for life. Their “magical” character is part of their personage; they appear and disappear as the conditions and contexts require and in accordance with Mother Mountain’s dictates and wishes.
The Bambero, for example, is master and lord of the mountains, one of Mother Mountain’s main sons. He is the child of the first plantings, ancestral caretaker of the life of the mountain and of the animals’ collective well-being. His task is to assure that Mother Mountain’s resources are distributed with justice and equity, and to punish those who take more than they need.
There are many stories about the Bambero, all with pedagogical and knowledge-based teachings. One was told to me by Lorenzo, an elder from the north of Esmeraldas who everyone calls María. “One day I went to ‘montear’ (hunt) and spent almost the whole day walking through the mountains looking for an animal for my food,” said Lorenzo, “but I did not find anything. When I was about to return home, I heard some moans in the matapalo brambles, it was as if someone was asking for help. I walked slowly towards the brambles and when I looked inside, I saw that a bear had grabbed a baby guatin (a large rodent) and was hitting it. When I saw this I didn't like it because the bear was bigger; around here we all know that the bear is an animal that has more strength than a guatin,” Lorenzo exclaimed.
“Since I had the shotgun in my hand, I thought about killing the bear, but I remembered that the bear is an animal that nobody around here eats, so I looked for a large stick and hit it. When the bear felt the blow, he let go of the guatin and ran away. When the guatin was free he jumped over the brambles and went into the bush. After the guatin left, I began to think that I could have killed it, because the meat of this animal is good food. But I began to think: that if one liberates another from an injustice, taking its life is a much greater injustice.”
Because Lorenzo hadn’t been able to hunt anything, he couldn’t stop thinking about the guatin. He continued walking and when he was near his house, he told me he heard a guatin’s cry coming from the mountains. “It had the voice of a boy and it seemed to be saying: ‘Bye-bye Ma'ia. Bye-bye Ma'ia. Bye-bye Ma'ia.’”Footnote7
“That afternoon I arrived home without bushmeat to eat,” Lorenzo said, “but when I was in the river getting the smell of the mountain off me, it seemed to me that on the other side of the river, in the middle of the mountain, a hoarse male voice was saying: ‘Well-done Ma’ ia. Well-done Ma'ia. Well-done ma'ia.’ Then I remembered the Bambero who, according to our tradition, is in charge of caring for the animals of the mountain, forest, and bush. I think the Bambero wanted to make me his assistant, but I cannot fulfill this task because I live in the bush and eat what it gives, that is why every week I have to kill an animal to feed myself and my family.”
The Tunda is another of these magical beings. She is Mother Mountain’s eldest daughter and part of the ancient plantings still present in the ancestral communities of the territory-region. She is known as the woman of a thousand faces and affections, eternally in love with life and owner of eternal youth. She lives near small rivers or estuaries where, according to tradition, she finds elements she needs to feed the people she casts spells on and temporarily loves. To cast a spell on a hunter, she takes on the figure of an animal, to cast a spell on a boy or a girl she appears as a known person, an uncle, aunt, brother, or sister.
The Riviel is another of Mother Mountain’s many children. He is a personage of the waters, traveling the river mouths and the beaches of the sea. The Riviel does not bother anyone, many people have seen it, especially the fishermen. He always travels in a piece of a canoe that some human discarded.
The Gualgura is also part of the ancient planting. Tradition says that the Gualgura is a “bad vision.” It appears as a newly hatched chick that walks alone through the bush calling out “pio pio.” If someone picks up the Gualgura, it gets big and bigger until it exceeds the size of the person who picks it up. The Gualgura can kill people. In fact, every human being who has the use of reason knows and should know that a chick cannot walk in the bush or mountain; this is not a space for a newly born, meek, and domestic animal to live in. The human needs to know that when he or she walks through the bush and comes upon beings that do not belong to that space, these beings are “things” that are not of this world. When this happens one invokes the power of the divine and continues on his or her way. That is why the elders left, sowed, and cultivated knowledges of the sacred or divine, and that is why tradition says that the divine is scapular, a medallion. All intangible beings, those who by their nature cannot be seen, live in this world together with humans, each one in their own place. When the human forgets the presence of these other beings, they reclaim their space in the visible world so that the human can see them and be reminded that the world of the territories does not belong only to humans.
Of course we can ask how such a life philosophy and world view challenge the very bases of modern Western thought and its precepts and practices of science and technology. The science at work here is distinct. It is grounded in the vital balance – rather than the exploitation – of Nature.
The plantings and the cultural seeds are something increasingly forgotten. Perhaps this is because of the devaluation and contempt that our people experience, the result of learning in someone else’s world. The perception is that we are gatherers and not sowers. Going back to the plantings is important, then, not only to strengthen ourselves as a people of African origin, but also to recognize and understand why territory has been and continues to be a vital space, a space where acts of resistance and ancestral tradition, as well as knowledge, existence, and life are sown. As Grandfather Zenón reminds us, “using the gifts that Mother Mountain offers one relearns and puts in practice the knowledges, including the curative knowledges, that were saved in collective memory.” During the COVID pandemic, these knowledges and ancestral plantings saved many lives.
Tradition orders us to sow, to feed the body and to feed the head. From the vision of African origin communities in the north of Esmeraldas, the body is this part of matter very close to Nature, very close to Mother Mountain or Mother Earth. According to the elders, the body has to be returned one day to Mother Earth because that is from where it came and from where it was fed. The concept of body, to understand it in a simple way, is linked to the earth, and is fed by Mother Earth, by her resources and what she produces. That is why the food that comes from the land has to be shared and used in a caring, respectful, solidarity-based, and relational way. There is a whole world in that of feeding the body, a world of knowledges generated from the individual and shared use of Mother Mountain’s gifts, what we African origin peoples understand as to be collectively well; collective well-being.
The knowledges of the head, on the other hand, are sown to facilitate the life of the body; they are knowledges that are inherited and only those who deserve them inherit them.
Our world of knowledges is always divided into two different but complementary worlds: the divine and the human. The knowledge of the body remains in this space of the human. Conversely, those of the head belong to the world of the divine; that is where the knowledges of the divine are kept. The heart also has a lot to do with this world of the divine, but it is with its outward manifestations and expressions. The human who has a good heart does not learn bad things because his or her heart does not permit it. The head feeds more on things inside; it is what can be understood as the “secretive world” that includes prayers and knowledges to heal the soul. The knowledges that heal the body are also secretive; they are kept in the head. The head is a more closed world. What is kept in the head is to protect the body, to protect the heart. The knowledges of the head belong to the individual who seeks and cultivates them; many are transmitted from one generation to another through a cultural pedagogy of sorts that has many secretive rules or laws. The heart belongs to this part of the world that expresses itself outwards, in sharing, in singing, in dancing, in music, in celebration. This is how I have learned from the words of the elders.
When Grandfather Zenón, grandfather of all the women and all the men of African origin born in the great territory-region of the Pacific, talks about sowing, he relates it to the historical struggle of becoming people again after the dehumanization of enslavement and the practices and policies of negation and exclusion that continued with the Republics and then with the state. In many ways, he recalls Fanon (Citation1967) or, maybe, it is Fanon who recalls Zenón. As the latter argues and affirms: “The cultural sowing of the territory allowed us to be again, in the same territorial spaces where we had not been; where we were not.” The seeds sown in this sense were – and still are – seeds of life. They are seeds that have germinated and grown, taking root and bearing vital fruits, fruits that continue to feed the bodies, hearts, and heads of those who live in the ancestral territory; fruits that continue to sustain, feed, generate, and bear both knowledge and (re)existence.
When Grandfather Zenón says that cultural sowing “allowed us to be in the spaces of the territory where we had not been,” he brings forth several pieces of history. For example, during slavery we were not because we had no roots in this land. The plantation and hacienda belonged to the master and its laws were governed by the master, the royal mines belonged to the master or owner, and this master or owner established the laws of being and life. African origin women and men could not “be” in that territory; it was a bare territory without roots, a territory ruled by the other, empty of our heritage, of our being.
But at some point the elders began to sow, to plant magical beings, to plant our stories and philosophies, to plant readings and laws on the use of the waters, land, and gold. They also began to sow new forms of life on the hills, in the mountains, in the trees. It is in this context that the words of Grandfather Zenón have a vital meaning: “sowing is how we return to be where we were not.” One of the most productive and long-range plantings that the elders did, says Abuelo Zenón, “were those of cultural doing and cultural knowledge, the seeds of which the ancestors brought in the ‘zumbos’ [the inside part] of their heads” (in García and Walsh Citation2017a, 81). I don’t know when all this planting began, perhaps, the first enslaved that arrived sowed the magical beings and when newly enslaved peoples arrived they found the seeds had already been sown and their task was to cultivate them. As such, we can paraphrase Zenón’s words by saying: “only by planting in the territories, can we return to being where we had not been.” That is to say, only by sowing in the territories can we once again encounter our history, our knowledges, ourselves, and the beings and elements that affirm life.
I think that is what Abuelo Zenón means when he says that “the acts of resistance of the elders are not dead weight.” Anyone can unearth acts of resistance and use them as tools in the now, but that act of resistance has to be born in the memory of the one who unearths it. The value of the seed has to be recovered by the memory of the one who manages to recover that seed. It is a memory that will have a long life because it can be used at any time. And there is Grandfather Zenón, gathering the memory, compiling it, putting it together, offering and using it as the collective memory of all. This is the value of the seed and of sowing, a value that renews its validity in the efforts of individuals to recover the seed that the elders sowed.
Recovering the seed and sowing and re-sowing it are, in effect, processes that are pedagogical in nature. Our reference to pedagogy and the pedagogical here is not tied to the institution of formal education. Rather, we are thinking of processes, practices, and praxes rooted in the long trajectory of resistance, insurgency, and social, cultural, territorial, political, epistemic, and existential struggles to re-exist and live; that is, in the doing of planting, cultivating, harvesting, and re-sowing as pedagogies-methodologies of and for knowledge, existence, and life. In this sense, it seems in many ways the plantings are actions of self-reparation, self-affirmation in a collective and cultural sense.
Zenón confirms this when he says that “we understood that the other is not going to repair the damage of slavery, the damage it caused us as a people, in our memory, in our hearts, in our heads.” We knew and know that others weren’t – and aren’t – going to fix it; the people repaired – and continue to repair – themselves. The act and pedagogy of sowing have to do with self-reparation; of once again becoming where we had not been. Territory, in this sense, becomes a space for reparation, and the seeds are what will feed that reparation. As Abuelo Zenón says, “sowing the new land with the culture of origin helped us heal the pain caused by the loss of the motherland that remained on the other side of the sea.” Everything that is built in the territory, the philosophies and knowledges planted there, all this is reparation, self-reparation. We repair ourselves from our knowledges, our strength, and our rationality, becoming where we had not been.
The acts of planting and the actions of self-reparation and self-affirmation are, without a doubt, acts and actions of knowledge building; of learning to unlearn that which dominant society negates, espouses, and avows in order to relearn from and with the seeds that carry an otherwise of being-knowledge-life. This does not mean an idealistic or essentialist view of the past, nor does it suggest a simplistic recuperation of the past in the present. Instead, it is a recognition of the interweave of being-knowledge-life in constant construction and creation, in which ancestral plantings continue to offer sustenance, learnings, and relearnings of and for the present, particularly – but not only – for those who maintain the territorial relation. In this respect, can we not ask about the meaning and practice of knowledge planting today, especially when spaces of collective territory are disappearing?
Perhaps this is a stage of new plantings for this current generation. When one plants, one recuperates something so that it does not die, so that it remains. It seems that Abuelo Zenón refers to this when he says: “memory must be recovered so that memory is maintained, so that it does not die.” That is part of the sowing in spaces of ancestral territory and the new sowings in urban territories in current times as spaces of collective territory increasingly disappear.
As we well know, this disappearance is linked to the greed of capital which provokes deterritorialization, the plan and project that, in the words of Grandfather Zenón: “the palm growers, loggers and miners want to impose on our ancestral rights,” rights that, as we argue below, are part of the collective knowledge that precedes and supersedes the state. As Zenón affirms,
those of us who remain here in the communities are few. We stay because we don’t want to lose the right that the elders planted. We are the ones who, by the law of tradition, resist the power of money.
In fact, and as we have argued elsewhere (García Salazar and Walsh Citation2010), the province of EsmeraldasFootnote8 is one of the most affected by the aggressive penetration of national and transnational capital dedicated to logging, shrimp, mining, and African palm exploitation, by continuing and increasing violences linked to extractivism, narco-trafficking, and the multiple complicities of companies and organizations of different kinds and their allies, including the state. It was said more than a decade ago that much more than 50% of the ancestral territory of the communities of African origin settled in Esmeraldas had been lost, which implies thousands of hectares of territory dispossessed, thousands of beings and lives disinherited and driven out. Today the percentage is significantly higher, most likely closer to 75%.
“Deterritorialization” is the word that communities use to refer to this violent reality, the “bad living” that destroys and replaces collective well-being and affirmation in the face of negation. It expresses the clash of civilizational-cultural logics with relation to the very idea of territory and the collective memory and knowledge planted there, and of the logics and practice of extraction, environmental science, technology, and capitalist greed over territory-nature and as life.
If for the region’s African-origin communities territory is equal to life – that is, the relational coexistence of humans and Mother Mountain’s other beings – , for dominant society and state, territory signifies property.Footnote9 In the dominant capitalist-modern-colonial logic, territory is a space of individual possession and legal ownership in which “the owner” has the power and authority to use the land for his or her own benefit, to resignify as “resources” the gifts of Mother Mountain, and advance her exploitation. Moreover, “deterritorialization” embodies what the elders call “the new diaspora”; that is, the new dispersion of peoples of African descent, a diaspora that threatens to be the last one without return.
We refer to this new dispersion as deterritorialization because it is an action that, coming from external actors and from power, seeks to expel families from the territorial spaces where they have always lived. Deterritorialization is the opposite of territorialization, the sense of life that the ancestors planted and cultivated, a sense rooted in relationality and collective well-being realized on and in the spaces of territory. This sense and its actions served to anchor ancestral rights and to guarantee a dignified life. In fact, deterritorialization ignores what we refer to as cultural sowing; it is part of a great plan to dispel from the entire Pacific region the family trunks of African origin. Grandfather Zenón has told us about this plan: “Of all the pains that we have suffered on this long road of dispersion throughout the Americas, the most violent, the most painful, the saddest after slavery, is the denial of our right to be born, grow up, and die in the territories where the bodies, blood, and knowledges of the ancestors are sown.”
With deterritorialization, not only are the spaces to sow and cultivate food lost, but so too are the achievements of material culture for the sowing and harvesting of knowledges. Increasingly, histories, memories, and knowledges are deterritorialized. With the loss of ancestral territory, future generations lose a good part of the political project of their people, precisely because it is in the spaces of ancestral territories that the memory of the acts of resistance of these people are preserved, along with the memory of the processes of self-reparation that began with the sowing of the seed of the ancestral culture of the territory, what Grandfather Zenón calls “becoming where we were not.”
To continue the planting that the elders began is an ancestral mandate, a mandate that in these present times often requires other methods and pedagogies of sowing, as well as a recognition that the sowers and irrigators of ancestral seeds are increasingly fewer.
2. Relearning and re-sowing resistance and marronage
In essence, the challenge for African-descended peoples today is “to be” in new spaces where their being continues to be negated. But it also has to do with unlearning in order to relearn. In this, the elders offer many teachings. Among them, there are the teachings and lessons of resistance, including the resistance of “not learning” what the dominant society has tried to impose. Without a doubt, cultural sowings of collective memory and knowledge are key lessons, lessons from history itself if we understand that history begins with the moment in which the community is liberated.
For the elders, the story begins at the moment we begin to be people. This moment is full of acts of resistance but also, as we noted above, of self-reparation. As Grandfather Zenón reminds us: “The elders’ acts of resistance are not burdens or dead weight that must be carried simply for the sake of carrying, rather it is in these acts that we can find guides for what we have to do today. Resistance to what dominant society imposes is the only clear path that we, the excluded, can take in order not to lose the referents of our cultures of origin and to continue sowing life, better said, to continue being ourselves within a collective sense of belonging.”
Today’s generation has to rethink the histories and collective memories of resistance, to see them in the context of these times, to once again be disobedient. This is the generation that has more work to do with self-reparation.
The intertwining of resistance, collective memory, and history – more than anything the struggles for dignity and liberation – is not only in the voices of the elders. Today, and throughout the AfroPacific, this intertwine and these struggles take on new meanings and strength in the contemporary posturing of marronage, re-signified as an attitude and action of rebellion, resistance, insurgency, affirmation, creation, and construction. As Libia Grueso (Citation2006–Citation2007, 146) puts it, “marronage is a way of rethinking against the form of colonialism that is structured on the negation of the other – that is, slave” in which, in addition, “a sense of gender as an imposed category is also determined.” Similarly, Betty Ruth Lozano (Citation2014) makes clear that, since the time of enslavement, Black women have exercised a marronage of cultural resistance and an insurgency of cultural, ancestral, and spiritual knowledge as a life project. For Lozano, it is this legacy of marronage that continues to guide the agency of Black women in the Pacific and their positioning of a radically “other” feminism.
The growing reference and use of marronage (cimarronaje in Spanish) among Afrodescendant activists and intellectuals in the region reveal its understanding as an embodied posture and practice that disobeys the continued reign of coloniality and its axes of dehumanization, racialization, gendering, negation, and condemnation. Marronage affirms collective existence, collective memory, and collective knowledge while pointing out a radical decolonizing action, and a political project of existence, thought, knowledge, and life (León Citation2021).
To speak of “cimarron thought” is to underscore an essence, an attitude, and a collective consciousness of thinking aimed at reconstructing existence, freedom, and liberty in the present but in conversation with the ancestors. It denotes a politically and culturally subversive thinking (a thinking that in dialogue with Nelson Maldonado-Torres, has a de-colonial attitude) that confronts the dehumanization and nonexistence that coloniality has marked and, in doing so, works towards a decoloniality of knowledge, power, and being. (Walsh and León Citation2006, 218)Footnote10
The term cimarron or maroon as a being of resistance is vital; it makes present collective memory, legacies of thought and knowledge, and the continuous struggle of existence and liberation. But also, and at the same time, it awakens and stimulates collective consciousness about the reason of sowing and re-sowing in the now.
3. Final thoughts that keep the conversation and the sowing going
Faced with the present-day reality of the AfroPacific territory-region and the increasingly present deterritorialization, destruction, appropriation, extraction, and death of Mother Mountain’s gifts as well as her plantings of knowledges and beings, we seek ways to sow life. Certainly Grandfather Zenón’s pedagogy of the word – a pedagogy and teaching that knows no temporality – is a manifestation of this sowing.
The elders say that the word is the seed of all knowledge. Planting and cultivating cultural seeds and continuing the sowing is the best way to strengthen and support the new generations’ sense of collective belonging and knowing. The pedagogy of the word allows us to not only continue the in-house (casa adentro) sowing in Black communities, but also to sow out-of-house (casa afuera), including in academic spaces, making evident that communities have always had and continue to have a clear idea of their cultural values, and revealing how painful the relationship with others and others’ knowledge can be. Zenón's words return the word to the community, breaking the myth that our knowledge is not knowledge but simply folklore.
Today we are less and less maroons, we cultivate less the attitude of being disobedient, rebellious, and resistant to dominant society. Rather, we are increasingly entangled up in trying to reach and be part of the other’s knowledge, in seeking the other’s acceptance and qualification, the membership of recognition in the other’s knowledge. We talk with the other’s knowledge; even when we are talking about our own being, we like to use the words of the other, the “trusted” word, as if our words and knowledge do not matter.
So, as an exercise of self-reparation, some of us have assumed the generational task of being guardians of tradition and the word, of the knowledge and know-how of the elders; guardians of tradition and sowers of ancestral seeds. These guardians and sowers have the task of identifying the seeds of this knowledge, collecting them, preserving and taking care of them so that when the new generations look for these seeds they can find them. For this reason, we call ourselves guardians of the word, and also sowers of life and living.
Sowing life today is, without a doubt, an insurgent act, a pedagogical wager and commitment to resist and re-exist in the face of the dominant system and its projects of death. It is this system – at once racist, anthropocentric, heteropatriarchal, modern, colonial, and capitalist – that not only classifies and orders beings, knowledge and philosophies-practices of living, but also devastates and annihilates life itself.
For this reason, the sowing and re-sowing that we have discussed here have to do, first off, with the ancestral territories where communities of African origin have planted and cultivated Mother Mountain, her beings, knowledges, and traditions, all of which are understood as life. If the first seeds were the ones that “the ancestors brought in the zumbo of their heads,” as Abuelo Zenón says, and with their planting an ancestral right, what are we to do today, the guardians, sowers, and communities in order for these seeds to survive the violences of destruction, extraction, and deterritorialization, and the death of rivers, forests, and tangible and intangible beings? And, if the seeds are still there in some heads, how and where might they be re-seeded?
While ancestral plantings invoke ancestral territory, their importance extends beyond, including to the new urban “territories” where, increasingly, the majority of Afrodescendant peoples now live. In this context ruled by an individualist and consumerist ethos and the imaginary of an inclusion-based politics, the crucial questions are what and how to plant, why, and what for. And, how to ensure that the seeds do not undergo a radical modification, leaving them sterile for future generations?
As we have suggested here, ancestral plantings and pedagogies of sowing are intertwined with the struggles of existence and life. This is so for the peoples of the AfroPacific and, we suspect, also elsewhere. The pedagogies that we seek, imagine, construct, and employ are not reactive propositions, nor are they efforts to keep alive an idyllic past or a cultural essentialism. They are, rather, indispensable strategies, practices, and methodologies to plant, germinate, cultivate, and harvest life up against the projects of physical, cultural, spiritual, territorial, and ancestral death.
All of this related to the planting and cultural seeds is something that is less and less thought about today. Perhaps this is because of the devaluation and contempt that our people experience, the perception that we are gatherers and not sowers. Returning to the plantings is important, then, not only to strengthen ourselves as peoples of African origin, but also to recognize and understand why territory has been and continues to be a vital space, the space where much has been sown, including acts of resistance and ancestral tradition. As Abuelo Zenón says, “those of us who remain here in the communities are few. We stay because we don’t want to lose the right that the elders planted. We are the ones who, by the law of tradition, resist the power of money”.
That is, the power of capital. And it is this resistance and sowing that continue to support a vital pedagogy casa adentro, a pedagogical wager of and for life.
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Notes on contributors
Catherine E. Walsh
Catherine E. Walsh is an intellectual militant who, since 1999 and at Juan García’s request, has accompanied the community-based processes of Ecuador’s Black movement. She was senior professor and director of the Latin American Cultural Studies doctoral program at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar in Ecuador until December 2022 when she retired from the University; what she refers to as a political, ethical, and personal decision of “deinstitutionalization.”
Juan García Salazar
Juan García Salazar was a community-based historian and educator, known as the “guardian of tradition” and self-identified as “worker of the process.” On July 17, 2017, he passed to the other side, beginning the re-encounter with his ancestors.
Notes
2 As we have done in other co-conceived conversational texts, we choose to use a nonconventional writing style of italics and non-italics. The italicized represents the words of Juan García Salazar (translated into English by Walsh) and the non-italicized those of Walsh, other related references, and our shared thoughts in conversation. This style attempts to break the singularity and homogeneity of voice most often present in co-authored texts as well as the authoritative-interpretive stance frequently assumed when one individual writes about (rather than with) the thoughts and writing of another. In so doing, it raises important considerations about the logics, methodologies, and ethics of writing and, of course, collective work itself.
3 Abuelo or Grandfather Zenón, a central figure in and of the AfroPacific, was Juan García Salazar's maternal grandfather who many years ago passed to the other side. Since his passing, Zenón is recognized by the African origin communities of the territory-region of Esmeraldas as the grandfather and elder of all. While it is Juan García Salazar, community-named “guardian of tradition,” that most often puts to voice Abuelo Zenon’s wise words, these words and voice are understood as without individual owner; they are the words and collective voice of the ancestors and elders who speak in the present tense. In this sense, Zenon’s voice and words challenge academic research-based norms since they have no place and date of interview, or specific reference citation. All of Grandfather Zenón’s words included here are present in a number of García Salazar’s texts and in our shared published conversations in which Zenón is another interlocutor (see most especially García Salazar and Walsh Citation2017a, Citation2017b). Since the present article is based on the first (Citation2017a), we do not generally include here a publication reference for his quotes. In the few cases that his quoted words come from another source, the publication reference is so noted.
4 Such intertwine is certainly not limited to the Colombo-Ecuadorian AfroPacific region, but is present in other African diasporic territories where ancestrality continues to organize community and life. In South America, Brazil’s Quilombola communities are another example.
5 Afrodescendants make up 7% of Ecuador and 40% of the population that lives in conditions of poverty. The province of Esmeraldas is the province most impacted by poverty and discrimination (TRT Citation2019). Also see note 10 below.
6 The citation here is taken from the book’s webpage: https://edipuce.edu.ec/extractivismo-neo-colonialismo-y-crimen-organizado-en-el-norte-de-esmeraldas/. Translation by Walsh. Currently, in 2023, the situation of the region is remarkably worse. With the rapid rise in the presence of drug cartels, narco-criminal groups, and the ties of both with extractive invasion, the future of this ancestral territory and its peoples is in great danger. The reflections here, written and conceived in large part before Juan García Salazar's passing in 2017, do not take into account this current reality.
7 Ma´ia = María.
8 The province of Esmeraldas located in northwestern Ecuador has a population of approximately 416,272 inhabitants: 203,176 urban and 213,096 rural, a majority of African descent (51.2%). The Afrodescendant presence radically increases to more than 80% in the northern part of the province where life has historically circulated around the rivers and the sea, enabling a border dynamic with the region of Tumaco, Colombia, marked by strong family ties and the permanent exchange of both people and commerce (García Salazar and Walsh Citation2010, 345). According to the United Nations’ Council on Human Rights, 85% of the population of the Esmeraldas province lives below the poverty line, 23% has access only to the most basic services, and 15% of the population is illiterate. See TRT (Citation2019). https://www.trt.net.tr/espanol/vida-y-salud/2019/12/26/en-ecuador-los-afrodescendientes-representan-el-40-de-las-personas-que-viven-en-la-pobreza1329284#:~:text=El%20grupo%20resalt%C3%B3%20que%20las,educaci%C3%B3n%2C%20y%20al%20trabajo%20decente.
9 Relevant here is the reference to this territory, first by the colonists and later by the state, as “waste land,” a direct negation of the presence of African-origin communities and their practices of territory-life, begun generations before and after the configurations of states; in the words of Grandfather Zenón: “when the states were not.”
10 For a related discussion of decolonial and decolonizing practices of knowledge, memory, and existence in Ecuador, see Walsh and García Salazar (Citation2015).
References
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- García Salazar, Juan. 2010. Territorios, territorialidad y desterritorialización. Un ejercicio pedagógico para reflexionar sobre los territorios ancestrales. Esmeraldas: Altropico.
- García Salazar, Juan, and Catherine Walsh. 2010. “Derechos, territorial ancestral y el pueblo afroesmeraldeño.” In Estado constitucional de derechos? Informe sobre derechos humanos Ecuador 2009, edited by Programa Andino de Derechos Humanos, 345–360. Quito: Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar/Ediciones Abya-Yala.
- García Salazar, Juan, and Catherine Walsh. 2017a. “Sobre pedagogías y siembras ancestrales.” In Pedagogías decoloniales. Prácticas insurgentes de resistir, (re)existir y)re)vivir, edited by Catherine Walsh, 291–309. Quito: Ediciones Abya-Yala.
- García Salazar, Juan, and Catherine Walsh. 2017b. Pensar sembrando/sembrar pensando con Abuelo Zenón. Quito: Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar/Ediciones Abya-Yala.
- Grueso, Libia. 2006-2007. “Escenarios de colonialismo y (de)colonialidad en la construcción del Ser Negro. Apuntes sobre las relaciones de género en comunidades negras del Pacífico colombiano.” Comentario Internacional. Revista del Centro Andino de Estudios Internacionales 7: 145–156.
- Lapierre Robles, Michel, and Aguassanta Macías Marín. 2018. Extractivismo, (Neo) Colonialismo y Crimen Organizado en el Norte de Esmeraldas. Esmeraldas: Pontificia Universidad Católica and Ediciones Abya-Yala Quito.
- León, Edizon. 2021. Filosofía de las existencias desde el cimarronaje. Desaprenderes desde los márgenes. Quito: Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar/Ediciones Abya-Yala.
- Lozano, Betty Ruth. 2014. “El feminismo no puede ser uno porque las mujeres somos diversas. Aportes a un feminismo negro decolonial desde la experiencia de las mujeres negras del Pacifico colombiano.” In Tejiendo de otro modo. Feminismo, epistemologæia y apuestas descoloniales en Abya Yala, edited by Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, Diana Gómez Correal, and Karina Ochoa Muñoz, 335–352. Popayán: Editorial Universidad de Cauca.
- TRT. 2019. “En Ecuador los afrodescendientes representan el 40% de las personas que viven en la pobreza.” https://www.trt.net.tr/espanol/vida-y-salud/2019/12/26/en-ecuador-los-afrodescendientes-representan-el-40-de-las-personas-que-viven-en-la-pobreza-1329284#:~:text=El%20grupo%20resalt%C3%B3%20que%20las,educaci%C3%B3n%2C%20y%20al%20trabajo%20decente
- Walsh, Catherine E. 2023. Rising Up, Living On. Re-existences, Sowings, and Decolonial Cracks. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- Walsh, Catherine, and Edizon León. 2006. “Afro-Andean Thought and Diasporic Ancestrality.” In Shifting the Geography of Reason: Gender, Science and Religion, edited by Marina Paola Banchetti-Robino and Clevis Ronald Healey, 211–224. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press.
- Walsh, Catherine, and Juan García Salazar. 2015. “(W)riting Collective Memory (De)Spite State: Decolonial Practices of Existence in Ecuador.” In Black Writing, Culture, and the State in Latin America, edited by Jerome C. Branche, 253–266. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.