Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies

by Alastair Bonnett

  Athos will probably always be plagued by occasional female incursions. Yet far from making the monks doubt their territorial gender claim, invasion and ridicule only seem to strengthen their view that they are the defenders of a sacred heritage. The Avaton is just one of many ways in which Athos is proudly out of step with the modern world. It permits foreign visitors on sufferance. The monks issue just ten visitor permits a day to the non-Orthodox, but up to one hundred for “Greeks and Orthodox.” When they land at Athos, visitors have to go back in time, literally. The Greek Orthodox Church adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1924 but not on Athos. Here the monks still use the ancient Julian calendar (a practice also maintained by small Old Calendarist sects in Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, and the United States). As a result, Athos is thirteen days behind the rest of the world.

  The stubborn archaisms of Athos and the beauty of its landscape make many feel protective toward it, including Prince Charles, who is a regular visitor. Yet there is something deeply unattractive about the sophistry that sustains the Avaton. Today its defenders resort to the language of respect for cultural difference. Walter Schwimmer argues, “Somebody who demands the end of the ban of women on Mount Athos simply lacks respect for the way of life the monks of Mount Athos have chosen.” Schwimmer throws us an apparently rhetorical question: “Can such lack of respect for the others, violating their human dignity, be the basis of a ‘human right’?” It’s a slippery argument and makes it hard to warm to Athos. Such a defense could be used to deny any and all human rights merely on the basis that they impinge on someone else’s choices. The “respect my choice to discriminate” defense also reminds us that, when considered alongside the world’s manifold examples of religiously sanctioned female-free places, the Holy Mountain looks like an extreme case of a general trend rather than a charming exception.

  Ranch of Sprouts: Brotas Quilombo

  23° 00′ 59″ S, 46° 51′ 31″ W

  Ranch of Sprouts is one of the old names for Brotas Quilombo, an Afro-Brazilian township. Quilombo is the generic name given to the free territories that were established by runaway slaves in Brazil. The settlements came in all shapes and sizes, but the most famous was Palmares. Established in 1600 on the northeast coast of Brazil, Palmares was a republic of ex-slaves and is said to have been about the size of Portugal. It held out for eighty-nine years, far longer than most quilombos. Today there may be two thousand suburbs and villages that have quilombo roots. The Palmares Foundation, which is attached to the Brazilian Ministry of Culture, recognizes 1,408, spread out across all but three of Brazil’s twenty-seven states.

  The quilombos were forgotten for most of the past century. Unmarked and unrecognized, they hung on as scruffy enclaves, absorbed and surrounded by modern municipalities that expropriated their land or did their best to ignore them. But the Brazilian constitution of 1988 changed all that when it recognized the legitimacy of quilombo land. It was a momentous shift, for the constitution declared: “The definitive property rights of remnants of quilombos that have been occupying the same lands are hereby recognized, and the state shall grant them title to such lands.” In 1995 a year of national celebration was announced to commemorate the death of Zumbi, the last leader of Palmares, who was officially titled a “hero of the Brazilian nation.” In this atmosphere of acceptance, many communities have outed themselves as quilombos in “festivals of self-definition,” usually held on November 20, Brazil’s annual “day of black consciousness.”

  The quilombos have become the centerpieces of a new confidence and pride among Afro-Brazilians. Their acknowledgment has also opened up interesting questions about the centrality of “free places” in the struggle against slavery and for black identity. Escape is not just about running away; it’s about having somewhere to go, about setting down roots in a different kind of place. If free places cannot be sustained, then escape becomes impossible and resistance slowly dies. The story of the quilombos drives home these simple truths, but it also throws up more complicated issues. After all, if quilombos are communities of escape, what is the point of them after the abolition of slavery and in a world in which Afro-Brazilians are just another ethnic group in a multiracial society? By referring to the quilombos as “remnants,” the constitution was making a point: it was recognizing their history but also dispatching them to the past. When does a place stop being a quilombo? When does it stop being defined by its past? The answer has emerged over the past couple of decades, as the quilombo movement has evolved, and for the time being at least, it appears to be “never.”

  Brotas Quilombo is being tested by all these questions. It is home to about thirty families and lies on the edge of Itatiba, a small town seventy-six kilometers from the booming mega-city of São Paulo. The houses are built with concrete blocks and asbestos tiles and are spread over an overgrown suburb of dirt streets and tropical woodland. This modest place was once just part of a much larger escape zone that drew in runaways from far and wide. However, like many other quilombos, a small plot of land was eventually bought up by two ex–farm slaves, Emília Gomes de Lima and Isaac de Lima, the original novice or seedling ranchers, hence the name “ranching sprouts.” Oral history testimony cites Isaac de Lima as hoping that “everyone that has my blood will have a place to live.” Many of the villagers root their ancestry in this first tenured couple, and they are the great-grandparents of its oldest inhabitant and local matriarch, Ana Teresa Barbosa da Costa, whom most people in Brotas Quilombo call Aunty.

  The ownership of Brotas Quilombo has been in jeopardy many times over the past hundred years. Unaffordable property taxes, lack of official recognition, and plans to turn the whole site into a hospital waste dump nearly destroyed it several times. Until recently it was off the beaten track and at the wrong end of town. Few people visited apart from those going to worship at the quilombo’s popular Umbanda religious or cult house. Interviews with the people who live in Brotas Quilombo have consistently showed a powerful desire not to let the past slip through their fingers. “Today, eight generations later, most of the residents of the quilombo are of mixed race,” a local resident, Paulo Sergio Marciano, told a BBC reporter. “But our priority is the recovery of our traditions, of the connection between Brazil and Africa.” Today this nostalgic passion is finally reaping rewards, and Brotas Quilombo has been recognized by the state of São Paulo as an urban quilombo, an achievement that has brought with it a cluster of official and academic reports on its past and future.

  Coming out of the shadows has also brought concrete challenges, some of which concern property law. Like most quilombos, the ownership deeds for Brotas Quilombo were far from complete. Entitlement to the land has had to be proven through many different sources, including oral histories and, literally, dug-up artifacts. Chains and iron balls have been uncovered and passed on to the authorities as well as a stone figure of a woman from an African tribe. These items matter, for they are used as evidence of authenticity and ownership. This was especially important in the early 2000s when residents were faced with a construction company that had started to build condominiums on their land. In 2003 a government official claimed that the state was “not in a position to say whether or not there has been an invasion of this property, because there are no obvious borders.” Since then much has changed. The borders have been confirmed and new investment has brought street lighting and a heritage center to Brotas Quilombo. Indeed, there has been something of a revolution of attitudes. From a marginalized backwater it has become a fashionable place to visit, especially for a more socially conscious generation. It now hosts interracial festivals and history events that attract people from all over the district.

  The “quilombolization” of Brazil is seeing once hidden communities step into the light. Even settlements that make no claim to being founded by escaped slaves are seeking and now gaining recognition as quilombos on the basis that they have a largely black population. Interviewed by a fellow anthropologist, Alfredo Wagner Berno de Almeida, who works wi
th quilombos across the country, warns against casting them as a frozen heritage. “The quilombo is not the sphinx, it is not a pyramid,” he says. “They are not monuments, they aren’t part of the artistic patrimony. They are part of the productive life of the country.” Others, like Onyx Lorenzoni, a federal deputy, complain that the march of the quilombos “is dividing Brazil into nations of color.” Is Brotas Quilombo turning from an outpost of Afro-Brazilian culture to a subsidized black time machine? It doesn’t seem so. Locals of all different shades and backgrounds are coming to Brotas Quilombo and getting involved. Its rediscovery is adding something unique and important to the wider town.

  Quilombos are not remnants of something gone but places that look to the past to define their present. It’s something that all living places do. It can sometimes mean that they appear to be more interested in preserving traditions than inventing new ones. But that is a risk worth taking—indeed, it is a risk that has to be taken if places are to be communities, something more than just spaces of temporary individual habitation. Without the binding presence of the past, places are emptied of a meaningful future.

  FARC-controlled Colombia

  In an increasingly surveilled and homogenized world, some may consider insurgent places an anachronism. If so, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, hasn’t heard the news. In the early 2000s they controlled around 40 percent of the country. Over the past decade their zone of influence has diminished to a little less than 30 percent, but that still amounts to a great deal of jungle.

  FARC-controlled Colombia is unique territory, not only in terms of its scale and longevity as an insurgent place but also because FARC’s capacity and desire to hold on to this place seems to run counter to global trends. It’s not that heavily armed militants have gone out of fashion but rather that we have grown used to a different breed. Islamist groups move around like ghosts, quietly slipping between rented rooms and anarchic nations. Their only hope of territorial control arises from the connivance of states that find them useful, or failed states that can’t get in their way. Somalia, Afghanistan, Sudan, South Yemen, Mali, and Pakistan have all fallen into one or both of these categories. Al Qaeda, Arabic for “the base,” found such a base in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Away from such protected safe spots, militants have had to morph into unplaceable networks. The results have changed all our lives, so it’s not surprising that our ideas about the geography of armed insurrection have been shaped by religious fighters’ spectral maneuvers.

  As a result, a very different kind of rebellion, with a different relationship to place, has been overlooked or cast as yesterday’s news. Yet armed rebels with revolutionary socialist ideologies have not gone away. They include Maoists in Nepal, who in the 2000s controlled about 80 percent of the country, and Naxalite Maoists in India, who currently have operational control over large swaths of remote forest. Another example is the socialist nationalists of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK, along with their political offshoots. They are based in the Qandil Mountains of northern Iraq, but their sphere of control extends deep into northern Syria and Iran.

  These leftist revolutionaries have often shown scant regard for human life. However, they are bottom-up movements, peasant-based and with many female cadres, which, geographically, makes a great difference. It means they are rooted in place and can and want to hang on to the territory they consider their home turf. The contrast with Islamist terrorism, which is a top-down, entirely male-dominated, geographically restless phenomenon, is stark.

  The FARC has a real stake in the place from which it comes. It was founded in April 1966 by communist farming communities that had been fighting a war of “mass self-defense” against government forces for nearly two decades. The FARC developed in rural areas that had a long tradition of fierce autonomy and distrust of the central government in the capital, Bogotá. By the 1980s FARC control had spread well beyond its core areas. Militarily the guerrillas were pushing forward on more than eighteen fronts, proudly adding the term “Army of the People” to their name. They were “operating as a de facto government,” says FARC expert Gary Leech, “for rural communities across vast stretches of countryside where the state had never established a presence.”

  Over the past twenty years the FARC has come to embrace a more flexible, more nationalistic, “Bolivarian socialism.” It has left many of the strictures of Marxism-Leninism for its sometime comrades, sometime enemies, in a smaller outfit called the National Liberation Army (whose zone of influence is in the mountainous northwest of the country). But to understand how and why the FARC continues to place such store in occupying the jungles and remote villages of Colombia, we must look to some classic revolutionary works. Guerrilla Warfare, published in 1961 and written by Ernesto “Che” Guevara, is probably the most important. Establishing and keeping inaccessible territory is the key to Guevara’s lesson plan. A “guerrilla band will here be able to dig in,” he says. “Aircraft cannot see anything and cease to operate; tanks and cannons cannot do much owing to the difficulties of advancing in these zones.” Building up defensive space also allows a revolutionary infrastructure to be put in place, “where small industries may be installed, as well as hospitals, centers for education and training, storage facilities and organs of propaganda.”

  But these technical details only scratch the surface of Guevara’s ambitions. His real motivations were political. Rooting an armed group in the countryside allows the revolution to go to and come from “the people.” Building up what another guerrilla leader with an obsession for holding territory, Mao Zedong, called “the base of the people” is the means and the goal. The idea is that “guerrilla warfare basically derives from the masses and is supported by them,” Mao said. “It can neither exist nor flourish if it separates itself from their sympathies and co-operation.” Given the ruthless nature of the FARC, which gains much of its income from kidnapping and taxing drug traffickers, it may sound like an unlikely conceit. But it provides the guerrillas with what they consider to be a tried and tested basis for their own commitment to redraw the map of the nation into zones of insurgency and imperialist power.

  So much for the theory. The FARC has not shown itself adept at maintaining the “sympathies and co-operation” of the Colombian people. One 2001 Gallup poll showed that less than 3 percent of Colombians had a favorable opinion of the FARC. Many blame its fighters for a war that has killed around 250,000 people and caused millions to flee their homes. It is a war that looks both endless and pointless. Although the FARC’s determination to control territory has been successful, the group never seems to have known what to do next. Che and Mao would have pushed on, because they saw the mountains and jungles as a springboard. But the FARC guerrillas aren’t just based in the countryside; they are entombed in it.

  What keeps them there is partly sentiment but also the brutal fact that these are the only areas where their message continues to have any kind of appeal. Writing for a Colombian political journal, Alfredo Rangel, a onetime defense ministry official turned Bogotá-based private security worker, explains that while “their national banners are invisible or not credible, their local, armed patronage and their ability to take advantage of rural youth unemployment allows them to establish pockets of support in many regions.”

  The result is an endless series of halfhearted advances and speedy retreats—over recent years more of the latter than the former. The longer this has gone on, the more FARC’s investment in carving out territory has shaped the mindset of all the other combatants on the field. The Colombian army also defines its mission as seizing, holding, and defending territory. So too do the anticommunist paramilitaries of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, which in the mid-1990s declared that its intention was to “reconquer” land “colonized” by the guerrillas, “because it is there that the subversion has succeeded in creating parallel government.”

  The stalemate looked as if it might be coming to an end
in 1998, when the government handed over a huge swath of territory to appease the FARC. It was hoped that this gift, an area about the size of Switzerland, would provide the kind of gesture of goodwill that would kick-start meaningful peace talks. Although the détente lasted only a few years—the FARC seemingly unable to get beyond warfare as their raison d’être—there have been growing calls in recent years for the idea to be given another chance. Spain and France have proposed that an international demilitarized zone, without the armed presence of either the guerrillas or the state, might be a better way forward. It is a territorial solution to what is a territorial dispute.