Questions of Memory and History in Cuba and Sierra Leone by Emma Christopher

thank you everybody I'm unbelievably honored to be here can I just test the sound check the sound this okay for the recording okay okay it's so great to be here and it's especially great to talk to teachers and the people that take these stories and messages into the schools where they are and so powerful I think for for students coming up to to realize the importance of these ties and I particularly mean when I say that children who are maybe not of African origin to understand what it means to those who are which i think is is incredibly important I'm standing up here on so it's a bit formal standing up here because I'm going to flick through some things on the screen afterwards I'll sit down oh please let's have a very informal conversation about this I'm happy to answer any questions and talk with you about it but before that I was just going to talk to you a little bit about the project behind the film they are we was made for a popular audience and for schools and so on and one of the hardest things for me to learn as an academic historian was how little of the history can actually go into the film before people turn off and that was a really hard thing for me to learn I would put in more history as was always my training and then we would have test screenings and people as soon as you got into the academic history stuff people just be you know falling asleep tuning out so I had to take all that out but that doesn't mean that there isn't there wasn't years of more traditional research behind the project and what I wanted to talk to you a bit about today first of all is that project and basically the woman who I think the film is basically about Josefa Diago I don't actually know and her African name and I dearly wish that I did in the absence of any African name for her I will have to call her who's ever Diago although I am aware that's deeply problematic to call somebody only by their the name they were given by their slave master and his own surname which is what she took when she became a free woman but I want to talk a bit about that because I think that is the heart of the story and I want to talk about what that means in terms of identity an african-american afro-caribbean identities which I I think his perhaps not bought out enough in the film because of this need to make a very linear film that people can't a linear story that people can identify with what I want to say right here at the front is that there's many different kinds of connections that between the African diaspora and Africa and I don't in any way want to privilege this cultural connection there's many other kinds of connections that people can have and although this is a story about a cultural connection I'm very far away from thinking but that's the only connection or that that's how we should always seek a afro african-american and African connections I think they all can basically fit into a much bigger wider discussion about african-american identities and links with Africa okay so the story behind they are we I think is if one very tough and very determined and in very a typical lady Josefa Diago her story as far as I've been able to piece it together looks something like this I think it's kind of interesting for us to look at her story from the other end from a kind of roots perspective if you would like if we look at her being born in Africa and going out into the Diaspora whereas the film is very much an african-american or afro-caribbean perspective of tracing the roots back so I'm going to see how different it looks if we look at her as an African child being born and going out into the Diaspora through through the horrific circumstances of the transatlantic slave trade now Josefa was born somewhere in the chiefdoms of the Bantu people which today are in the southern part of Sierra Leone close to the tire River okay have a map that's Sierra Leone on the west coast of Africa that's where the Bantu people are Freetown is the capital and or Liberia the the free colony of African Americans is just to the south of this just off the map the lands would have been bigger more extensive when her Zephir was born there they may have been slightly in a slightly different place we're not sure it's very difficult to talk about the culture of the bands of people that she was born into because they are perceived as the historical dictionary of Sierra Leone says to no longer be in existence and the Bantu language too is considered to be extinct but of course it's much more complex than that as you saw in Bay are we in fact this is a very interesting example of how the transatlantic slave trade forced ethnicities to change the banter was an ethnic group that was born of their attempts to take escape the slave trade they've actually fled from farther north and this is the Tammany which is today one of the biggest groups in Sierra Leone and they actually got attacked in a jihad that was launched from an Islamic group in the futa Jalan which is today across in Guinea and I think you can see that that has quite a lot of resonance with what's happening in the world today in terms of Boko Haram in terms of Isis or ISIL all those things it's been going on back to these times so in the 1720s the group in the far southeast broke away and became separated from the rest of the Tim knee and became known as the Bantu people now that was quite a good place to settle until the slave trade was abolished I know that sounds counterintuitive it's that's exactly what I mean when the slave trade was legalized by Britain and the u.s. in 1807 and 1808 slave traders didn't stop slave trading they just got more devious they moved away from traditional ports such as the ones you probably know from less we forget tours and those kinds of things like cape coast castle and El Mina they moved away from slave trading there you were much too likely to get caught and they moved to places like Gallinas or Gallinas having spent years making the film in Cuba I always pronounce it go Eunice but you can say either in the u.s. Gallinas gayness which and the reason that Gallinas became a major slave trading port which some of you will know was the home of Pedro Blanco who sold the Amistad slaves the reason that that became so it was so appealing for illegal slave traders was because as one of them said it had the exact right the exact right mixture of peace at the coast and lots of wars inland which meant there was a steady supply of captives coming down to the coast the other reason it was really popular was because of this which is what happened the sea bar you can see this is the Atlantic Ocean on the left of the picture and you can just see up there that this all these little creeks and rivers just behind the sea bar what this means is that the slave ships can pull up right to here and get over the sea bar at high tide and they can just meander there because people started sending out much smaller slave ships after the slave trade was abolished they're much faster they can move much stealthily away from the patrol ships and the low tide high tide they can get over there into those little creeks you see at the back get their slaves on their captives on the patrol ships are bigger they can't get across the sea bar they're stuck out here in the Atlantic Gallinas or gayness is the perfect place to illegally slave trade it also means that slaves like how Zephyr can come down these creeks at the back and get straight to the slave ship just in terms of illegal slave trading this is wonderful I realize it's very sad to see these things so you can imagine that for the Banta this is also this this is so you see 1807 1808 comes this is Gallinas not at all important in the slip legal era of slave trading as soon as it's illegalized you see what happens as many people were leaving from as many captives were leaving from a single year in the single year in Gallinas in the illegal period had left in a century beforehand for people like the bouncer who are so close as you saw it is devastating it's absolutely devastating for the whole hinterland this was absolutely devastating the those reports that whole areas were depopulated as people around inland to try and escape there's lots of reports of famine because people are abandoning their crops to try and flee away it also has a really fundamental effect on ethnic groups because there's even it's a there was a very well-known inter-ethnic confederation of people that tried to join an inter-ethnic group which is almost unheard of in order to protect themselves and their children this Confederation was slave trading but the idea was that if you were behind if you were in the safe town of this powerful Confederation you yourself would not be slave trading and your people would not your children would not that was the desperation that these people had for the banter it was absolutely devastating so having gone there to escape the slave trade they then end up right in the line of fire of the slave trade they also end up as the Mende the other big ethnic group in Sierra Leone moves towards the coast their lands are utterly taken over there is there are stories that let me see there were stories that the last visit there's a place today called my way I apologize for the pronunciation the best I can do is my grain where it said that the Bantu Warriors were finally ratted and disappeared into the sea in a whirlpool that's the mythology of what happened to them as early as the 1830s the Mende the group that came for them that came to their lands they were working for Pedro Blanco at the coast the major slave trader the banter this tiny ethnic group was never going to survive this and and they did not there are none left today the worst thing possibly I would say the worst thing about slave trading in this illegal period is that it's overwhelmingly children you can fit more children on the slave ship you can crowd them and more easily you can much more easily brainwash them to not say anything should the patrol kit ship cap get you you know should the patrol come and say you're illegally slave trading you can far more easily brainwash children to not reveal that they are enslaved that they are captives these are exactly the same reasons that people take child soldiers today in exactly the same part of the world so as my colleague Benjamin Lawrence has written the age of enslavement of sorry the age of abolition at least in West Africa is actually the age of child enslavement we see it in in the Americas and Britain says this great age of abolition it's not happening in Gallinas it's just not unfortunately so the bantha are completely decimated by the transatlantic slave trade the girls the but this is not to say that they're all dead of course not when they say the ethnic group of the banter no longer exists what they means is they've been subsumed into the Mende that came for them so young Banta women and girls became the wives of Mende men and some deliberately amalgamated because it's much safer to be in the big group than the small group that's the way to keep yourself safe by about 80 or 100 years after this there was nobody left who identified themselves as Banta rather than Mende but what's quite interesting I think is that the kind of Mende that are down here in the South of Sierra Leone are known as the barre Mende as opposed to the rest of the Mende and what bar Mende means is the different Mende and some people have suggested and I think I think this is quite convincing that they're different because they're part Banta they've assimilated all these Banta traditions into the Mandi and so the bantha are a fascinating case for ethnic identity in Africa because they they were separate as a Bantu people because they was fleeing from slavery then they were wiped out because of slavery and yet they still are in some ways the Banta are even today known for having things that were specific to the banter even though if you ask them their ethnicity they would say their bar mehndi or mending okay what I want to say also is that the things that that they are famous for are very relevant to her Zephyrs life and to the film that we've sit that you've seen this morning the songs and dances that she took with her to to Cuba very much their passport their identity and they were up until the Civil War this is common in history in many parts of West Africa but in this group especially the songs of dances that they have even in the civil war in Sierra Leone which was 1991 to 2002 this was their primary mode of identifying themselves when they got cut off from anyone else much more than an identity card or anything else if you can sing the same initiation songs and dances of someone else you are their brother or their sister that's very clear what was also interesting in the Civil War was that that the last manda leader who you saw in the film Lucia Mara she was initiating children and especially girls because she believed that the things that she taught them would protects them should they be taken away by the rebels as you saw in the film they actually lost around half of their children as the rebels moved in were kidnapped it's a thing that's so horrific it's hard for us to even get our heads around but Lucy believed and they all believed that these this meander its let me just say sorry let me break though and say mender and Mende it's very confusing I dearly love they had a different name for their society that doesn't sound almost identical to the ethnic group that they got taken over by one has an e on the end one has an e on the end so Mende is the ethnic group meander is the very specific initiation group that is the film is about so met Lucy believed that the men are training the training for this initiation Society would keep the mostly girls and the few boys between the society safe if they were taken by the rebels because they're herbal remedies would protect them from malaria and skin diseases and so on and the banter our Alma also famous for having great supernatural skills now I you know look this may not be within my world view I don't think it matters that's not what's important at all it may not be within what your world view I think it's very clear that it matters a great deal to them and I think that's very interesting for the story as Josefa because of what the other historians have found in Brazil that supernatural powers I don't have a better term for them than that but something that we would consider supernatural they would consider a part of everyday life were very very important to slaves in Brazil and most likely in Cuba too because it's something the master cannot take away from you he just cannot take that away from you it's not in his well view it's something you can fight back with no matter what else he takes away it's very important and I want to say that when Lucy told me she was teaching the girls and the boys that who were going to be kidnapped most likely in this most horrific Civil War some of them didn't come back for eight nine years many of them are still not back to this day they just don't know what happened to them when she told me that I was really like well is that what happened to her Zephir did they really think that if they initiated her into this it would give her the skills for life and of course it is even today these are life skills you can't they consider them to be the equivalent of our you know going to school and having education of course this is something that she would have treasured okay we just move on so yes at some point in their childhood house ever would have gone to be as initiated into the boys the woman's I'm sorry the the women's society there's the boys equivalent everybody is in these societies everybody across the whole region they call secret societies but the thing that's secret about them is the initiation rites which will afterwards be your identity they are considered they are law they are education they are a system of social training they are a way to communicate with the ancestors a way to communicate with the spirits a way to learn the skills you learn where you fit into their society so just as American children or Australian children might learn to debate ready to take part in you know democracy they would learn all the skills that they needed in order to take part in their own societies it's almost unimaginable and to us how important these things are unless you are initiated you're not a real person unless you are initiated you can't get married and give birth unless you're initiated you won't be really considered trustworthy in your own society so it's very important I think that once the Cubans get back to Sierra Leone they were shown these masks this is the male mask from the Perrault society which is a kind of they have different names but this is a generic name is the Poirot Society for the men and as you saw in the film what they do right ways they get the Cuban men to dance behind the sacred men's masks which was you know deeply profound and telling this is our society we will accept you dance behind it and the men right away went to dance behind it this is the woman's mask and the bundu mask which they got out and you can see Lucy in the the kind of mustard yellow color dancing to the Bondi Soho Zephyr would have been initiated into that and then I think well I might have kind of unpicked this story that the meander this other initiation whose song she's been singing in Cuba for all these years is a kind of higher education so the firm the children of the families who'd found that this upper Bantu kingdom they went on to this higher education which was called the meander and I think if we see it in that way we begin to see why this mattered so much to her Zephyr why it mattered so much to her that she sung these songs for decades and decades in Cuba because she was just about to be initiated into the peak of her society certainly for women to have an incredible kind of status and respect in her society and at that very moment that she's just about to become one of the most respected people in the society she's transformed into a captive and a human commodity it's unimaginably tragic and I think if we begin to see the importance of the Mendes society it gives this real interest of how why it mattered to her so much to keep singing these songs quite apart from all the other reasons people wanted to keep singing their songs now what I also want to suggest to you is that this story what happened to her then it's probably very very different to what happened to the ancestors of most African Americans today now in saying that I want to be very clear that I'm not in any way suggesting her experiences were not equally horrific she was a young girl who was imprisoned likely whipped chains probably starved most of the captives that left from Gallinas were partly starving by one statistic they were not much less hungry than the people in the warsaw ghetto in the second world war she could have been raped she could have heard any of these things happen to her I'm not in any way suggesting her situation wasn't utterly horrific but it was not like most of the people who are ancestors of today's African Americans in on the mainland and the reason for that is again because she came to the Americas in the illegal slave trading period in the legal fly trading period ships were much bigger they went down the coast sometimes for months and slave ship captains considered it to be a really great thing if they could get people from all down the coast because then they had less language in common they were less likely to revolt that's no longer the case in the illegal slave trading period you nipped across in your little fast ship you had smaller hold anyway now children are less likely to revolt than adults anyway you and then the biggest deal now is not to you you're worried now not so much about slave ship revolt as about being captured by the machole's the anti slave trading patrols so what happens to her Zephir I think is that she is still with people from the meander society she's still with her fellow initiates it sounds unbelievable but I don't think it is though as she saw in the film there's an oral tradition in the Bantu kingdoms that they at some point in the past one of the meander initiation groups is all taken away now as we know oral tradition can have you know a kind of interesting relation to what is written in the historical records in this case of course nothing is written in the historical records the bantu don't have a an oral tradition written tradition it could be that what that guy is telling me in the film is that many of their children and young people are taken and they've amassed this into one oral tradition that could be the case and I fully admit this it could also be however that what he's telling me has a much closer relationship to the truth and I don't subscribe to the view that oral tradition is any more problematic than written records they're both just problematic in different ways they're both telling us different things so imagine if she really is taken with others in her mentor Society of course that would have been exactly the kind of thing slave Raiders would have done there's a group of really young they were probably 10 11 12 year olds they are exactly the kind of age that you can sell for the highest prices I'm sorry to talk about human beings in that way but let's look at it through the slave traders perspective for a minute to see if this could be true that's exactly who they would have gone for they raised the highest prices that they're pretty much on defender they're outside of the village of course that's who slave Raiders would have gone for there are also the the daughters and some of the sons of all the most powerful people in the village so if you can get them you've destroyed them and the guy who was telling me this it's not in the film he tells me that his mother up until heard her death knew who some of the families were who who'd gone in this and that his mother had always told him about a woman who lost all her daughters on that occasion and never recovered from this attack so it could be true I mean it could easily be true that that Josefa was taken with the rest of her member society and she goes there not far away from Gallinas she's just put on a canoe she goes down she could even be sold by Pedro Blanco or one of his she comes out of Galena so either Pedro Blanco who saw the Amistad slaves or other of the slave traders who were his cohort that she's with the rest of her group now what happens from the other side of the Atlantic is equally different to how most enslaved people how most captives got to North America what happens on the other side of the Atlantic is Pedro Diego in Cuba is setting up a plantation in the 1840s which is called Santa Elena he doesn't go and buy slaves at market as Franklin Knight the historian said by this time period the best way to go and get captures from Africa is to charter a ship send it over there loaded up and bring it back this is not the same as the most North American slaves at slave owners I'm sorry who went and bought them at auction at marketplace and from traders who dealt with a slave ship coming into Charleston or wherever then the slaves would these these captive people who already didn't know each other and didn't share much language then they would be broken up again on the auction block in Charleston or wherever it was this is different she is Pedro Diago sends out the slave ship from where he is he leaps from Matanzas he does a deal with probably with Pedro Diago or one of his certainly one of Pedro Diego's friends the slave ship comes out from Cuba it slips there over the burette Colinas as we saw it loads everybody on and it sneaks away as fast as it can and they're all owned by Diego he takes the whole cargo if he sells them to anyone else it's his brother whose plantation is next door the slaves are all one unit she is very likely it's not impossible it sounds crazy in a North American context she's very likely with people that she knew for the rest of her life this is very important now I don't I'll never be able to prove that it's it's impossible to prove but as evidence for that this is the will of Pedro Diego from a couple of generations later sorry a couple of decades later you saw a part of it is annotated in the film this marks on who they were now its pages and pages long and it's kind of horrific in itself it says the value at the end and their age the nation etc about 15% of them are listed as Ganga which is what she was listed as what's there she's on the top there was therefore Ganga 37 she was worth 750 dollars at the time of his death a couple of she's already been in Cuba for a couple of decades by this point now there is sorry there's a lot of other people on there who were the same age as her and who are Ganga it's quite possible but two decades earlier given that their life expectancy has been calculated they're only seven years it's very possible that decades earlier when she arrived there's more of them it's not at all impossible that she's still with other people should grow up with now the reason I want to mention this is because I don't I believe that all kinds of african-american cultures are they reflect as does everybody else's culture what was needed what was useful to them it's clearly the case that if you are enslaved somebody you know on a Maryland farm who owns three or four other people you have no choice but to form a culture with them that's what you have to do if however you are hose effort diago on a plantation with at the time of Diego's death she was one of about 400 other slaves and he was most likely underplaying that so that his brother got more in his will so it was probably much more than 400 more and certainly with his brothers plantation next door we're talking in the thousands 70% of them are African born they have two white people of course they have more opportunity to keep their own cultures alive and what I think is I find this absolutely fascinating is that there's so many of them and so many African traditions that when I first met cuoco Casanova Umberto cuoco as everyone calls him who you saw in the film but old guy this is the list he wrote for me about the Sun trelaina spirits and what some of you will recognize from this I think is that it isn't just for example that yeah Bay their main God is syncretized with San lázaro so let me just run you through that most in in in Cuba as in Brazil and in other places the spirits the African gods have become syncretized with Catholic gods so that that was a way so for example on San lázaro day which is a Catholic holiday they celebrate Yin Bay it was a way to get on your owner you if he said you could have some hours off for San lázaro you celebrate year bay and claimed it was for San lázaro and eventually they become synchronize a huge simplification but that's they become syncretized what's fascinating about this at least to me is that they're not just syncretized with catholic saints they're simple sim syncretized with Yoruba Saints so the Yoruba from today from Nigeria who are a much bigger group on the plantation the meander this the Ganga the small group have syncretized with the bigger African group as well as the Catholic saints said is clearly a way that they are surviving within an african based society in cuba which is just not something that happened in the americas apart from maybe on the sea islands in Georgia and South Carolina and again we begin to see why and how her Zephyr kept her traditions alive and I want to suggest you something that I've just started to realize that if we go back to the idea that she had supernatural powers that she had her ball powers that she was indeed a female leader on Santorelli Santa Elena plantation in Cuba I want to suggest you that as the decades went on she she was even more powerful because from that point of view from her point of view she won I mean she won she outlived diet Pedro Thiago by decades she even outlived slavery she lived to become a free woman in this world in which there was a seven year life expectancy she survived we'll never know because we don't know exactly how old she was 7080 years after she was taken there she won I mean by any outlook of theirs whatever powers she had that they believed she had they were pretty powerful she she was winning and I think that's kind of helps to explain why people carried on in fact Josefa doesn't just live long enough to outlive slavery which is in itself an incredible thing incredibly rare she lives long enough to teach her stories her songs and her dances to her great-granddaughter and she has flew into D Agra florinda didn't die until 1984 again we're seeing the difference with african-american communities there's there's you know there were not that many people alive in 1984 in the u.s. who were taught their songs and dances directly from an African ancestor were just not that many people in Cuba there were not that many either but there are some and this is one of them hos F at Iago live long enough to teach it to all the people that you saw in the film and I think what's interesting at least to me is that their culture it's very clear to see why they kept it alive jose florinda was known as the powerful herbal healer even though they'd long lost any idea of what their songs and dances were in terms of her Burress p remedies and yet she was known as a Hobel healer within Cuba once after about the mid-60s when Cuba medical care becomes free to everybody that dies out and it becomes much more of a sense of identity what's interesting though is that back in Sierra Leone too it's moved on I think one of the dangers of all these tracing cultural roots in this way is that we assume that the Africans have stayed static of course they haven't in this particular case there's more of the meander identity more of the bantam and identity in Cuba than there is in Sierra Leone today they're looking at restarting the mental society partly as a way to protect their children who are now at great risk of being trafficked because of the downturn in the economy since the Ebola epidemic because of the Cuban connection so they're hoping to get the songs and dances that they have in Cuba that have been forgotten in Sierra Leone they know the meanings of them and together they can start something new we started I should say which i think is intriguing so what I want to say is that in neither of the places do I believe that this is like a cultural retention it's a living breathing thing in both places and the fact that they've both moved on and can still talk to each other is kind of an amazing thing but it's not a cultural retention it's a living breathing very transformative culture and I think that's important to say otherwise we kind of fall into the trap of believing that that they didn't innovate and didn't you know use it for you know really very practical purposes this is not purely just something they carried with them this is something they carried with them and use and reuse and teach and use for good okay that's I'm kind of almost at the end of what I want to say I guess but I just want to bring it back to that question of different identities in the different ways you can see these things pretty much every time I show this film in the u.s. although interestingly enough almost never I don't think ever anywhere else and I've shown it in many places I don't think anyone has ever not asked me about DNA testing when I show this and whether it's possible and whether I have DNA tested these people to make the links I don't this is very difficult it's actually not possible to show that as far as I'm aware and I've talked to a lot of people you have to show either fathers father's father's father's or mother's mother's mother's mother's you can't have a connection like this where it it moves down the generations going you know into different things well it's also kind of interesting is that Henry Louis Gates I'm al maybe shouldn't say but anyway Henry Louis Gates actually asked me if I if it will be possible for me to get collect bouncer DNA when I was in Sierra Leone because they just don't have enough African DNA to make the kind of connections they want to and this there's definitely countless numbers of people I couldn't even guesstimate across the Americas that have bantu DNA that's a given but if they were tested if they were DNA tested they would almost certainly show up as either Tim knee the group they broke away from or Mende the group they were assimilated into because those are much bigger groups that are in these databases and I'm not even sure it's possible at this moment although I'm sure it will be soon to differentiate that what is the banter that are away from this and so what I want to suggest you is that there's different kinds of identities that are all equally valid they can all tell us different things florinda and sorry not going to house esse I think definitely called himself a banter woman for a reason I'll show you in a moment her descendants today or her family today in Sierra Leone call themselves Mende people in the Diaspora who test and where her relatives in the Diaspora could test as either Tim Neil Mandy there's different kinds of identities I don't think we're in the business or should be in the business of privilege in one above the other they tell us different things they can complement each other I personally feel this has been a horrific enough story that we shouldn't get into trying to privilege one kind of connection over another because they tell us different things now I'm going to end by saying oh and I also want to say that the other thing that DNA testing would be kind of fascinating in in a kind of fascinating way when I talk to the gang along about in Cuba about doing DNA testing they were happy to do it but their question is that they have always considered this a cultural group and so they've assimilated people into it who actually had no idea who their African ancestors were or where they came from and as long as they felt they were part of the gang galanga bar we're prepared to learn the songs and dances and follow their way of life they were happy to have them and I think that's a kind of beautifully inclusive thing so for them the issue is am I in some way if I did DNA testing going to be differentiating between the kind of genetic members and the adopted members as it were and that's something I'm just leaving in their hands I can't you know I put it to them they said they were happy to do it but they didn't want to differentiate so that's that's another issue and what it's also kind of interesting is that Alfredo to kaznia who you saw in the film the wood carver from Cuba he if you did the ma test him he would be at least as much Congolese at least as far as he knows as he is Banta because Florinda Diago married a Congolese man or at least someone who thought it was Congolese so there's all these identities together Alfredo is very proud now to be accepted into Bantu land but the only way he would ever be able to trace his Congolese roots will be a fee DNA tested so there's many different ways to see this and I'm not really suggesting we privilege one over the other now I want to just end with one of the little tip bit and we'll show you a teeny bit of film I think I hope haven't talked for too long now in one thing I want to say is that at the end of making they are we I was well in the course of making their way I discovered that the gang go along about in Cuba were also recorded audio recorded in the 1950s by the famous Cuban American anthropologist Lydia Cabrera they those songs left with Cabrera when she fled in the Cuban Revolution and are now in the Smithsonian the people in Cuba had long ago forgotten about these recordings even PUA at the old lady in the film who was who was singing on those recordings Puu is sadly no longer with us Puu was thinking on those recordings in the 1950s but she'd forgotten all about them they hadn't heard about them since 1959 of course they'd forgotten I managed to get permission to take those recordings back to Cuba and play them to them and it's kind of fascinating because they're the same songs and dances Cleo you can't see the dancers but the same songs clearly but there's Sun in a very different way I'm not a musicologist but for want of a better way to describe it they're much more as we might say African the way they sing them today is much slower more melodic much more kind of like lighting music that's obvious but then at the end of making they are we I had to go back to Upper Banta to check that they were all ok with it that it was how they wanted it to be to make sure all the credits wrote correctly you know the subtitles etc well as they should be and it was only at that point that I got the chance to take the Lydia Cabrera records and with me and play them now this is hours and hours of footage which of course I'm not going to show you and I've never really edited it so forgive me for this but there was a song that florinda was singing in the 1950s to Lydia Cabrera which they tell me means it's calling the names of the Banta leaders and it means something like I am Banta here's just a little bit of footage I it's just a minute or two these songs there is one that means more than any other this one - GLaDOS they have some that is so meaningful is direct that's Jory momma Dee Maggie Vanya all mentally from there one okay what they are see they are singing directly about the meander society when you initiates meta society you have to dance I expressed regards to comma Jen you dance so why do people come they we see you're a comedy comedy is bad I have heard about this in this done that is why I have come so I have composed it for this dance I have come for this meta dance that is what exactly what those people are single okay and I wanted to just pull you that kiss I think what it shows is the kind of I mean it's not a great film clopin it's not well shot or anything and it doesn't capture some of what they said but you can see that Joseph the schoolteacher and actually the chief also I really quite moved to hear that song and I personally think it's the most amazing thing that hos ever lived long enough to pass that to her great-granddaughter a song that tells who she was and it says this is who I am these are my people and I personally think that's amazingly powerful and one last anecdote to finish one of the first times I went to upper Banta the paramount Chiefs wife that's that was the village section chief you saw in the film but the paramount chief who isn't in the film his youngest wife saw Alfredo Duchesne it's a woodcarver which is something that's very important to them and she gave me this elephant carving for him there he is back in Cuba with it when I took it to him in Cuba and she wanted him to have that and I only discovered later that the oral tradition in Sierra Leone in the South where they are is that the Bantu people became elephants when they don't and if you scratch an OE front underneath you find about a person and I like to think that was she of course that's not literal but I like to think that what she was saying was you can might be a Cuban you might be out for a Cuban you might be anything else but if we scratch underneath we know exactly who you are you were bound to person and he keeps that in his studio but opposite his bed so he can look at it the witches I think that's beautiful okay I won there I'm happy to answer any questions understand no no because Banta doesn't exist anymore it's only in these songs and in a few a few cheats use that language when they are initiated as paramount chief and it's in these songs but what's kind of interesting is that in both places some words are mixed into the language they speak now so for example in the song you hear that is as they say in Sierra Leone FA Yankee they sing get in Cuba as Pepe young gay as if it's someone's name it's not of course there's also in Sierra Leone they've moved words from the Bantu language into the Mende language which is what this week today so any kind of similar words have been mixed in in both countries and yet somehow underneath all that there's enough for them to sing the songs together because there's enough words they're not similar enough to Spanish and Mende to get mixed in maybe French but knowing but that song has been sung for so long that people can know they'll go cat the language yes when they conduct the song if not the whole language oh yeah they don't speak the language at all they had no idea what the language was in Cuba they know what the language is in Sierra Leone but they had no idea what language they were singing in Cuba none whatsoever they interestingly enough that they also sing them in the same order as they do in so at San lázaro on December 17th in Cuba they sing them in the same order as you initiate as you use them as initiation songs so even though so much was lost so much was retained and there were times that I totally got it wrong for example there's a song that in Cuba they called Don Antonio as if it's someone's name it never occurred to me that was an African song I thought it was just something that had been you know son later never occurs to me that this might be an African song only later is it play are they singing it I think when we went either it's playing or they're singing it when we all were all in Sierra Leone and they can join in it's just that they it's a it's a song in which you call the names of your leaders and so as I surmised I really don't know but at some point in the past they had a leader in Cuba who was called Antonia and so they think it as Don Antonia but the rest of the words are the same as the African songs and they can join in and then they start singing it and they're saying like Papa Monda which is what they called the oldest of the guys from Cuba so there's lots of times that I kind of got it wrong and I I was so you know being the cynical academic and I have to like get this right I used to do things like confess like putting in other songs like I would get other Afro Cuban songs that were recorded by Lydia Cabrera for example cuz she recorded with all different Afro Cuban groups and I'd put them in in the middle of this you know we'd go there and I'd say okay in this one they got it right every time every time they would go that's not ours and I I would go back you know I so kind of like this cannot be true this cannot be true how could this be true and I would go back two years later and ask another old lady in a different village and she'd say oh yeah it means breeze carry me to the sea and at the end of the day you have to be like well these people are not having a joint conspiracy to for me or to fool Azad I mean there has to be some point at which you go yeah well I don't know if it's right or not but it's what they believe they're not just trying to fool us all that's just ridiculous and yeah for two years I would go back and forwards and play different songs and play them in different orders and they could get it every time they would be like yeah no this is our song but it should be before the other one damn that is what they did scuse my language that is what they do and so eventually you kinda have to be like well I I don't know but clearly they all think that's true and that is the story whether it is on art is not whether individual words are the same or different is not in the end what I think it's about because I just don't think it can be after 200 years or whatever it is yeah absolutely and they are rituals absolutely and they are very clear that flow ended Iago there their grandmother today was I mean it's about her eldest granddaughter I think second oldest granddaughter told me that even when she was grown and was a mother of her own children Clarinda would come and drag her to that place if she was not there singing on the kind of weekly basis now they only do it once a year but she was they were strong to a women who were not allowed to not do it this was something that they were going to to perpetuate and they have done so but yes it's absolutely a religion to them as much as a a culture and I didn't go into that so much in the film because that's a very difficult thing in I mean it was kind of comedy in a way beautiful comedy that when I went back to Sierra Leone to mock panda bear and I said I was going to bring oh can I these people to visit you would that be okay and they of course were like yes but we we want them to come to stay with us please can they not just come and look at us and go we want them to stay so I had to get my head around that and I went to ask them and say is this going to be okay and all the Cubans to their immense credit were like absolutely we're up for that we will do it and I asked the old guy cuoco you know he's in his 70s and I said it's if it gets too much for you you can go on stay in the guest house not that that's very luxurious but you know you can we'll get a car and he said no I'm doing this so that all happened but then I was back in Sierra Leone setting it all up and one of them said to me so do they know about Jesus or should we tell them about that imagine the beautiful irony that you can't laugh you know our songs and dances in your African traditions but 180 years and then you go back to Africa to learn about Jesus and so I had to say well they do know about Jesus it's a very Catholic country but like you they have both things together so we get we kind of got over that one but so it was very hard for me to put that in the song because they don't actually have that as a religion in Sierra Leone today and after decades and decades of colonialism as I'm sure you can understand it would be like you know as they said to me we still think of the ancestor of our ancestors and very special but we don't worship them as God's anymore because we've been told that's the wrong thing to do so I kinda couldn't push that religious aspect of it without insulting somebody so we went with the kind of and even to the Cubans it's very much you know certainly Alfredo would also be initiated into Santeria and he has Catholic saints on these walls so I I kind of didn't go down that but it is absolutely a religion to them as well yeah yeah yeah good thinking how did you choose your idea I had no intention of ever making this film I had no idea it was possible I truly did not know that I I started off I filmed the gank along about at their ceremony I was actually working on a totally different project altogether about a slave factory which is just the term for a slave warehouse a slave trading business in well these slave traders had to slay factories one in Galena someone just south and which is today Monrovia and Liberia and I was following where everybody from those places went out into the world it's a very unique case where it's possible to do that and I was looking at where they went to in Cuba cuz I know they were mostly selling captives to Cuba and so I contacted a good friend of mine who is Cuban but lives in the UK and said any kind of evidence of people from Sierra Leone Liberia region in Cuba today and he said yeah there's this one group left we should go contact them so a few months later we were both in Havana together doing work and he said well we can go but I don't drive and I said that's ok I Drive you're Cuban you've got then I'll Drive you get the way in that's all great so we went into the PU year the old lady who's passed now sadly she said come back for the annual festival you can't come and not company annual festival so ok so I went to the annual festival and filmed it and my idea at that point was very much I really need to film this to try and interpret it later because my Spanish is not good enough that I always understand what people are singing or telling me right at that time and also I was intrigued I was absolutely intrigued because they said to me this is pure Ganga it's not anything else now in my head is like they have to have adopted bits of other African ethnicities of course you don't say that's people but I was nonetheless intrigued by how they perceived that they had kept their own African religions separate from all the other bigger African afro-cuban religions so I filmed it and then I edited that hours and hours of footage to about 30 minutes we only with an idea to just using it in my own research and showing it to other historians who don't get to you know hang out in Cuban film festivals and you know that's most people and then I was back working on the original project in Liberia as she saw in the film and those people in that cafe saw I had to get my laptop out to look for a map and the people I was with a colleague of mine an Australian colleague of mine and the people in the cafe saw the thumbnail of the edited 30 minutes on my laptop and said what's that can we see that and was so interested in it that I had to go back the next day and show the whole town as you can see in the film and that was just I don't talk about this very often because I don't I don't want the film to be about this and so that's why I didn't put it in the film but I'm actually fleeing from a war at that point a war has broken out in upcountry Liberia that's why I've got my laptop out so I've got to get over the border into Sierra Leone and sneak the car back the other way and it's perfectly calm now this was like six years ago it's all good but that happened and so when you see that in the film where they're going around on the motorbike promoting that there's a war in the next town and he does the the guy on the bike John Ballard doesn't tell me till the end of the day oh now I've got to go now because my wife and children are in that town you stayed to do this are you crazy I think it's just mad and so whilst that's happening in the next town these people are so intrigued to see this film that they've went at this place and then they all show up and at that point I was like I have to film this I had no idea that I would make a film about and find their roots but I was fascinated by that idea that it meant it meant so much to them and that they wanted to see this culture because it does go so much against this idea that a lot of African Americans have that Africans are not interested and I really had to film that it was so kind of like really they all showed up on this day I mean I know that's not that much to do that I know it's not you know Paris but still I mean they all showed up to ask questions and then as I carried on showing it to people there was just this desperate need to help me find the answer and what people have asked me before now is like didn't everyone try and tell you that it was their song so you would belong to them no nobody else at all ever did that in the thousands upon thousands of people that I showed it to everybody just wanted me to tell me who these people belong to and I had the film that I had no idea that I would find an answer or that it would ever lead to people that could sing along I mean that's too crazy to imagine but I had was so intrigued by this idea of what it meant to them but that's what I thought I was doing that I was filming what this ceremony meant to people across the region of Sierra Leone and Liberia and then the logistics of doing the project were nightmarish I don't know what you all need to know it as I say in the film it took two years for me to get permission for the Cubans to go to Sierra Leone it took another year to edit a hundred seventy five hours of film into an hour and 20 minutes yeah it's it's nightmarish i if you have any specific questions happy to answer I let them decide it couldn't be less than four because you need three people to drum and want to say I said that the only criteria I had was that it couldn't be for men they had to have a woman because I think that's a different dynamic I'm not into that and I'm really glad that I made that stipulation because what's happened in the their society as I unpacked later I didn't realize this at the time was that it was always past their woman to woman to woman it always was until Fleur entered Iago died in 1984 Florinda had had three children at three daughters but two of them predeceased her the third one was alive even when I was there but had a horrific alcohol problem as I tried to interview her several times and she would just talk about how much she'd been drinking since the age of 14 she clearly did not pass her mender secrets to her daughter who was struggling with this obviously all her life so Florinda died without anointing a successor for the first time what they did was they called in the local son Tara which is fascinating in itself because it shows some kind of interconnection of afro-cuban religions so they call in the santero who chooses cuoco as the successor who's fluent as eldest grandchild who's a boy of course the guy and because Santeria is a very male-dominated religion so he chooses a guy Cuoco told me he's been waiting since 1984 to florinda to appear to him in a dream and tell him what the secrets are only after we go to Africa does he realize he's gonna be waiting a really long time because they're women secrets and what happens okay what happens when we get to Africa is that they never question the tell Farah is the boss because she's the woman how could she not been help me de and even the fact that the mender I have never ever heard of anyone I've ever spoken to has ever heard of another society like this in West Africa where it's I mean it's incredibly unusual that they initiate both boys and girls but that they're mostly girls and that it's always a female leader but yet you can initiate boys it's unheard of I've never come across anything like that what it tells us about the banter I'm not really sure but so they never question the Elvir is the leader in and even in Perico the town they live in Cuba cuca thought he was the leader but everyone else thought PU yeah Florida's got goddaughter the old lady was the leader if whenever you went now an ass they would always say peers that later she thought she was the leader she says in the film I'm the chief like okay but in cuccos and she was too old to travel obviously she was in their eighties then but cuoco in his own head is the leader it's not in anyone else's but we have to just let him so yeah there's this kind of interesting thing happened but I didn't choose those people they chose themselves Cuoco chose himself and his grandson I had already met Alfredo and the reason I really pushed to have Alfredo although you know they said it was okay was that he is probably the person I'd ever met in Perico who had been pushing this I'm so proud to be African identity when no one else would he had books and books on Africa he he was famous in his the first time I ever met his mother he was out of Perico and she let me into me and the colleague I was with the Cuban guy who took me there for the first time she led us into his studio and his mother just starts going on about and I find this immensely sad and I don't I want to say it as a token of sadness that she was just going on about how ugly his African stuff was and I think it's in men we sad but this is the kind of way that it sometimes played out in Cuba because there has not been this pride in being from Africa because of the idea that you were all Cuban and after the Revolution that was your only identity which was why in the film they say there was all these years we couldn't celebrate this stuff they did it but they shouldn't have been doing it because Castro promoted this idea that anything was divisive within Cuban society shouldn't be promoted and so in some ways they've done an amazing job on racism in other ways it's been most unfortunate and so Alfredo was someone who had always pushed for that and I will never ever forget screening the film back in Perico and after it was all finished and done and you know everyone came from the town and whatever and even though the government representatives were there and you you know it's scary for them it still is even because even though because of that alfredo stood up and he gave this off-the-cuff speech about how we've got it all wrong folks we have to be really really proud of where we're come where we come from just like the people are proud who come from Spain and it was people stood and listened and cheered him and it was a moment I will never forget so I kind of press for him because he had plowed that on his own I mean he really had been he'd bought up his children to believe they should be proud other people thought he was nuts so I really wanted him and then Alvaro was an obvious person because she's florinda successor so yeah that's that's kind of how it came about but I'm really glad I I pushed for a woman not least because I thought that would have a different relationship with the African women and I really wanted to have that in the film I didn't just want it to be loads of guys showing off you know though that happens too but I'm so glad I did because then we had the reason that she's never appeared to him in a dream which is you know kind of funny but oh but I shouldn't laugh but it is quite funny yeah I was watching closely the both costumes the man's costume what everybody's following after and the woman's costume my impression of that was that the woman they make the woman look like a witch you know like nobody was talking in fact nobody try to touch the woman mm-hmm they follow the man's let me feel because I was teaching not long ago I was teaching the culture like how people celebrate New Year's Eve in different countries for example in Peru mm-hmm they have the Lions the Chinese lion they try to follow him and it make that impression in my head that they try to touch the lion for good luck oh they did touching this other person there yeah they torture the man nobody touches a woman interesting by the way that the woman looks like she looks like a witch like dark you don't like it yeah darkness what everybody follows a man you see just wonder if it is the society its abided like that in there like they they say I confess I've never thought about that it's a very interesting angle I've never had a sense from them that they are in any way disrespectful or afraid of that mask I think they treated us yeah what's kind of fascinating is that that's the only woman's specific mask that's known about in Africa and it's the only one I don't know if he's got a sense of this in the film that covers the whole head I actually have one in my office but and and the reason for that of course is that women's hairstyles are very distinctive if you cover a man's face I mean everyone knows who it is but the idea is that you can't tell who it is so if you cover a man's face he's invisible women's hairstyles are very very distinctive the way they you know have their the patterns done and so you have to cover the whole head for it to being to be an anonymous person and so this is the only one that's known about you know in only these fondue masks of the only female specific masks that I think are known about in all of Africa which can either be OHS or youth but you pronounce it fondue whichever way you like it would you find those bone do mask I mean this was a manatee initiation whatever that was was doing it was that tie to my manatee or was that just tied to the greater white plate sure they go across the whole area from even into Liberia into Guinea and even into Cote d'Ivoire to Ivory Coast at the top and this is something that was replicated absolutely on American plantations across the Americas because they transcend language they transcend different gods they transcend so though it becomes a regional identity in the Americas that is I don't know particularly about North America apart from the sea islands that there would be enough people to do that kind of thing definitely in Brazil and in the Caribbean that is because even today these are marks of unity because everybody can understand in some way the peril and the bundu even if they can't understand each other's languages and so certainly we know historians know that in Brazil people were marrying captive slaves were marrying second generation with in not necessarily their ethnic group but within their regional group and certainly within people that had come out of this part of Africa the Perot and the bondo are they absolutely the basis of what they understand life to be and this happens again in times of tragedy in the Civil War you could go and stay with other people that were in the same peril and bondo to you the power the bondo at bedside the power the men Society became a way to a primary way to raise forces to go and fight either to protect your people or to we've saved your children from the rebels the primary way that you do that is through the peril and bondage society so it's almost only mad of all for us how important these things are you take a new name when you're initiated because you are seen as a new person you get the cicatrices that the scarification that people have are cut at this time and they often to mark a skill that you learnt or a special trait you're considered to have and its really an immense sadness to us that we can no longer pinpoint what those said what those red people are doing some work towards it but it's it's very difficult to know but they were a passport that people had and it's clear why parents did those things and cut those scars onto them and whatever because it was something that no one could take away and wherever they went they would not be something that their captor could read but there was something that everyone else could read in the same slave pen as you or on the same ship as you it's a way to say this is who I am and this is who I really am beneath this hell that I find myself in now and so these things all go back to the param Bundy Bush initiations and they would have existed certainly they existed on the sea islands most likely they existed in other places within the US as well that we just don't know enough about because obviously they were not anything the planter wrote about this was not something they were advertising they were doing but I I don't know whether it was I've never considered that she looked like a witch keep the women private where the man is the one that leads and he's costume is more a much lighter in color you know the woman is all is all in black so I kept looking at and relating to yeah I I'm gonna ask them about that next time I see them right I've never thought about that same date the one that came from the tree the guy no it's it's Palmer its palm palm kernels yeah I did not make him do that I have to also I did not make off right now go up that tree when I see his face I'm like you're not doing that I so did not make him do that I did not set up that that's just the Juke why everyone calls him to do this isn't it why you're not doing that and he's halfway up the tree I was like yeah yeah I don't know if I had safety approval to do that but it was kind of funny that we had these great conversations with them wear baggy the guy whose trees he's going up has this conversation with us where he says how do you make make in Cuba and we're looking into the guy Wow we kind of got the supermarket want to tell you but no they I mean it was just amazing what before I got there with them they I had was called to this village meeting and I sat down with them and they said they're just the most amazing people and I have these conversations that even now I can hardly say to you without just being immensely moved where they said things like well what should we give them to eat a nice no no I'll bring I'll bring food I mean I'm not trying to impose on you I know these are subsistence farmers right it's like I'll bring food there oh no if you're gonna bring half the food we have to contribute the other half of the food I used to like really you're trying to give things to me I mean I just mind blown and they they were even saying to me first of all when they said they wanted us to stay in the village I said well you know it's difficult because I need to recharge the camera batteries and so on and they have no electricity obviously and they said well can we get a generator and then we'll save up for the gas for the generator and it was like I mean the lengths they went to to have us there are just so mind-blowing but one of the things they want to ask me was what they eat should we what can we get for them to eat and I said no no we have to eat you know whatever and Solomon the school the young guy the school teacher his mom was cooked for us the whole time we were there not one of us got sick from a stomach complain which I mean they have no running now they have a pumps an NGO has put a pump in for them at this point she's washing plates with river water and she's cooking for all these people that have zero experience with microbes from West Africa not one of us got sick I think that is the most amazing credit to that woman whatever we gave her for doing that for us was nowhere near enough and they they have these wonderful things where I remember one question they said to me was should we collect spoons for them or do they know how to they eat with their hands two people eat with their hands in queue but can we collect spoons and I was like I can bring spoons that's okay and when I got there I know it's just like every day it's different yeah when I got there they dug as this pit toilet and then they discuss with someone else who'd been to well like Solomon the younger the schoolteacher he's been to Freetown and stuff at the capital and he'd been talking some other people that you knew foreigners and they discussed that going to the toilet is a kind of private affair for us so they'd made these rush matting doors like a whole screen around the toilet The Dig Dug appeared and made a thing around it and then they collected all these white stones and put them as a like pathway up there so if we had to go in the night we could because there's no lights obviously we could find our way up there I mean the lengths that they went to I just Beyond and there's a colleague of mine that grew up in Africa said great Olaf have no village than to dig your toilet and I think that's really true I need in me a bowler epidemic we got that message to them right now go dig toilets this is what but no normally they don't know we were there for five days I think yeah we were in Sierra no we were there for a week we were there for a couple of weeks in Sierra Leone but we were in the village felt like a week which you know it was it was it was the most amazing week of my life easily topics I guess you West Africa tropics but I keep waiting to see people that was me it's very humid it's not sunny but it's very humid but I you know it's very humid but you know they're from Cuba that's also very hot humid I however I was funny but that's behind the camera so that was okay and ya know it was it's kind of very hot it's just not something ya know it was it's actually quite nice and cool at night there so you can get some sleep thankfully yeah but yeah it was I was the cameraman were probably dripping in smoke behind the camera ya know that they look very cool and at all times I don't know how they perfect that look I wish I knew thank you so much

Channel: Vanderbilt University

Views: 7,401

Keywords: Vanderbilt University

Id: H2QaWVhQr-c

Length: 79min 27sec (4767 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 10 2016