The domestic slaves were better dressed than those on the plantations. They were frequently seen in full dress, at times with top hats and an umbrella that they held open to protect their masters from the sun. In the cities, the average number of slaves per master was considerably lower. They spent much of their time away from the master’s vigilance, hired out as newspaper sellers or to work in the streets. A daily or weekly rate was charged for their time, at the end of which they delivered the money they had earned to their masters. They worked in a wide range of occupations, as painters, bricklayers, carpenters, dockworkers, tailors, blacksmiths, dressmakers, coach drivers, cart drivers, barbers and shoemakers. The women worked as domestics, cooks, cleaners and nurses, as well as washing, ironing and starching clothes. They sold manioc pap, dried shrimps, sweets, cakes and delicacies from Africa. They walked around the streets offering their wares, often carrying their children on their backs, tied in a cloth that displayed their nation of origin called a ‘Pano da Costa’. Some of them worked as messengers as they were always walking around the town and could thus transmit information and even news of rebellions. Enslaved females were also forced to work as prostitutes in the areas surrounding the port, selling their bodies and handing their earnings to the master.
In a slave-based society all work that required physical effort was considered degrading and was ‘relegated’ to the slaves. Colour became a demarcation line in Brazilian society, which associated black Africans with physical labour. ‘Mulattoes’, for example, many of whom were the illegitimate children of their masters, were generally chosen for household tasks. Although they made up only 7 per cent of the total slave population on the engenhos, they represented 20 per cent of domestic slaves.29
Brazilian slavery was unusual in that it offered an opening for an enslaved person to achieve her or his freedom, called ‘alforria’. Freedom was usually conferred for good behaviour, but could occasionally be purchased by slaves. They were allowed to make savings and a few of the mulattoes who had specialized skills could actually hope to be freed sometime in the future. Despite not being included in any Brazilian law, either civil or religious, the opportunity for release had always existed. Freedom could be granted in wills, as a recompense for loyalty, or out of personal affection. Women, children and those with special abilities accounted for the highest number of releases. In Bahia, 45 per cent of all the slaves granted freedom were mulattoes.
However, the number of releases was small – in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it never surpassed 1 per cent per year of the total slave population. Meanwhile, the likelihood of being re-enslaved was extremely high. All release documents could be revoked; their maintenance depended on the former slave’s behaviour being considered ‘appropriate’. ‘Disloyalty’ was considered sufficient reason for revocation of a slave’s release. Former slaves who travelled were frequently arrested and had their documents invalidated.
In the absence of any authentic system of justice, violence and abuse became established customs. Throughout the colony there was contempt for laws that sought to control violence, facilitating the practice of illegal re-enslavement. The requirement for slaves to carry passes and written permission from their masters in order to travel was applied to any person whose physical features suggested that she or he may have once been a slave. It was very common for black people to be stopped and ordered to show their travel documents, proof of identity or passports. By this process, many men carrying documents that attested their freedom had these confiscated and were then taken prisoner and sold back into slavery.30
The scorching flames of the furnaces, combined with the sweltering heat of Brazil’s northeast, the lack of food, the constant ill-treatment and the gruelling work regime, meant that labour on the engenhos was indeed a hell on earth. It was Padre Antonil, again, who defined the colony as ‘a hell for blacks and a purgatory for whites’. The word ‘hell’ became a metaphor for work in the colony. However, despite the cruelty and sadism, it is clear that the violence of the system stemmed from economic considerations: to force the slaves to accept their condition and to produce as much as possible.
It was very hard to escape from slavery. The system was established throughout the colony, making Brazil the largest importer of forced labour that had ever been known. Slavery permeated every level of society: owning slaves was by no means a privilege reserved for the few. Priests, soldiers, civil servants, artisans, tavern owners, merchants, small farmers, poor people and even freed captives owned slaves. Thus slavery was more than just an economic system: it influenced behaviour, defined social inequalities, made race and colour the indicators of a fundamental difference, underpinned rules relating to command and obedience, and created a society that was conditioned by its paternalism and strict hierarchical structure.
And there is a further indicator that refutes the worn-out argument that slavery in Brazil was less violent than elsewhere. Of all colonial slaves, the Brazilians were among those who reacted most vigorously, killed their masters and overseers with more frequency, took refuge in quilombos more often, and orchestrated recurring revolts. There are a number of explanations for the extent of slave rebellion in Brazil: the fragility of institutions such as the police and the law, the lack of cohesion among the landowning classes – who were divided into small-, medium- and large-scale property owners scattered throughout the colony – and above all, the all too evident truth that violence generates violence.
After all, the enslaved were by no means inert – a fact that is often overlooked. Within the galling limitations of their condition, they fought to gain a little free time, to maintain their families, to recreate their customs and religious practices in a foreign land, and above all to protect and care for their children.31 While appearing to be good Catholics and true converts to the faith, who attended Mass and worshipped the saints, they maintained a secret, parallel system that related each of these Catholic saints to an African orisha.
Through worship, Brazilians entered into a sort of religious dialogue. Many Africans who arrived in Brazil and were forcefully converted to Catholicism embraced both the religion and its saints; but they also altered the saints’ names, features and significance. Thus they created a new pantheon that allowed them to discreetly worship their own kings and deities as they outwardly took part in religious festivals that venerated the Portuguese Crown and the Christian saints. The martial art called capoeira originated in a similar way. The name refers to the places where the sport was first practised, the plots of land cleared and burnt by the slaves where the grass had begun to grow back. Originally a fighting sport, it was presented as a recreational dance.32 Faced with severe restrictions, the slaves constantly created false appearances – fights were disguised as dances, and orishas as saints. Slavery created a world of disguise and negotiation.
In fact, from the very beginning of the colony there was a sense of tit for tat. In reaction to their harsh lives the Africans sometimes escaped, and, whenever they could, they rebelled. As long as the slavery system lasted there were always quilombos. No form of slavery is better or worse than any other. All kinds of slavery have one thing in common: they generate sadism, the naturalization of violence and the perversion of society. What has remained, in all places that allowed the existence of slaves, is the ignominy of having assimilated such a system and perpetuated it for so long. The fight for freedom was always the greatest desire and only objective of the slaves. Although the masters generally manipulated the situation by ill-treatment and punishments of every conceivable kind, they did at times offer positive incentives, promising days off work and even freedom. The slaves too were obliged to negotiate. They made requests to be allowed to spend Fridays and Saturdays looking after their own affairs, demanded to choose their own overseers and be placed in charge of the plantation equipment. They wanted to care for their children and worship their gods alongside the saints they had discovered in the New World. There is a rare document in which the scrivener register
s a petition by the slaves to be able to ‘play, rest and sing’ without asking permission. There was little hope and a lot of violence, but the workers who came from Africa did more than just survive. To escape from their condition as ‘pawns’ they sought any loophole in the system through which they could recreate their culture and aspirations as they dreamt of freedom and rebellion.
TIT FOR TAT: REBELLIONS, UPRISINGS AND ORGANIZED ACTION
The enslaved never relinquished their will to have agency and control over some aspects of their own lives. In the first place, they created ties of affection, religious associations and social networks. Travellers noted that at times they established affectionate relations with the wives and children of their masters, and close ties were maintained between malungos (fellow travellers during the crossing). They also showed their resistance to the gruelling work regime by bargaining with the overseers, refusing to execute certain tasks, or by simply not doing what their masters demanded.
But they also reacted with violence to the brutality of their daily routine. Escapes – both individual and en masse – were frequent, as were organized uprisings and the murder of masters and overseers. The slaves that fled took refuge in the quilombos and mocambos (the smaller settlements for escaped slaves) that began to appear in Portuguese America during the sixteenth century. The word mocambo means ‘hiding place’; quilombo was a Kimbundu term used in Angola for a certain type of fortified military camp made up of warriors who underwent initiation rites, adopted strict discipline and practised magic.33 The use of the word to designate groups of escaped enslaved people began after the establishment of Palmares – as we shall see, the most successful and persistent grouping of quilombos ever established in the country – but only became generalized in the eighteenth century. In an attempt to prevent their proliferation, the Portuguese authorities passed a law that no more than six slaves could gather in the same place at any time, except for when they were working.
From the middle of the sixteenth century, when the first news of the appearance of quilombos began to arrive in Salvador and rapidly reached Lisbon, to the mid-nineteenth century with the start of abolitionist writings, escaped enslaved people persistently sought to establish a place for themselves in a society that offered no alternatives.34 Between the harsh reality of the slave-based society and the attempt to reinvent a viable reality, many enslaved people did not think twice: suicide was an extreme solution, and to venture off alone along roadways and through villages was too risky. The answer was to escape into the interior in groups and try to establish communities in the forests or the uninhabited, inhospitable sertão (the arid hinterland), outside the slave-based society. Quilombos were generally established in places that were difficult to reach, to protect them from the police who were based in the cities, far from the traffic along the highways and the intense vigilance of the plantations. Although ironically, there were quilombos that maintained trading relations with nearby settlements.
The proliferation of mocambos and quilombos throughout the colony was the result of complex characteristics and identities. They were not just transitory settlements for runaways with no viable future, the emblematic spurning of rules of a slave-based society, nor did they exist in complete isolation: many of them established commercial relations with nearby communities. They were a radically new element in the political landscape, combining resistance with negotiation, and rebellion with pragmatism.35 For those who lived there, they were dangerous and, at times, spelled tragedy.
The quilombos provided a concrete alternative to slavery, and for this reason they became a very real concern, causing fear among the colonists and the authorities, who prepared to systematically confront them. However, because of the variety of connections they established, the quilombos also became a part of the society that sought to repress them. They established a wide variety of commercial links with neighbouring communities, built networks of varying degrees of complexity for obtaining information, and, as was inevitable, formed bonds of friendship (and love ties) with plantation workers and communities on the edge of the towns.
The population of the quilombos survived on food they found in the forest, on vegetables they planted (mostly corn, manioc, beans and sweet potatoes), by breeding chickens and by trading with nearby communities.36 All the quilombos established some kind of friendly coexistence with their neighbours. Many, however, also created hostility because certain groups raided settlements on the outskirts of towns, sacking farms and carrying off the animals as well as assaulting travellers on the highways.
In the mid-eighteenth century, Buraco do Tatu,37 a quilombo located in Itapuã,38 dangerously close to the city of Salvador, maintained its economy by theft. It had loyal accomplices among the slaves and freemen of the city who brought supplies of livestock and munitions.39 In one aspect all quilombos were the same: their chances of survival depended on the network of social connections they managed to establish with neighbouring communities. With their proliferation, scattered around the most productive captaincies of the colony, they soon formed an underground world – the campo negro, ‘the black region’40 – which allowed them to extend their area of influence and increase their degree of autonomy.
A remarkable variety of characters and social types gravitated around the quilombos with different degrees of complicity and commercial interests. By no means were all of these associates enslaved people and freemen. They included smugglers; slaves from the plantations who provided information and carried messages between the quilombos; peddlers who brought gunpowder, cachaça, clothing and salt, as well as the booty from sackings by roving quilombo residents.
Not even the quilombo residents who chose to live by theft and sackings were able to dispense with the complicity of this network of relations and interests. For their part, the authorities did what they could to neutralize these support systems. Sending the police from Salvador was not enough to destroy a quilombo like the Buraco do Tatu; troops of Indians had to be mobilized and sent to attack them.
In the Lower Amazon region, in the extreme north of Portuguese America, the encampments of escaped slaves along the Curuá and Trombeta tributaries41 were established ‘in the midst of the turbulent waters’ above the first rapids and waterfalls on the left bank of the vast river. This was dense forest near the frontier with present-day Suriname.42 In order to survive there, physical fitness, courage and acute perception were not enough; it was crucial to know the forest. The quilombolas (inhabitants of the quilombos) adapted to forest life by establishing relations, at times friendly and at others hostile, with the local Indians, and with local animals. They adapted their diet, substituting flour for babassu coconut paste43 and eating turtle meat when fish was in short supply. They also sculpted images of their deities using pulp they extracted from palm-tree trunks; and they discovered the economic value of nuts and the medicinal use of certain plants, such as caraíba oil and salsaparrilha.44 In due course they became ‘bichos do mato’ (forest creatures) – sons of the forest.
PALMARES: THE QUILOMBO REBELLION
Every quilombo has its own story, but Palmares – the largest and possibly the longest-lasting community of escaped slaves in Portuguese America – became a national symbol of the long tradition of bravery and resistance of Brazil’s quilombo warriors. It is generally thought that the original nucleus of Palmares was made up of around forty slaves, all of whom were from the same engenho in Pernambuco. They escaped, climbing the Serra da Barriga in the Zona da Mata,45 in what today is the state of Alagoas, probably around the year 1597.46 The location, surrounded by mountains and completely unpopulated, provided a natural fortress from which the fugitives could ward off attack. Palm trees were abundant in the area, providing sustenance and comfort, including the palmito (hearts of palm), which they ate, and fronds for thatching houses, making clothes and laying traps. The palms were powerful symbols; it was only natural that the fugitives should settle in their midst, and baptize the place Palmares.
Palmar
es did not refer to one single quilombo, but to a confederation of communities of various sizes scattered around the region. They were interconnected by pacts, but they conducted their own business affairs, were autonomous, and chose their own leaders. They included the Acotirene quilombo, whose name was a tribute to the matriarch and counsellor of the quilombola leaders; the Dambrabanga quilombo, named after an outstanding military leader; the Zumbi quilombo, named after the community’s religious and military leader; the Aqualtune and Andalaquituche quilombos, named respectively after Zumbi’s mother and brother; the Subupira quilombo, which served as the military base for the quilombolas; and the Cerca Real do Macaco,47 the largest and most important quilombo in the region. It was from here that the Palmares leader Ganga Zumba, the ‘Great Chief’, presided over the council of leaders and made decisions on vital questions of war and peace.
Although later, with its expansion, the quilombola confederation became a multi-ethnic society, many of the first inhabitants were from Angola and the Congo and the refuge was initially known as Angola Janga – ‘Little Angola’. This attempt at the recreation of an African nation in Brazil demonstrates not only that the inhabitants saw themselves as foreigners, but also that they created a politically organized community with public administration, its own laws, form of government and military structure, as well as religious and cultural principles, all of which helped forge and strengthen a collective identity. The colonial authorities also recognized the existence of Palmares: in documents sent to Lisbon they referred to it as a ‘republic’, a term which at the time was used to refer to any area, whether in Portugal or overseas, that had its own administration, was regulated by a political system, and possessed a relative degree of autonomy.48
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