Mike Austin

HST 407

June 6, 1993

¡QUILOMBO!

          Spartacus had a plan: he would escape his Roman masters, gather others under his banner and create a community of ex-slaves to harass and prey upon Roman cities.[1] In other words, he would begin what colonial Brazilians would later call a quilombo.[2] But he was certainly not the first with this idea:         

            But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites. The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites, and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labor.[3]

Of course, we know that Moses gathered up these "slaves" and fled for the Prom­ised Land, a place that we can refer to as the first quilombo.[4] Wherever one turns in the history of slavery one reads of innumerable attempts to flee bond­age and form independent and free societies. The Brazilian experience was no different; indeed, the records of Brazilian slavery are full of references to quilom­bos. But we should have expected this: three-hundred years is a long time for a people to re­main in chains, but plenty of time for them to develop  a history of attempts —  both failed and successful — to escape from their white oppressors and set up separate communities. We shall discuss these quilombos that dotted the landscape and annals of Brazil and which make their presence felt even today.

*********

          Once there was a black El Dorado in Brazil.

          There it was like a shaft of sunlight liberty released: ¡Quilombo!

                              ——— Gilberto Gil

          As soon as Africans were brought to the shores of Brazil they began to plot their escape. This was no easy thing: trapped in a foreign land, surrounded by white people and  speaking little if any Portuguese, these blacks had only a small  chance of making a successful flight to freedom. Indeed, where could they go? To the cities? Hardly; plantation owners were quick to discover a slave's absence and  to send out notices to all surrounding areas requesting any information about their property. Returned slaves could expect little mercy from their master. To another plantation in the hope that a new owner would offer a better life? No; any plantation owner would be almost certain to return escaped slaves. The only logical an­swer then would be for slaves to try to flee to a place where there were no whites. Invariably this meant either just beyond the plantations but near enough to raid them, or to the very frontier of Portuguese civilization in Brazil, a wild no-man's-land inhabited only by Indians and beasts. Both areas gave birth to quilombos.

          The first gatherings of escaped slaves appeared in the 16th century. These places hardly deserved the name "communities"; they were what we would call "forest hideouts," or what the Portuguese termed mocambos. These were usually little more than a collection of rude shacks  inhabited by a small group of run­aways. Capture, disease, starvation, insecurity and death were daily realities of these mocambos. Even  so, they were a permanent feature of planta­tions even if the average mocambo had a short existence. Rare was the plantation that was not an unwitting host to several hideouts that eked out an existence on the fringes of white society. As the Portuguese pushed westward in their voracious search for land, so did the mocambos. The black man thus became an unwilling and unher­alded explorer: escaped slaves reached every tributary of the Amazon long before the white man did.[5]

          The number of mocambos increased along with the number of Portuguese settlers, and they began to adopt more permanent features. Even though a mo­cambo might lose half of its inhabitants for one reason or another, its population could be replenished  by the steady stream of blacks fleeing plantation life. Mo­cambos increased in  size and longevity until their definition as "forest hideouts" had little meaning. In the late 17th century the word quilombo — signifying a larger and more stable (and thus more threatening) settlement of escaped slaves — began gradually to replace mocambo, and by the 18th century only the new term was used.[6] Smaller quilombos were little more than groups of mocambos that were more or less mobile.  These units could if need be move from area to area and unite with or break away from other quilombos. Larger quilombos were really permanent settlements of runaway slaves, and  they had their own systems of eco­nomic organization and political authority. What had been a ragged group of es­caped slaves barely surviving on the periphery of plantations had now become a new civilization, a black one, whose very existence would come to represent a challenge to the foundation of Brazilian civilization.

           How could this be so? Could groups of escaped slaves really threaten Por­tugal's colonial investment? We must remember that every slave soci­ety in history existed in constant fear of those it enslaved; Brazil was no different.[7] Indeed, quilombos menaced Brazil's plantation system both directly and indirectly: most quilombos survived by raiding plantations and carrying off manufactured goods, seed and women — sometimes white women; and the very existence of quilombos was a constant reminder  to every slave that there was indeed a possi­bility of free­dom.

          Quilombos were numerous throughout the colonial period: the authorities were simply unable to stop their formation. So many were there that travel in the more isolated parts of Brazil became hazardous, for any in­trepid traveler might come upon a  quilombo.[8] A law passed in 1740 that prohib­ited firearms aroused vociferous complaints from citizens whose businesses forced them to travel through the rural areas.[9] The nighttime forays of quilombolas spread terror among the plantation areas, and at times rendered travel impossibly dangerous. The Rec­oncavo region was especially prone to this due to the large number of quilombos in the area; on any rural road one could expect to see slaves running for their free­dom, and who  no doubt would  have met attempts to stop them with great hostil­ity.

          The Portuguese landowners certainly did not ignore the danger that they believed quilombos posed to their life and property. Of course, the smaller slave settlements could usually be ignored: the loss to theft could be chalked up to the cost of doing business, and it was certainly less than the cost of arranging a full-blown military expedition to destroy the bothersome quilombos. But faced with a hostile and predatory quilombo near the borders of several large plantations the colonists would not hesitate to pool their resources and hire special bounty hunters whose sole areas of expertise lay in the destruction of quilombos and the capture of runaway slaves. These capitães-do-mato were almost all mulattos or free blacks, and would go from plantation to plantation looking for work putting down any troublesome quilombos; they seldom went unemployed, even if they were not al­ways  success­ful.[10] Many accounting records from the early colonial era until the end  of slavery show entries for the hire of a capitão-do-mato. Sometimes the size and strength of a large quilombo or the trouble caused by a small one was such that private en­terprise was insufficient to deal with it. In such cases the local gov­ernment would become involved.[11] The municipal police authorities would enlist soldiers, capitães-do-mato and Indians — sometimes entire villages — and try to destroy the settlement. One finds stories like the following throughout Brazilian history:

          About the same time [1806] the governor of Bahía ordered destroyed two troublesome  quilombos...on the outskirts of the city near Cabula and Nossa Senhora dos Mares, and   the [capitães-do-mato]  with eighty soldiers surrounded their huts and took prisoner  seventy-eight blacks, some of whom were free negroes.[12]

and:

          When thefts of cornmeal, sugar, or other foodstuffs became too frequent, planters called in   the local authorities. One summer morning a police chief and five municipal policemen  joined a planter, thirty of his slaves, and several neighbors — all well-armed. Moving   through abandoned land gone to brush they came upon a grass-roofed rancho where there     were a mulatto and two negro women. A fourth quilombola fled when warning shots were             fired. In the rancho they found "iron pots, candles, a bag of cornmeal, vegetables, a   suckling pig quartered and salted, and several articles of clothing."[13]

Even these methods were not enough: by the 19th century the government set up quasi-military organizations that included forest patrols, a large infantry and a standing  militia to deal with the recurrent problem of quilombos.[14] In areas heav­ily infested with quilombos — the Bahía and the Reconcavo — the repetition of military expeditions against the slave settlements  suggests the impossibility of the task.[15] The quilombos were not without resources of their own: in 1767 a group of quilombolas marched into Sergipe de El-Rey with drums beating  and banners flying, demanding letters of manumission; the local forces were insufficient to stop them. And we have yet to discuss the most powerful and successful of all the quilombos, Palmares.

          Still, the reader should not assume that quilombos were at all times and at all places a successful challenge to colonial power; on the contrary, defeat,  cap­ture and death were the more likely outcomes for quilombolas when they met with a well-organized assault by the white authorities. The quilombo was never a real danger to the Portuguese system in Brazil, but rather more of a constant nui­sance that drained resources and destroyed property.[16] And, though the planters in Bahía or the Reconcavo might have disagreed, settlements of runaway slaves did not — could not — threaten the backbone of the economy, slavery. One thing quilombo­las did achieve was an increase in the number of their fellow blacks be­ing enslaved and brought to Brazil to make up for the loss of human capital due to the presence of quilombos.[17] This hardly represents any sort of  victory. We must not blame the quilombolas for this sad fact, but should keep in mind that as slaves they had re­sponded to the harsh realities of slavery, an institution that was an af­front to God and man. Who would not try to escape it?

          We know perfectly well what the slaves were fleeing from; but what were they fleeing to? What type of societies did these runaway slaves create around the perimeters of Brazilian civilization? It is impossible to know everything we would like to know about life in a quilombo, whose illiterate inhabitants could leave no written records; and it is curious to consider that most of those settlements will al­ways be unknown to us, for the only ones we know about are those that came into contact with the white man. We must rely upon archeology, oral history, and that most biased of sources, the Portuguese who went to quilombos only to destroy them. We know that their formation in the midst of a hostile slave-based culture was a risky and difficult proposition at best. Most settlements were modest, transi­tory affairs consisting of  between twenty and fifty runaways. More than anything else these ex-slaves sought anonymity from the white oppressor: theirs was not an organized insurrection nor any sort of collective action but only a wish to be left alone. To this end they tried to be as self-sufficient as possible, only venturing into white areas when absolutely necessary. After anonymity their aim was a conserva­tive one: to lead as nearly as possible a normal life. To best accomplish this they banded together for mutual protection. They were a varied and motley throng not only of slaves but of free blacks and criminals.[18] One can quite easily understand why criminals would join what was essentially an outlaw band; but why would free blacks reside in a quilombo? Could it have been  that these freedmen saw greater opportunity  among their own kind — outlaws or not —  than  among those who had enslaved them in the first place?   

          The frontier upon which some quilombos established themselves was wild and lawless, but it was not empty: Indians lived there. Before the blacks were brought to Brazil to do the work of whites the native population was enlisted into this un­enviable chore. The Indians either died or fled, but at any rate proved un­equal to the task set before them. Their lack of enthusiasm forced the Portuguese to Africa for a labor supply. The first black runaways ran into scattered settlements of Indi­ans; and  as the larger quilombos were established Indian blood mixed with black blood to create a new, hybrid race never before seen. Not all these "mixings" were voluntary: in Brazil there was always a huge disparity between male and fe­male slaves, a fact that was only exacerbated on the quilombos. The  runaway slaves naturally turned to the supply of indigenous females to meet their biological de­sires. Freyre even calls the black presence in Indian lands a "civilizing" one, since the slaves would bring what they knew of Christianity and the Portuguese lan­guage to the frontier.[19]  Of course, we should not expect that at all times the run­aways would bring vestiges of Portuguese civilization with them into the bush. New arrivals on Brazilian soil more likely would have retained the African ways they  knew so well, and would have continued to practice them after fleeing to a quilombo.

         *********

          Two quilombos stand out  from all the rest: Trombetas and Palmares. Both had in common near self-sufficiency and an inhospitable location that was difficult for the whites to get to. Both raised agricultural products and traded their surplus for manufactured goods only available from the whites; both required repeated and sustained military pressure over several years to destroy them. Trombetas was the smaller of the two. It was established in 1821 near present-day Manaus on the banks of the Trombetas River. The area was home to dozens of quilombos, two of which, Inferno and Cipotema, upon their destruction by the authorities contributed their surviving runaways to the new settlement of Trombetas. A cafuzo[20] slave named Atanasio had formed the quilombo when he and forty other mixed-breeds fled into the forest. Trombetas inspired other slaves in the region of Para, and they began arriving in the settlement in groups of up to a hundred. Atanasio ex­ploited the growing power of his quilombo by attacking any near-by plantations  and sowing terror among their owners. By 1823 Trombetas boasted a population of over 2000 and had trading contacts as far away as Dutch Guyana and beyond.[21] The quilombolas  did not bother to hide themselves when they went to Obidos to trade in cacao, manioc and tobacco, so assured were they of their own power.

          Their confidence proved misplaced. By 1823 the Brazilians managed to destroy Trombetas and end what was undeniably an intolerable situation and an obvious embarrassment. The Portuguese took Atanasio prisoner, but the plucky ca­fuzo soon escaped and founded another quilombo near the ruins  of Trombetas that sur­vived until 1835. The survivors of that  settlement fled upriver and founded yet another quilombo, "the marvelous city" of  Cidade Maravilha. Aparrently this set­tlment was so peaceful that its inhabitants could travel freely on the river to sell their wares and by 1852 could send their children to white areas to be  baptized. If any slave met his former master he would ask his blessing, and was allowed to go about his business unmolested.[22]

          The history of Trombetas points out how difficult — impossible — it was to eliminate the threat of quilombos. No sooner had one been de­stroyed than its survivors would form another. We must keep in mind that what we mean  when we say a quilombo was destroyed is that a  military force made its way to the set­tlement and demolished only its physical structure. The fundamental idea behind the quilombo — living in freedom away from the whites — could never be elimi­nated. It was this idea that carried the dream of Palmares to every Brazilian slave long past this settlement's own physical destruction. And so it is to the great quilombo of Palmares that we turn next. 

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                              Rest, black man.

                              The white doesn't come here.

                              If he comes,

                              the devil will take him.

                              Rest, black man.

                              The white man doesn't come here.

                              If he comes, he'll leave

                              with a taste of our cudgels.[23]

          In the interior of the present-day state of Algoas was the quilombo of Pal­mares. She existed from 1630-1697, but her influence survived her destruction. Her name meant "palm forests," and  it was a fitting one: at Palmares, as in Angola — origin of many quilombolas — the palm was king.[24] It was from the palm that the dwellers at Palmares obtained houses, oil, baskets, pots, pipes, food, for­tifica­tions and clothing. At the apogee of her power she could boast of hundreds of dwellings scattered over 240 miles, thirty thousand quilombolas in all. Her army was equipped with stolen European weapons, and it won every battle but the last one. She has been called "a negro Troy and  her history an Illiad."[25] Even without such exaggeration there is no denying that the Portuguese  authorities feared her and treated her with respect. It was a complement to her that subsequent policy concerning quilombos was geared toward preventing another Palmares.

          Palmares was born out of a war among white men. Protestant Holland had no use for the Treaty of Tordesillas, and so she established a base in Pernambuco (1630). Portugal  promised freedom to all blacks who would help her expel the in­vader. But the slaves had already learned the worth of the of the white man's word, and in the ensuing political chaos many of them simply fled into the bush.[26] These runaways founded a "republic" in the lush and nearly inaccessible forests of Pal­mares, and began harassing white settlements. This earned her the wrath of the Dutch, who launched several expeditions from their capital at Recife against the quilombo. In spite of her military successes in Europe the Dutch achieved little more than to burn a few abandoned villages and to get lost in the im­penetrable thicket that surrounded the settlement. The Republic of Palmares suffered not at all: by 1643 she had a population of six thousand; by 1670, twenty-four thousand more, living in dozens of fortified villages.[27] After the Dutch were driven out of Brazil the Portuguese went after Palmares, sending expedition after expedition against the quilombo. At times the Portuguese succumbed to hubris:

          Great as is the host of our enemies, it is a host of slaves. Nature has created them more to obey than to resist. If we destroy them, we will have lands for our plantations, blacks for  our service, and honor for our names. The blacks fight like fugitives. We will pursue them like lords![28]

and at times to despair:

          Our army, which could tame the pride of Holland, has produced no result against those barbarians on its many and frequent incursions into Palmares.[29]

          Clearly this quilombo was like no other. She was well-organized and geared toward self-sufficiency. To this end she developed an efficient military structure centered around the palisaded training center of Subupira with its eight hundred huts. Palmares was on a permanent war-time footing: when the quilombolas tended to their crops they carried their weapons; at night all inhabitants were counted. To cater to what were assuredly the polyglot religious creeds of her in­habitants, there were priests of both African and Christian religions. Any fugitive who reached Palmares was automatically a free man. Curiously, a slave captured in battle remained a slave at the quilombo, but was allowed to buy his free­dom. As in most barbarous communities ignorant of the legal niceties and elegant corrup­tion so evident in the civilized world, the law concerned itself with the fun­damen­tal crimes of murder, theft and adultery, all of which were most severely punished.

          As we should expect, the economy of Palmares was based upon agricul­ture and  enough raiding forays to supply the quilombo with guns, manufactured goods and women. Corn, manioc, sweet potatoes and sugar were raised, and chickens wandered around the huts. As a result the quilombolas of Palmares ate better than the slaves on the coast. The usual practitioners of those trades so essential to any frontier society — masons, carpenters, tinsmiths, weavers — could be found at Palmares, many of whom had learned their craft as a slave. In the bizarre racial and cultural mixture that was Palmares[30] Portuguese served as the lingua franca: this not only brought some order to the babble of tongues evident among the quilombolas  but served to make easier and more frequent trade between Palmares and her white enemies.[31] But though the Portuguese traded with the quilombo, never did they consider her a permanent fixture of the landscape. Her eventual defeat and overthrow were never far from their minds; and how could this not be so, since the very existence of such a powerful force of hostile blacks on Portu­guese territory  was a constant irritant and an insult to white authority  and con­trol?

          By 1678 the continual  military pressure put on Palmares began to  take its toll. Her king, Ganga-Zuma, decided to throw in the towel  and negotiate with the Portuguese. The whites, always eager to exploit any political division in the quilombo, accepted the offer of a treaty. Its terms were draconian: Palmares was to be dismantled; all persons born there were to be freed; all fugitives were to re­turned to their owners. Ganga-Zuma, weary of war, agreed  to it. But there was strong opposition to Ganga-Zuma's plan for capitulation, and it centered around his nephew, the indomitable Zumbí. This epic figure of Palmares has been called "a negro Spartacus."[32] He rejected any sort of surrender to the Portuguese, saying "I don't believe in the word of my enemies. My enemies don't believe it them­selves."[33] Zumbí took command of the quilombo and allowed all who would throw in their lot with Ganga-Zuma and the whites to do so. Only five thousand quilom­bolas followed the deposed leader into exile, leaving twenty-five thousand to fight on with Zumbí.

          With Zumbí in power at Palmares and all possibility gone for a peaceful end to the troublesome quilombo, the Portuguese in Pernambuco made attempt after attempt during the next two  decades  to subdue the Republic, but to no avail. It was not until 1694 that Recife sent for that great killer of Indians, the Paulista Captain Domingos Jorge Velho, who was a mulatto famed for his military  skill. Velho arrived at the frontier of Palmares with cannon and nine thousand troops. He suffered serious military reverses, but he proved as persistent as his opponent, Zumbí. Finally, in 1695 Velho's forces breached the palisaded fortress of Palmares' capital, Macacos. The fighting was fierce, bloody, and hand-to-hand. Zumbí es­caped the immolation of Macacos and planned to carry on the fight, but he was cut down by a traitor who had been hired by the Portuguese. Zumbí's head was mounted on a pike and carried to the slave zones where it was put on display "to encourage the others." The palisades and fortified huts of Palmares were no more, but the legend of Palmares and Zumbí continued. Slaves throughout Brazil knew of Palmares and her king; and it was the rare rebel  chieftain after 1695  who would not adopt the name of Zumbí.[34]

  *********

            Slavery was ended in 1888 and all quilombolas legally became brasileños. Most quilombos by that time had either ceased to exist or had been surrounded and incorporated into the ever-expanding areas of white civilization. Some of the more isolated ones stayed defiantly where they were — usually in the wild hinterlands of Brazil. More than  a few of these settlements would later serve as bases for white expansion and colonization into the frontier regions, where the black man on his quilombo had long thrived. The modern city of Orobó, 150 miles from Bahía, was once a quilombo,  as were many of its surrounding towns. The suburbs of Bahía itself had their origin in settlements of runaway slaves. In the mountainous state of Minas Gerais there are scores of villages that are peopled by descendants of quilombolas. Clearly, Brazil's topography  is littered with hundreds of place names derived from a quilombo.

          Why were there so many quilombos, and why did their founding continue for generations? Was it because slavery — that great supplier of quilombo man­power — existed for such a long time? This leads to another question: why did  slavery in Brazil survive for such an extraordinary length of time and for far longer than it did in the other Latin republics? Was there a connection somewhere that would explain both the long history of slavery and the large number and long exis­tence of quilombos?

          Yes, there was: the presence of a frontier. Without it quilombos could never have been formed. To Moses the frontier was the Sinai: cross it, and he and his people would be free. To Spartacus and his followers, the frontier was the bound­ary of the Roman Republic beyond which they would be free. To the blacks of the Confederacy, it was the North.[35] The frontier provided both the idea and reality of freedom: as long as it existed there was a chance of escape, a chance to set up free and independent communities.

          Consider the case of slavery in the Western Hemisphere. Wherever it ex­isted, there were runaway slaves, who in the tropics outside of Brazil were called "maroons." The history of these maroons and the communities they established neatly parallels that of the Brazilian quilombos: maroons and quilombolas were both products of slavery and an  accessible frontier; there are examples  of maroon settlements and quilombos large enough and strong enough that they threatened white control, developed commercial contacts far afield  and raided white areas; both types of slave communities would often negotiate with the whites and would sometimes interfere in the many internecine struggles to which the European colonizers were so prone.[36]

          What became of these maroons? Simple: they  ran out of frontier into which they could disappear. The Caribbean, Central America and Northern South Amer­ica (the "Spanish Main") were all  centers of maroon activity;  yet by the early 19th century most of the region had been settled. The islands in the Caribbean were naturally the first to lose their frontier, not having had much to begin with, and so were the first to witness the disappearance of maroon activity. Central America is many things, but most assuredly it is a rather thin isthmus, which meant that it lost its frontier, and its maroons, relatively quickly.[37] The Spanish Main was the last to lose its maroons, but before the independence era they were all gone or dead.[38]

          Brazil could not present a more different picture. Until quite recently what passed for civilization there was never far removed from the coast, which made it  at least feasible for a runaway to escape past the thin strip of white control. I should mention that the  Brazilian frontier is still unsettled today. Only in  the 1960's did the government begin to build a road through that vast region, a project that is yet to be finished.[39] Because of this huge unsettled region quilombos of one form or another survived into this century and were only gradually absorbed by encroaching white expansionism. Much of this area is still a "wild no-man's-land inhabited only by Indians and beasts." As such, it is still susceptible to a type of quilombo activity: the government in Brasilia has decided to populate the interior of the country. To this end it is promoting the frontier as a place where the poor of the Northeast can go and start a new life in  communities free from the "slavery" of poverty. Does this sound familiar?

*********

                   A final note: the following did not come from an account of slavery in 17th century Brazil, but from a recent newspaper article concerning the exploitation of cheap labor in the Mato Grosso do Sul  region of Brazil:

          Workers who try to escape are pursued by gunmen and returned to the estate, where they can be beaten, whipped or subject to mutilation or sexual abuse...In the Amazon, a few  cases have been uncovered of foremen chaining workers at night or killing those who try and run away.[40]

Slavery, in Brazil, in 1993. But where can these slaves escape to? Where is their quilombo?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1.       The South American Handbook. Bath: 1992.

2.          Mattoso, Katia M. de Queirós. To Be a Slave in Brazil.          Rutgers: 1989.

3.          Conrad, Robert E. World of Sorrow. Baton Rouge: 1986.

4.          Schwartz, Stuart B. Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian           Society. New York: 1985.

5.       Stein, Stanley J. Vassouras: A Brazilian Coffee Country 1850-1900.           Princeton: 1985.

6.          Galeano, Eduardo. Memory of Fire. New York: 1985.

7.          Skidmore, Thomas E. Black Into White. Oxford: 1974.

8.       Klein, Herbert S. African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean.           New York: 1986.

9.          Freyre, Gilberto. The Masters and the Slaves. New York: 1956.

10.          Pierson, Donald. Negroes in Brazil. Chicago: 1942.

11.          Rogozinski, Jan. A Brief History of the Caribbean. New York: 1992.

12.     The Oregonian.

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