The ancestors of the people of Playa de Oro were brought
to this place
(from Africa via Columbia) by a Spainard who set them
to work panning
for gold in Rio Santiago. I don't think they minded
the gold panning,
because they still do a fair amount of it. But
they didn't care much
for slavery, and so, in secret, they built a cannon
from a very hard
black wood. One day when the slave master came
paddling up in his canoe
to collect the day's nuggets, they blasted him with
the cannon, and that
was the end of him. (They say the cannon is now in
a museum in Guayaquil).
Having no way back to Africa, the rebel slaves and
their descendants
remained there at Playa de Oro (Beach of Gold). As
the furthest
community in on Rio Santiago, they had only occasional
contacts with the
outside world.
The British came in the early 20th century, cleaned
out most of the
gold, and left. The Ecuadorian military came in the
1970s, built a big
barracks, and spent awhile looking for any gold the
British had
overlooked. There wasn't enough to bother with,
so they left. They
donated their barracks to the community, but as the
barracks was a
two-hour walk from the village, the community had
no use for it, and it
was abandoned.
In the 1990's, multinational logging companies came
to Ecuador's El
Choco. They began buying and/or stealing, then
clearcutting forests
downriver from Playa de Oro. In 1992, US AID showed
up with offers to
help Playa de Oro get title to its ancestral forests
if the community
would permit the development of a "sustainable" timbering
project. This
would require the construction of a road to Playa
de Oro, and would give
US companies access to their timber. The community
accepted US AID's aid
only in getting title to 10,000 hectares of their
ancestral forests.
Then it asked the agency to leave, and refused to
allow a road to be
built to their village. Thus Playa de Oro remains
as it always has been,
the furthest community up Rio Santiago, and accessible
only by boat.
I arrived there in 1995, looking for a land base to
establish a jungle
cat reserve, and we struck a deal. They would designate
their territory
as a safe haven for all species of indigenous jungle
cats (jaguar, puma,
ocelot, margay, oncilla, and jaguarundi), and through
Earthways
Foundation, I would raise the funds needed for them
to transform that
abandoned barracks into a lodge which they could use
to attract
researchers and eco-tourists, thereby creating a small
source of income
for the community.
The lodge opened in 2000 and is completely under their
control. They did
the renovation work, built the boat for needed for
access, built the
furniture, planted the fruit trees, rice, and other
food needed to make
the place somewhat self-sufficient. The community
provides the
motorists, the guides, the cooks, and the management.
The director - one
of the few locals who is literate - went to Quito
and learned to use
e-mail so we can be in contact on a monthly basis.
In truth, the Playa
de Orans are pretty special. Not that I would expect
a visitor to notice it, since they live in huts and
look like a lot of
poor black folks in ragged clothes with big smiles.
But they're one of
the few jungle communities I've ever seen which had
the courage and the
smarts to stand up to all the modern world reps who
came motoring up
their river to "help" them by stealing their gold,
their forest, and now
their eco-tourist potential. Some Quito tour agencies
have tried to cut
deals with them - you know, the kind where the tour
agency charges
clients $500 for 3 nights in the jungle, and the community
which
provides the food, lodging, boat transport, and guide
service gets $50
per person. Community leaders rejected that, too,
being of the opinion
that they are better off dealing with independent
travelers. Now we have
teamed up with the nonprofit organization, Feline
Conservation
Federation, to bring in small groups of tourists a
few times a year and
help fund conservation research at the reserve, without
inflating prices
and lining the pockets of outsiders so that the community
receives fair
compensation for their lodging and services.
These small guided groups
and independent travelers trickling in have less of
an impact on both
the environment and the community.
The modern world has brought a few changes to their
way of life. Last
year each house (hut on stilts) got water, in the
form of a tap in the
yard. But still no indoor plumbing or electricity.
A couple of their
dugouts, and the ones we use at the reserve, now have
motors, and with
motors on the boats, they are able to travel downriver
more often, to
towns like Borbon and San Lorenzo. From there they
can bus to Esmeraldas
and even Quito and Guayaquil. But on the whole they
live off the land
and the river pretty much as they always have.
The community is made up of 52 families, or about 350
people. Most of
them are nominally Catholic, but when a local man
died recently, the
stories which swirled around just under the surface
made it clear that
there's a lot of Old Africa in what they believe about
the demons that
walk among us. However, there's not much of
Africa in daily village
life. The one thing visitors might be lucky enough
to see is a
performance of traditional Afro-Latino
dances done by the children to
cadences of drums and a homemade miramba.