The document transcribed here induces horror in its banal, unfeeling presentation of the fact that, in Cartagena in 1736, a thirteen year-old girl whose skin had been burned with branding irons was sold by a ship’s captain. The shape and meaning of the brands are recorded; her name was not. She is a person who had survived the Middle Passage and then survived being forcibly taken to Bogotá, it seems, as the Bill of Sale was filed with others from Cundinamarca. But historians are unlikely to learn much more about her.

We do know she is represented as being of “Mondongo” ethnicity. Did she end up finding people who spoke her mother’s language or remembered the land she had known before being abducted? Did she tell her own children about different parts of her life and find ways to recreate her personhood? Some in her situation certainly did. Scholars who work with legal cases from the 17^th and 18^th centuries have found many enslaved women and men who staked claims to freedom. Those who read notarial records see people who bought themselves out of slavery. Research that relies on the history of music, art, and other cultural practices, similarly, demonstrates that enslaved people born in Africa remade the cultural world of the Americas so profoundly that their full humanity cannot be denied. Despite that history of resilience, however, the traumatic pain remains.

For readers who have not looked carefully at Bills of Sale that document enslavement, it may be valuable to pause before undertaking to read through this girl’s transfer, supposedly as “property.” It is worth remembering that she is one person among the approximately 12 million for whom historians have documents proving that they were captured, forcibly transported within African regions claimed by different political actors, violently coerced aboard ships, and sold in the Americas. It is also worth remembering that however painful this history, a long tradition of intellectual and artistic work makes it clear that paying attention to the pain of those enslaved in the past can be part of moving toward a collective process of social, cultural, and political transformation in the present.

Many who have done this intellectual and artistic work are well-known, some less so. Any attempt to suggest the range involved would need to include musicians like Paul Robeson, Bob Marley, Gilberto Gil, Tite Curet Alonso, Susana Baca; poets and writers like Candelario Obeso, Nancy Morejón, Joaquim Machado de Assis, Langston Hughes; and visual artists like Kara Walker, Dalton Paula, Diogenes Ballester. That list includes cultural producers from Brazil, Cuba, Jamaica, Peru, Puerto Rico, and the United States–it could easily be made much longer and point to more national traditions. In Colombia, too, examples abound of Black artists, choreographers, curators, writers, and historians who lay pain before their publics as a way of pushing toward a deeper conversation about racism in the nation’s present.

Turning to the Bill of Sale, the task is not only one of reading but also one of looking carefully at every part of this document. Produced in 1736 as an “instrument” to facilitate sales, it was pre-printed, with spaces left blank so that those involved in the entirely “legal” practice of buying and selling of human beings could fill in their own names and sometimes also the names of enslaved persons. It is worth noticing that the printed words are carefully truncated to allow for endings to be correct in gender and number, and that additional blank lines were added where the seller might write in identifying information for several people. Physical and emotional pain leap off the page.

Please note that the below transcription retains line breaks in the original and uses the somewhat arbitrary conventions of italics to indicate script and bold font with underlining to indicate pre-printing. Accents and spelling are somewhat modernized. Note also that Ana María Gómez López has translated the text to read more like an English-language Bill of Sale from the same period and less like a literal translation; it is also not line-by-line.

It is because of documents like this one that the professional historian Sergio Mosquera, who was born in Istmina, and who founded the Muntú Bantú Memory Center for Documentation and Afrodiasporic Materialities in Quibdó, asked local blacksmiths to recreate a set of branding irons, complete with a mock-up brazier. When taking school groups, college interns, and others through the space, he points out the coals he has included in the installation since conceiving it in 2015. Mosquera’s purpose is to have visitors reflect upon the physical trauma enslaved people were forced to endure in addition to their psychic pain.

Colombian contemporary artists working in many different forms of media engage in a similar practice. 20 years ago, Liliana Angulo, a photographer and performance artist who now (in 2024) serves as the director of Colombia’s National Museum, produced—twenty years ago—a wide range of different kinds of self-portraits that explicitly commented on racism in the country from different temporal positions. Among these was a color photograph of her with an iron shackle around her neck—demanding that Colombians recognize a collective past predicated on African enslavement. More recently, the Cali-based artist Fabio Melecio Palacios produced a series of wall sculptures in the form of over-sized brands, directly referencing archival documents and his own visit to the island of Goreé, in Senegal. In recreating shapes that had been burned onto the skin of enslaved people, Melecio used discarded razor blades as a way of tying together past and present. He was explicit about wanting viewers and gallery visitors to realize that these were still shapes that evoked woundings, blood, pain: Approach them at your peril, his work forewarns.

The original document is housed in the fond “Negros y Esclavos” of Colombia’s National Archives, sub-fond for Cundinamarca, as indicated above. It is a place Colombian scholars look to as they wrestle with what a past marked by enslavement means in each new generation. Indeed, this same Bill of Sale, along with others, appears in an essay included in a field-defining book titled “I Demand My Liberty: Black Women and their Resistance Strategies in New Granada, Venezuela, and Cuba.” One of the co-editors is Aurora Vergara Figeroa, who now (in 2024) serves as Colombia’s Minister of Education. Now, in the early decades of the 21^st century it is more than ever true that none of us need confront the archives alone.

Further reading:

Bosa, Bastien, Diana Angulo, Ingrid Frederick, and María Clara Quiroz. Solo cicatrices: Carimbas de la trata transatlántica. Universidad del Rosario, 2023.

Farnsworth-Alvear, Ann, Marco Palacios and Ana María Gómez López, eds. The Colombia Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.

Fernando Gómez Echeverrí. “La exposición de Fabio Melecio Palacios en Espacio El Dorado trae al presente un pasado infame,” El Tiempo, June 30, 2023, https://www.eltiempo.com/cultura/arte-y-teatro/fabio-melecio-palacios-la-historia-de-un-hombre-carimbado-782418

Gómez, Pablo F. “Pieza de Indias,” in New World Objects of Knowledge: A Cabinet of Curiosities, edited by Mark Thurner and Juan Pimentel. University of London Press, 2021*.*

Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12, no. 2: (2008): 1–14, doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1

Mosquera Mosquera, Sergio A. *La carimba: La carimba candente. La carimba sobre la piel.
*Serie Ma’mawu. Vol. 8. Universidad Tecnologica del Choco. 2003.

Pena Mejía, Adriana. “Negra menta: Por un reconocimiento a la mujer afrocolombiana.” Artelogie 9 (2016) https://doi.org/10.4000/artelogie.322

Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12, no. 2: (2008): 1–14, doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1.

Pena Mejía, Adriana. “Negra menta: Por un reconocimiento a la mujer afrocolombiana.” Artelogie 9 (2016) https://doi.org/10.4000/artelogie.322.

Reyes Castriela Esther Hernández. “Aproximaciones al Sistema de Sexo/Género en la Nueva Granada en los Siglos XVIII y XIX,” in Demando Mi Libertad: Mujeres Negras y Sus Estrategias de Resistencia en La Nueva Granada, Venezuela y Cuba, 1700-1800, edited by Aurora Vergara Figueroa and Carmen Luz Cosme Puntiel. Editorial Universidad Icesi, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.5329457