“Whites were auctioned on the block with children sold and separated from their parents and wives sold and separated from their husbands. Free Black property owners strutted the streets of northern and southern American cities while White slaves were worked to death in the sugar mills of Barbados and Jamaica and the plantations of Virginia.”(from the forgotten slaves Hoffman reveals). In 1855, Frederic Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who designed New York’s Central Park, was in Alabama on a pleasure trip and saw bales of cotton being thrown from a considerable height into a cargo ship’s hold. The men tossing the bales somewhat recklessly into the hold were Negroes, the men in the hold were Irish.Olmsted inquired about this to a ship worker. “Oh,” said the worker, “the niggers are worth too much to be risked here; if the Paddies are knocked overboard or get their backs broke, nobody loses anything.”
Before British slavers traveled to Africa’s western coast to buy Black slaves from African chieftains, they sold their own White working class kindred (“the surplus poor” as they were known) from the streets and towns of England, into slavery. Tens of thousands of these White slaves were kidnapped children. In fact the very origin of the word kidnapped is kid-nabbed, the stealing of White children for enslavement.(the untold story of slavery)
From wikipedia….”Arabs also enslaved Europeans. According to Robert Davis between 1 million and 1.25 million Europeans were captured by Barbary corsairs, who were vassals of the Ottoman Empire, and sold as slaves between the 16th and 19th centuries.[8][9] These slaves were captured mainly from seaside villages from Italy, Spain, Portugal and also from more distant places like France or England, the Netherlands, Ireland and even Iceland.[10] The impact of these attacks was devastating – France, England, and Spain each lost thousands of ships, and long stretches of the Spanish and Italian coasts were almost completely abandoned by their inhabitants. Pirate raids discouraged settlement along the coast until the 19th century”
Sala Malongo everyone as we all come back from celebrating from the holidays and clearing our heads from the New Year festivities have been a bit negligent with the site handling family business. But we are getting back into the swing of thing and bringing people up to speed. One of the major misconceptions of Palo Mayombe is that it is totally an African tradition. It would be true if their was a physical representation of a nkisi in the Americas among the tribesmen of each individual sect or rama. In this case we have to base our understanding on Oral traditions and stories which were incorporated to each individual group. Slavery for all of the people involved was a global epidemic for all races and creeds and ethnic groups. If we truly start to disseminate a one class that did not suffer on the grabs of slavery we would be fooling our very own existence in this world. I remember that my godfather told me many of times that a lot of the elders in Palo Mayombe were of light to white skinned individuals who were knowledgeable beyond our years. Now I struggled with this classification for years because myself being of a lighter complexion I always thought well slavery was highly concentrated on the African Influence. Well we as priests forget that if it were not for many of the native people’s of places like Brazil, Santo Domingo, Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago, and all the islands the Bantu presence would not have surely survived. It is a marriage of many cultures and ideals that through time formulated Palo Mayombe to what it is now.
Most who understood the terrain and the plants,animals were encompassed into Palo Mayombe and so Nkisi was born from the Malongo(Nature itself) and brought into existence. Most nkisi can be identified as Totems as well a point of power and reverence. With this being said Palo Mayombe has its roots in africa but surely is part of the Americas. That is why you see this new resurgence of people wanting to connect with it this type of practice. Not everyone is made to practice Palo Mayombe in a priestly manner but I do believe that people have lost the reverence of being a believer and or a congregant of Palo Mayombe. Someone who looks to Palo mayombe as a place of respect and understanding and a devotee of Nkisi. I do not believe that palo is a separatist religion just that the people who have very little knowledge and know how can sit there and actually formulate ideas that create separation. Thus thrusting Palo mayombe back into the dark ages of fear and loathing, Where this romanticism with devil worship and Satanism which in the truest essence of palo mayombe is non-existent. Good and bad, right and wrong does exist but the little fork guy in the suit is a bad movie made for political and social consumption.
As we move forward to 2013 and look at the real stories in Palo Mayombe and historical details that shape our religion can we expect the community to be pro active in this new renaissance of understanding of truth and enlightenment. Or are we simply going to sit back and allow for people to keep lying to us about the true nature that is Palo Mayombe? The Palo Mayombe of the 1600 to 1900′s have changed drastically and how will we write our stories of self in this multicultural event of nuances and people? We are still building a cultural process of being in our religion and whether we are white,black, jew, gentile, latino, arab etc we need to focus on what makes palo mayombe great. That is kanda(community) by far and how we move and bring forth a true understanding of palo mayombe and take it back from the ideological view of criminality and disambiguate our religion back to its fundamental roots which is healing and culture then and only then will we have made an attempt to right our own way into the history that is Palo Mayombe. Flame wars and threats does not make a cultural difference in palo. You make a difference as a priest(ess) of our faith with acts of ritual work and process and forward movement. Its time for a lot of the community to grow up and grow together and understand that the cultural process of self is building a good strong character and being worthy of those titles that in the real world for a laymen does not mean nothing but for the devotee and practitioner alike means something. Palo Mayombe now as it was back then is made of all the fantastic ethnicity I have mentioned and as we look to Paleros who live in Alaska, Norway, Switzerland and all over the globe let’s be an example and not a just another cult of supposed black magic. Tata Musitu