Divided into chapters that place the texts in African geography (North, South, East, West), this book compiles journalistic and travel chronicles through a continent made up of 54 countries that, says the author in an interview with El Sol de México, , “it has more similarities with Latin America than we think.”
Diego Gómez Pickering compiles in his book Africa Radiography of a Continent, the trips he has made to the black continent for academic research (the most recent one that he did not manage to include in the book is on spirituality in the Ivory Coast), journalistic reports, such as which he did in 2019 after the Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone originally published in the magazine Proceso, diplomatic missions for positions such as the direction of Africa and the Middle East of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and for tourism.
“There are 21 texts of different formats, which cover a period of 15 years, half the time I have known Africa; The most recent texts are from two years ago, there are testimonies from asylum-seeking migrants from different African origins who were waiting, in one of the most critical moments of the pandemic. It is a book that invites the reader to look at Africa in the 21st century, contemporary, with all its flats.”
For the author, the distance that separates Latin America from Africa is geographical, “it is distant in terms of distance, just like Europe, which does not seem that way to us. Outside of that distance there is no other distance than what official history has wanted to sell us or what we have internalized as distant,” he points out.
“As for the rest, there are many coincidences on any level, of course the economic one, as regions that consolidate their development late if we compare it with Europe or North America, on the political level as well, although it is clear that we as a region have greater age, we have been independent countries on average for 200 years, when in Africa they are 70 years old at most, African independence begins after the Second World War, but I believe that the democratic processes and the evolution of State institutions are very similar, because “They are the result of extended colonization processes.”
Gómez Pickering also mentions corruption or abuse of power as similar practices, also in our societies, “they are very similar, matriarchal or patriarchal, we have both, the family structure is the basis, there is a dependence in a certain way on that social fabric, Many of our cultural products, such as music, are related to Africa due to the arrival of Africans.”
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The African presence in Latin America and particularly in Mexico stands out, “from the beginning of the country as we conceive it today, in 1519 they landed in Veracruz together with Hernán Cortés and the hundreds of Europeans who embarked from Cuba, there is at least one documented dozen Africans, slaves and freedmen who participated alongside Cortés and his troops in the taking of Tenochtitlán, in the founding of the first European African, mestizos and American settlements in the center of the country, which with the arrival of more Africans in the 17th century, what was New Spain had the largest African population on the American continent, something that surprises us because we do not associate Mexico with blackness as a rule, which it is, not an exception as we believe.
“We can see Africa in ourselves, which for me is a fundamental purpose of the book, to begin to see it as something of our own, not as something foreign. For some time now we have been living a moment of introspection, in which many questions are asked about what the Mexican identity is, what better situation than to go to the origin, the black root is there, on par with the Mesoamerican and the European. And beyond, a new international order is being formed, starting with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, by all social movements, discontent with partisanship around the world, there is a moment of transition and it is time for Mexico to rethink its role in that new concert of the world, which would have to happen by having our gaze fixed towards the north.”
2023-10-08 08:00:00
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