Zombie! Zombie! Zombie world!
Zombie apocalypse! Get to know the walking dead that still haunts Brazil! “Sing about the wind, sing about the sea, but don’t forget to sing about the Quilombo dos Palmares!
”. You know what “quilombo” means, right? Quilombo means “hiding place in the woods”.
It’s an African word. Ever since Brazil started to deal with what would turn out being history’s greatest flow of slaves, the country got filled up with quilombos, the hideouts in the woods where slaves that managed to run away from their “owners” would run to and hid in. No quilombo got to be as important, as significant, as long-lasting, as powerful as the Quilombo dos Palmares.
The Quilombo dos Palmares was situated in Serra da Barriga, 90km away from Maceió. It’s also close to Muriqui, an awful place, since it’s Renan Calheiro’s electing place. Scary!
Quilombo dos Palmares wasn’t a single quilombo, it was actually a net of quilombos, 12 quilombos that managed to occupy 200 km2. These quilombos were connected by trails in the woods. The most important, the most significant of those quilombos was the one called Quilombo do Macaco.
It started around 1600, 1602, and then it started flourishing and growing. It got to 8 thousand habitants. This whole group of quilombos got to have up to 20 thousand refugee slaves, and also black and white people running away from the law.
It was a very cosmopolitan community. It’s not known what language they spoke at the quilombo, it’s very likely to be African languages, even though indigenous languages and even Portuguese was probably spoken there too. What matters is that many punitive expeditions were sent to combat the quilombo, since 1658, even by Dutchmen on the period of the Dutch occupation of Brazil.
All of them were defeated until 1678, when the master of this quilombo, Ganga Zumba, that, by the way, means “great master”. . .
Some say he was the son of a Congo princess, I don’t know, ‘cause man, there’s a lot of mystification. There’s very little effective documental information about the events concerning the Quilombo dos Palmares, except, of course, its destruction, to which we will get to. The fact is that in 1678, Ganga Zumba was called to a meeting in Recife, with the governor of Pernambuco.
He made a magnificent entrance, fit for a master, through the streets of Recife, and he would have made a deal with the governor of Pernambuco that determined the following things: those who were born in Quilombo dos Palmares would be free, but those who ran away there should go back to their previous masters. The meeting happened, but there’s no documents recording what deal was set. The fact is that is said that when he got back to the quilombo, Ganga Zumba got poisoned by one of his own subjects, in a conspiracy led by whom?
Led by whom? By Zumbi, man! By Zumbi, that would be the nephew… He was said to be the son of Ganga Zumba’s sister, therefore he was also directly connected to that supposed royal lineage of the Congolese princess, that would be the origin of this royal family that commanded the quilombo.
The fact is that Ganga Zumba died. And since 1680 the leader, the absolute master of the quilombo is Zumbi, that existed in fact. There is a lot of mystification around him, but he was real.
He had a concrete and palpable existence, and he was the one that resisted the attack that would turn out to be the final attack, the fall of the quilombos, when the Paulista bandeirante Domingos Jorge Velho was hired for a fortune to, together with a great troop with more than 6 thousand soldiers, attack the Serra da Barrica. Da Barriga. I got the name wrong, but that would be a good name too.
But it isn’t Barrica, it’s Barriga, dumbass, Barriga! And the Serra was attacked precisely on the 6th of February, 1694, the Quilombo fell. But Zumbi managed to escape.
He escaped and he hid in the woods, and it was very important, utterly important, for the slave masters and for the stablished power that Zumbi was captured and killed, and he ended up being betrayed by some André Furtado, Antônio Furtado, the name is not known for certain, and Zumbi was captured around the region of Serra da Barriga, and killed in the 20th of November, 1695, the day that many centuries later would become the Black Awareness Day in Brazil, right? And he was killed and decapitated and his head was taken to be exposed in the center of Recife, and the text states the following: “to satisfy the offended and the justly wailful, and above all, to frighten the blacks that thought he was immortal”. So, in a testimony of the time (this is a text of 1695), it is said that Zumbi’s followers thought he was immortal.
This alone already gives him that aura that would only grow with time, specially since the 20th century, when in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s of the 20th century, historians, specially leftwing historians started to create a powerful myth of Zumbi as a warrior, as an undefeatable warrior. Edson Carneiro, a great historian from Bahia, wrote a beautiful book about the Quilombo dos Palmares. Décio Freitas, my friend and fellow countryman, wrote a book lowkey guessing… I loved Décio, but really, man, there’s little documents to prove things!
It is metaphoric, symbolic book, way more than historiographic. But it makes sense, it makes sense because we need to remember that Brazil received the greatest number of slaves in the history of humanity. It was the last country (worth of the name) to abolish slavery.
Then some people say “no, it was Mauritania”, I’m talking about countries, ok, countries! The last country worth of the name to abolish slavery, legally speaking, was Brazil, in 1888. So it’s normal and it’s natural that Zumbi turns into a symbol of freedom, of revolution, right?
But it is necessary to separate myths from history, and there are a lot of myths surrounding Zumbi, even though it is a fact that he existed. One of the incongruities on this story is that the first mention to Zumbi in a document was made by a master of slaves. Sebastião da Rocha Pita, from Bahia, that wrote a book called “The History of Portuguese America”.
He doesn’t even say Brazil. The name “Portuguese America” is pretty revealing by itself. He hails the end “just as glorious as useful” of the Quilombo dos Palmares.
It is the first effective documentary mention to the existence of this quilombo that symbolized and symbolizes the fight for freedom. Not only the fight of the blacks for freedom. Mainly the fight of the black people, but also the fight of the indigenous, of the underprivileged, the fight of all of those who don’t support a world where there’s slavery.
Nowadays, the place where the quilombo was set is still there. I suggest that you visit it. Go to county of União dos Palmares and go up.
It is an extraordinary, magical place. Of course, it doesn’t have the lightest vibe of the world. It has a strong vibe, an intense vibe, but it is an incredible place.
I was there. The quilombo went through archaeological excavations sponsored by National Geographic around 1990, and they discovered many actual documental things about this quilombo, but what matters most and this is how I finish this episode, is not so much the real existence of the Quilombo dos Palmares, but the symbolic existence of the Quilombo dos Palmares, for all of those that believe in the freedom of the human being and in the destruction of those that believe that they can master other people. What a political episode!
Yeah. That’s it. Bye.
What you just watched is full of simplifications and generalizations, but the general picture was just like that. Now, if you wanna know how things actually were, you will have to read.
