The Curse of Changó Revisited

• In Event: Manuel Zapata Olivella, an Afro-Colombian Renaissance Man

Abstract

In Manuel Zapata Olivella’s masterpiece, the novel Changó el gran putas (1983), he proposes that the Yoruba deity Changó damned sub-Saharan Africa to slavery. This myth does not exist in this form in Yoruba cosmologies, so it appears it is mostly Zapata’s creation. Jerome Branche, Víctor Figueroa, and others have argued that the malediction blames blacks for slavery and exonerates whites. I do a close reading of the myth, taking into account Bantu and Yoruba cosmologies and Western notions of alienation, all of which inform the novel. I argue that the myth is actually about black shame and disunity, two challenges the heroes of the novel struggle to completely overcome in Colombia, Haiti, Mexico, Brazil, and the United States. Based on this interpretation of the myth, the related curses of slavery and racism are a chance for the African Diaspora and its allies to bring justice and inclusion to the Americas in the form of a truly New World with affirmative black identities and without disunity, shame, or oppression, the Nuevo Muntu. Changó’s curse begins in his mind, not with the plague of slavery and racism brought by the Europeans and the heirs to their injustices. Likewise, a change in mindset will allow blacks to be the leaders of a revolutionary form of justice, the ideal Changó represents.

Author

• John T Maddox, University of Alabama at Birmingham