The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America - autonomous ...

58 Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
storm center of the black peasantry. Plantains were interplanted
with young cocoa trees to serve as shade. According to Garcia, in the
late nineteenth century the best plantings of plantain in the entire
valley were also located there (Garcia, 1898:23). Palau described the
plantain as "the most useful tree of the Indies" (1889:32). It is a
semi-perennial producing fruit every eight to twelve months regardless
of the time of year, and like all the peasant crops, it requires
very little labor. Today, with a roughly similar ecology, a subsistence-sized
peasant plot requires no more than one hundred days of
relatively light labor. Evaristo Garcia estimated that one hectare of
plantains could supply twenty-four adults with their staple food requirements.
He described how in his journeys through the valley he
would enter the wooded regions to find inhabitants of the "Ethiopian
race" sheltering in thatch huts surrounded by plantains and
many other useful plants. Some families possessed small herds of
cattle, horses, and pigs. Because they could thus subsist so easily, in
his opinion, the peasants were loath to work on the cattle and sugar
haciendas. For this reason, he wrote, there were few functioning
large estates up till the end of the century (Garcia, 1898 :29).
In many senses these black peasants were outlaws—free peasants
and foresters who lived by their wits and weapons rather than by
legal guarantees to land and citizenship. The fearful specter of a
black state was not lost on some observers. "In the woods that enclose
the Cauca Valley," wrote the German traveler Freidrich von
Schenk in 1880, "vegetate many blacks whom one could equate
with the maroons of the West Indies." They sought solitude in the
woods, "where they regress once again slowly to the customs of
their African birthplace as one commonly sees in the interior of
Haiti. . . . These people are tremendously dangerous, especially in
times of revolution when they get together in gangs and enter the
struggle as valiant fighters in the service of whatever hero of liberty
promises them booty." With the revolution of 1860, the Liberal party's
forces had destroyed the last restraints holding back the blacks.
The majority of the valley's haciendas had gone bankrupt and suffered
terribly from the persistent onslaughts of "fanatic" blacks.
"The free black in the Cauca Valley," he wrote, "will only work under
the threat of an excruciating poverty, and even so, is still likely
to persist in his destructive ravages" (1953:53-54). And the worse
blacks were those who lived in the southern part of the valley.
The peasants especially valued the indiviso (indivisable) and common
lands, most used for cattle raising. Although the landlords
claimed these as their own private property during the late nineteenth
century, and more vigorously once the valley was opened to