African roots in Latin America: Palenque (Colombia) | Armin Schwegler | TEDxUCIrvine

welcome buenas tardes my name is our Mitch wiggler I'm a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese here at UC Irvine I'm here today to tell you an amazing and uplifting story about a very unusual people these are the people of Pauling resilient people people whose culture and language I have studied for the last thirty years and in the process I'm happy to say I have become their friend these people have had unusual lives in part because they have been isolated for virtually 400 years because they are poor because historically they did not know how to read and write and of course because they have been black and blacker than black within their own country nobody has written down their official history and worse still even the Palin ghettos themselves do not recall where they came from in Africa and who founded their village but they do remember that they were unusual people with a special spirit there were freedom fighters the first free officially free community anywhere in the Americas they speak their own language Kuja boca de la lengua qu you want them in attend a unit door the one I him and so today I'm going to tell you the story of how through studying their language and ultimately also their DNA we have managed to reconstruct their history and their origins with great precision so let me take you to Palenque and let us watch what it looks like [Music] San Basilio ripple NJ und Lauria Africa ki Colombia yeah send re Palin Guiteau super eve otro colo a Peru to ET a la me a send Rho mu kina soup aa save otro Colo Poteau coucil okay Tata daija suit Oh muy me quiero un Valu Ichi t ah yeah senda revote row Colo a voice we pop si ma nd atoll okay vanilla africa palenque located a sweat o yama barroom on blender america so there we are and let me take you back to the beginnings of how this history and story really unfolded to do that we need to go back to 1985 this is the moment where I travel to Colombia for the first time boarded a bus and then walked into this village a village of black people where I became the white man called the colored man and this is the language that I heard a language that I could not understand even though I speak Spanish fluently a mix of Spanish words African grammar and much that they invented for themselves Joe [Music] jung-mi you don't win me above we're dumping them I feel out Koopa my so there I was in this village no electricity no running water and yet beautiful people full of spirit speaking and celebrating their culture and their language but it was life in isolation a life where they could preserve African customs their own speech but there were bilingual and happened bilingual for centuries so they were acquainted with the outside world to a fair extent but because they were black and so poor people laughed at them constantly they were ashamed to speak the tongue and half of the population had already given it up when I arrived there but it was a lil Africa in the Americas and in this context my friend Victor that you can see here and I and the rest of the community always wondered where did these people really come from and as this girl told me and asked me many times the interior Africa suit limini where in Africa did we really come from but this search for African origins as you can imagine seems rather hopeless and let me explain to you here in a couple of minutes why it seems so daunting to find this out for one you're all aware of course that the slave trade was a huge undertaking that lasted roughly 400 years there is now a new dynamic map on the internet that encourage you to visit and let me explain how it works on that map you see dots and each star represents a ship of three to four to five hundred slaves the life expectancy on the ship as you'll see in a minute were short but the life expectancy forty slaves once they had landed in the I guess was no more than two to three years so keep that in mind as you watch this man evolve and move as the dots go from Africa to the new world every da represents in a modern sense a jumbo jet falling out of the sky twenty thousand ships you will see fly across the screen compressed into less than a minute 12 million slaves 20 percent of which perished during the voyage and 20 percent of whom were children so let us watch in silence and in horror as the slave trade unfolds you so there you have it clearly can you imagine what we faced the complexity of reconstructing a history for a single people in a single village speaking a singular language and you may have noticed that a lot of these ships did not go to the United States in fact the slave trade was mostly a Latin American phenomenon and Cartagena the city where the party Rose ended up was the New York City of the slave trade so how did we manage to figure this out well there were some initial clues that turned out to be key let me explain to this day the palenque rose when somebody dies they dance around the coffin with drums and they go into trance and they chant a chain that came from africa Chemung Congo chimoree long ago she might even go to Angola and so they go on but as they chant just like you they do not understand what they sing it is very much like Latin and in church emotional content but no real meaning in terms of words and so as I lived with the Palenque rose I decided to study these songs close up and I wrote a book of about eight under pages and then I showed that these texts can actually be understood and here's what that song says from the Congo people I am from the people of Luongo from the lungo of angola and if you're familiar with the african map then you realize that this is really one and the same region as you can see on this map it refers back to the old congo kingdom it refers to the long go coast which is adjacent and Angola just to decide but more meaningful still is this all these people from these three regions spoke a single language which we call he Kongo our language still spoken today by five million people but Pauline Garros do not understand it anymore this is the language that lies in the past and it sounds like this well you're wrong is when a you want Illuminati when a world I'm about to burn caca and then as I heard the language as I realized that maybe just maybe these fallen heroes were truly different and special I had a revelation and the idea was very simple that the Pauline heroes were one type of people in they ran away coming from a single place having a single language and over the years as I progressed with my research we found more words in palinka that linked us up with this old Congo region as you can see here the word for cattle is the same on both sides of the Atlantic and in Palenque the word for snake yoga sounds very much like it sounds in the ki Congo language so we gathered more and more evidence to three hundred more such words and it became ever clearer that there was a strong connection to this Congo but the problem remained we couldn't really be sure whether all these people had come from the Congo or whether they came from other regions in Africa as well so we had still doubt even though we had learned a great deal and that leads to the big jump that comes in 2010 this is the time when population geneticists had read linguists articles including my own and they wanted to see whether our hypothesis was correct and this was the moment when we can to team up with them this included multiple teams from all over the world but one person in particular and sorry poor was instrumental in this work and so they did what population geneticists do best they collected data and they collected data in palinka and in Africa and they obtained DNA from 42 population groups from all over the place and then they also zeroed in in particular on this Mayan Bay region in the Congo where I had said that the origins of these people must lie and so after months and months and months of work and analyses the results came in are the people from polenka really descendant from this very small community of my own be a region no bigger perhaps an Orange County as you can see here we were right on target the DNA data confirmed exactly especially for the male population in buying it what we had suggested so let me cite just one or two sentences from the dissertation that Ansari por published in two eleven the DNA analyses he says are in accordance with linguistic and historical data which suggested that African young bespeaking slaves founded Bolling so in short what this means is that my friend now can be sure that her ancestors indeed came from the Congo it also means that these ships that you saw flying across the ocean carried some of these ancestors between 1600 and 1650 before they managed to escape into the hinterland of Cartagena so what does all of this really mean for us well it means a lot of things for one thing it means that history once lost almost completely can now be reconstructed in using language using DNA and other information but perhaps more importantly it also means that a people once so stigmatized can now be proud again and the Pauline kiddos have regained the pride they have regained the pride to the point where they now speak their language in front of visitors and there's a lot of them not by linking openly so and with enormous pride Soho Liana here that I met two weeks ago in Cartagena even in front of tourists spoke with me in palenquero and she insisted on speaking on an arrow only for everyone to see and as this girl told me mehendi sutapa content Theresa Wei Lian de Soto mini Lehman Congo we Pauline ears are now happy to know that we too have a history just like the white peope I have a history in history books of Colombia they too now have their own story and so that stigma has fortunately vanished and not only that but the Pauline Gators have now become famous to the point where the UNESCO now protects this village officially even President Obama met up with them something unimaginable thirty years ago shame has gone to fame and so now I have a dream and the dream is as simple as it is powerful and the dream is to unite my Pauling care of friends with their distance ancestors in the Congo can you imagine what a happy embrace that would be 400 years in the making 400 years of separation and 400 years of forced separation at that so I invite you to join me next time and I hope that by that time that dream will have become reality thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 159,012

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Social Science, Africans, Genetics, Language

Id: HY4RTVaD9Sg

Length: 17min 42sec (1062 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 06 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/binidr]

It’s a long video so maybe watch in your downtime. 17 minutes long. It’s not exactly to do with Nigeria but it’s relevant to show the power of language preservation and how it is connected to our identity.

Credit to u/choclopataco for the link.