In the Afro-descendant town of Puerto Tejada, in the southern Colombian department of Cauca, a handful of master swordsmen represent one of the last bastions of the traditional martial art called grima, or machete fencing. From its origins in the colonial era to the threats facing this ancestral art form in the present, grima is an integral part of Afro-Colombian cultural heritage.

The House of Cacao

The House of Cacao offers a cool and tranquil refuge from the tropical sun in a region known for its sweltering heat. Yet even in this cultural center, a welcome shelter from the clamorous streets outside, the metallic ring of steel striking steel breaks the quiet repose. Here in the Academia de Esgrima de Machete y Bordón, some of the last masters of an ancestral Afro-Colombian martial art propagate their teachings to younger generations dedicated to the survival of their heritage.

“This is an art that, ever since our African ancestors arrived in this country, we have maintained and preserved through the generations,” explains Maestro Miguellourido, a recognized master with fifty years of experience in the art. “That’s why for us, grima is an art of freedom and resistance. That’s why we can never allow it to die. It’s our heritage and the legacy of our ancestors.”

Yet the future of this heritage is uncertain. The masters dwindle in number as many young Afro-Colombians look to urban Colombia and mestizo culture instead of their own heritage. Grima has no official status in the National Registry of Colombian Cultural Heritage. Like so many others, it’s a tradition that stands at an impasse between a storied past and an uncertain future.

An ancestral artform

In some respects, history has moved slowly here. As in colonial times, sugar is the lifeblood of the region’s economy. In centuries past, the Spanish forced enslaved Africans by the tens of thousands to work these fields. As thousands more were sent to the deadly gold mines of the neighboring Pacific, the lowlands of southwest Colombia took on the distinctive African character that they still retain. 

Today, neocolonial business interests plunder the region for its sugar and gold just as the Spanish did before them. Through the intervening centuries and up to the present, one ubiquitous tool has remained instrumental in the hands of the cane cutters: the machete.

The men skilled in its use in the fields soon learned to handle the machete with equal aptitude as a weapon. Drawing on African martial traditions merged with European styles of swordplay, Afro-Colombians developed grima—a contraction of the Spanish esgrima, meaning fencing—as a practical and distinctive form of self-defense. A machete in one hand and a defensive stick in the other made for a simple yet effective fighting technique.

The same machetes that once cut cane eventually sought the necks of the Spanish enslavers as thousands of Afro-Colombians joined the wars of independence in the name of liberation. The series of hegemonic nineteenth-century regimes that followed independence later broke that promise. In later decades, the sons and grandsons of the rebels put their machetes to equal use during the civil wars that wracked Colombia well into the twentieth century.

For practitioners of the art today, the liberatory history of grima is still fundamental. 

“The legacy of this art is a liberatory one that has given to the Black people of Cauca the generosity of freedom because our people, Black men and women, were principal actors in the fight for freedom throughout Colombia,” explains Alicia Castillo Lasprilla, a local educator, researcher, and grima activist. “In this cultural center, the House of Cacao, a center of Afro-Colombian culture and memory, we are reconstructing every piece of historical memory that links us to the practices and customs of our ancestors.”

For Lasprilla, grima is a core expression of Afro-Colombian culture indelibly linked to many others. 

“This martial art overlaps with our gastronomy, our ancestral cuisine. It’s also linked to traditional medicine, oral tradition, music, popular arts, and artisanry. By safeguarding grima, we safeguard our whole culture.”

In search of recognition

One way grima practitioners and activists seek to guarantee the future of their art form is by campaigning for its recognition at the national and international levels, as an officially inscribed form of intangible heritage.

“We are in the process of safeguarding this tradition by seeking recognition and support at the municipal, departmental, and national level so that we can cultivate this art and pass it on to the next generations. This is an arduous task, and we’re facing an uphill battle for recognition,” says Maestro Porfirio, who studied under the legendary Héctor Elías Sandoval—a researcher, storyteller, filmmaker, and poet, in addition to a master swordsman. “The fact that many people have come from other countries to visit us, seeing something of value in our art, when our own government hasn’t even recognized it—this situation needs to change.”

The grima practitioners campaigning for heritage recognition believe it may represent the best opportunity for valorizing and preserving their art. Perhaps the publicity, state programs, and funding that accompany heritage recognition could provide the boost grima needs to remain a living tradition.

Still, students of heritage regimes know that such lofty ambitions are sometimes misplaced. Sometimes, they have unintentional adverse effects on the communities and traditions they seek to valorize.

Afro-Colombians, in particular, may have reason for concern. Colombian anthropologist Maria Fernanda Escallón documented one example in the village of Palenque. Members of the maroon community, the descendants of escaped African slaves who established free enclaves on the margins of colonial societies like Colombia, inhabit the town. Palenque, located in the Colombian Caribbean, experienced significant socioeconomic and political tensions following a UNESCO heritage declaration in 2005. 

The same is at risk of happening with viche, a traditional Afro-Colombian sugarcane distillate that was once illegal but was legalized and officially recognized as national heritage in 2021. The commercial production that followed now threatens to put artisanal producers out of business.

Yet not all heritage declarations have had such questionable results; others have succeeded in safeguarding threatened traditions and benefiting source communities. Whether attaining official recognition would solidify or jeopardize the future of grima depends on a delicate and unpredictable balance of legal procedures, community leadership, and bureaucratic political factors. For now, that question remains perhaps unanswerable. However, if the activists for recognition have their way, it will have to be answered sooner or later. 

In the meantime, grima masters like Miguellourido and Porfirio continue to preserve and propagate their teachings in spaces like the House of Cacao. For them, grima is heritage, whether official or not, and they see it as their duty to extend it to the next generations as it was to them.

“What fills us with pride is when people come, they see our art, they learn it, and they leave happy in the knowledge that Colombia possesses its own martial art, which is grima with machete and bordón,” says Maestro Porfirio.

As I left the tranquil courtyard of the House of Cacao, the bright ring of steel still sounding from within left me with the resonant impression that, for now, whatever the future may hold, grima remains a vibrant and living tradition.

Rowan Glass is an anthropologist, journalist, writer, and filmmaker based in Colombia. 

The post Grima: The Last Masters of Afro-Colombian Machete Fencing Fight To Save Their Tradition first appeared on Lazo Magazine.

Resilience and coexistence in the wake of colonialism

“Wakhtán,” came the customary greeting in the Kamëntšá language as I entered the house of Batá Margarita Chicunque, 80. Margarita is one of the most highly respected artisans in Sibundoy, locally renowned for her mastery of weaving. 

I had come to pick up a capisayo, a ceremonial poncho, which I had commissioned in the traditional style. 

Margarita waved me into her home with a smile that showed the gaps in her teeth. I sat to watch as she put the finishing touches on her work.

Margarita’s hands seemed to move automatically, drawing the fibers together, interweaving red threads with blue, white, and black — the traditional colors of the Kamëntšá. Even as her hands flew across the loom in a series of movements honed by decades of practice, her eyes were on the grainy screen of the antique television, whose light illuminated the narrow confines of her modest workspace.

The broadcast showed the inauguration of Gustavo Petro, the newly elected President of Colombia at that time — and the favored candidate among the two Indigenous communities of the Sibundoy Valley. 

Petro is one of those rare voices in Colombian politics who has shown concern for the welfare of Indigenous communities, who make up 3.4% of the nation’s population.

When my Kamëntšá hosts in Sibundoy learned that Petro had won the hotly contested election of 2022, they cried tears of joy. Many hoped that Petro’s presidency would mark a turning point in a history marred by discrimination against Indigenous peoples. 

For locals of Margarita’s generation, that history is well within living memory.

When Margarita was a girl, she recalls, few outsiders came to Sibundoy. The area was difficult to access at the time. There was only one road into the valley, built in the 1930s by Indigenous forced labor overseen by the Capuchin missionaries who ruled Sibundoy for the better part of the twentieth century.

Empowered by the Colombian state to rule over a large swath of southwestern Colombia, the Capuchins dominated Sibundoy from 1904 to 1970.

A history of forced assimilation

In the days of the Capuchin rule, children caught speaking Kamëntšá or Inga were beaten in the missionary schools and ridiculed by their mestizo peers. The Capuchins claimed they wanted to “civilize the savages” by stripping away their culture and replacing it with the Spanish language, Catholic doctrine, and the Colombian national anthem. 

The Capuchin fathers, who equated Indigeneity with backwardness and idolatry, hoped that with enough brutality, nothing of the Indigenous cultures they came to “civilize” would survive.

At the same time, the Capuchins sought to populate Sibundoy with mestizo settlers brought in from other parts of Colombia. By the mid-twentieth century, settlers from the neighboring city of Pasto and places farther afield like Antioquia — known as the “Whitest” region of Colombia — came to outnumber the valley’s Indigenous communities. 

With a combination of trickery and theft, the mestizos soon came to occupy the best land in the valley, pushing the Indigenous inhabitants to the marshy base, which floods each season and is ill-suited for cultivation.

Though the challenges faced by the Indigenous communities of Sibundoy continued after the dissolution of the Capuchin Mission in 1970, the resilience of people like Margarita demonstrates that the missionaries did not succeed entirely. 

Seventy years after learning how to weave the traditional patterns from her mother, who learned them from her mother before her, Margarita keeps the ancestral arts of her people alive — as do her daughters and granddaughters. 

But Margarita’s craft hasn’t remained unchanged during the decades she made her living at the loom. 

“When I started,” she told me, “we had only sheep wool to weave and stones as beads. We had to make our own natural dyes with plants, which we had to go out and find.”

“Today, we can buy synthetic yarn and plastic beads in all colors,” she added. “Now that the materials are much cheaper and more abundant, everyone can weave.”

Festival season: a microcosm of cultural and religious pluralism

Even though Indigenous traditions like Margarita’s weaving survived the Capuchin Mission, colonization still changed the Indigenous cultures of the valley. Today, the plaza at the center of Sibundoy is known as Interculturality Park, a nod to the mix of cultures in the region.

Both the Kamëntšá and Inga cultures are irreversibly marked by the experience of colonization and the following decades of coexistence with the mestizo population. Not only does every Indigenous person in the valley today speak Spanish — and many no longer speak Kamëntšá or Inga — but almost all are also practicing Catholics. 

Nevertheless, there is something different about the forms of Catholicism practiced in Sibundoy. One example is the festival of Clestrinÿe, which marks the culmination of the Kamëntšá calendar.

Every year on the Monday before Ash Wednesday, the Kamëntšá don their ceremonial regalia, take up their instruments, and embark on a procession that renews their people’s contract with their ancestors, Mother Earth, and the cosmos. Vibrant colors, discordant sounds, and all manner of sights and symbols converge in this gathering of a people celebrating an annual ritual of resistance and renewal.

Once forbidden by overzealous Catholic missionaries, today, the festival gets larger and more festive each year. 

The meaning of the festival, however, is still a topic of active debate within the community. Some ascribe Christian values to it. Others stand by the ancestral interpretations.

And even though the Capuchins failed to stamp out the festival, their successors rebranded it the “Carnival of Pardon,” claiming that Christian notions of forgiveness from sin are part of the festival’s symbolic acts of communal reconciliation. 

This Catholic gloss conferred legitimacy on the festival for some in the community. It also attracted outside interest in the Sibundoy Valley.

Others, however, rebelled against this cooption, preferring to emphasize the festival’s roots in the precolonial past — a world concerned with ancestral spirits, ancient deities, and the annual renewal of a delicate cosmic balance. Today, both interpretations vie for legitimacy in the tumult of the deeply syncretic Clestrinÿe festival. 

At stake in such debates is the question of what it means to be Kamëntšá following centuries of intercultural contact and exchange. This question permeates every aspect of life for the Indigenous communities of Sibundoy, where differing cultures and identities increasingly converge.

Tourism: a help or a hindrance?

In recent years, the growth of Colombia’s tourism sector has attracted increasing interest in the Sibundoy Valley.

Many of the foreign visitors who come through the valley come in search of yagé — the local term for a potent hallucinogenic brew better known as ayahuasca. 

As in much of the Amazon, the Indigenous communities of the Sibundoy Valley have long used yagé as a sacred plant medicine. 

At a ceremony with an Inga shaman, a French tourist in his mid-30s explained why he had come to seek the sacred brew.

“In the West, there’s no more spirituality,” he told me. “We’ve become disconnected from nature, from ourselves. Yagé helps restore that connection.”

Today, thousands of foreigners — mostly Westerners — flock to the Sibundoy Valley every year to experience the powerful visions produced by the brew. 

The valley’s indigenous inhabitants have mixed reactions towards these foreigners. 

Some members of the Indigenous communities regard the newcomers with suspicion. When I met with the governor of the Kamëntšá council to request permission to take photos and videos during Clestrinÿe, he initially suspected me of spying on the community’s inner affairs. My host family had to intercede on my behalf — with lengthy advocacy spoken in the ceremonial register of the Kamëntšá language — for him to agree. Such reticence is typical among the more traditional members of the community.

Not everyone is so suspicious of outsiders, though. Where some see threats, others see opportunities.

The 40-year-old Rosario Jacanamijoy, currently a government bureaucrat in the Colombian capital of Bogotá, dreams of someday returning to her native valley to buy back the lands that mestizo settlers swindled from her grandparents decades ago. Once she buys back her family’s land, she plans to build a series of cabins to start an ecolodge to promote sustainable tourism.

“We would like the whole world to know our community,” she told me. “Our colors, our weaving, our territory.”

Defending the land for future generations

Despite the optimism of people like Rosario, outside threats to the valley’s Indigenous communities persist in the form of multinational mining concessions, road development projects, and the long-lasting Colombian armed conflict. 

When the Capuchins left, others took their place. First came the oil barons, Western corporations that installed pipelines in the neighboring lowlands, rich in the so-called black gold of the Amazon. In the process, they displaced Indigenous populations and polluted ecosystems.

Then came the guerrillas, narcos, and paramilitaries, who brought the violence of the Colombian conflict up the slopes of the Andes and into the Sibundoy Valley. Locals soon found their family members threatened, or even disappeared, at the hands of these bandits. Such violence continues sporadically.

Today, Western-owned multinational mining companies like Libero Copper continue to threaten the autonomy and health of Indigenous communities and their natural environments. At the same time, projects like the long-stalled San Francisco-Mocoa Bypass, a highway development project, threaten Kamëntšá land claims and local ecosystems.

Even so, Antonio Juagibioy, an Inga shaman, land defender, and former Inga council member, finds cause for hope.

As we walked along a mountain path over the beautiful and verdant Sibundoy Valley with the Territorial Guard — an ethnically mixed Kamëntšá-Inga unit of land defenders who patrol the territory for trespassers — Juagibioy told me that their region has its own soul, life, and air. 

“Why do we defend the territory? For those on the way, the children, the youth, all those still walking behind us,” he said. “For them, we defend the territory so that one day they’ll have a place to say, ‘Thanks to the elders, those who came before, for leaving us this.’”

Rowan Glass is an anthropologist, journalist, writer, and filmmaker based in Colombia. 

This journalism was possible thanks to the generous support of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center and its Pluralism and Civil Exchange program.

The post Cultural Pluralism and the Indigenous People of the Sibundoy Valley first appeared on Lazo Magazine.