Benkos Biohó Monument's Contradictions Questioned
An article examines a monument to the maroon leader Benkos Biohó in San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia, questioning its representation of freedom through the formal language of slavery and Western monumentality.
A bronze monument in San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia, commemorates the maroon leader Benkos Biohó. The sculpture, titled "Benkos rompiendo las cadenas de la esclavitud" (Benkos breaking the chains of slavery), visually portrays the founder as a shackled captive, a contradiction that raises questions about how history is told. The article in Words Without Borders uses this monument to probe the criteria for monumentality established in the 1943 architectural manifesto "Nine Points on Monumentality."
The 1943 text, authored by Siegfried Giedion, Jean Luc Sert, and Ferdinand Léger, argued that monuments require a "unifying consciousness and unifying culture." The article questions this premise, asking if unity is a necessary precondition or a potential consequence. It suggests the monument to Biohó offers a chance to examine monumentality through other modes of consciousness, including those shaped by trauma, dispersion, or radical new thought.
The Historical Benkos Biohó
Historical research by scholars like Nina de Friedemann and Cristina Navarrete places maroon communities, or palenques, in Colombia from the start of the slave trade in Cartagena de Indias in the sixteenth century. Benkos Biohó, whose name corresponds to an African king enslaved on the Guinea coast, organized one of the first palenques in the coastal savanna. His group, feared by Cartagena's authorities, secured a license to circulate and carry weapons in 1603 after foiling repeated attempts to subjugate them. The Crown broke this agreement in 1621 with Biohó's trial and hanging.
Navarrete's work has complicated the popular narrative. She proposes a separation of almost a hundred years between Biohó's fierce palenque in the jungles of La Matuna and the legal constitution of the town of San Basilio from the reduction of the Palenque of San Miguel in 1713. This later agreement, the Entente Cordiale, granted freedom and territorial self-determination but came with caveats like compulsory Spanish schooling and incorporation as a reserved army for the Spanish Crown.
The Monument's Creation and Myth
The monument in San Basilio de Palenque merges these two histories into a single myth: that the town was founded by Biohó in 1603 after signing the 1713 Entente Cordiale. The town's unique culture and language, Palenquero, flourished there. UNESCO recognized San Basilio de Palenque as the first free people of the Americas in 1995, giving global resonance to its libertarian myth and prompting the monument's creation.
The myth reached Western audiences primarily through two books: Roberto de Arrázola's Palenque: Primer Pueblo Libre de América (1970) and Nina de Friedemann's Ma Ngombe: guerreros y ganaderos (1989). Friedemann was also involved in the monument's creation, bringing the bronze to Palenque following UNESCO's commemoration. Sculptor Luis Guillermo Vallejo created the work. Before its installation on a pedestal built by the Palenqueros around 1997, the bronze was housed in the town's church for almost two years, where it was treated as a miraculous image and a kind of saint.
A Contradictory Representation
An analysis of the monument reveals a striking contradiction. The founder is depicted enchained. His body extends upward but is visually immobilized by the cement pedestal. The article proposes the implicit ground he escapes is the abysmal mouth of the slave ship about to cross the Atlantic. This recasts the cimarrón, or self-declared free man, as a captive, portraying the maroon warrior as a runaway slave.
The article argues that in Vallejo's sculpture, the representation of freedom depends entirely on the symbolic universe of slavery. Also, it commemorates Black freedom using formal elements of the Western canon: orthogonal concentricity, the elevated gaze of a static spectator, and the expressiveness of a heroic gesture. These choices align with a vision of the monument as a phallic unit of meaning, that is, as upright, impenetrable, and individual.
Questions of History and Language
Focusing on a single person, the article contends, ignores the collective nature of maroon resistance and installs an essentialist mode of representation. Ideologically, it draws from what the article calls UNESCO's whitewashed relationship with slavery, which informed the town's recognition as a Masterpiece of Intangible Heritage. The overall effect, the article concludes, is that UNESCO's commemoration pacifies the political force of maroonage and culturalizes its relentless fight against colonialism.
The monument raises historiographical questions about who tells history and how. It asks what notion of maroonage the monument proposes and in what language-a term extended beyond the written word to include visual, material, and spatial configurations. The sculpture serves as a focal point for examining the tensions between myth, history, and the power of monumental form.
