The date, November 20th, was chosen to commemorate the death of Zumbi, one of the icons of resistance against slavery in Brasil. Zumbi was the last leader of the Kilombo (or Quilombo) of Palmares, a community of over 10,000 people (at its peak) that resisted incursions by the Portuguese for over 80 years. More recently, people have also been focusing on the figure of Dandara. Zumbi was Dandara's husband. She is understood to have participated in the defense of Palmares both by helping the plans and by fighting directly with against the Portuguese Army.
To commemorate this day, we'll read an abridged version of the document below.
Originally posted on facebook by Maicol William on June 1, 2016
FROM WIKIPEDIA: A griot is a West
African historian, storyteller, praise singer,
poet and/or musician. Griots are a repository of oral tradition and are often seen as a societal leader due to
their traditional position as advisors to royalty. According to the book Savannah
Syncopators, "Though [griots] have to know many traditional songs
without error, they must also have the ability to extemporize on current
events, chance incidents and the passing scene. Their wit can be devastating
and their knowledge of local history formidable". Although they are
popularly known as "praise singers", griots may use their vocal
expertise for gossip, satire, or political comment.
Once I read that in past, in the seventeen and
eighteen hundreds, one of capoeiristas favorite pastimes, aside from
challenging the police and showing the elites who should fear and respect who,
was to climb up on bell towers and ring the bells. Some interpreted this very
dangerous behavior (which resulted in grave accidents and even death) as purely
exhibitionism, like the behavior of a street child. It was more than this.
Street kids, who love exhibitionism, were enchanted by the capoeiristas and
considered them almost superhuman. The capoeiristas reputation and their aura
of invincibility made them the stuff of legends. Add their in their elegance,
their smooth behavior, their easy smile always on their face, their
incomparable cunning, their mandinga, and their “closed body”, and you can see
how they would easily be described as godlike. The racist society in which they
lived however painted them as devils. And this portrayal as devils is what has
been sustained in the history books. We get fuller picture of why capoeiristas
were considered supernatural beings when we consider that their exhibitionism
pushed them to often would demonstrate their abilities in public. It’s
interesting that, whether they were considered half-god or half-devil, they
were perceived as more than human.
But let’s focus on the bell. A bell is an
instrument to tell the official time. Those who control the bells are those who
have the power to announce the important moments to the entire group. The
Church, which the official institutions in Brasil recognize as the
representative of God’s will, holds the monopoly over bells that keep time
publicly. Having bells means having power. And capoeiristas like to give
demonstrations of power. Therefore, in the same way in which they went to
subvert the public order by challenging the elites, in the same way in which
they challenged the police over the definition of public order, they took on
the power to tell the time and they made the bells ring. In a structure that
was designed to make them the least important people in society, they would
laugh in everyone’s face and make themselves the most prominent. The dominant
social institutions wished to stomp on their head, they placed themselves in a
position of power. Capoeira is an exercise in self-determination, in freedom.
And for Black people, freedom cannot be exercised without daring, without
subversion. Black folks were not born to follow rules – we were born to break
them. Because the reality is that in Brasil [and in the United States], rules
were made against us, they were designed to oppress us, capture us, kill us.
Look at the statistics about mass incarceration, poverty, vote suppression,
police brutality. Those who believe that this was true in the past, but no
longer, are fooling themselves. The need to challenge society’s norms is still
present. Challenging the structure is Black people’s law. We can only exist so
long as we continue this challenge.
Once again, let’s leave the conversation about
the essence of Capoeira to the side for a moment and focus on the bell. The
bell has the power to capture people’s attention and to announce that the time
has come. The bell signals the moment of connection. When church bells ring,
they remind people of God, of spirituality. Many [catholic] people do the sign
of the cross. Church bells announce the beginning of Mass. It is almost
impossible to remain indifferent to the sound of a bell, even for those who
were not raised in the Christian faith.
The berimbau has the same properties, it fulfills all of these function.
The berimbau captures people’s attention, no-one can ignore it, people crane
their necks to see what it is. The word gunga itself, which comes from the
Bantu languages, means “bell”. And if the berimbau is our bell, then the roda
is our Mass.
The Gunga bears the voice. The Gunga is king.
The Gunga is God. The Gunga is the one who controls the roda. It calls some
people to come to “Mass”, and it invokes the ancestors to the ritual. It
announces the time to meet our ancestors, to work on our spirituality. The Gunga
holds great power. In our current society, this power is being suffocated, just
like the power to challenge the system is being suffocated. Our society
obscures the fact that Black people are descendants of great civilizations, of
glorious lineages of kings and queens. Whiteness hides anything that might
bring pride or power to Black people. If today we don’t identify all of the
greatness that exists in Black people and in Capoeira, this is because of the
culture of whiteness. Some people believe that Black Brasillians are
‘descendants of slaves’ and that Capoeira is only a form of street fight. They
want us to believe that they are the ones who freed the slaves, and freed
Capoeira from the clutches of street thugs. They sell the idea that Black
people should be happy with their current conditions because ‘things were much
worse.’ This is how it works: choose the worst possible term of comparison, and
everything can be portrayed as an improvement. We should distrust every part of
this official narrative, and look beyond the curtain. Our mission should be to
subvert this narrative. We must refer to what Black people had before the
intervention of whiteness in history.
See what power there is in being the bearer of
history, the holder of the voice. In Capoeira, the Gunga is the one that tells
our stories, the guardian of the voice. The Gunga is power. The person who
receives the Gunga holds – or should hold – the role of the griot. The oral
tradition is fundamental, because the griot’s voice carries history. Words form
a connection that is the basic principle of connection to the ancestors, to
spirituality. Words are Axé. They connect us to one another, to the future, to
the past, to the entire world… If you close your eyes an think to griots
fulfilling their duties, using the instrument called kora, which also has
certain similar features to a berimbau, you get an image similar to a roda, in
which the person with the Gunga is in the center, as a reference to all the
others. Our society however wants to leave this correspondence between the
Gunga and the griot in the past. The oral tradition is neglected. It’s common
these days, at the end of the roda, to simply acknowledge the Mestres and
guests who are present and to list upcoming events. No history. It almost seems
like a commercial, and it is, in some ways. But it should be a commercial for
our history, which has few other means to be spread in our society.
The death of the oral tradition is the killing
of Capoeira itself. Killing the griot means breaking the main channel for the
distribution of the oral tradition. This is one of the main reasons why
Capoeira has been growing further away from its origins. This is in large part
a reflection of the process of whitening. When we pass the Gunga and Capoeira
itself to someone who represents the opposite of the history of Capoeira, the
roda serves an opposite purpose. Without an intense amount of previous work,
white people don’t have the minimum prerequisites to fulfill this role. First,
because the history of Black people is erased by society’s institutions. Since
this is the case, without having an interest and expending great effort, it
cannot be accessed. And how can you tell a story that you don’t know? Secondly,
because the “official” history of white people, (the ‘master narrative’ of
history) is taught and reinforced everywhere. Even if they wanted to talk about
their history, what would there be to talk about? There is no need for a griot
to tell the “official” master narrative of history for white people. Even more
than this, the stories told by a griot would denounce and challenge the master
narrative of history, calling into question the narrative that “I deserved what
I worked for, no-one gave me anything”. The society would be confronted with
the huge historical debts that it owes to Black people and Indigenous people,
among others. This is reason enough why whiteness must erase those stories.
Therefore the function of griot in Capoeira gets set aside, because this is how
whiteness works: it promotes the idea that you should take what you like, and
eliminate the rest.
However, Black culture cannot allow this, it
is fundamentally holistic. Either you respect everything or you have nothing.
We are taught that, when you enter into someone’s home, we behave according to
the norms of that home. For those who are respectful, you dress in white on the
days in which you are expected to dress in white. It doesn’t matter if you feel
better wearing other colors. It is necessary to make sacrifices to be part of a
community. If you only follow the community when it is entirely convenient to
you, then the community serves you and not the other way around. The community
establishes a relationship of solidarity and you don’t reciprocate. It is
necessary to learn how to sacrifice in order to maintain the tradition. Imagine
if each individual demanded that a community adapt to each of their personal
preferences. Things would get lost – there would be no essence preserved.
Identities would disappear. A culture of resistance is a culture of
preservation. We have to make an effort for a community, give this respect. The
community decides the direction, and the individual should accept the decision.
This doesn’t mean to lose oneself entirely, but find one’s place. This is the
meaning of the word ubuntu.
The problem is that there is a radical
difference between Black culture and the culture of whiteness. Individual white
people are not the problem. The problem is the culture that they learn. They
must re-educate themselves. Their individualism is in direct opposition to a
sense of community. Whiteness, colonialism and capitalism push people to use
and discard, to exploit the resources, exhaust them, and leave. To take the
parts you like and throw away the rest. Once you begin to operate like that
with Capoeira or with any other cultural artform, you change its essence.
Imagine someone asking for a bacon cheeseburger without bacon and without
cheese.
Without a griot, without an oral tradition,
you close the channel to the ancestors. Without ancestrality, there can be no
Black culture – if for no other reason that without the ancestors we wouldn’t
be here, neither ourselves nor our culture. Therefore we have to reestablish
the link Gunga-griot-oral tradition-ancestors. The Gunga is a responsibility –
a big responsibility. Being the bearer of the voice is not for everyone. The
bearer of the voice cannot remain silent. The bearer of the voice must share
this voice. How can you use the Gunga to call everyone together, those here and
those who have passed on, and not complete the connection? Let us cultivate the
oral tradition – it is the basic element. This is for everyone, both for Black
people and for white people. However, white people have to be extremely more
careful since, as I said above, they did not grow up in this culture and in
fact were exposed to the opposite values. Beyond this, they bear some
historical debts that they should stop trying to avoid, most of all if they
wish to participate in Black culture and be among Black people without being in
the way.
Starting from the moment in which we give the
berimbau in a white person’s hand without guaranteeing that they have
understood the function of a griot, and that they have taken up the
responsibility that it entails, starting from the moment in which we give them
the power to tell our stories, we are setting ourselves up for the loss of some
things. However, it’s worth remarking on the fact that we don’t do this
spontaneously, out of our own will. In this country, we were never allowed to
have our own will. We always had to struggle to exercise it. And we always
confronted terrible repression when we did so. Either we bury our will, or we
are buried along with it. Therefore, rather than dying, better to give some
things up. So that in the future, when the opportunity presents itself, we may
re-establish ourselves and re-enter the game.
We are accustomed to celebrate those who died
for us, but we sometimes forget those who, perhaps even while preferring to
die, did not do so that they could secure the continuity of our history,
passing the baton to the next generation, in the hopes that they might be
avenged by their descendants who, under better circumstances, might be
strengthened by their culture and rewrite the history. It might be difficult to
understand that for some people, sacrificing their lives meant to live on. Live
on in the name of the community of the lineage, becoming a bridge. Equally
important to those who died, they lived to tell their tales, taking on the role
of the griot, taking care that those who died didn’t stay dead, guaranteeing
that our group doesn’t decline but grows in number. When the time comes, we’ll
need everybody. And when the time comes, the bell will mark its arrival. But
the bell has to ring. It is necessary to make the gunga speak. In order for
this to happen, the person who plays the gunga must become a griot. Through the
oral tradition, we must elevate our spirituality and access our ancestrality. Knowing
where we’re going is crucially related to knowing who and where we came from.
Our future will be written by answering the questions that were not addressed
in the past. Sankofa is the philosophy that must be practiced more and more.
And Sankofa is also Ubuntu – very much so! When we say “I am because we are,”
we must remember who we are now and who we will be in the future must be built
starting with who we were.
[arranged
and translated by Matteo Tamburini. NOTE: the ability to read the entire document
in the original is one more reason why you should learn Portuguese.]
For a
reference to Capoeiristas climbing Church Towers, see: Capoeira: A History of
an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art, by Matthias Röhrig Assunção
For the original, see https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1941102539507671&id=1921597918124800
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