Town is piece of Africa in Colombia

By Mike Power

PALENQUE, Colombia (Reuters) - The drumskin sings in the tropical sun as 12-year-old Pedro Joaquin beats out an ancient rhythm. His mother shells peas and nods approval as chickens peck in the dirt around her feet.

The sights and sounds could be those of an African village, but they come from Colombia's Palenque de San Basilio.

"Welcome to the first free town of the Americas," says Manuel Perez, head of the cultural council at Palenque, a town established in 1603 by a slave from nearby Cartagena, where slaves were sold by Portuguese traders and Spanish colonizers.

Now it is one of the few surviving such towns, jealously preserving a language and culture more African than Latin.

The name Palenque means "fortified escaped slave village" and many of these villages were built throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. But only this one, with 3,000 residents, survives with its distinct tradition intact.

Palenque's tourist infrastructure is extremely limited. Transport is difficult, with only a dirt road linking the town with a highway. Motorbike taxis ply a daily trade for local people.

There are no places to stay, there are few restaurants, and the visitor center is dilapidated and underfunded.

It is a curiosity, a town out of time and place.

In the school at 8 a.m., the children sing in Lengua, a language that sounds more African than Spanish, with roots trailing back to villages at the mouth of the Congo River.

Thousands of slaves were snatched by Portuguese traders there in the 1600s, taken to Cartagena and sold to the Spaniards, who resold them to work on sugar, cotton and tobacco plantations and gold and emerald mines across Colombia.

Slaves created languages known as Creoles, blending their many native tongues with those of their captors in order to communicate in mixed groups.

But Lengua is unique, says Armin Schwegler, professor of Spanish Linguistics at the University of California, who has studied Palenque's language for more than 20 years.

"This is the only place in Latin America to have a Spanish-based Creole," says Schwegler. "The African element is the Kikongo language. Ninety percent of the language is Spanish, but the grammar is so different that it is unintelligible to an outsider."

ENDANGERED CULTURE

UNESCO declared the village a "Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity" in 2005 because of Lengua.