The Song of the Absent Rower: Candelario Obeso

I came across the word "zambo" for the first time here in Colombia. It is a commonly used ethno-specific term for someone from a mixed African and Indigenous background and seems not to have any particular negative connotation. I delved deeper, however, to discover that in standard Castillian, "zambo" is the word for "baboon".

You immediately start making connections. "Creollo", "mulatto", "mestizo" -- these other categories (any racial category for that matter) used to describe a person's racial background have me cringing -- but I am surprised at how freely they are employed in Colombia. Perhaps these terms have been "appropriated" over time by those whom they aimed to denigrate -- much in the way being called a "wog" has been back home? It is "Zambo", for some reason, that intrigues me with its traces of old world Spanish racism, (that repulsive equation of a primate and a person), as well as the historical seed it carries within itself : a connection between Spain and Africa in the first instance via "baboon" and then the subsequent application of the term to a class of African slaves and exploitated Native people who united in a New World context.

I suspect "zambo" even insinuates its way North to the USA to become the totally reviled term, "Sambo"?

Candelario Obeso, the Afro Colombian poet, refers to himself as "your beloved zambo" in his beautiful poem, Cancion der Boga Ausente (Song of the Absent Rower) with a certain degree of irony and affection. From a dirt poor background, Obeso comes from Mompox, (which we have just visted) and which was the first town in South America to declare its total independence from Spain in 1810.

Mompox is also most famously associated with Simon Bolivar who was stationed here after two failed attempts to liberate his native Venezuela. Bolivar and the much feted 400 Momposinos marched on Caracas in 1811 giving huge impetus to the liberation of the whole of New Granada (Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru) a year later.

A monument to those events of the early 1810s sits proudly at the centre of Mompox's decaying Plaza Simon Bolivar with a handsome statue of El Liberador and an heroic inscription which reads:

If to Caracas I owe my life,
To Mompox I owe my glory.
For those with a literary bent, Mompox (and not the author's home town of Aracataca, I am assured) was the inspiration for Gabriel Garcia Marquez's mythical town of Mocondo depicted in One Hundred Years of Solitude. I am amused that quite a few Colombians I meet are rather dismissive of their Nobel Prize Winner and find him a bit repetitive as I do.

...Want to read the remainder of this story? It is available in my book, 'The House on Lopez Cotilla - A Journey through Latin America' (Kindle Direct Publising, 2012)