In Wolof, the most widely spoken language in Senegal, the word teranga It contains a whole culture. It means hospitality, welcoming strangers as brothers, strangers as compatriots. Teranga was also the name of a communal dining room established in the Catalan Maresme in the 80s and 90s, in which migrants from African communities reaffirmed their identity in the kitchen, the pillar of their societies. It became a space of resistance in a country where they did not exist in the public space; their existence was invisible to the eyes of society and politics. Food is one of the many ways in which they confirmed their presence in the history of Spain, as the exhibition traces. black filesas part of Manifesta 15 Barcelona.
“In Spain, there was a great silence on the issue of blackness in the public sphere. There were practically no shops, restaurants, bars. This constitutes your subjectivity. Faced with this hostility, the domestic space became a space of resistance and self-sufficiency,” explains Tania Safura Adam, director and curator of the exhibition. He arrived in Spain in 1989, at the age of 10, from Mozambique, and already in 2008 he embarked on the project of telling the story of the peninsula’s little-known relations with Africa. “Barcelona was very reluctant when we wanted to show the contemporaneity of migrations. They directed you to the Immigration services, and not to Culture. It’s as if the migrant’s culture had no value,” continues the founder of Radio África.
To claim this denied recognition, more than 900 objects are moved, including books, records, photographs, documents or videos, to the former headquarters of the Gustavo Gili publishing house. The rooms, divided into thematic sections such as religion, aesthetics and the domestic sphere, contain a tension between objects that prove the vigor of a black daily life in Spain and archives that compile the marginalization and persecution that African migrants have suffered from 1975 to today. They hang newspaper clippings that recall the selective detention of blacks in the 90s, such as that of Rosalind Williams or that of a South African trade unionist invited by the workers’ commissions.
Maresme as origin
Videos and maps also evoke the strike in the church of Pi in 2001 against a new immigration law that allowed all irregular migrants to be expelled from the country. “The mechanisms of rejection and prejudice are not recent, they come from the 16th century, with municipal ordinances, the expulsion of the Moors, the Inquisition. There is a denial of otherness. Spanish society has an aversion to difference. It is normal that in institutions the other does not exist,” explains Adam. The exhibition condenses part of the results of his three years of research, España Negra, which, with other researchers, sought to fill the gap in studies on the imprint of black people in Spain.
A path whose first visible trace in the 20th century emerged on the Maresme coast. The Catalan strip welcomed a large number of migrants due to their demand for agricultural work. In the 80s, restaurants, bars and greengrocers began to emerge in its surroundings with products that cover the entire continent: banana, mango, coconut, okra or ginger. “Black identity cannot be told without the domestic sphere. Meeting spaces became places of cultural resistance, where many people who worked in the city but could not afford to live there met,” explains who is also a journalist. In the area, mainly in Granollers, there are still hairdressers built by migrants to preserve a symbol of their personality.
First the hairdressers
“Wherever there are Africans, there will always be hairdressers. Hairdressers emerge before any other activity. They are places where you can be free, where you see yourself as they tell you it’s not good in public space,” explains Adam about his photographic essay, which is part of the exhibition, on the beauty centres of Granollers. In this same room the documentary is screened People with rough hair by Tony Romero. Another film that can be seen in black files East Black Cataloniain which Congolese director Gilbert-Ndunga Nsangata interviews several sub-Saharan Africans raised in Spain about their sense of belonging. However, the unpublished films in the exhibition are personal videos.
Among them are those of Josep María Torren, a resident of Calella, who helped the migrant communities to obtain their papers and taught them Spanish and Catalan. He recorded the musical and dancing meetings of the Senegalese and Gambian populations that took place in the abandoned factory of Llobet-Gubi. In addition, he filmed the Guinean processions of the Virgin of Bisilia, a figure inherited from the Spanish colony with long braids and a dress made of fibers of African origin.
black files In the same way, he recovers artistic personalities. This is the case of the Guinean sculptor Leandro Mbomio, nicknamed the “black Picasso”, or his compatriot Guillem d’Efak, a jazz and bolero musician who has recorded eight albums in Catalan. As well as the popular trade unionists of the 20th century who set a precedent for the important popular union of street vendors, founded in 2015, and for the subsequent launch of his own brand Top Manta in 2017.
Is the black community already integrated into the history of Spain? Adam answers: “The mechanisms of prejudice continue to perpetuate themselves in subtle systems such as leisure, education or tradition. But it is true that there is less and less shame in occupying public space. There is no longer an African being, but it oscillates between pseudo-African and pseudo-Catalan.
