Colombia’s civil war displaced Afro-Colombians into an invisible shantytown named for Mandela

Evidence

Colombia’s Nelson Mandela City exemplifies the effects of this contemporary raceless logic of neoliberalism. Nelson Mandela City is a migrant shantytown of 50,000 people that has grown informally next to the harbor in the celebrated cultural capital of Cartegena. The poor migrants have fled the interior, squeezed out with no prospects between the governmentsponsored paramilitaries and the rebels in Colombia’s lingering and increasingly deadly civil war. The vulnerable inhabitants of Nelson Mandela City, overlooked and left to eke out livelihoods for themselves from practices such as streetwise micro-vending and micro-mining garbage dumps, are overwhelmingly from the largely denied, all but invisible Afro- Colombian population, a mixed legacy cemented between slavery’s denied past and the neoliberal present. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1227

Categorization

• XREF: The irony of a shantytown named for Mandela resonates with the ‘raceless democracy’ naming cited in the chapter.
• SHARE: A specific friend working on Afro-diaspora geography would appreciate this concrete case.