Individual and Collective Self-Emancipation

Africans had resisted enslavement since the rise of the Atlantic slave trade. Once in the Americas, enslaved men, women, and children always defied slavery. Individually or collectively, through minor actions or through more organized plots, they found ways to oppose their enslavers by escaping, organizing runaway slave communities, taking their own lives, and even in some instances killing their owners, as Monica did in Brazil’s deep south in the early nineteenth century, described at the beginning of this chapter.

None of the actions led by individuals and groups examined in this chapter were effective in ending the institution of slavery altogether. But in some cases, bondspeople were successful in their attempts to emancipate themselves temporarily or permanently. As we will see in chapters 14 and 15, men, women, and children who continued to live in bondage found other ways to resist slavery. By preserving their languages, music, dance, martial arts, and religious traditions, they survived slavery and expanded the possibilities of resistance. Most important, they made African cultures a central and influential component of the cultures of the Americas. Doing so was also a form of resistance.