Palomino, Colombia
Sean Thomas has narrated this article for you to listen to.
I’m in a truly wonderful place: the Caribbean coast of Colombia. It’s got more bird species than most of Europe, exquisite cotton-top tamarin monkeys that hop through jungles, and one of the world’s highest coastal mountain ranges. There are empty beaches, shimmering lakes, colonial townscapes and a recent folk memory of terrible gangsters.
Some male babies are largely kept in caves from birth, in the darkness, until they are nine
It also boasts several indigenous tribes, one of which – the Kogi – I had never heard of until I got here. But the more I read about them from my hammock on the beach, the more I become determined to encounter them – and to talk to one. A Kogi.
Why? Because they are so strange. For a start, they are probably the last of the pre-Colombian people to live pretty much as they did before colonial times: in simple stone huts, lost in the mountains and jungles. Indeed, it was probably this wilderness that saved their culture. Whenever invaders came, such as the Carib in the 10th century and the Spaniards in the 16th, the Kogi melted deeper into the forests, and further up the ice-capped Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. As they fled they took their strange lifestyle with them.
The Kogi (the word means ‘jaguar’) only wear white, which makes them unmistakeable when they come down to the coast. They live on and worship a holy mountain, which is the centre of their universe. They believe they are the ‘elder brothers’ of the world, and the rest of us are younger brothers, who need instruction, because we are destroying the planet (they have a point). They hand-weave charming rustic ‘handbags’, or mochilas, for holding their daily coca leaves.
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