Afro-Colombian dances with colorful traditional clothing. VWPics/SIPA USA/PA Images. All rights reserved.
When I first visited Buenaventura, back in 2013, my orientalist curiosity of the “capital of the Pacific” was confronted by the social, political and economic disaster that marks this strategic region. My colleagues were visiting the city as part of a research group on violence and drug trafficking and having just arrived in their country I was trying to get a glimpse of the celebrated “Afrocolombianidad” in Colombia’s geographic imaginary. Buenaventura is a metaphor of Colombia’s antiblackness.
Although the city is celebrated for its vibrant black presence (according to national census 89% of the population is black) and for housing the country’s main port, it denies to the black population basic citizenship rights. Life in Buenaventura is not that different from life in other racially-driven depressing zones of social suffering of black Americas but here, the contrast between black misery and the port-service economy of Colombia’s gateway to the world market is insidious.
