GASPAR YANGA & THE FIRST FREE PEOPLE OF TH E AMERICAS

[Kala]

GASPAR YANGA & THE FIRST FREE PEOPLE OF TH E AMERICAS
Posted by: "Runoko Rashidi" Runoko@yahoo.com runokor
Tue Jan 9, 2007 9:20 am (PST)
THE GLOBAL AFRICAN COMMUNITY

H I S T O R Y N O T E S

GASPAR YANGA AND THE FIRST FREE PEOPLE OF THE AMERICAS

Posted by RUNOKO RASHIDI

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http://members. Aol.com/_ ht_a/fsln/ yanga.htm

The Setting: The first shiploads of slaves from
Africato Mexico were hardly off the boat when an
abortive slave uprising occurred in Mexico City. It
was in 1537. This uprising frightened the Spaniards on
many counts. The conquest was still proceeding. Only
about a fifth of Mexico was in Spanish hands, and much
of that not yet secure. The threat of "barbarian"
Indian invasion from the far North or South was quite
real. Moreover, wrote the Viceroy to his King, the
uprising was preceded in Mexico City by close
organization by Blacks, who chose their own "King,"
and devised a plan that called for Blacks and Indians
to cooperate and together rise and slaughter all the
Whites.

During the 1540s there were two uprisings of Blacks
near Mexico City, and rumors of plots for African
uprisings in the capital were heard frequently during
the 1600s. In the 1560-1580 period, Afromexicans who
had fled the mines in Zacatecas kept the area in
turmoil with raids on haciendas and roads. During this
period one group of escaped Black miners from
Zacatecas joined with the unconquered Chichimec
Indians northwest of city and together they descended
upon the settler communities in what became a brutal
war. Also in the late 1500s slaves from the Pachuca
mines rose up and fled the city. These ex-miners found
refuge in an inaccessible cave from which they sallied
forth periodically to steal cattle and other
necessities.

The African population in Mexico was pronounced along
the Atlantic and Pacific coastal areas. On the
Atlantic side, large slave labor sugar plantations in
coastal Veracruz produced great profits for the
Empire. A combination of the profiteers' need for
workers and the habit of slaves running away, led the
slave masters to utilize chains and other cruel
measures on their subjects. Nevertheless, the enormous
mountains behind the Veracruz lowlands became the home
of fiercely independent maroon communities of both
ex-slave Blacks and of Indigenous, too. The peaks of
the range rise to 12,500 feet on the south, and to
18,300 Mt. Orizaba and 14,000 Cofre de Perote in the
center. Below the ridges in the 10,000 foot northern
stretch of the range there is the best evidence of the
value of these jungle covered mountains for hideaways.
Located in a canyon is a small city of an Aztec
tributary state that became an Indian refuge that the
Spaniards never discovered. The town remained occupied
on into the 1700s, and its existence did not become
known to the outside world until 1994.

Yanga: The most memorable of the numerous Afro-Mexican
maroon colonies in the range was the one founded after
a bloody slave rebellion in the sugar fields in 1570.
The rebel leader Gaspar Yanga was a slave from the
African nation of Gabon, and it was said that he was
from the royal family. Yanga led his rebel band into
the mountains, where he found a locale sufficiently
inaccessible to settle and create his own small town
of over 500 people. The Yangans secured provisions by
raids upon the Spanish caravans bringing goods from
the highlands to Veracruz. Relations were established
with neighboring runaway slaves and Indians. For more
than thirty years Yanga and his band lived free while
his community grew in size. A Spanish study of the
situation concluded that Gaspar Yanga must be crushed.
With that goal in mind a Royal war party left the city
of Puebla in January of 1609. It did not succeed in
its goal. Before he died, Yanga would have in hand a
treaty with the Spaniards that granted freedom to his
followers and established their own "free town."

Five decades after Mexican independence Yanga was made
into a national hero of Mexico by the diligent work of
the grandson of Vicente Guerrero, Vicente Riva
Palacio. The energetic Riva Palacio was an historian,
novelist, short story writer, military general and
major of Mexico City mayor during his long life. In
the late 1860s he retrieved from moldy Inquisition
archives accounts of Yanga and of the expedition
against him. From his research, the grandson of the
first "Black President" brought the story to the
public in an anthology in 1870, and as a separate
pamphlet in 1873. Reprints have followed, including a
recent edition in 1997. Others have written about
Yanga, but none have matched the flair of Riva Palacio
in conveying the image of proud fugitives who would
not be defeated.

Riva Palacio informs us that Yanga was quite old in
1609 and "the revered ancient one" had delegated
military organization to his aid, the Angolan
Francisco de la Matosa. Upon receiving word of the
Spanish expedition that had left Puebla, Yanga had
General de la Matosa gather fighters for a defense.
The General dressed in clothing fitting a commander,
in the hope of instilling military decorum on troops
which had little weaponry and nothing in the way of a
military uniform. Their combat had been guerrilla
raids. The maroon band whipped into shape by de la
Matosa, aided by Yanga's son Ñanga, had but a hundred
fighters with firearms, and some were using old
muskets of the conquistadors. Four hundred others
prepared to fight with rocks, poles, machetes, and
bows and arrows. Into their mountains marched the well
armed Spanish war party of 550. There were 100 crack
Spanish troops, but the rest were a mix of adventurers
looking for spoils and conscripted Mexicans, including
Indians and "mulatos" some of them also armed with
bows and arrows.

A retreat further up into the wilderness, no doubt,
tempted Yanga. The 39 years that he had lived in the
mountains gave him knowledge of the routes in and out
of the ravines, around the 200 foot waterfalls, and
through the forests of 150 foot high vine and fern
covered trees. But should he flee? "The revered
ancient one" had already moved many time while
creating a community that tried to farm land and tend
cattle. The band included ever more children and
elderly. Yanga gambled on standing up to the enemy.
The reports Riva Palacio found in the Inquisition led
him to conclude that Yanga had decided ahead of time
that he would join de la Matosa and his son with the
troops, and that they would make a show of force that
they hoped would inflict enough damage to interest the
Spaniards in negotiations for peace. The terms?
Perhaps the Spaniards would be interested in granting
a form of peace treaty similar to the one that had
ended hostilities with many Indigenous groups in
Mexico, that is, a "homeland" in which there would be
self-rule on local matters, but from which would come
tribute taxes for the King of Spain and loyalty to the
Crown in case of foreign attack. There was, however, a
major difference between the Indian and Afromexican
situation. Because of the slavery inflicted upon the
Blacks, any free "homeland" would soon be crammed with
African runaways from servitude. Yanga offered an
answer to this worry of the slave masters. He promised
to return any new slaves who sought asylum in his free
territory. Early in February word reached the Yanga
settlement that the Spanish war party was near. Yanga
all but lit the way to his village by sending the
enemy a captured Spanish prisoner, who carried a
message that offered the deal. The message also
included gratuitous insults to the Crown and a warning
that to take on the Yangans would prove costly.

A deal was not forthcoming and a fierce engagement was
fought downslope from the settlement with heavy losses
on both sides. The maroons retreated back through
their settlement, which the Royal troops entered and
burned. The prospect of chasing the maroons further up
the mountains was not, however, an inviting one for
the Spanish war party. A priest was then sent to seek
out Yanga, and hopefully convince him the cause was
lost. Yanga reiterated his terms: In return for a
grant of farmable land and the right of
self-government, Yanga offered that he and his
followers would return to the Crown authorities any of
the slaves who, in the future, might flee to such a
Black refuge. In addition to their own town, the
rebels wanted it in writing that all the slaves who
had fled before 1608 should be free; that only
Franciscan friars should attend to their people; and
that Yanga should be their governor and that the
succession should go to his descendants. In spite of
the opposition of the slave holders of the sugar
plantations, the Crown acceded to Yanga's petitions,
and the maroons were officially settled on the slopes
of Mount Totutla in 1630.

Riva Palacio had titled his Yanga account The 33
Negroes. They were not of Yanga's band. Their fate was
the horrifying evidence of the long term impact of his
achievement upon the psyche of White Mexico, and thus,
upon the history of the whole long stay in Mexico by
the Spanish rulers. Riva Palacio explains that news of
the agreement with Yanga was greeted with great alarm
and misgiving among the resident Spaniards of Mexico City. Slave owners in the city were livid and demanded
assurances no such breech of private property rights
as the massive manumission of Yangaistas would ever
happen again. Rumors of Blacks scheming with Yanga for
further gains abounded. "Was it true that along the
road from Veracruz to Mexico City there was an
encampment of thousands of Blacks?" it was asked.
Would not the freedom given the band in the Veracruz
mountains embolden them to try to free all Blacks? Was
not a muleteer from Veracruz seen talking in
suspiciously hushed tones with local Blacks? Did not
the local Blacks seem to have a chip on their shoulder
since the word has spread about Yanga? Were the Blacks
about to rise up and kill everybody, especially us,
the Spaniards seemed to be asking.

Rumors reached a boil on Easter week 1612. The
authorities canceled all celebrations for fear the
parades would be used by the Afromexicans of the city
to spark an uprising. Then in the middle of the night
on Easter a butcher was parading a pack of pigs into
town and something bothered the pigs. They began a
horrible squeal. Shutters were flung open. Shouts were
heard. It was assumed the Blacks and mulatos were
rising up. By midday 33 Blacks had been rounded up for
execution, 29 men and 4 women, While paraded by
government authorities to the gallows they were beaten
by a drunken mob. The mass hanging did not satisfy the
mob, which tore the bodies to pieces and placed the
heads and other parts on poles which were left hanging
for a considerable time, until the authorities
determined that the stench was too strong and the
parts were buried. "Thus was snuffed out the sound of
conspiracy in the year 1612," writes Riva Palacio.

Yanga's town survived. And it was moved to better farm
land in the lowlands. The Yangans had asked for a
better location, and the Viceroy agreed, having
concluded that he preferred to have the Yangans live
near his newly build military base than up in the
mountains. The military base became the present large
city of Cordova. The town of Yanga, then known as San Lorenzo de los Negros, had 719 people at the time of
Mexican independence. Today it is a city of over
20,000, with the majority being people from the
highlands rather than Afro-Mexicans from the region.
Nonetheless, since 1986 the city has celebrated its
founder in an annual August "Festival of Negritude."
(See statue of Yanga, photo montage of the festival,
and details on the festival in the Gallery section)

[Olùkọ́ Ọbádélé]

O se fun oro yii. Mo koko ko nipa Yanga ni ile nnkan-aye-atijo Mexico. Won soro die nipa Yanga sugbon won ko so nnkan nipa awon eniyan dudu ti won wa ni ile Olmec ti won saaju awon oyinbo patapata.

Thank you for these words. I first learned about Yanga in a Mexican museum. They spoke a little about Yanga but they didn't speak about the Afrikans of Olmec land who preceded the europeans completely.

Obadele