The nation has not complied, as of the time of this writing. Indeed, the jousting among maroons, governments, and large corporations seems likely to last for years. The stakes are nothing less than the future of the tropical forest itself, and the maroons are not fighting only in Suriname.
SHAKE IT, OX!
In 1991 Maria do Rosario Costa Cabral and her siblings bought twenty-five acres on the banks of Igarapé Espinel (Espinel Creek), a sub-sub-tributary of the Amazon in Amapá, Brazil’s northeasternmost province. A wiry, watchful woman of sixty-two, Dona Rosario was born into a maroon community called Ipanema—a place so poor, she told me, that families cut their matches in half lengthwise to make a box last twice as long. Her father spent his days as a rubber tapper, toting the latex to one of the small natural-rubber distributors that still hang on in the area. If he and his friends showed up with a lot of rubber, wealthier people would realize they had found an especially productive group of trees. They would figure out the location, force out the rubber tappers, and take over. The same thing happened with their farms. They would acquire abandoned land—a plantation that had failed twenty or thirty years before—and pull out a few harvests. Just as the family was settling in, men with guns would show up. You are squatters, they would say. If they had a contract, they would say the title was invalid. Leave now, they would say, touching their weapons. Little changed when Dona Rosario reached adulthood. Repeatedly she set up farms and repeatedly she was pushed off them. Still, she jumped at the opportunity to buy the land on Igarapé Espinel.
To non-Amazonians, the property wouldn’t have seemed worth troubling about. It is located about two hundred miles from the river’s mouth, where the Amazon is so large that it acts like a tidal body—tides flood the area twice a day. The force is so large that deep within the forest nameless streams well over their banks and march inland, sometimes for miles. People build their homes on stilts and paddle their canoes between the trees. Even when the surface is exposed, it is thick with gooey mud. I visited Dona Rosario’s farm recently with Susanna Hecht, the UCLA geographer. The mud soon covered us to our knees and practically ripped the boots from our feet.
Dona Rosario told us that she got the property cheap, because it had been ravaged by the heart of palm craze of the late 1980s, when every fashionable menu from London to Los Angeles had to feature heart of palm salad. Heart of palm is the growing tip and inner core of young palm trees, particularly South American species like açai (Euterpe oleracea), jucura (Euterpe edulis), and pupunha (peach palm, Bactris gasipae). Determined to wring every penny out of the forest that they could, palm hunters scoured the lower Amazon with the implacability of paid assassins. Barges discharged crews with axes and winches who chopped down entire palm groves to obtain the edible tips (the hearts can be removed without killing the tree, but this takes more time). If they spotted anything else that looked valuable, they took that, too. “The land was looted,” Dona Rosario told us. “It was a mass of vines and scrub.”
She set out to bring it back with techniques she had learned from her father in the region of her birth. With help from her sisters and brothers, she planted fast-growing timber trees for sawmills upriver. For the market, they put in fruit trees: limes, coconut, cupuaçu (a relative of cacao prized for its fragrant pulp, rather than its seeds), and açaí (formerly used for heart of palm, the tree has purple fruit that produce a yogurt-like pulp). With woven shrimp traps—identical to those in West Africa, Hecht told me—the family caught shrimp and kept them alive in cages that drifted in the creek. At the river’s edge they encouraged shrubs that made habitat for fish and fry and planted trees with seeds and fruit that would attract them into the flooded forest. To an outside visitor, the result looked like a wild tropical landscape. The difference was that almost every species in it had been selected and tended by Dona Rosario and her family.
Dona Rosario lives on the fringes of a sprawling quilombo complex centered on Mazagão Velho (Old Mazagão), founded in 1770 by transplanting almost entire the last Portuguese colony in North Africa. The year before, the inhabitants had fled before a Muslim army, arriving as a body in Lisbon. Treating defeat as opportunity, the Portuguese court ordered the community to resettle en masse in Amapá, where its presence was supposed to thwart potential incursions by French Guiana, Amapá’s northern neighbor. A Genoese engineer designed the new town as a graceful Enlightenment-era city, complete with public squares and gridded streets. Slaves actually built more than two hundred houses in what was then called Vila Nova Mazagão (Mazagão New Town); the Portuguese may have moved as many as 1,900 people into them. The transition was eased by grants of cash, livestock, and several hundred slaves. Soon the newcomers made the unhappy discovery that the lower Amazon, unlike the dry, breezy Moroccan coast, is hot and humid—it is located almost exactly on the equator. Within a decade of arrival the colonists—malarial, famished, living in wretched huts they were too poor to repair—were begging the crown to relocate them. Ultimately, almost all of the surviving Europeans slipped away. The remainder soon died. Through no act of their own, the slaves found themselves at liberty. Vila Nova Mazagão had become a quilombo.
Hundreds of quilombos were established in the lower Amazon, a maze of rivers that tidally spill over their banks twice a day, washing a mile or more into the interior. Because the rivers are the main transport routes, villages spread out along the banks (top, Anauerapucu, in the state of Macapá); houses are built on stilts (bottom, in Mazagão Velho) to let the tidewater pass beneath the floorboards. (Photo credit 9.5)
They were free as long as they pretended they weren’t. The Portuguese administration wanted to be able to report to the king that his subjects were guarding Brazil’s northern flank. The slaves were willing to say they were doing it, if that meant they would be left alone. Everyone was happy: the maroons pretended they were Portuguese subjects in a Portuguese colony and the Portuguese pretended the maroons were guarding the frontier. As the decades went by, the descendants of the colony’s Africans spread out along the riverbanks, living much like their Indian neighbors. The river supplied fish and shrimp, the small-scale garden cultivation yielded manioc, the trees provided everything else. Two centuries of constant tending and harvesting structured the forest. Mixing together native and African techniques, maroons created landscapes lush enough to be mistaken for pristine wilderness.
So did others. Portuguese euphoria from the destruction of Palmares had been short-lived. Slaves continued to escape and to live in the forest. But they didn’t repeat the mistake of forming big, centralized communities like Palmares. Instead they created ten thousand or more small villages in a flexible, shifting network that spread across much of eastern Brazil and the lower Amazon. They mixed with extant native settlements, collected Indian slave escapees, threw open their doors to Portuguese misfits and criminals. Many Africans had lived in tropical environments before being shipped across the ocean. They were comfortable in hot, wet places where people farmed palms and kept trapfuls of shrimp in the stream. They were happy to learn when Indians showed them how to fish by scattering poison in a tributary or make protective “boots” by melting latex over their feet or squeeze the bitter compounds out of manioc with long, tubular baskets. Ideologically opposed to “going native,” the Portuguese were much less willing to adjust. In consequence, the forest seemed dangerous to them, a place to be ventured into only with an army. Ceding the field to quilombos, the colonists were only partially aware that the escaped slaves were living within a short walk of the plantations, as in Calabar or Liberdade. In consequence, the quilombos were left largely alone—unless they were unlucky enough to be in the path of gold miners, rubber tappers, or other people who sought quick wealth in the forest.
To inexpert eyes, the riverbank across from Maria do Rosario’s home looks like a typical tropical hodgepodge. But almost every plant in this image was sown and tended by Rosario and her family, creating an environment as ecologically rich as it is artificial.
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Brazil has a host of hybrid spiritual regimes—Candomblé, Umbanda, Macumba, Santería—often focused on special areas where Afro-Brazilians drum, dance, and practice the ritualized martial art of capoeira. In their isolation, Brazil’s quilombos built their own pageants and festivals atop these spiritual traditions, binding together communities in steel hoops of shared memory. Consider the satirical bumba-meu-boi (loosely, “shake it, ox”), celebrated in quilombos across northeastern Brazil. In the version celebrated by the quilombo of Soledade (Solitude) in the eastern state of Maranhão, villagers pay festive homage to the fable of Pai Francisco, a henpecked African slave whose pregnant wife hankers for a taste of ox tongue. Alas, the only nearby ox is the pride and joy of Francisco’s brutal master. Worse still, Francisco has been entrusted with its care. Nonetheless, he leads the beast into the forest and puts his knife into it. Quickly apprehended, Francisco is threatened with death unless the ox can be resurrected. Dancers representing authorities from the local mayor to the national president haplessly struggle to bring the beast back to life, giving spectators a chance to hoot at their failures. Ultimately, native priests revive the animal with blasts of tobacco, perfumed waters, and the shaking of special rattles: the indigenous arsenal of cure. Crowds cheer as the ox staggers to its feet and exhort it to dance lively—bumba, meu boi! A cheerful mashup of America (tobacco, priests, and forest creatures) and Africa (cows, slaves), bumba-meu-boi is the tale of the quilombo itself: slaves escaping their fate with the help of Brazil’s original inhabitants.
Five hundred miles southwest, the quilombo struggle for freedom is revisited even more overtly at the rite of lambe-sujos (an insulting reference to the red African cloth used for turbans—the equivalent, perhaps, of “towelhead”). Covering their entire bodies with a shimmering, tarry coat of charcoal and oil, quilombo dwellers in the state of Alagoas reenact their ancestors’ lives in an annual pageant. The day begins with men and women playing runaway slaves gathered in a protective circle around a king and queen—African nobility, like Aqualtune and Yanga. Some of the slaves suck on baby pacifiers, symbolizing the cruel circular plugs strapped into the mouths of recalcitrant slaves. Ominously lurking at the edges are caboclinhos (another pejorative term, perhaps translatable as “redskins”)—Indian trackers who were agents of the Portuguese. Their bodies dyed red with plant oil, brilliantly colored feathers exploding from their heads, the trackers meet the Africans in their protected circle. After ritualized struggle, the caboclinhos win; as the lambe-sujos are dragged through the streets, they beseech bystanders for money in a final attempt to buy their freedom.
In these Afro-Indian communities, the context is head-spinning: people with African ancestors in what amounts to blackface, people with native ancestors who allied with Africans playing other natives who fought with them. Somehow stepping across the centuries, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Africans beg contemporary Brazilians for the means to attain liberty.
Constantly hunted by slavers, the escaped slaves and natives who coalesced into Brazil’s quilombos naturally sought spiritual comfort—and found it in an extraordinary variety of religious observances that mixed African, Indian, and Christian elements. These limbs hang in the Room of Miracles in Salvador’s Igreja de Bonfim, votive offerings given as thanks for miraculous cures in a church that is a holy place for both Catholicism and the Afro-Indian religion Candomblé. (Photo credit 9.6)
Legally, Brazil’s quilombos had had nothing to fear after the nation abolished slavery in 1888—nobody was going to return runaway slaves to captivity. But the end of slavery did not mean an end to discrimination, poverty, and anti-maroon violence. The nation’s maroon communities continued to conceal themselves, staying so far out of official sight that by the middle of last century most Brazilians believed that quilombos no longer existed. In the 1960s, the generals who then ruled Brazil looked on their maps and observed to their displeasure that about 60 percent of the country was blank (actually, it was filled with Indians, peasant farmers, and quilombos, but the government dismissed them). To the generals’ way of thinking, filling the emptiness was a matter of national security. In a breathtakingly ambitious program, they linked the brand-new, ultramodernist capital, Brasília (itself one of the generals’ mega-projects), the western frontier, and the ports of the Amazon by slashing a network of highways across the interior.
In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of thousands of migrants from central and southern Brazil thronged up the highways, believing the generals’ promises that they could begin new lives in new agricultural settlements. Instead, they encountered bad roads, poor land, and lawless violence: Deadwood with malaria. Many smallholders abandoned their farms soon after clearing them—few conventional annual crops would grow in Amazonia’s aluminum-saturated soil. In the long run, the big ranches didn’t do much better, even though many received subsidies from the military government. In the short run, they deemed all people found on their property to be squatters and removed them, often at gunpoint. In this way countless quilombos were expunged, their inhabitants scattered—Dona Rosario’s family was probably among them.
The onslaught of ranches was greeted by worldwide protest. Chico Mendes, a kind of Brazilian Martin Luther King, led an international campaign to recognize the rights of the Amazon’s inhabitants to their land. Meanwhile, the dictatorship’s hold on power unraveled as Brazil plunged into economic crisis. The nation enacted a new, democratic constitution in October 1988. Two months later a rancher-paid hit man killed Mendes. But the assassination was too late to stop his cause. Among other things, the new constitution already declared that “quilombo communities” are “the legitimate owners of the lands they occupy, for which the State shall issue the respective title deeds.”
“Nobody understood the implications of this,” said Alberto Lorenço Pereira, undersecretary for sustainable development in the Brazilian ministry of long-term planning, which formulates the nation’s land-use policy. When the new constitution was enacted, he told Hecht and me, its drafters imagined “a few remnant quilombos somewhere in the forest” whose elderly members would be rewarded with their fields. Now many researchers believe that as many as five thousand may survive in Brazil, most of them in the Amazon basin, occupying perhaps 30 million hectares—115,000 square miles, an area the size of Italy. Not only did the quilombos occupy an enormous territory, much of it spread out along riverbanks, which meant that they controlled access into a still-larger expanse in the interior. Conflict was inevitable, Pereira said. “A lot of people want that land.”
I saw what he meant when I visited the quilombo of Mojú, four hours of bone-jarring muddy road from Belém, the city at the mouth of the Amazon. Its twelve linked settlements had been founded by runaways sometime in the late eighteenth century. It had existed in hiding for almost two hundred years, Manuel Almeida, head of the village quilombo association, told me. The end of slavery had brought no relief, Almeida said. The rubber tappers had come first, grabbing Mojú’s rubber trees. Then came the timber companies, stripping the forest of mahogany and dyewood. Cattle ranches had seized land in the 1960s and 1970s—the properties, though little used, were still fenced off. A company punched through roads to a bauxite mine upstream. Two other firms that mine kaolin, a special white clay used in porcelain-making and paper-making, had jammed pipelines through the middle of the village. Now the bauxite firm—a subsidiary of Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, the biggest mining company in the Americas—wanted to put a pipeline for crushed bauxite through Mojú on the way to a big refinery west of Belém. All of this had occurred without permission or consultation, Almeida said. The government had granted the firms concessions that gave them the right to build these things because the quilombo had no legal existence.
Almeida was talking in his home, in a room that was bare except for a hammock and a crucifix on the wall. Now and then his wife and brother walked in and offered glasses of water. He said that he had heard that Brazilian co
mpanies were prospecting in the region for natural gas. He said that he had heard that American companies wanted to put in resorts at the mouth of the Amazon. He said that a man had come by with some papers that he said gave him the right to put in a farm for oil palms. He said that Mojú’s twelve communities had existed for two centuries and that this ought to count for something.
THE VIEW FROM DONA ROSARIO’S FARM
Two years after relocating Mazagão from North Africa to the northern Amazon, the Portuguese feted their own bravery by honoring St. James, the patron saint of Iberian anti-Muslim activities. For the colonists, isolated on the equator, it must have been an apprehensive time; according to Laurent Vidal, a historian at the University of La Rochelle who is the author of a study of Mazagão, the clergy, too, were gloomy, fearful that civilization itself was under assault. Perhaps that is why they jointly chose to honor a golden moment in Mazagão’s history: the day, two centuries before, when the favor of St. James had allowed them to repel an attack by Sultan Abdallah al-Ghalib Billah, the powerful ruler of much of what is now Morocco. Something about the occasion took hold in the celebrants’ imaginations—not just those of the colonists, but also their slaves. As the Portuguese left Vila Nova Mazagão, their slaves stepped in to take their places in the ritual. Decades after the last European had departed, its African and Indian inhabitants were still reenacting a faraway battle between Islam and Christendom. They still do today.
Over time, the celebration has grown ever more elaborate, ever more encrusted with ritual—and ever more disconnected from actual events. The battle that maroon descendants celebrate today is entirely different from the battle commemorated by the founders of Vila Nova Mazagão. Sultan Abdallah has vanished, replaced by a Muslim leader named, mysteriously, Caldeira (Boiler). When Caldeira’s siege does not breach the walls of Mazagão, Caldeira tries a Trojan Horse–like ruse. Admitting the failure of his attack, he proposes rewarding the Christians’ courage with a masked ball, at which he will serve platters of delicacies, a treat for hungry soldiers. In fact, the sultan plans to use the masked ball as a cover to persuade Portuguese soldiers to defect. Those who remain loyal will be given the sweets, which are poisoned. The Portuguese wisely suspect the gifts. They slip some of the food to Caldeira’s horses, which expire promptly. At the ball, they give some to his men, killing them. Then they feed Caldeira, killing him. By morning, the dance floor is littered with corpses.
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created Page 46