THE IMPORTANCE OF NARRATIVES AND CULTURAL HOLIDAYS: BALANTA MAN VS. HALLOWEEN

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In an interview on Firing Line with Margaret Hoover, Bryan Stevenson expertly explained the significance of “narratives”:

“There are narratives that actually shape the way we think. . . . Stories . . . but ideas, values . . . . for example, in the 1970’s and 80’s [America] declared a misguided war on drugs. [America] said that the people who are drug addicted and drug dependent are criminals and we need our criminal justice system to respond to that crisis. We could have said that people with addiction and dependency have a health problem and we need our health care system to respond to that. The reason why [America] made the crime choice was because we were being governed by what I call the politics of fear and anger. It was a NARRATIVE that we had to be tough on crime. That people who don’t do exactly what we want them to do are criminals and we use that narrative to justify these extreme punishments and I think we have to change that narrative because I think fear and anger are the essential ingredients of oppression and injustice. If you go anywhere in the world where people are abused or oppressed, the oppressors will give you a narrative of fear and anger.”

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It was the narrative that facilitated what Michelle Alexander called The New Jim Crow enslavement of a generation of black people in America. The narrative was the ideological foundation that enabled a massive transfer of wealth from predominantly black Americans to white Americans.

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In addition to the disproportionate mass incarceration of black people, the drug war devastated the social and economic development in those communities for decades. Young black men in particular were criminalized for the buying and selling of weed to support their families and communities when few employment alternatives were available. Taxpayers’ money armed the police force which was used as a terroristic occupying army in black communities. According to Alexander’s reserach, “more black men are behind bars or under the watch of the criminal justice system than there were enslaved in 1850.” However, marijuana reform law now says that the same activity that made young black men criminals is now “legal” and the economic benefits are staggering. According to the Investopedia Government & Policy 2020 Election Guide,

“Better than expected sales of marijuana in Colorado and Washington over the past several years have resulted in buoyant tax revenues. In 2015, Colorado collected more than $135 million in taxes and fees on medical and recreational marijuana. Sales in the state totaled over $996 million. Sales in North America grew 30%, to $6.7 billion, in 2016, and is projected to increase to $20.1 billion by 2021, according to Arcview Market Research. Local research supports this view as well; a report from the Colorado State University-Pueblo's Institute of Cannabis Research recently found that the legal cannabis industry has contributed more than $58 million to the local economy, primarily through taxes and other fees. Should marijuana become legal on a federal level, the benefits to the economy could be exceptional: a report from cannabis analytics company New Frontier suggests that federally legal pot could generate an additional $131.8 billion in aggregate federal tax revenue by 2025.”

Now consider that the number of black farmers in America peaked in 1920, when there were 949,889. Today, of the country’s 3.4 million total farmers, only 1.3%, or 45,508, are black, according to new figures from the US Department of Agriculture released this month. They own a mere 0.52% of America’s farmland. By comparison, 95% of US farmers are white. The land theft and wealth transfer from black farmers in America to white farmers in America means that black people are not in a position to benefit from growing marijuana legal. In addition, access to capital and loans to buy land and build processing and distribution centers means that the entire financial system that was created to serve the original white monopoly capitalists that formed the state governments as well as The United States of America will be the biggest beneficiary of the new transfer of wealth from black people to white people.

Meanwhile, the narrative about drug use has now changed exactly from “the people who are drug addicted and drug dependent are criminals and we need our criminal justice system to respond to that crisis” to “people with addiction and dependency have a health problem and we need our health care system to respond to that.” This is because, marijuana is less considered a drug, but heroin and opiods are considered drugs. And the biggest users and opiod drug addicts are overwhelmingly white. Thus, it is now politically acceptable to change the narrative about drug addicts in order to transfer wealth into servicing the health needs of white people and the priorities of the original monopoly capitalists that formed the state governments and the United States of America.

This is a very clear and specific example of the significance of NARRATIVES.

WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH BALANTA PEOPLE AND CULTURAL HOLIDAYS?

Holidays serve as signifiers and symbols of national and cultural narratives. It engages, or attempts to engage, all of society in the acceptance and performance of a cultural narrative. For example, the 4th of July or “Independence Day” is a national holiday to celebrate the official narrative that a group of militia men whom are referred to as “patriots” were courageous freedom fighters who defended themselves against the tyranny of England and eventually, through a just war, established a new government and nation built on the principles of freedom and liberty for all people. That’s the narrative that is commemorated every 4th of July.

However, this narrative has always been challenged. According to Samuel Johnson’s seminal English Dictionary published at the time, the word "patriot" had a negative connotation and was used as a negative epithet for "a factious disturber of the government". An alternative narrative claims that the followers of a group called The Sons of Liberty were traitors and terrorists who engaged in criminal action against British troops (police) when they attacked them and attempted to defy the legally constituted authority at the time.

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The most famous, and perhaps the greatest, expression of an alternative narrative of America’s Independence Day holiday was given in 1841 by Frederick Douglass, who asked, “What to the slave, is the 4th of July?”

“Fellow citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? . . . .I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me by asking me to speak today? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn that it is dangerous to copy the example of nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin! I can today take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people. . . .

Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! Whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorry this day, "may my right hand cleave to the roof of my mouth"! To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave's point of view. . . . Whether we turn to the declarations of the past or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America!”

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SO LET US NOW CONSIDER THE SPECIFIC NARRATIVE EUROPEANS USED AGAINST BALANTA

1433 Romanus pontifex, the first in a series of papal bulls issued during the fifteenth century that regulated Christian expansion, sanctioned the Infante’s request and Portugal’s alleged mission in Guinea since ‘we strive for those things that may destroy the errors and wickedness of the infidels’.

1506 Earliest account of the Balantas in written records, Valentim Fernandes, Descripcam, “There was very little stratification in Balanta society. Everyone worked in the fields, with no ruling class or families managing to exclude themselves from daily labor.”  

1594 Andre Alvares Almada, Trato breve dos rios de Guine, trans. P.E.H. Hair - “The Creek of the Balantas penetrates inland at the furthest point of the land of the Buramos [Brame]. The Balantas are fairly savage blacks.”

1615, Manuel Alvares commented, “They [Balantas] have no principle king. Whoever has more power is king, and every quarter of a league there are many of this kind.” and “They are all great thieves, and they tunnel their way into pounds to steal the cattle. They excel at making assaults . . . taking everything they can find and capturing as many persons as possible.”

1627 Alonso de Sandoval wrote that “Balanta were ‘a cruel people, [a] race without a king.”

1684 Francisco de Lemos Coelho says that “much of the territory of the Balanta ‘has not been navigated, nor does it have kings of consideration.’”

Late seventeenth century, Capuchins noted that ‘Balanta and the Falup’ cause notable damages and seize every day the vessels that pass by . . . and this even though the vessels are well armed.’

After constructing the narrative that the Balanta were “savage”, and “cruel” and later, that their “souls needed to be saved”, and creating a “legal” system (but not “lawful”) that replaced natural law with a new, man-made fictitious “corporate” or “statutory” law that made it “legal” to enslave the people in the land of “Guinea” , the Europeans, led by Portugal and then England, proceeded to send the most vicious of men to kidnap and capture Balanta men, women and children. The firsthand early accounts of these raids are documented in Balanta B’urassa, My Sons: Those Who Resist Remain Volume 3. Click here to read the official account of the Portuguese’s first arrival in the land of Guinea, according to Gomes Eannes de Azurara’s, the official royal chronicler of the King Don Affonso the Fifth of Portugal.

According to Herman L. Bennett, in African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic,

“The Portuguese do not act in accordance to existing definitions of conquest. During their initial voyages along Guinea’s coast, the Portuguese not only eschew establishing a settlement, either peacefully or by force; they also make no effort to contract a treaty so as to acquire a territorial claim to ‘the land of blacks.’ With several noteworthy exceptions, the initial Portuguese encounter with Guinea constituted chattel raids. Such raids underscore the commercial imperatives of those ‘notable deeds’ and of Portugal’s conquests.

Not to be outdone, the English, led by John Hawkins came to Guinea as violent, uncivilized barbaric criminals. West Africa: Quest For Gold and God 1475-1578 by John W. Blake recalls,

“After 1553 . . . English traders henceforth made regular voyages to Guinea. . . . The later struggles were the outcome of acts of pure aggression, perpetrated by groups of enterprising merchants and sailors in England and in France. . . . the Englishman, William Hawkins, seems to have sent three expeditions between 1530 and 1532. . . . Englishmen ventured to Guinea once more after 1553, and the international struggle in West Africa assumed hitherto unrivaled proportions. . . .Taken as a whole, a sordid fight for trade resulted in which little mercy was given and none expected, while the interests of the negroes were entirely subordinated to those of the whites. . . . London merchants and Plymouth sailors now advanced religious arguments, as well as the argument of force, to support their clandestine operations in Guinea. . . . England, as was perhaps natural for the paramount protestant state, took the lead in Guinea enterprises from 1559 to 1571. . . .It was John Hawkins who first put into operation the idea of English participation in the Africo-Caribbean slave trade, . . . .We hear of at least one other English ship which loaded 125 negroes at Cape Verde in the winter of 1564-5 .”

In A History of The Upper Guinea Coast 1545 to 1800, Walter Rodney Walter adds,

“Hawkins’ methods were typical of the first phase which the Portuguese had long left behind. He made direct attacks on unsuspecting villagers, and he seized slaves whom the Portuguese had purchased.

LET US NOW CONSIDER THE SPECIFIC NARRATIVE USED BY AFRICAN SCHOLARS TO DESCRIBE BALANTA

Walter Rodney writes:

“The earliest European reports disclose that the Balantas had a multiplicity of petty settlements consisting of family lineages (Fernandes, 80) . . . . The Balantas had quantities of prime yams…. The best farmers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries - the Balantas, the Banhuns, and the Djolas- all had cattle and goats …. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Andre Dornelas pointed out that Balanta territory was free from heavy vegetation. It was these very Balantas who reared the most livestock in the area, and it was they who provided supplies of foodstuffs for their neighbors….That peoples who were far superior producers of food than the Mande and Fula are consistently dubbed ‘Primitives’ is due solely to the contention that they did not erect a superstructure of states. . . . It is only the Balantas who can be cited as lacking the institution of kingship. At any rate there seemed to have been little or no differentiation within Balanta society on the basis of who held property, authority and coercive power. Some sources affirmed that the Balantas had no kings, while an early sixteenth-century statement that the Balanta ‘kings’ were no different from their subjects must be taken as referring simply to the heads of the village and family settlements. . . . as in the case of the Balantas, the family is the sole effective social and political unit. . . .

The distribution of goods, to take a very important facet of social activity, was extremely well organized on an inter-tribal basis in the Geba-Casamance area, and one of the groups primarily concerned in this were the Balantas, who are often cited as the most typical example of the inhibited Primitives. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Portuguese realized that the Balantas were the chief agriculturalists and the suppliers of food to the neighboring peoples. The Beafadas and Papels were heavily dependent on Balanta produce, and in return, owing to the Balanta refusal to trade with the Europeans, goods of European origin reached them via the Beafadas and the Papels. The Balantas did not allow foreigners in their midst, but they were always present in the numerous markets held in the territory of their neighbors. . . .

Among the Balantas, who are to be classed as a ‘stateless society’, the system of land tenure is different. The Balantas are all small landowners, working their lands on the principle of voluntary reciprocal labour.”

In Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations Along The Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400 -1900, Walter Hawthorne writes,

“Like most in the coastal reaches of Guinea-Bissau, Balanta society was politically decentralized. In such societies, the village or confederation of villages was the largest political unit. Though a range of positions of authority often existed within villages and confederations, no one person or group claimed prerogatives over the legitimate use of coercive force. In face-to-face meetings involving many people, representatives from multiple households sat as councils threshing out decisions affecting the whole.

Concerning the Balanta, then, there are two narratives. The European narrative says that the Balanta were cruel savages who needed their souls saved and were thus to be legally enslaved. The African narrative says that the Balanta were an egalitarian society where everyone worked together and there was no monopoly of authority or coercive force. All decision affecting the people were made by consensus through a council of elders. The Balanta were the best farmers, participated in an organized pan-ethnic market and fed the local people regardless of ethnicity. 

SO THE QUESTION IS, WHO WERE THE REAL CHAMPIONS OF FREEDOM, LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY? THE EUROPEANS OR THE BALANTA?

In defense of their freedom, Hawthorne describes the Balanta military skill,

“In part, the Balanta and other coastal groups resisted enslavement by exploiting the advantages offered by the region in which they lived. Put simply, the coast offered more defenses and opportunities for counterattack against slave-raiding armies and other enemies than did the savanna-woodland interior. In the early twentieth century, Portuguese administrator Alberto Gomes Pimentel explained how the Balanta utilized the natural protection of mangrove-covered areas – terrafe in Guinean creole – when they were confronted with an attack from a well-organized and well-armed enemy seeking captives or booty: ‘Armed with guns and large swords, the Balanta, who did not generally employ any resistance on these occasions. . . . pretended to flee (it was their tactic), suffering a withdrawal and going to hide in the ‘terrafe’ on the margins on the rivers and lagoons, spreading out in the flats some distance so as not to be shot by their enemies. The attackers. . . . then began to return for their lands with all of the spoils of war’. Organizing rapidly and allying themselves with others in the area, the Balanta typically followed their enemies through the densely forested coastal region. At times, the Balanta waited until their attackers had almost reached their homelands before giving ‘a few shots and making considerable noise so as to cause a panic.’ The Balanta then engaged their enemies in combat, ‘many times corpo a corpo’. . . .

Upon finding a stranded boat, young Balanta warriors summoned tabanca age-grade members with a bombolom. This instrument, a hollowed section of tree trunk with a horizontal slit that is struck with two sticks, is used by Balanta today to transmit detailed information over long distances. In casual conversation, one elder told me that the bombolom is ‘the Balanta telephone.’ Alvares described these instruments in the early seventeenth century:‘Bombalous are used to signal what they want announced in a very public way within districts or among neighboring village, and these serve the same purpose as do sentinels and beacons, so that as soon as the sound of the bombalous is heard this is the signal for all to listen. . . . When a war breaks out, within an hour it is known over a district of 20 leagues. If there are settlements all the way the information is passed along more easily, even if the houses are a league apart, since each tells the next.’ Similarly, Spanish Capuchins specifically mentioned that Balanta ‘play a certain instrument that they call in their language bombolon’ to ‘announce the attack.’

Having assembled in what the Capuchins called ‘a great number,’ Balanta warriors struck their stranded victims quickly and with overwhelming force. ‘Upon approaching a boat,’ the Capuchins said, ‘they attack with fury, they kill, rob, capture and make off with everything.’ Such attacks happened with a great deal of regularity and struck fear in the hearts of merchants and missionaries alike. Others also commented on the frequency of Balanta raids on river vessels. On March 24, 1694, Bispo Portuense feared that he would fall victim to the Balanta when his boat, guided by grumetes, ran aground on a sandbar, probably on the Canal do Impernal, ‘very close to the territory of those barbarians.’ . . . .

Faced with an impediment to the flow of trade to their ports, the Portuguese tried to bring an end to Balanta raids. But they were outclassed militarily by skilled Balanta age-grade fighters. Portuguese adjutant Amaro Rodrigues and his crew certainly discovered this. In 1696, he and a group of fourteen soldiers from a Portuguese post on Bissau anchored their craft somewhere near a Balanta village close to where Bissau’s Captain Jose Pinheiro had ordered the men to stage an attack. However, the Portuguese strategy was ill conceived. A sizable group of Balanta struck a blow against the crew before they had even left their boat. The Balanta killed Rodrigues and two Portuguese soldiers and took twelve people captive.

Returning to Hawthorne’s Strategies of the Decentralized,

“In 1777, Portuguese commander Ignacio Bayao reported from Bissau that he was furious that Balanta had been adversely affecting the regional flow of slaves and other goods carried by boats along Guinea-Bissau’s rivers. It was ‘not possible,’ he wrote, ‘to navigate boats for those [Balanta] parts without some fear of the continuous robbing that they have done, making captive those who navigate in the aforementioned boats.’ In response, Bayao sent infantrymen in two vessels ‘armed for war’ into Balanta territories. After these men had anchored, disembarked, and ventured some distance inland, they ‘destroyed some men, burning nine villages’ and then made a hasty retreat back to the river. Finding their vessels rendered ‘disorderly,’ the infantrymen were quickly surrounded by well-armed Balanta. Bayao lamented that ‘twenty men from two infantry companies’ were taken captive or killed. Having sent out more patrols to subdue the ‘savage Balanta’ and having attempted a ‘war’ against this decentralized people, the Portuguese found that conditions on Guinea- Bissau’s rivers did not improve.’

Viewing the regional slave trade as a threat to their communities, the Balanta continued their raids on merchant vessels transporting captives and other goods. Such raids would tax Portuguese patience throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century . . . . Thus, by garnering weapons and iron in regional markets and from Luso-African merchants, many Balanta communities, like those of other decentralized coastal societies, were not only able to stand up to threats posed by the slaving armies of Kaabu and Casamance, they were also able to withstand assaults by Portuguese who were attempting to profit by insuring the smooth running of the coastal trade routes that moved captives to area ports.”

BALANTA MAN VS. HALLOWEEN

Knowing the importance of narratives, and having the power to shape them, I am combating the European narrative about the Balanta on one of their cultural holidays, Halloween. In America, this is a day when white people celebrate “horror”. They make movies about depravity, evil, murder and dismemberment and then dress their children in costumes portraying the depraved characters. They also make movies and dress their children in costumes of skeletons and ghosts, creating an fearful emotional response to dead people. This is the exact opposite of Balanta culture, which maintains a living connection with “enas”, the living vital life force energy that survives “after death” and continues to communicate with those living on earth. Finally, the white Americans also create movies about superheroes glorifying the character traits of courage and heroism, defeating “bad people” and criminals. They depict theses superheros to reflect their culture and their narrative.

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So today, to combat this narrative, I have summoned Balanta Man! He is the real life Balanta Super Hero who killed the brutal, European criminals, rapists and murderers that came to steal Balanta children and murder those they could not enslave. According to Balanta legends, their age-grade warriors had the power to transform themselves into animals and other creatures.

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