Some cultures survive because an institution decides to protect them, fund them, catalogue them in a national heritage inventory. And some cultures survive in spite of all that, carried in the bodies of people who decided alone, without mandate or budget, that what they bore was too important to let die. Sonia Bazanta Vides, born in Talaigua Nuevo, Bolívar, in 1940, known from the beginning as Totó la Momposina, belonged to that second category. She died on 17 May 2026 in Celaya, Mexico, aged 85, after two years of silence imposed by aphasia, a condition that progressively strips those it afflicts of the ability to speak and to sing. What disappears with her is not a voice. It is a function.
The Voice That Kept What No One Teaches
To call her a “folklorist” or a “traditional singer” is a way of reducing the problem to its most manageable dimensions. What Totó la Momposina did for sixty years was not to preserve a repertoire. It was to sustain, with body and voice, a chain of transmission that the Colombian state never seriously set out to support. The rhythms she performed (cumbia, bullerengue, mapalé, porro) are not musical genres in the sense of the recording industry. They are survivals. Rhythmic and vocal systems of African origin that the slave trade transported across the Atlantic, and that the Afro-Caribbean communities of the Colombian coast kept alive for centuries without anyone asking them to and without anyone paying them for it.
Totó understood early on that this was her work. She did not theorise it, did not convert it into a political programme. She practised it, with her musicians, with her family, with the artisanal logic of someone who knows that memory is transmitted through doing, not through archiving. She brought this music to stages across Europe, the Americas and Asia at a time when Colombian folklore had neither a global market nor institutional representation, with no infrastructure beyond the determination of someone who knows exactly what she carries.
In 1982, Totó la Momposina sang at the ceremony in which Gabriel García Márquez received the Nobel Prize in Literature, in Stockholm. It was the first time that Afro-Caribbean Colombian music sounded before a global audience of that scale, within the framework of the highest intellectual recognition the West confers.
The Atlantic as Score
Cumbia is not Colombian in the sense that the tango is Argentine, as the cultural product of a constituted nation. It is the result of a violent and forced synthesis. African rhythms from the Gulf of Guinea, elements of the indigenous cultures of the Caribbean coast, sediments of European colonial music, all compressed into communities that had access to no other space of cultural elaboration than the body, the voice and the drum. What those people brought with them on the slave ships, the one thing that could not be confiscated, was the rhythmic memory of their cultures of origin. What is called Afro-Caribbean Colombian folklore today is that memory, surviving.
Totó made that genealogy the axis of her work, not discursively but sonically. The gaitas, the drums, the vocal forms of the bullerengue have direct correspondences with musical traditions of sub-Saharan Africa that ethnomusicology (the comparative study of music across the world’s cultures) can identify and document. What she transmitted was audible evidence of a history that Colombian school textbooks narrate in the margins, when they narrate it at all. She did it without manifestos, without explicit politics. By singing. And that, at bottom, is the most political thing there is.
In 2013, Totó la Momposina received the Grammy Latino Lifetime Achievement Award, the highest recognition of the Latin American music industry. The award changed no public policy, guaranteed no budget, obliged no state to do anything. It functioned, as it almost always does, as a belated certification of something that no longer needed certifying.
Cartagena, 1997
I was a photographer then, and that condition, the camera around my neck and the implicit access it grants to those who know how to use it, allowed me to stay on after one of her concerts at the Centro de Formación de la Cooperación Española in Cartagena, as the musicians dispersed across the stage and through the corridors with that mixture of exhaustion and electricity that follows a good performance.
I had previously lived in Togo, a small country in West Africa that borders the Gulf of Guinea, in precisely that stretch of the African coast from which the majority of the enslaved people who arrived in Cartagena were forcibly embarked. I had heard in Lomé percussion rhythms and collective vocal forms that I recognised without yet being able to name them precisely. That recognition was not produced by Totó. It was produced by the music alone, before I ever knew her, because the connection between both shores of the Atlantic is inscribed in the rhythms themselves. Any ear that has been in both places can hear it without anyone pointing it out.
What the encounter with her gave me was something else, and more decisive. I spoke of Togo, the Gulf of Guinea, of what I perceived in her music as the direct survival of something I had known in Africa. She listened with the attention of someone who recognises in what they are told a confirmation they do not need but will not refuse. What I understood was not the transatlantic sonic connection; I already carried that. It was the awareness that what she was doing was a deliberate act of cultural identity, sustained by a single person against the inertia of a system that preferred not to concern itself with the matter. Totó knew exactly what that music was, where it came from, what its survival meant. The world recognised her afterwards, not before. Always afterwards.
What Colombia Will Not Do
The wake is scheduled in the Elliptical Hall of the Congress of the Republic. There will be speeches. President Gustavo Petro wrote that “my relative and the most exquisite figure of Caribbean Colombian art and culture” has died. The Ministry of Culture bade her farewell as “the eternal teacher”. This is the standard protocol. The Colombian state, which for decades built no sustainable cultural policy for Afro-Caribbean music, discovers in the obituary that it possessed a national treasure.
In the coming months there will be no new law protecting the intangible musical heritage of the Colombian Caribbean. There will be no structural funds for the singers and drummers of the Mompox region, of whom few remain, working without sustained funding or visibility. There will be no reform of the model through which these forms of knowledge are transmitted, which continues to depend on fragile family and community chains, without consistent institutional support. What there will be is a tribute on 27 May at the National Capitol, a few statements in the press, and then silence. The same silence that existed before her death.
Totó la Momposina did not need Colombia to validate her to know what she was. For sixty years she demonstrated that memory survives without permission. The question her death leaves open is not about her. It is about what remains when the body that sustained that function no longer exists, and the state that should take its place is still busy preparing speeches for the next funeral…
G.S.
