Las Llamadas: Uruguayan festival born from African struggle
ByAFP
Published February 10, 2022
Drummers participating in Montevideo's "Llamadas" parade, one of the events that make up Uruguay's carnival -- the world's longest -- on February 10, 2022 - Copyright Russian Defence Ministry/AFP Handout
Mariëtte Le Roux
As a little boy, Cesar Pintos — now 86 — played “drums” with his friends in the streets of Montevideo’s black-majority neighborhoods, beating tin cans with twigs to ancestral rhythms brought to Uruguay by enslaved Africans.
It was the 1940s, barely 100 years since the abolition of slavery in the South American country and a period of explosive growth for candombe — a uniquely AfroUruguayan music style.
“Black people brought it here,” Pintos told AFP of the music, which UNESCO recognized as a piece of Uruguayan cultural heritage “transmitted within families of African descent.”
“They brought it in their heads, because they had nothing” in the line of possessions, said Pintos.
As an adult, he started his own “comparsa” of drummers and dancers from his Cordon neighborhood, one of the birthplaces of candombe.
Read more: https://www.digitaljournal.com/world/las-llamadas-uruguayan-festival-born-from-african-struggle/article#ixzz7KZ8h3BoF
Apparently the festival is still ongoing, so the film makers led the video into one from 2020.
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