POPE FRANCIS UNCONVENTIONAL ACTS

Okello Oculi writes that Afro-Argentineans deserve freedom, dignity an end to racial genocide

In March 2018, Pope Francis will make history by saluting the national conference of the Communist Party of China with offers of a group of Chinese art works. The art items were looted in the 19th Century by Catholic missionaries and taken to the Vatican Museum. The gesture will be another of the novel and unconventional acts that have marked his short papal tenure. Within the context of the proclamation of January 1, 2015 to December 31, 2024 as ‘’The International Decade for the Rights of Peoples of African Descent’’, by the General Assembly of the United Nations, Pope Francis should also have on his agenda a gift to AFRICA HOUSE in Addis Ababa works of art from Argentina’s ‘’Museo de la Estancia Jesuitica de Alta Gracia’’, and ‘’Museo Historicio National’’ in Buenos Aires’’. The second museum hosts a 1836 painting by Martin Boneo which shows a live ‘’Cancombe’’ dance festival by AFRO-ARGENTINEANS. The first museum holds a painting depicting ‘’Jesuits, natives and African slaves’’. Pope Francis was himself ordained as a Jesuit priest.

Such act of cultural diplomacy by a son of Argentina should be accompanied by Ms Maria Lamadrid who, in 2001, was prevented by Argentina’s immigration officials from boarding a flight to Panama because they told her: ‘This can’t be your passport. There are no Blacks in Argentina’’! The Holy Father should also offer a retroactive denunciation to the lie told in the 1950s by a mulatto Minister to Josephine Baker, a visiting American star singer. When she asked: ‘’Where are the Negroes?’’, the minister, Ramon Carillo, answered: ‘’There are only two, you and I’’.

The minister was reflecting what observers have labelled as an official policy of practicing social ‘’genocide’’ in Argentina by claiming that African immigrants had NEVER entered the country. Professor Joy Elizando has written that ‘’by the late 1700s, nearly 50 per cent of the population in the interior of the country was black, and between 30 and 40 per cent of the population of Buenos Aires was black or mulatto’’. Henry Louis Gates Jr has noted that between 1601 and 1866, Africans imported from Mozambique and Angola numbered 63,845 in the Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata. President Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, who ruled from 1868 to 1874, openly expressed a policy of extermination of Africans in Argentina, boasting that they had ‘’become a Brazilian problem’’. Between 1861 and 1914, a policy of ‘’whitening Argentina’’ was pushed forward by importing 2.27 million Italians. Yellow Fever, malnutrition and being forced to fight in the country’s wars as frontline troops exacted heavy tolls.

The notion that Afro-Argentina and Argentina are not compatible has come under increasing challenge. Ms Maria Lamadrid, for example, leads an organisation called ‘’AFRICA VIVE’’ (or Africa Lives) which in 2001 persuaded the government ‘’to hold a ceremony to honour the country’s black military heroes’’. In a report in The New York Times (September 14, 2014) , Michael Luongo noted that in 2009 an institute called ‘’Movimiento Afrocultural ‘’

WHEN NIGERIA’S NATIONAL FOOTBALL TEAM, THE SUPER EAGLES THRASHED THE ARGENTINEAN TEAM IN THE 1996 LOS ANGELES OLYMPICS, AND IN EARLY NOVEMBER 2017 ( BY FOUR GOALS TO TWO), AFRICA VIVE ACTIVISTS MUST HAVE DANCED WITH DIVIDED JOY AS CHILDREN OF THEIR ANCESTORS THRASHED THOSE WHOSE RACIAL ARROGANCE HAVE PSYCHOLOGICALLY SO SEVERELY INJURED MILLIONS OF ‘COLOURED’ PERSONS

was launched in Calta Defensa in Buenos Aires for the mission of ‘’promoting African-Argentina heritage’’. In the 2014 World Cup the coach of Argentina’s team made a historic decision– if seemingly incognisant to global spectators – to bring in a Black player as a substitute.

AFRICA VIVE is inspired by exhibits of paintings of ‘’Argentina’s gauchos, or cowboys’’ in the Museo Las Lilas de Areco and Museo Ricardo Guivaldes. Tourist entrepreneurs have started receiving over 110,000 visitors a year to a chapel built in 1861 at Capilla de los Negros for the worship of YEMANJA – a Yoruba goddess of the sea. The national dance ‘’TANGO’’ is being re-claimed as a product of Africa, with ‘’the first paintings of people dancing the ‘’tango’’(being) of people of African descent’’. It is being traced to a Kikongo word for the Sun – NTANGU – and the movement of the sun being replicated in a dance here on Earth.

When Nigeria’s national football team, the ‘’Super Eagles’’ thrashed the Argentinean team in the 1996 Los Angeles Olympics, and in early November 2017 ( by four goals to two), AFRICA VIVE activists must have danced with divided joy as children of their ancestors thrashed those whose racial arrogance have psychologically so severely injured millions of ‘’coloured’’ persons that –according to Professor Miriam Gomes – ‘’if someone has one drop of white blood, they call themselves white’’!.

Pope Francis, as an Argentinean, grew up under the silence among the country’s rulers and middle classes about the existence and poverty of Afro-Brazilians. He was a young priest when liberation struggles blazed in former Portuguese colonies in Africa: Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde. In the Americas, the victory of Fidel Castro in Cuba – with a medical doctor from his country, Ernesto Che Guevara, emerging as both a hero and second in visibility with Fidel - must have caught his imagination. The intensive pressure that successive American governments threw at Cuba provoked Cuba’s policy of invading South America will free health care, free education and economic investments - goods which their own repressive governments were not providing them. As Afro-Cubans got free education up to university level and carried themselves with rare dignity as they competed victoriously at Pan-American games, he must have taken notice. When news came that black troops that Cuba sent to Angola defeated white racist troops of South Africa, it must have rattled the silence across Argentina about its African presence.

The politics of Global South must be deeply ingrained in the awareness of Pope Francis. It must include black Africans standing up to fight for the ‘’leafy tree of freedom’’. Pope Francis should use his enormous charisma and passion for justice to awaken the Americas to whispers by Chile’s legendary poet, Pablo Neruda, that AFRO-ARGENTINEANS demand freedom, dignity an end to racial genocide: waiting and waiting in the silence of his Papal Bull.