What is known to most Colombians and in the world beyond is that this village of 3,500 has produced at least three world champion boxers, the most famous probably being Antonio Cervantes—Kid Pambelé. But the story of San Basilio as a cradle of champions is inextricably intertwined with its struggle with freedom.

 

That history of struggle began when Benkos, the Prince of Guinea Bissau, was kidnapped by Portuguese slave traffickers and sold to Alonso del Campo in 1596. On the way to Cartagena the boat sank in the Magdalena River. He escaped to Montes de María and became the leader of the Cimarron resistance movement, whose members would settle in San Basilio de Palenque. Many consider Palenque as the first freed territory of America, one that UNESCO crowned with the flamboyant title of “Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity” in 2005. However, neither Palenque nor Biohó received much attention during the commemoration of the Latin American bicentennial of independence. Few people remembered how Benkos died heroically as a martyr when the Spanish governor of Cartagena betrayed the terms of the peace treaty that he had signed. That’s why the tourists still ask who is that nude black man in bronze and chains reaching for the sky.

 

Despite the town’s deficiencies (there is no sewer system, for example), the population keeps expanding because of the arrival of displaced peasants from Montes de María—victims of a long and never ending conflict among paramilitaries, guerrillas and the state. The palenqueros don’t want to be involved in politics. In San Basilio the atmosphere is peaceful and the only sound is that of champeta, beating a catchy rhythm that animates the streets. San Basilio—often called just “Palenque”—carries a long history of oppression, misery and colonial violence, but the town receives the foreign tourists with the festive music of the picos (mobile speakers) and the joyful dancing of a mother lulling her little twins. Behind a fence, in the public school grounds, boys and girls play soccer. Some pose for the camera, showing their fists in boxing positions. The youthful boxing tradition arose from the military society that the villagers had to develop to fend off the Spaniards (a fact immortalized in Marlon Brando’s film Burn!). The community became a kind of Afro-American Sparta. As soon as they could walk, boys and girls were trained in the martial arts.

 

On the other side of the soccer field is a boxing gym that Coldeportes, the national sports agency, inaugurated in 2007, practically a palace among poor houses and only comparable to the new cultural center constructed by the Ministry of Culture. Inside hangs a large portrait of Kid Pambelé, a palenquero who went from being a bootblack to becoming the most famous black boxer of Colombia, when on October 28, 1978 in Panama City he knocked out Peppermint Frazer and won the world championship title in the light welterweight category (140 pounds).

 

In the 1970s, two other world boxing champions from Palenque also brought national attention and pride to San Basilio: the Cardona brothers, Ricardo and Prudencio, in the divisions of bantamweight and flyweight, respectively. Palenque’s Rodrigo “Rocky” Valdes also held both the WBC and WBA middleweight crowns at various times between 1974 and 1978. Nevertheless, Kid Pambelé alone kept the world championship for eight years, defending the title in 21 fights. He became a close friend of President Misael Pastrana Borrero, whom he brought to San Basilio for a historic visit, along with the public electricity and water supply its residents had been awaiting for so long. On Christmas of that year the saint of devotion was no longer San Basilio (the same San Nicholas who inspired Christmas), but San Kid Pambelé, delivering the greatest gift the town had ever received. According to Colombian journalist Juan Gossaín, the cult of the Kid is explained by the fact that he taught Colombians that winning was possible in a country of losers, where people often celebrated failure because of near victories.

 

This was that same frightened, insecure and weak boxer whom his first trainer had called the Black Threat. This fighter once placed a bet against himself in a fight with such bad luck that his opponent had done the same thing, so he threw himself to the ground first without having received the slightest scratch. After the discredit following such a loser trick, the iron discipline and even the hard words of his trainer were fruitful. According to journalist Eugenio Baena, trainer Ramiro Machado, seeing that his pupil was not reacting during a fight, used to insult him with racial epithets, adding “You will always be a slave if you don’t win this fight.” Pambelé says the cursing from his mulato trainer didn’t bother him, but rather spurred him on. Nevertheless, we have to wonder if such insults, used again and again since colonial times to destroy self-confidence and self-esteem, were what threw him from glory to the obscurity of drugs and addiction.

 

Today our Kid struggles between an image of himself as Antonio Cervantes, former world champion and father of at least 11 children, and a hallucinated version of “The Black Threat” who harms himself and his family. In the national imaginary and the archives of YouTube and the electronic media, the images of some of his 44 knockouts coexist with those in which you can see him punching the wind. A man of very few words, he coined a phrase that ended up as part of the national popular wisdom: “It is always better to be rich than to be poor.” The sentence competes only with one that Francisco Maturana, former trainer of the Colombian national soccer team, offered after one more defeat: “Losing is winning a little.” Both have been the object of general mockery and scorn, but they are maxims that suggest why the portrait of Kid Pambelé remains as lonely as the boxing ring of San Basilio and the man who inspired the painting. He still wanders in search of his past glory, while his family would give all they have to bring him back, even though he sold all the properties he had in Cartagena and Caracas, including the house he had bought for his mother.

 

The music that flows through San Basilio in the form of bullerengue, son palenquero, chalupa, chalusonga, lumbalú, mapalé and champeta and the extremely erotic, expressive, skillful and challenging dances that palenqueros perform makes us wonder if the palenquero boxer has something like the jogo de cintura of a Ronaldinho who seems to dance samba while he plays soccer. But in San Basilio there is no clear bridge between combat and dance. The punches that led Pambelé to his glory and fall had more force and violence than the power of congregation, bonding, cultural reaffirmation or erotic seduction of dances like mapalé. In his fight against poverty and the meanness of a world in which you “hit or you are hit” (“te chingas o te chingan,” in Mexican terms), the Kid had moved far away from his own people into an environment where the wealthy and privileged class adopted him as a trophy of national success, but abandoned him when he turned into a falling idol lost in a limbo of cocaine. 

Later on Sunday a heavy rain begins to fall. The lonely boxing trainer closes the doors of the gymnasium and says he is this close to throwing the towel. He complains because there are few youngsters ready to dedicate their lives to boxing and embrace the hard discipline required to have a new palenquero world champion. Most of them run away from punches and prefer to go in search of glory as singers. They play champeta, a growing rhythm of Cartagena, similar to reggaeton. During October’s drums annual festivity, this Cimarron enclave turns into a cosmopolitan center. Tourists from all around the world come and gather with the palenqueros, this time not to see a black man knocking down another man in exchange for a golden belt in the Madison Square Garden, but to celebrate a rebirth of the same power that led the fists of Biohó towards freedom. Imagine the people, all dressed in white, gathered to chant a lumbalú to honor the life of their dear Antonio Cervantes, Kid Pambelé, son of Benkos Biohó and San Basilio de Palenque in
the language of the village: 

 

Andrés Sanín is a lawyer and journalist from the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia. He is currently a doctoral candidate in Harvard’s Romance Languages and Literatures Department.