Eduardo Galeano - The Memory of Fire Trilogy - Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind

(247)

Bolívar and the Indians

The laws in Spain’s American colonies were never obeyed. Good or bad, the laws never existed in reality — neither the many royal warrants which protected the Indians (and which confessed their own impotence through repetition), nor the ordinances that banned the circulation of Jews and novels. This tradition does not keep eminent Creoles, generals, or doctors, from believing that the Constitution is an infallible potion for public happiness.

Simón Bolívar weaves constitutions with fervor. Now he presents to the Congress a constitutional project for the new republic bearing his name. According to the text, Bolivia will have a president for life and three legislative chambers — tribunes, senators, and censors— which have some resemblance, says Bolívar, to the Areopagus of Athens and the censors of Rome.

People who cannot read will not have the right to vote; and since almost all Bolivians speak Quechua or Aymara, know nothing of the Castilian language, and cannot read, only a handful of select males will have that right. As in Colombia and Peru, Bolívar has decreed in the new country the abolition of native tribute and of forced labor for Indians; and has arranged to divide communal lands into private plots. And, so that the Indians, the country’s immense majority, may receive the European light of Civilization, Bolívar has brought to Chuquisaca his old teacher, Simón Rodríguez, with orders to establish schools.

(42 and 172)

Cursed Be the Creative Imagination

Simón Rodríguez, Bolívar’s teacher, has returned to America. For a quarter of a century Simón was on the other side of the sea. There, he was a friend of the socialists of Paris, London, and Geneva; he worked with the printers of Rome, the chemists of Vienna, and even taught elementary lessons in a small town on the Russian steppe.

After the long embrace of welcome, Bolívar names him director of education in the newly founded country. With a model school in Chuquisaca, Simón Rodríguez begins the task of uprooting the lies and fears hallowed by tradition. Pious ladies scream, learned doctors howl, dogs bark at the scandal. Horror: the madman Rodríguez proposes to mix children of high birth with mestizos who until last night slept in the streets. What is he thinking of? Does he want the orphans to take him to heaven? Or does he corrupt them so they’ll accompany him to hell? In the classrooms, neither catechism nor sacristy Latin, nor rules of grammar are heard, only a racket of saws and hammers unbearable to the ears of monks and pettifoggers schooled in the repulsiveness of manual work. A school for whores and thieves! Those who believe the body is shameful and woman an adornment, cry to high heaven. In Don Simóns school, boys and girls sit jammed side by side; and to top it all, their studying is playing.

The prefect of Chuquisaca heads the campaign against the satyr who has come to corrupt the morals of youth. Soon, Marshal Sucre, president of Bolivia, demands Simón Rodríguez’s resignation, because he has not presented his accounts with due meticulousness.

(296 and 298)

The Ideas of Simón Rodríguez: Teaching How to Think

The author is considered mad. Let him transmit his ravings to the fathers yet to be born.

Everyone must be educated without distinction of race or color. Let us not deceive ourselves: without popular education, there will be no true society.

Instruction is not education. Teach, and you will have people who know; educate, and you will have people who do.

To order recital from memory of what is not understood, is to make parrots. Do not in any case order a child to do anything that has no “why” at the foot of it. If you accustom the child always to see reason behind the orders he receives, he misses it when he does not see it, and asks for it, saying, “Why?” Teach the children to be inquisitive, so that, asking the reasons for what they are told to do, they learn to obey reason, not authority like limited people, nor custom like stupid people.

Boys and girls should study together in the schools. First, so that in this way men should learn from childhood to respect women; second, so that women should learn not to be afraid of men.

The boys should learn the three principal trades: masonry, carpentry, and smithery, because with earth, wood, and metal the most essential things are made. Instruction and a trade should be given to women, so that they will not prostitute themselves out of necessity, nor make marriage a speculation to assure subsistence.

He who knows nothing can be deceived by anyone. He who has nothing, anyone can buy.

(297)

Rivadavia

On the crest of the River Plata ravines, above the muddy bank of the river, lies the port that usurps the wealth of the whole country.

In the Buenos Aires Coliseum the British consul occupies the box of the viceroy of Spain. The Creole patricians use words from France and gloves from England, and thus they slip into the life of independence.

From the Thames flows the torrent of merchandise manufactured, to Argentine specifications, in Yorkshire and Lancashire. In Birmingham they imitate to the last detail the traditional copper boiler that heats water for maté, and they produce exact replicas of the wooden stirrups, bolas, and lassos used in this country. Workshops and textile mills in the provinces have scarcely a chance of resisting the assault. A single ship brings twenty thousand pairs of boots at bargain prices and a Liverpool poncho costs five times less than one from Catamarca.

Argentine banknotes are printed in London and the National Bank, with a majority of British shareholders, monopolizes their emission. Through this bank operates the River Plate Mining Association, which pays Bernardino Rivadavia an annual salary of twelve hundred pounds.

From an armchair that will be sacred, Rivadavia multiplies the public debt and public libraries. Buenos Aires’s illustrious jurist, who goes about in a four-horse carriage, claims to be president of a country he does not know and despises. Beyond the city walls of Buenos Aires, that country hates him.

(55, 271, and 342)

Lonely Countries

The infant said its first words. They were its last. Of those invited to the baptism, only four reached Panama, and instead of a baptism there was extreme unction. Grief, father’s grief, shrinks the face of Bolívar. The condolences sound hollow.

Bells ring out for the unity of Hispanic America.

Bolívar had called on the new countries to unite, under British protection, in one fatherland. He did not invite the United States or Haiti, because they are foreign to our American ways; but he wanted Great Britain to integrate the Hispanic American league, to defend it from the danger of Spanish reconquest.

London has no interest in the unity of its new dominions. The Congress of Panama has given birth to nothing but edifying declarations, because the old viceroyalties have birthed countries tied to a new empire overseas, and divorced among themselves. The colonial economy, mines and plantations producing for abroad, cities that prefer the bazaar to the factory, opens the way not for a great nation but for a great archipelago. The independent countries are disintegrating while Bolívar dreams of a unified fatherland. They have not signed a single trade agreement among themselves, but are flooded with European merchandise and almost all have bought the chief British export product, the doctrine of free trade.