MANUEL ZAPATA OLIVELLA AND THE AFRICAN CULTURES OF THE AMERICAS

Abstract

The Venezuelan historian José Marcial Ramos Guédez pays homage in this article to the medical anthropologist and Colombian writer Manuel Zapata Olivella, an intellectual comitted to the struggle of the Afroamerican people who died in the year 2004 in Bogotá. The general coordinator of the First Congress of Black Culture in the Americas, which took place in Cali in 1977, Zapata Olivella was always mentioned its books and brochures countering racism, poverty, discrimination and the exclusion of the descendants of Afroamericans, the indigenous population, and the mestizos of the American Continent.