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Date: Jun 28, 2007 3:25 PM
Subject: [TheBlackList] VENEZUELA: Afro-descendants Seek Visibility in
Numbers
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Subject: [GlobalAfricanPresence] VENEZUELA:
Afro-descendants Seek Visibility in Numbers
   http://www.ipsnews. net/news. asp?idnews= 38278

VENEZUELA: Afro-descendants Seek Visibility in Numbers
By Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Jun 22 (IPS) - As their counterparts in other
countries of Latin America have begun to do,
Afro-Venezuelans want to stop being statistically
invisible, and are seeking more precise figures to
help them in their struggle against racism and
marginalisation.

"To reinforce our demand for recognition, we want to
know exactly where we stand. Perhaps we make up 20
percent of Venezuela's 27 million people," Jesús
García, head of the Network of Afro-Venezuelan
Organisations, told IPS.

He protested that "the Afro-descendant identity is
excluded from all of the country's statistical
instruments. But we are going to mobilise to correct
that shortcoming with a view to the next census,"
which is to be carried out in 2010.

"We don't only want numbers, but also studies that can
shed light on the situation in terms of poverty,
education, health and labour. In the case of women, we
are also affected by European standards of beauty and
femininity as applied in the world of employment,"
Nirva Camacho, of the Cumbe de Mujeres
Afrovenezolanas, an Afro-Venezuelan women's
organisation, told IPS.

The term "cumbe" refers to free communities created in
the Spanish colonial era by slaves who escaped from
plantations.

On the health front, "there are also signs that we
suffer a higher incidence of illnesses like glaucoma
or anemia, and perhaps hypertension and diabetes, but
there are no studies on this. In addition, there are
discriminatory elements in education and in the
justice system, where people of colour are more likely
to be seen and treated as criminals," said Camacho.

With the support of the Ministry of Culture and the
United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the Network
of Afro-Venezuelan Organisations organised a seminar
Thursday and Friday on the experiences of other Latin
American countries in counting the number of
inhabitants of African descent, who represent an
estimated 150 million of the region's 500 million
people.

"There is a growing tendency in Latin America to
understand the collection of statistics as an
indispensable mechanism to better comprehend the role
of people of African descent in our societies,"
Marcelo Paixao, an activist with the Afro-Brazilian
Observatory and a professor at the Federal University
of Rio de Janeiro, told IPS during a break in the
seminar.

Brazil was a pioneer in such studies in the region, in
which Colombia and Ecuador have made progress as well,
said Paixao. He added that other countries like Peru,
Uruguay and Cuba have also begun to understand the
need for precise statistics.

"Because Brazil has a strong data collection system
and the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) trade bloc
is harmonising its statistical systems, the tendency
will also reach Argentina and Paraguay," the other
full members of the bloc along with Brazil, Uruguay
and Venezuela, he said.

He pointed out that Brazil "has the second-largest
black population in the world, only surpassed by
Nigeria, with 79 million people of African descent,
who make up 47 percent of the total population."

In the past, said Paixao, "our intellectuals thought
of blacks as a problem, but now there is positive
concern about racial issues."

Measures have been taken as a result. For example,
Brazilian students are now taught African and
Afro-Brazilian history, and 28 public universities
have adopted quotas to guarantee access by black and
indigenous students.

"Other measures have been adopted as well, in health
and the labour market. But the main contribution of
the new focus is the creation of a 'moral environment'
that is favourable to inclusive policies," said
Paixao. "That is hard to measure, and it is
paradoxical that these determined efforts to come up
with precise data and statistics should lead to
non-measurable results."

Joan Antón, an official with Ecuador's Ministry of
Social Development, said his country was the only
Latin American nation with a system of specific social
indicators on people of African descent.

Afro-Ecuadorians, who make up five percent of the
population according to the 2001 census, and at least
10 percent according to Antón, have, along with the
country's indigenous people, the worst economic and
social indicators, "reproducing the same social and
racial pyramid as during the colonial era," he told
IPS.

"That situation translates into Afro-descendants and
indigenous people being below the national average in
terms of university attendance and above the national
average with respect to the proportion of unemployed
women, or the proportion of people in jail, as they
represent 17 percent of the prison population," he
pointed out.

Fernando Urrea, a researcher at the Universidad del
Valle, a university in Colombia, pointed out that his
country's constitution, which was rewritten in 1991,
and law on black people provided new political and
legal recognition of communities of African descent.
Nevertheless, the number of blacks in Colombia is
still underestimated in official counts.

After Colombians were asked in the 1993 census whether
they belonged to an indigenous or black community, the
Afro-Colombian population was counted at 564,000
people, 1.5 percent of the national total.

But the 2005 census, carried out in the wake of
surveys on self-recognition and identity that asked
people how they considered themselves in racial and
ethnic terms, established the number of people of
African descent at 4.5 million (10.6 percent of the
population).

However, studies by the Universidad del Valle have
estimated the number of Afro-descendants at 7.6
million, or 18.6 percent of the Colombian population,
while non-governmental organisations put the
percentage as high as 40 percent.

"The explanation is that in Colombia, as in Venezuela
or Ecuador, the immense majority of the population of
African descent is urban, and mainly concentrated in
16 cities," said Urrea.

He warned the Venezuelan organisations not to use
indigenous groups as a reference point in terms of
gathering statistics, because "their situation is
different. The majority of Afro-descendants do not
live in rural communities, but in cities, and the
urban experience is totally different," which leads to
a more individual and less community-oriented
identity.

García said some of the demands by people of African
descent in Venezuela are based on the model of the
indigenous-style community, such as the demand for
land to farm or for quotas for representatives of
blacks in the political sphere.

He also pointed to incentives, in the form of specific
projects, for blacks to play a role in preserving the
environment, because some communities of people of
African descent are located in areas rich in
biodiversity and water resources, such as national
parks and other areas.

"But above all, what we want are public policies and
constitutional and legal recognition of the
Afro-descendant dimension of problems like poverty, as
well as our potential and the contribution to building
the nation that we have made over centuries," said
García. (END/2007)



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