The Story of Our Ancestors, the Story of Africa

E Kuenta di Nos Antepasados, e Kuenta di Afrika

It is a process which involves the creation of entirely new culture patterns out of the fragmented pieces of historically separate systems.

—JAY EDWARDS

Creolization, the evolutionary development of Afro-Caribbean culture, began when conditions allowed distinct cultural memories to regain meaningfulness within a New World context. Through a process of negotiation, certain histories continued; others became inverted or disappeared altogether. In the end, creolization enabled diverse African cultures to mediate their differences within a new collective construct, legitimizing their cultural presence in the New World. Between layers of antecedents, the creole form exists at the intersection of numerous cultural processes: between social and individual experience, between cultural Selves and Others, between retained and discarded histories and identities, and between colonizers and colonized.

Diverse African nationals entered into a process of creolization, emerging finally as "hybrid societies ... mosaics of borderlands where cultures jostled and converged in combinations and permutations of dizzying complexity" (Morgan 1997: 142). The history of creolization, then, traces the development of an alloy-culture from which much has been burned away. The mechanism for this process was set in motion quite inadvertently by white Europeans, whose ambitious economic vision for the New World squeezed maximum profitability out of minimum investment through unpaid slave labor. Toward this end, Africans of many cultural backgrounds, social statuses, and spiritual beliefs were captured and chained, transported within the holds of ships and forcibly relocated to the Caribbean, where they labored on the plantations or were resold elsewhere in the Americas.

According to Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, the multiplicity of African cultures "reach[ing] the New World did not compose, at [that] moment, groups" (1992: 10). Rather, the experience of slavery united the Africans, however diverse their backgrounds and cultures, compelling them to conform to the standards and expectations of the dominant white society. Although slavery eventually ended, emancipation failed to bring assimilation into the dominant culture, which was still unwilling to embrace blacks as equals. Emancipation, when it came, merely had the effect of cooling the New World "melting pot," and new cultural identities began to congeal. In the end, creolization enabled diverse African peoples to mediate differences within a new collective construct, and to redefine a cultural presence in the New World (Khan 2004: 4).

Montamentu, the religion for which Tambú served as accompaniment, decrees a modern cultural foothold based on abstract perceived Africanness, a hybrid adaptation of remembered African origins marked by their adaptation to the New World experience. Its emergence indicated the formation of a common identity and collective memory among the Afro- Curaçaoan people. To study Montamentu, then, is to examine one of the earliest examples of Afro- Curaçaoan collective memory. Its study reveals a dendrochronology—a history articulated in layered chapters. Just as cross sections of an ancient tree reveal secrets of climatology and other life circumstances to those able to interpret what they see, so too does the cultural stratum of Montamentu reveal to ethnologists the changing historical contexts of its growth and survival. Because creolization is bound to political and social stakes and meanings, unraveling its threads within Montamentu uncovers hidden complexities distinct to Curaçao's unique cultural encounters. Today's historians confront in Montamentu (and creolization in general) that which Trouillot calls the "ultimate challenge [of uncovering cultural] roots" (1995: xix).

Of the total 500,000 or so Africans who passed through Curaçao during the slave years, only some 2,300 were to remain permanently on the island. As previously stated, this created on Curacao two distinct slave communities: the negotie slaven, which was in a constant state of flux; and the other, the manquerons, which, much smaller in number, was static. The continuing turnover and growing diversity of the negotie slaven brought fresh supplies of African traditions to the island. Manquerons, forced to remain on Curaçao, were generally pressed into service as common laborers (Postma 1975: 237; Goslinga 1971: 362). As may be surmised, they came to connect with the dominant Dutch on an ongoing personal basis. Servants gained closest access to Dutch culture, often quartered within the landhuis ("plantation house") located on the grounds of estates they served, but every level of interaction and cultural exchange took place (Hartog 1961: 173). On the other hand, outside of marketing negotie slaven to other island plantations, Curaçaoan slavers maintained very little close contact with the negotie slaven. They were imprisoned as they were within the confines of Curaçao's two large detention camps—both located far from the homes of the Dutch; and, during their stay on Curaçao, their care fell to the island's lowest manqueron servants. Neither black subgroup represented to the Dutch a separate entity (Postma 1975: 271). The exchange of ideas between the negotie slaven and the manquerons produced a number of cultural by-products, including the Afro-syncretized religion, Montamentu. Because Dutch interests were largely focused on trade and profits, the goal of Christian proselytizing (which motivated other European colonialists) was not a high priority, and Montamentu, when it did evolve, was met with little interference from the island's dominant culture.

Africans taken into slavery through the Dutch West Indische Compaigne came predominantly from two geographical regions: the Angolan coast (roughly the area between Cameroon and the Congo River) and the region of West Africa. While the cultural foundation of Montamentu may be traced to these two African regions, sleuthing out the specific Old World antecedents presents a Gordian knot unlikely to be fully disentangled. Records, where they exist, tend to...