Interviews collected for the Archaeological Anthropological Institute Netherlands Antilles (AAINA) by Rose Mary Allen during the period 1980-1995

Besides the famous Zikinzá collection, Brenneker and Elis collected many more oral histories, which are stored in the Curaçao Public Library.

Oral history of Curaçao migrants who left for Cuba in the early 20th century to work in Cuban sugarcane fields.

“Ta Cuba mi ke bai” is the result of a study of the emigration of children from Curaçao to Cuba. This emigration peaked at the end of 1917 until 1921. Many Curaçao workers moved to Cuba to work in the sugar cane fields. There they met workers from other Caribbean islands, including Haiti, Jamaica, Barbados and also from Aruba, Bonaire and the islands above.

In a few years, some 2,300 Curaçaoans emigrated to Cuba. Rose Mary Allen visited old Curaçaoans who went to Cuba during that time and then returned to Curaçao. They were old, but could tell her a lot about Cuba and also about the reasons why they had gone to Cuba. And these were almost always economic reasons. There are still Curacaoans living in Cuba who went there at the time and stayed. That group intrigued Rose Mary Allen and she felt that her research would not be complete if she had not also visited these people in Cuba.

To get as complete a picture as possible of emigration to Cuba, the research was expanded by comparing testimonies with information from documents, such as official letters and newspapers.

On Curaçao, Paul Brenneker and Elis Juliana collected a large amount of oral data beginning in 1958.

Their oldest informant was born about 1853, ten years before the abolition of slavery.

Most of the information collected by Juliana and Brenneker is stored in the Zikinzá Collection, a database consisting of 1,400 songs, stories, and life histories. Anecdotes, childhood memories, rituals and folk songs were taped from 267 informants.

Content-wise, Brenneker and Juliana were concerned with capturing the knowledge and wisdom of the older, rural population, who still lived isolated from the city and encroaching modernization on Banda’bou or Band’riba.

www.elisjuliana.org

Rose Mary Allen used the Zikinzá collection for her dissertation, “Di ki manera,” on the Afro-Curaçaoan population in the period after the abolition of slavery.

Rose Mary Allen:

In this study I will present the key factors determining the social and cultural life of Afro-Curaçaoans during the first fifty years after the abolition of slavery in 1863. I will do so through a socio-cultural analysis of the social system of which they formed part. Their position within slave society will be the starting point, followed by an evaluation of the two principle elements of social control after emancipation: the State and the Roman Catholic Church. Rather than viewing Afro-Curaçaoans as mere objects to be acted upon, in this analysis I cite them as resilient agents, rising to – and often resisting in a variety of ways – the challenges and restrictions they faced in a free society. Their resilience and resistance are best demonstrated through the factors from which they drew their sustenance; these being mainly their social networks – such as families, peer groups, co-workers, local communities – and their culture, brought to the fore, for example, in their songs, stories and rituals. 

Rene Vicente Rosalia (b. 1948) received his doctorate from the University of Amsterdam on the legal and ecclesiastical repression of tambu, the multifarious and rich Afro-Antillean cultural expression that recalls the slave past. In addition to being the word for felling drum, tambu is also a collective term for polyrhythmic music, played in twelve-eighths time, dance, symbolism, sacred and everyday rituals, entertainment, community building, conflict resolution, information provision, social protest and courting.

He used the Zikinzá collection in addition to his own interviews.

See: Article Bernadette de Wit in the Groene Amsterdammer: https://www.groene.nl/artikel/duivelsdans