As a strategy, it was effective. The sheer volume of escapees to the Palenque presented a serious risk to Spanish rule. Moreover, Biohó used the title King of Arcabuco, posing a significant challenge to Spanish claims of authority as well as to the myth of African inferiority on which the entire colonial enterprise was based. The impudence of a former slave, who had rejected that reality and reinstated himself to his rightful position as king, could not be tolerated.
In 1605, desperate to prevent the loss of more slaves but unable to defeat the Maroons, the Spanish offered a peace treaty. They promised to recognize the autonomy of the Palenque on the conditions that they stopped assisting escapees and they ceased referring to Biohó as king.
The treaty was finalized in 1612. By 1619, the Spanish had reneged on it. They captured Biohó and he was hanged, drawn, and quartered two years later, on March 16. The Spanish may have destroyed the body of its founder, but they couldn’t kill his spirit of defiance, which remained strong in the Palenque, and the town flourished.
Throughout the Palenque’s history, hair braiding has remained an activity at the heart of its existence. A local poem, “Looking Back,” describes a hairstyle that bears much similarity to the Yoruba kolese:
Palanque is a community woven with the hair of its women.
It is very blessed both today
and blessed also in its history.
We can see those paths which inspired freedom,
but today they urge us “Don’t look back.”
Let the hairstyle be that of “Enough: No more”
As a way to progress
A way to move forward
Because history
makes you cry . . .21
While the Palenque could be described as an African community in Colombia, assertions such as this must always be made with caution. In the perennially wise words of Jamaican-British cultural theorist Stuart Hall, we should remember that cultural identities, like everything that is historical, undergo constant transformation: “Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialized past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power.”22
African cultures are characterized not by some spurious belief in unchanging tradition but rather by their dynamism and adaptability. Dr. David Hughes at Kent State University in Ohio refers to the crucial “tradition of innovation” that characterizes African tradition. Louis Gates Jr. identifies an African theme of “repetition with revision.”23 Rather than slavish attention to reproducing the past, it is an unparalleled ability to utilize existing cultural resources in order to birth new life from old that defines African cultures and their descendants.
As the earth turns around the sun
We turn around the world.
With the snail hairstyle
When we saw the snail
Sadness overcame us
As the boat gave many turns and enslavement never ended.24
Eglash tells of confrontations he has had with other Western scholars who insist Africans could not have true fractal geometry because they lack the advanced mathematical concept of infinity. Contesting this, he argues that there exist culturally specific representations of infinity from across the continent and that these demonstrate “a strong engagement with the same concepts that coupled infinity and fractals in contemporary Western mathematics.”
A Cameroonian style similar to el caracol, “the snail.”
From Roy Sieber and Frank Herreman, Hair in African Art and Culture (Museum of African Art, NY/Prestel, 2000)
He explains that the most common African visualizations of infinity are snail shells. For the ancient Greeks, infinity was anathema, a nightmare of infinite regression, associated with troubling paradox and pathology. However, within African intellectual traditions, the infinite typically has a positive association. In the case of the snail, it is seen to invoke prosperity without end.25 It seems no little coincidence to discover that “the snail” is a popular hairstyle in the Palenque. Through it we see the repurposing of an African symbol of enduring prosperity, where a centuries-long enslavement subverts the natural order of an African worldview.
For the intergenerationally enslaved, slavery must have seemed a never-ending hell. But the snail, like so many of these hairstyles, was far more enduring than any of these empires and, unlike slavery, the snail survived, and is today much admired. I am reminded once more of a sensibility that informs much of African and Afro-diasporic thought, an ancestral impulse that seeks its fulfillment in achieving a state of being where “it be better in my mouth / Than in the mouth of my ancestors” or, perhaps, in less esoteric terms, as the T-shirt says: “I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams!”
THE BEGINNING AND THE END
European history interrupted African development. Whatever markers we use—time, resources, food even—Africa was, comparatively, a place of abundance until the Europeans arrived. Since that time the continent has been materially impoverished. The best solutions offered today seem to be entirely dependent on economic systems that require inequality and exploitation in order to function.
As the twenty-first-century Scramble for Africa rages on, the obsession with Africa’s resources overlooks the continent’s most valuable ones. Wole Soyinka suggests that this as yet untapped resource is the essence of African spirituality. Some might refer to it as uBuntu, a philosophical concept from southern Africa, “the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity.” It has different names throughout the continent, but it’s a concept recognizable across indigenous African culture. Kofi Owusu-Daaku describes growing up in the rural Ashanti heartlands of Ghana where the Akan word nnoboa emphasized the importance of cooperation for better communal living. Among the Mande, mogoya is the ideal of personhood, a concept that emphasizes caring for others. And in the Bamanan worldview, an individual human being is not necessarily a person; to achieve full personhood requires cooperation with others in the community.26
Professor Musa Dube of Duke University explains that if uBuntu were practiced, ethnic discrimination, patriarchy, and the marginalization of people on the basis of class, sexuality, or race would be rendered meaningless. As Dube states, “our failure to affirm and welcome the other only speaks of our failure to be human.”27
Soyinka urges Africans to reconsider the value systems others taught us were worthless, encouraging “a quarrying inwards, before reaching outwards.” It is here that we might find the “key to the ‘Renaissance’ that is so tantalizingly projected on a receding horizon.”28
Races of people cannot be conveniently divided along lines that decree one as good, the other as bad. However, self-organizing systems can be either destructive or complementary to more equal systems for organizing society. Over the last five hundred years, as Europe expanded and conquered the rest of the world, it imposed an operating system that encouraged individualism, the rapacious exploitation of resources, and the hoarding and accumulation of wealth. The invention of race and its offspring, racism, remained central to its operating logic. Today, as in the past, its agents are not all white. Many black and brown imitators are active participants, freely operating for personal gain, within a model of extraction and exploitation that was once imposed. This has been, to date, the enduring victory of colonialism.