Moro
moros (pluriel)
Among the Kággaba (Kogi) of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the *moro* is the child or adolescent chosen by divination to undergo, beyond the initial nine-year training that every future Mama receives, two additional nine-year periods in darkness and fasting—until becoming one of those oracles who, it is said, "have seen the end of the world coming." The term also refers, more broadly, to any student in training to become a Mama. It is not an honorary title: it is a lived deprivation, the harshness of which Mama Bernardo, trained from childhood, himself recounted to Alan Ereira.
When you want to be a Mama you have to concentrate, you can't wander about thinking about girls, thinking about this and about that. You have to concentrate and really listen to what the Mamas say to you. And when you start to be a moro you can't just do whatever you want, everything is controlled. When the Mamas take you out to make an offering you have to fast, you go without eating, and when you come back they also don't give you anything to eat.
Moro is a Kogi word that Alan Ereira’s book—a work by the British BBC documentarian—leaves untranslated, a sign that no French equivalent exists. Ereira himself never met a moro: “They live high in the Sierra and speak only to the Mamas.” What we know of them comes from an informant, then from a Mama who was once a moro—Mama Bernardo—whose words reach us through two layers of mediation: oral translation on-site, then Ereira’s English.
Becoming a Mama already requires two nine-year periods in darkness—nine, the number of gestation, the number of worlds. The moro goes further: two more nine-year stretches in isolation so strict that contact with an “impure” person—anyone still bound to the coarse physical world—would void the entire preparation. Some emerge into the light only after thirty years. Mama Bernardo, who began this path as a child rather than from birth, retained its harshness: “You have to focus; you can’t waste time thinking about girls.” When the Mamas take you to make an offering, “you fast, you don’t eat, and when you return, they give you nothing either”—unless, perhaps, in the dead of night.
The moro is no mere disciple: it is a body and mind trained, through hunger and silence, to bear knowledge the community entrusts to no one else. Hunger here is not an accident of asceticism but its tool—one learns to want less in order to listen better. What the moro learns to carry is what the entry on aluna calls the mother-thought: and once a Mama, it is he who will ensure the debt of the pagamento is paid according to the Law of Origin. ≠ the Christian monastic novice, whose vows bind an already-formed will: the moro, often chosen in childhood by divination, does not choose—it is the community that sees in him, before he sees himself, the one who must one day witness the end of the world.