Ceferina Banquéz

She was born in 1945 in Guamanga, in the Montes de María (Bolívar) region of the Caribbean. She is a composer and interpreter of all the airs of the bullerengue, belonging to a family of old singers. The bullerengue is one of the oldest canta’os dances performed by people descended from the maroon; It is a happy song that talks about life and how it goes by in everyday life, tells the daily chores and tells the little stories of the towns and their people. It begins with the intervention of the intonating voice, with the response of the choir and the drums.

Ceferina narrates in her songs the ancestral practices, her daily life and the process of violence experienced in her town, since like many others she was forcibly displaced from her territory by paramilitary groups in the late 1990s. Currently Ceferina has returned to her land, resisting by means of their creations and their cultivation of bread to catch amidst palm monocultures.

She has a record work titled "Cantos ancestrales de Guamanga" (2010) with which she received the Award for Dedication to the Enrichment of Ancestral Culture of the Black, Raizales, Palenqueras and Afro-Colombian Communities, from the Ministry of Culture.