The hairstyles with which the Afro-Colombians told the slaves where to flee

50 kilometers from the waters of the Colombian Caribbean, in the square of a remote town among the hills, an expressive sculpture honors the memory of an exceptional hero.

Benkos Biohó is described as a “spirited, gallant and daring” man who commanded “an uprising and retreat of certain runaway blacks” in late 1599, according to the Spanish chronicler Fray Pedro Simón.

The word ‘cimarrón’ alone tells part of this story.

«Cimarron, after. (From above.) Adj., Amér. It is said of the slave or domestic animal that flees to the field and becomes wild». Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy (1970).

The word evokes centuries of cruel exploitation of millions of Africans who were driven from their homes and taken to the other side of the world to be sold and treated as objects in the service of their masters.

But it is also talked about daring revolts.

Benkos Biohó—along with his wife Wiwa, their children, and about thirty men and women—led one of these revolts by fleeing Cartagena de Indias and defeating the group of guards sent to capture them.

In their flight, they did not stop until they reached the place between the Montes de María, which in 1714, after more than a century of struggle, was legalized by royal decree under the name of San Basilio de Palenque, in whose square that church is currently a monument.

“The palenque de San Basilio was neither the first nor the only one, but it is best known for its libertarian strategy and for being commanded by King Biohó, and finally for being America’s first free people”, Emilia Eneyda Valencia Murrain, founder of the Association of Afro-Colombian Women (Amafrocol), explained to BBC Mundo.

While other palenques faded over time, San Basilio preserved an important part of its ancestral legacy, largely through oral tradition, a tradition that reminds us that Benkos Biohó was not alone in his achievement.

And that without the help of his wife and other women, it would have been much more difficult to make his way to victory.

It was their minds that recorded useful data and their cunning created an encryption system show the enslaved the ways to freedom without their subjects noticing.

remember the scenery

Kidnapped and transported, Africans came to America to stop being and to serve.

But no matter how hard they tried to strip them of every trace of humanity, that is a stubborn quality that lingered as much in the nostalgia for what had been taken from them as in the desire to escape hell.

When the only alternative was to flee, in such a strange place, how do you know where to go?

Well, on the Caribbean coast of the so-called New Kingdom of Granada, enslaved women devised a great discreet way to create and hide orienteering maps to spaces of freedom in plain sight.

Women weren’t so suspicious.

In addition, they left their environment more than men because of the tasks assigned to them.

“Normally, the potential, wisdom and cunning of women are underestimated and that is why in the case of Colombia they have been able to keep many secrets, to later use them for the benefit of the communities: healing, culinary, plant secrets. ..

“That was partly what happened with that libertarian process in the palenque de San Basilio”, noted Emilia Valencia, who heard the story of palenqueras when she went to investigate “many, many years ago”.

“They told me the place came about because when the women went from ranch to ranch, whether it was to run an errand or whatever, they watched the roads and points of interest.

“They then passed this on to the men and together they drew up the strategy.”

carrot

“You have to remember that the enslaved people came from different cities in Africa, with different languages, and in the beginning it was difficult for everyone to understand each other.”

But there was a common language they brought from their home continent.

“What we call “carrot braiding.”the one attached to the scalp, which is specific to African peoples”.

And those braids spoke: they told stories, explained the social status of the person wearing them, made clear their marital status, what religion they professed, identified them as members of certain communities or ethnic groups.

In the New World, they started talking about freedom.

“After consulting with the men, they agreed that they would use the braids, the hairstyles, as a secret code that indicated the paths by which to escape.”

The enslaved people became cartographers without pencil or paper, making and carrying maps drawn with hair on their heads.

“That’s how they designed what are known as the famous escape maps or the freedom or escape routes,” says Valencia.

And not only that.

in those hairstyles women also kept valuables which they would use once they reached the palenques, such as matches, grains of gold or precious seeds to cultivate.

Braided for chained

To plan the escapes, the women gathered around the heads of the smallest on which they drew their maps.

“They designed them with braids, a coiled one, for example, denoted a mountain; those that looked like serpents, sinuous, indicated that there was a source of water – a stream or a river -; a thick braid indicated that there was a detachment of soldiers in that section,” explains Valencia.

“The men they “read” the codes they wore in their hairstyle, from the forehead, which marked the place where they were, to the neckwhich represented the closed mountain, the place where they had to go during their flight”, emphasized the sociologist Lina María Vargas in the study “Poetics of the Afro-Colombian hairstyle” (2003).

It had been told to him by Leocadia Mosquera, a teacher from the Chocó department who had learned the secret of hairstyles from her grandmother.

He revealed that it wasn’t just about displaying geographic features or warning of the presence of guard posts: with their encrypted heads, they had to tell everyone what the strategy was.

The braids also indicated meeting points, marked with several rows of braids meeting in the same place, each with a possible path.

At those points, they met during the escape to find out how they were doing and make decisions.

The last stab was in the neck.

As Leocadia explained, if they met under a tree, for example, they would finish the braid vertically and upwards so that it would stand upright; if it was the bank of a river, they flattened it towards the ears.

In addition, there were sometimes braids of different lengths along the same paths, telling different groups how far to go, with the strongest coming behind.

All this information and more was passed through the cities and fields of colonial Colombia for the eyes of all but the understanding of a few.

the other edition

Unfortunately, over time, these liberating hairstyles became a stigmatizing tool.

“Something special happened,” says Valencia.

“The Maroons helped shape cities with art. But then there was a break with haircuts.

“Because? Because when they were ostensibly free and started to integrate into society, the women were forced to give up their hairstyle, what was their tradition, their culture.”

While some descendants received that inheritance thanks to stories passed down from generation to generation, many had to keep it private and many never found out.

“There was a demand from employers and general society to unite a hegemonic model of aesthetics and beauty, so black women were forced to straighten their hair.

Since then, says Valencia, “everything goes through the hair… violence starts from kindergarten.

“It was terrible, but we are making progress, thanks to the conversations, the forums, all the training and cultural processes.

“We have succeeded in decolonizing mind and body and now it’s great to see how we have a black vice president (France Elena Márquez Mina) and a minister (of Education, Aurora Vergara Figueroa).

“Dr. Aurora called me to thank me ‘for helping me with my self-recognition,'” she said, because she was also one of those who straightened her hair, and it was hard for her, but now she is very happy to show all her distress – as we call it to the maximum expression of negritude – in public.

“For black women, to go through those chemical ironing procedures and so on just to try and fit in, believe me, it’s very traumatic and very, very painful,” Valencia concludes.