If you're a football fan,have you ever wondered why Argentina has rarely fielded a black player in their team? This is surprising, given the fact that Argentina is in South America and unlike its neighbour countries,like Brazil,Ecuador,Chile,and others in the continent who all have black players in their teams, Argentina does not have a single black player.
This is not a mistake, you see years ago,the country had a lot of black people.Like Brazil ,Argentina was colonized by Spain and had a lot of blacks brought into the country from the Spanish empire slave trade in West Africa.
By the late 1700,nearly 50% of the country's population was black,and in the capital - Buenos Aires, between 30 and 40 percent of the population was either black or mulatto(a person of mixed black and white descent).
So what happened to these blacks? Well, I can tell you that they didn't leave Argentina voluntarily and return to Africa.
There have been wide reports about the treatment blacks received. It's said that, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, the Argentine president from 1868 to 1874, began a 'secret genocide' that wiped out Afro-Argentinean as they were widely called from the country's population. By 1875, the country had so few blacks that they didn't bother registering them in the national census.
“Former Argentine President Carlos Menem once declared: ‘In Argentina blacks do not exist, that is a Brazilian problem.’” – The Root
How did the president do it, you may ask. During Sarmiento's presidency, he initiated deadly policies against blacks. He separated black communities from the white Europeans, placing the blacks in places with poor infrastructure and health care.
When the country was hit by a yellow - fever and Cholera, the blacks lost thousands of its people, because they lacked basic infrastructure and health measures to tackle the outbreak.
When Argentina fought Paraguay, Sarmiento knew that his country stood no chance, so he initiated the forced recruitment of Afro-Argentines into the military, sending thousands of them to their deaths. There was mass imprisonment for blacks who committed minor or fabricated crimes which often resulted in major mass execution.
The majority of the deaths suffered by blacks were among the males, so before long there was gender imbalance. This resulted in black Argentinian women being forced to bear children for white or mixed Argentinian men.
Sarmiento wrote in his diary in 1848:
If you are a dancer ,you would have heard about the popular 'Tango' ,a style of dancing that Argentina is popular for, but according to culture experts,the dance originated in Africa, from the African kingdom of Congo and it was the black in Argentina that introduced it before the whites colonised it, made it theirs and tried to cut any connection blacks had with it.
Today, Argentina is regarded as the Whitest country in South/Latin America, this title was not achieved by some natural act of God, but the calculated murder of thousands/millions of blacks by a white supremacist government which considered Africans Inferior. Seeing or hearing of a country succeeding in eliminating blackness from its identity is chilling.
This is not a mistake, you see years ago,the country had a lot of black people.Like Brazil ,Argentina was colonized by Spain and had a lot of blacks brought into the country from the Spanish empire slave trade in West Africa.
By the late 1700,nearly 50% of the country's population was black,and in the capital - Buenos Aires, between 30 and 40 percent of the population was either black or mulatto(a person of mixed black and white descent).
So what happened to these blacks? Well, I can tell you that they didn't leave Argentina voluntarily and return to Africa.
There have been wide reports about the treatment blacks received. It's said that, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, the Argentine president from 1868 to 1874, began a 'secret genocide' that wiped out Afro-Argentinean as they were widely called from the country's population. By 1875, the country had so few blacks that they didn't bother registering them in the national census.
“Former Argentine President Carlos Menem once declared: ‘In Argentina blacks do not exist, that is a Brazilian problem.’” – The Root
How did the president do it, you may ask. During Sarmiento's presidency, he initiated deadly policies against blacks. He separated black communities from the white Europeans, placing the blacks in places with poor infrastructure and health care.
When the country was hit by a yellow - fever and Cholera, the blacks lost thousands of its people, because they lacked basic infrastructure and health measures to tackle the outbreak.
When Argentina fought Paraguay, Sarmiento knew that his country stood no chance, so he initiated the forced recruitment of Afro-Argentines into the military, sending thousands of them to their deaths. There was mass imprisonment for blacks who committed minor or fabricated crimes which often resulted in major mass execution.
The majority of the deaths suffered by blacks were among the males, so before long there was gender imbalance. This resulted in black Argentinian women being forced to bear children for white or mixed Argentinian men.
Sarmiento wrote in his diary in 1848:
If you are a dancer ,you would have heard about the popular 'Tango' ,a style of dancing that Argentina is popular for, but according to culture experts,the dance originated in Africa, from the African kingdom of Congo and it was the black in Argentina that introduced it before the whites colonised it, made it theirs and tried to cut any connection blacks had with it.
Today, Argentina is regarded as the Whitest country in South/Latin America, this title was not achieved by some natural act of God, but the calculated murder of thousands/millions of blacks by a white supremacist government which considered Africans Inferior. Seeing or hearing of a country succeeding in eliminating blackness from its identity is chilling.