[LINK] "Drumming Up Black Awareness"

[rfmcdonald]

Over at Inter Press Service, Marcela Valente takes a look at the mysterious history and current identity of the Afro-Argentines.

Black peoples’ presence and contribution to national culture have been systematically denied by official historiography. There is also a widespread perception that there are no people of African descent in Argentina, where 97 percent of the population describe themselves as white.

However, the latest scientific research has shown that more than half of the population has at least one Amerindian ancestor, and that the average genetic structure of the Argentine population contains a European contribution of around 78 percent, an indigenous contribution of between 16 and 19 percent, and an African contribution of between 2.5 and four percent.

In 1810, when the territory that is now Argentina ceased to be a colony of Spain, black people made up 30 percent of the population of Buenos Aires, and in some provinces they were the majority, as in Córdoba in the centre, Catamarca in the west and Tucumán in the north.

This very significant population, descended from Africans brought over as slaves in colonial times, was decimated when black soldiers served as cannon fodder in the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870), in which Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay virtually devastated Paraguay, which lost one million of its then 1.3 million people.

The yellow fever epidemic that killed off about eight percent of the population of Buenos Aires, apparently introduced by soldiers returning from the war, caused ravages particularly among Afro-descendants, who lived in overcrowded conditions without any sanitation.

Other sources indicate that the very high death toll among men ensured that widowed and single Afro-Argentine women would marry white men, thus assimilating into the populatino of a country that was becoming increasingly populated by European immigrants.