Public Project
The Guardian: A celebration of a child who never got to be born
Summary
The rule of a Colombian bunde ritual is that you cannot go home before the child is buried at midnight. If you try, their ghost will chase you
I’ve been taking photographs in Quinamayó in west Colombia for around six years now, for a project about the town’s Black Baby Jesus celebrations. Quinamayó is what is known in Colombia as a palenque, a community founded by enslaved people who fled the country’s haciendas before slavery was abolished in the 1850s. These people had not been allowed to preserve their African cultural beliefs – nor to participate in the most important Catholic events, even though they had been forced to convert to Catholicism. So in Quinamayó they decided to perform their own version of Christmas, 45 days after the traditional date – the same number of days the Virgin Mary is said to have rested after the birth. The celebration still takes place every year in mid-February.
It lasts four days, with the second day devoted to a procession centring on a wooden figure of Black Baby Jesus, which is paraded around the town. Children dress up as biblical characters and people dance to a local variation of the juga rhythm, which in Quinamayó is performed by a brass band. Dancers shuffle their feet as a reference to their forebears, with chains around their ankles.
Three days after I’d photographed this year’s celebration, the director of Quinamayó’s juga band messaged me to say a child had died in the town and a bunde was going to take place that night. That’s a ritual in which a child up to the age of 10 is both mourned and celebrated – the tradition dates back to a time when the passing of children was seen as a release from the suffering of slavery. It was something I hadn’t witnessed before. Quinamayó is an hour and a half from my home by car, so I set out immediately.
Continue reading: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/article/2024/jun/05/jair-f-coll-my-best-photograph-colombia-bunde
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