When you hear the popular refrain, “En tiempos de Ñañá Seré” (“In the time of Ñañá Seré”) you probably imagine that it refers to something that happened a long time ago, but like many, you probably have not stopped to think about who Nañá Seré was. For example, this writer always thought that she was probably a slave woman from Matanzas who was locked up or executed during the so-called “Ladder Conspiracy” of 1844—known as the Year of Leather [for the brutal repression carried out against an attempted slave uprising]. Perhaps it was somebody whose merits caused him or her to be remembered long afterward, like the slave woman Carlota.
Ñañá Seré, a hypothetical character of the popular imagination—nobody knows who he was, where he lived or what he did to achieve such fame, but we all refer to him (or her) when talking about something that happened very long ago—was not a flesh-and-blood person or a divine being: it was the collective name for seven empires of the Briyumba Congo, of the Bantu ethnic group, which existed in the first millennium of our era in Africa. Their individual names were Suama, Bakongo, Musundi, Loango, Gangá, Makoa and Mandinga—names which are better-known; we all know what they mean or we know somebody who is a descendant of one of those groups. These gave rise to the Congo nation on the banks of the Congo River in central Africa. According to legend, that was the origin of humanity. Therefore, saying “in the time of Ñañá Seré” is almost like saying “in the time of Adam and Eve,” or “in the time of the Great Flood.” However, we prefer to say “in the time of Ñañá Seré,” as a way of reaffirming the blend of cultures that makes up our nationality. Because here, as a poet once said, “He who doesn’t have blood from Congo has blood from Calabar.”
