Bonifacio Pinedo
*Bonifacio Pinedo's birth is celebrated on this date in 1880. He was an Afro Bolivian king. This monarchy was one of the few traditional African kingdoms that survived the changes of the Middle Ages and slavery.
Born in the tropical regions of Yungas in Bolivia, he succeeded Uchicho, of Congo and Senegalese origin. He was brought as a slave to the Hacienda of the Marquis de Pinedo in Los Yungas in what is now La Paz Department in 1820. Following custom, adopted the surname of his employer, Pinedo. He was crowned in 1823 and was succeeded by Bonifaz, who adopted the surname of Pinedo, the plantation owner. Then the king's Don José and Don Bonifacio would succeed, the latter crowned in 1932 and still remembered as the oldest in the area. He was the grandfather of the current king.
According to the story, as told by Bonifacio Pinedo, he was the oldest member of the Afro Bolivian community, a direct descendant of a noble African tribe that resided in the Congo at a time before France and Belgium colonized the region. In that era, the Spanish conquerors brought the dynasty to the New World as slaves. King Don Bonifacio I, who died in 1954, had several daughters treated as Princesses by the Community. The eldest, Doña Aurora, joined Genaro, the parents of four boys: Julio (current King), Justino, Hermenegildo, and Gabriel, the last three already deceased.
