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. These are now quite a fashion item.
They also have an intense and unusual religious practice whereby some male babies are kept in caves from birth, in the darkness, until they are nine (women come in to nurse, feed and care for them). When these light-deprived boys emerge, they are called mamos and are regarded as a priestly caste, brothers of the sun, and with a direct line to Aluna, the Great Mother God.
There is much more that makes the Kogi compelling, from their dualism to their funerary rites, but, above all, what fires my desire to meet them is their authenticity. The last pre-Colombian civilisation still living as they did before the Europeans! And so I climb out of my hammock, get in my rented car, locate a Kogi village on Google Maps, and drive off in a dust cloud in search of ‘the authentic’.
It’s not the first time I’ve done this – gone to find something truly ‘authentic’. And generally I have been disappointed.
In remote South Africa, on a journalistic assignment, I once hung out with a group of San bushmen, some of the last hunter-gatherers on Earth. All was going well until they told us they didn’t hunt any more, and for our photos we had to persuade the local landowner to kill a gazelle so we could film the hunter-gatherers ‘feasting on their prey’.
The authenticity declined further when the photographer told me that, actually, most of this tribe of San were living nearby in caravans, dressed in denims and T-shirts, and consuming amphetamines. Years later I heard that the clan, kept on their reservation like zoo creatures, had told the landowner to shove it, and had gone back to real hunter-gathering in Botswana. I silently cheered.
In Greenland, on another assignment, I tried to do something similar: meet the Inuit. I’ve long been obsessed with the Inuit, ever since I read about one subculture, the Dorset, who became so depressed by the extremes of life in Greenland they committed cultural and actual suicide. Even today, when archaeologists uncover examples of Dorset art, it is deeply sinister.
And what did I find when I got to Greenland to finally meet some Inuit? Friendly, funny, sometimes quite drunken people living in stained apartment blocks subsidised by the Danish government. There was a local museum with Inuit art, but it was run and staffed by Danes. The landscape was spectacular, but everyone mainly ignored it and ate Thai curries in overheated cafés. Even the ‘adorable’ huskies were not what I expected. They were kept chained to rocks on the outskirts of towns because of their unpleasant appetite for small Greenlandic children.
So how goes my search for the super-authentic Kogi? Turns out: not very well. Google Maps claims I can take one road, but it’s blocked. I try another road, but then a man with a gun says no – and when a man with a gun in Colombia says no, you listen. After hours of this I try one last route with lots of boulders, and it’s at this point that I learn a handy lesson for life: never try to cross South American mountains in a rented Suzuki Swift.
My car is broken, and leaking. It’s got enough mojo to make it to the nearest little town, where there are a few people outside a tiny grocer-cum-coffeeshop, selling lottery tickets, fish, mochilas, and cold beer. And it’s here, of all places, after buying a mochila, that I finally have my encounter. There is a Kogi – a mamo, I believe – right in front of me, purchasing food. This is how it goes:
Me: ‘Do you speak English?’
Kogi man of the sun: ‘No.’
Me: ‘Oh, OK. Er… Donde auto… reparas? Do you know where I can get my car repaired?’
Kogi man of the sun, who spent his first nine years immersed in total darkness so that he can speak to the Great Mother God: ‘No.’
With that he wanders away. I find a car repair place, and they fix my minor problem, so I can head off and try again, but I don’t. Because I’ve done my job: I met a Kogi, we talked about car repair, and anyway what is authenticity? Why is this backpacker town of Palomino, with its Nutella pancakes and yellow dirt roads and pretty girls doing yoga and locals selling tatty jewellery and cannabis pizzas to bad Norwegian guitarists, any more or less authentic than a Stone Age tribe on a holy mountain?
I don’t know, so I fly home and unpack and then I realise my authentic mochila is a really good kitchen container for my sachets of Japanese dashi stock powder. This feels like a weird victory for authenticity, though I have no idea why.
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