Bambero

Also Known As: el Bambero, from the bambas, the buttress roots of the great forest trees he lives in; the same word names a living office, the bambero mayor
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: South American Mythology, Latin American Folklore
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: He keeps an exact running tally of every animal in his forest and rations out its meat according to what a household actually needs.
Role in Mythos: He is the owner and warden of the game animals in the forests of northern Esmeraldas, one of the children of the mother mountain whom the ancestors are said to have planted in the territory on purpose.
Relation to Humans: A hunter who kills to feed his family passes through the forest unmolested and never learns that he was assessed. A hunter who kills for sport, or wounds an animal and walks away from it, gets three warnings and then the right side of the Bambero’s face.

In the forests of northern Esmeraldas the largest trees do not simply stand on the ground. Thin fins of wood fold out from the trunk above head height and run down into the mud, making rooms in the shade underneath. People call them bambas. Between them the earth stays dry when everything else is running with water, and the air there holds wet bark, rotting fruit and, now and then, tobacco smoke. That last one is the detail that matters. It means the owner is at home.

The Bambero is named after those roots, and owner is the exact word for what he is. He holds the animals of the forest the way a farmer holds livestock, and he counts them. The elders say he keeps the accounting precise and goes over it constantly in case one is short. Anybody who walks in with a gun is walking through somebody else’s property, and there is a rule about what may be taken. Kill to feed the house and you are within it. Kill for the pleasure of killing, or put a shot into an animal and leave it in the leaf litter to finish dying on its own, and you are not.

He is small, thin and easy to underestimate. The hat has a medium brim and a crown drawn up to a point, the cigars are always lit, and the left hand is malformed. On his back he carries a morral packed with roots, herbs, lengths of bejuco vine, strips of bark and waters, which he mixes with real skill and uses on animals that have been shot and abandoned. He travels sitting on a tatabra, a white-lipped peccary, which is a small hard-tempered forest pig, and the picture is as odd as it sounds and also entirely to the point. The man who owns the animals rides one.

Dawn on a riverbank, fog still lying flat on the water. He comes through the trees at a walking pace, going over his figures, and somewhere back in the montaña an animal that took a shot the day before lies in the roots with its breathing gone shallow. He gets down, opens the satchel, and works bark and water into the wound. Nobody witnesses this. It is simply what he is understood to be doing while nobody is watching.

When he does want to be seen, the sequence is fixed. He steps into the hunter’s path, raises his right arm clear of his body and points, and the direction he points is the way out. If the man carries on, the warning is repeated. On the third refusal he goes for him, knocks him about and turns the right side of his face into the light. No source describes that face. It is only ever given by its effect, which is that grown men run without stopping until they reach their own doorway, and the ones who do not reach it are found lying in the path.

Then comes the cure, because a fright on that scale is treated as an illness with a name and a treatment. The espanto is worked out of the man at home with the known herbs and with holy water, aguardiente and tobacco, the same kit brought out for mal de ojo and mal de aire. The Bambero does not kill anybody. He delivers a shock and hands the patient back to his household, and the household knows the remedy already, which tells you how often this is supposed to have happened.

Where he came from is the strangest part of the record, and the tradition answers it directly rather than shrugging. The elders of the Afro-Esmeraldeño communities say the beings of the mother mountain were sown there. Juan García Salazar, who spent decades gathering the oral memory of the region, set it out with Catherine Walsh in a chapter published in 2017: the ancestors who arrived in chains had no roots in that land, so they planted some, and what they planted included the Bambero, La Tunda, the Riviel and the Gualgura, seeds that would carry a law of the forest into a place where every other law belonged to the master. García declined the word mythological for them. He called them personajes mágicos, magical characters, and said flatly that they were neither fictional nor fabulous, that they existed and held key teaching roles in maintaining the collective wellbeing. Read that way the Bambero is not a survival of anything. He is a piece of governance, installed deliberately, and the thing he governs is greed.

The story García chose to show him working came from an elder in the north of Esmeraldas whom everyone called María. He had hunted all day and found nothing. Heading home he heard groaning inside the bamba of a matapalo, looked in, and saw an oso caballuno, a beast nobody there eats, beating a young guatín. He had the shotgun in his hand, remembered that the oso is not food, found a stick and hit it with that instead. The oso let go and ran, the little agouti jumped the root wall and vanished into the bush, and only afterwards did he think about the meat he had just released. He walked home turning it over, and settled on this: if you free something from an injustice, taking its life is a larger injustice. Near the house he heard an agouti calling in the forest with the voice of a boy, and what it seemed to say was Chao Ma’ia. Goodbye, María. Later, washing the smell of the montaña off himself in the river, he heard a man’s voice from the far bank say Bien Ma’ia. Well done, María. He understood that he was being offered a job as the Bambero’s helper, and he turned it down, because he lives in the forest and eats what the forest gives, and every week he has to kill something to feed his family.

The name also belongs to living people. In the communities of the north a bambero mayor is a man who guides the community and keeps the oral tradition moving from one generation to the next, and the best known holder of the title was García Salazar himself, born in northern Esmeraldas in 1944, who built the largest archive of Afro-Andean oral memory in the country and died in Quito in 2017. He preferred to be called a worker of the process. Everybody else called him the bambero mayor.

His powers are an owner’s powers. He knows the number, he sets the share, he can heal what has been wounded and he can put a man flat on his back with nothing but a turn of the head. What he cannot do is refuse somebody who is genuinely hungry, and he does not try, because need is written into the law he enforces. He warns three times before he touches anyone, which means every punishment in the tradition is one the hunter picked. And there is a heavier limit, which the elders state without any softening. He was alive, they say, until the forests lost their ancestral owners and the sane use of what those forests gave, and both passed into the hands of the state and the companies holding its concessions: timber, African palm, shrimp ponds, gold. More than half the ancestral territory of the Afro-Esmeraldeño communities is reckoned to be gone. A spirit whose whole office is counting animals in a forest does not outlast the forest.

So the tally is the thing to hold on to. Somewhere back in the bambas a small man with a ruined left hand goes through his animals one at a time, the way he always has, checking that none of them is short, in a forest that is short a great deal.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the Bambero?

The Bambero is the guardian and owner of the forest animals in the Afro-Ecuadorian tradition of Esmeraldas province, in the Pacific lowlands of northern Ecuador. He is described as a small thin man who lives in the bambas, the buttress roots of the giant forest trees, and who keeps an exact count of every animal under his care. The elders of the region class him as one of the children of the mother mountain, alongside La Tunda, the Riviel and the Gualgura.

What does the Bambero do to hunters?

He leaves alone any hunter killing to feed a household, and punishes those who kill for pleasure or who wound an animal and abandon it. He blocks the offender’s path, raises his right hand and points the way out, and repeats the warning twice more. On the third refusal he attacks, exposing the right side of his face, and the hunter either flees home or is found unconscious on the trail.

Where does the Bambero live?

He lives in the bambas, the tall buttress roots that fan out from the base of the biggest trees in the rainforest of northern Esmeraldas, and his name comes from them. He moves through the forest riding a tatabra, a white-lipped peccary, carrying a satchel of roots, herbs, bark and vines on his back. He uses that satchel to treat animals that hunters have shot and left behind.

How do people recover from meeting the Bambero?

The fright is treated as a named illness, the espanto, and is cured at home with medicinal herbs together with holy water, aguardiente and tobacco. This is the same remedy used in Esmeraldas for other ailments of supernatural cause, such as mal de ojo and mal de aire. The Bambero is not held to kill anyone; the damage he does is shock.

What is a bambero mayor?

A bambero mayor is a living person, not a spirit: a community guide in northern Esmeraldas charged with keeping the oral tradition alive and passing it to the next generation. The best known holder of the title was the Afro-Ecuadorian oral historian Juan García Salazar, born in 1944 and died in Quito in 2017, who assembled the largest archive of Afro-Andean oral memory in the region. He himself preferred to be called a worker of the process.