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<!-- EDIT BELOW THIS LINE Afro-Colombian intellectual Manuel Zapata Olivella was born in Lorica, Colombia, March 17th, 1920. Much of the interests he shows in his work came from his family background. His parents, Antonio Maria Zapata and Edelmira Olivella, were, respectively, a mulato and a mestiza, who managed to instill in their children a sense of commitment to the Afro-Hispanic communities of the Americas. All of their offspring (which included Manuel Zapata Olivella and X brothers and sisters) became important public figures in Colombia’s academic and artistic circles. Antonio Maria, the father, was himself the first black Colombian to graduate from the University of Cartagena, to where the family moved when Manuel Zapata was still an infant. Education being a valued resource in the Zapata Olivella family, Manuel attended the University of Bogota, where he first entered as a medical student in the early 1940s; he completed his medical degree from that institution between 1944 and 1949. During the hiatus from the first entrance to the second period of college education, Zapata Olivella traveled extensively around Latin America, the United States, and Europe, and during these explorations he developed an anthropological eye and noted things that would later be the material of many of his works. As a student, in the 1940s, Zapata Olivella joined efforts with other Afro Colombian students to form the Club Negro de Colombia, through which the first “Dia del Negro” was organized. On that celebratory day, they marched in one of Bogota’s most important avenues to demand the incorporation of African contributions in Colombians textbooks. The group also expressed solidarity towards the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, as well as their hopes for a decolonized Africa in the future. Though the Club Negro disappeared quickly, it came back in the 1970s with a different name, Centro de Estudios Afro-Colombianos. Inspired by this institution, Peruvian student Jose Campos developed the First Congress of Black Cultures of the Americasm, which took place in Cali, Colombia, in 1976. Zapata Olivella served as the Congress’s Secretary General, and later took on responsibility as its President and main organizer. Manuel Zapata Olivella had an impressive CV, and he published extensively between the 1940s and 1990s, his most prolific period as a novelist (more than a dozen published pieces then, beside numerous essays and short stories). His works has been awarded several prizes, both in Colombia and abroad, including the Premio Espiral (Spain), in 1954, for the novel Hotel de Vagabundos; Detras del Rostro was the recipient of the Premio LIterario Esso in 1962, and then, in 1963, the same novel won the Premio Nacional de Literatura (Colombia). Also in 1963, Chambacu, Corral de Negros received an honorary mention from the prestigious Casa de las Americas (Cuba). But the list does not stop there: in 1985, his masterpiece, Chango, el Gran Putas won the Latin American fiction prize of the Premio Literartio Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho (Brazil), and Levantate Mulato, originally published in French, won the Premio de Derechos Humanos (Paris), in 1988. The following year Zapata Olivella was awarded the Premio Simon Bolivar (Colombia) for his radio broadcasts on Colombian identity, and in 1995 France named him Caballero de la Orden de la Artes y la Cultura.


 * Afro-Colombian
 * Colombian Society
 * Colombian People of African Descent