Runaway Slave Communities

In Brazil, as well as in the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean, bondspeople who emancipated themselves by running away formed settlements of various sizes in rural and urban areas.

With few exceptions, there is no way to know whether enslaved men, women, and children featured in the thousands of existing fugitive slave ads were recaptured by their owners. But many bondspeople who escaped slavery in urban and rural areas of Brazil and the West Indies may have had the opportunity to join runaway settlements. The traditional definition of a quilombo or maroon community denoted settlements in mountainous regions that were difficult to access. However, in Brazil, for example, as slavery expanded, runaway slave communities became widespread in urban areas and near urban centers, hidden in plain sight. There are countless stories of these settlements, especially the largest and long-lasting ones. African-born fugitives made up most of the early runaway slave communities. Since the 1940s, archaeologists and historians have uncovered documents and artifacts associated with these settlements, therefore illuminating their histories, which also survived in popular memory.⁶³

One of the first documented settlements of fugitive enslaved men, women, and children in the Americas emerged in the region of present-day Mexico.

A similar settlement emerged in New Granada, in the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru, part of present-day Colombia. Known as palenque San Basilio, this settlement was formed at the end of the sixteenth century. Domingos Bioho (also known as Benkos Bioho, DionĂ­sio BiohĂł, Rey Benkos, Rey de la Matuna, and BiohĂł Rey) was one of the leaders of this palenque. The few sources that survive describe Bioho as an African-born man who escaped bondage with his family in approximately 1599. By the early seventeenth century, he may have been one of the founders of the palenque San Basilio. His name, Bioho, connects him to the Upper Guinea, in today’s Guinea-Bissau, where he was probably captured and sold into slavery in the region of New Granada.⁶⁷ The Maroons fought the Spanish for several years. Then following a treaty, they succeeded in preserving the palenque’s autonomy between 1605 and 1619. But eventually, the Spanish defeated the Maroons. They captured, hanged, and quartered Bioho in 1621. In popular memory, however, Bioho became San Basilio’s legendary founder and was transformed into a symbol of Black resistance. Today, tourists who visit San Basilio de Palenque, thirty-five miles from Cartagena, can see a statue honoring the seventeenth-century Maroon.

Powerful Maroon communities based in remote areas surrounding sugar plantations also emerged in Jamaica during the seventeenth century, especially after a series of slave revolts between 1673 and 1694 that followed the English occupation of the island.⁶⁹ Many Jamaican Maroons were Akan speakers born in West Africa who brought to the Americas their previous warfare experience. The British military repeatedly fought the Maroons without any success. Starting in 1720 these armed conflicts intensified in what became known as the First Maroon War, which ended with the signature of two treaties in 1739, one with the Leeward Maroons based in the Cockpit Country and one with the Windward Maroons established on the eastern part of the island. By containing the Maroons through these agreements, the British obtained their support to recover enslaved fugitives and suppress slave rebellions; in exchange, the Maroons obtained land. Yet, as the Maroon population dramatically increased in the decades that followed the treaties, their territory became too small. British planters were also concerned about the rise of the slave revolt in the neighboring French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1791. The combination of these factors was exacerbated by the judicial whipping of two Maroons of Trelawny Town in 1795. When the Maroons protested the punishment that violated their sovereignty, the British forces imposed martial law. As the Maroons resisted, the Second Maroon War broke out.⁷⁰ Only in 1796 did the British succeed in defeating the Maroons, who were deported to Nova Scotia and then to Sierra Leone, as will be discussed in chapter 17.⁷¹

Despite the experiences in present-day Mexico and Colombia, as well as in Jamaica, Brazil was the colony and later the independent nation that hosted the greatest number of runaway slave communities in urban and rural areas.

The largest and longest-lasting Brazilian Maroon settlement was Palmares, the seventeenth-century quilombo in Brazil’s northeast region in the present-day state of Alagoas, then the captaincy of Pernambuco. The term quilombo and its organization have been connected to West Central African structures. Some historians explained that the Palmares quilombo was inspired by the West Central African kilombo, a male initiation-based warrior society and military organization created by the Imbangala.⁷⁴ Yet this thesis was rejected by historian John K. Thornton, who insisted that West Central Africans from Angola predominated in Palmares. According to him, the Imbangala would not have offered an attractive social model for Africans who had recently arrived in Brazil in the seventeenth century.⁷⁵ More recently, by embracing the idea that Brazilian quilombos drew from the Imbangala kilombo, Toby Green has defined kilombo simply as a West Central African group of warriors that gathered “people from different lineages speaking different languages.”⁷⁶ In the most comprehensive study about Palmares, historian Silvia Hunold Lara puts forth a compromise among these contrasting views.

The mocambos that gave birth to Palmares were scattered refuges located in a mountainous forest area located between forty-five and seventy-five miles from the coast and covering a region of one hundred miles parallel to the coastline.⁸⁰ In the 1640s, Palmares was already composed of nine villages. Organized as an independent state and ruled by a monarchy, its population was estimated between twenty thousand and thirty thousand individuals in 1670.⁸¹ Surrounded by palisades, the villages included hundreds of dwellings connected to each other. Residents cultivated gardens and widely used palm trees to build houses and beds. In addition to tapping these trees to produce palm wine, dwellers also consumed the hearts of palms and palm kernels, from which they extracted oil and produced butter.⁸² Historians and archaeologists still debate the exact composition of Palmares’s population, but most of its residents were enslaved West Central Africans and Brazilian-born fugitives who had escaped sugarcane plantations.

The Portuguese attempted to destroy Palmares for the first time in 1612. Years later, during the Dutch occupation of Pernambuco from 1630 to 1654, the quilombo had increased in size, and despite a few expeditions, the Dutch failed to destroy it. After the Dutch’s expulsion, the Portuguese organized several expeditions against Palmares but were also unsuccessful in suppressing the quilombo. In 1677, the Portuguese led an incursion during which they destroyed many mocambos and took hundreds of prisoners. In 1678, Gana Zumba, the quilombo’s king, eventually signed an agreement with the government of Pernambuco in which the king promised to deliver fugitives and the Portuguese promised to liberate Maroons born in Palmares and grant them a territory in the region of CucaĂş, where nearly three hundred people were to be relocated.⁸⁵ But Zumbi, one of the leaders of Palmares and purportedly the king’s nephew, refused to deliver fugitives born outside Palmares to the Portuguese. Thus, along with his followers, he moved his mocambo to the woods, where they continued to resist the Portuguese attacks.⁸⁶

In the following months, Gana Zumba was poisoned and killed by his opponents. As Zumbi and his warriors continued to fight, men and women who had relocated to CucaĂş broke the agreement and started plotting to escape to join Zumbi. In response, the Portuguese destroyed CucaĂş and reenslaved its tenants in 1680. In the following years, the war against Palmares continued and intensified, badly affecting sugar production in the region. After the destruction of CucaĂş, Palmares recentered around the Serra do Barriga mountain range. Portuguese officers reported the settlement’s increasing number of members, dwellings, farming animals, and rich plantations, in addition to a greater military organization.⁸⁷ After many incursions, and following a long siege, the Portuguese-led forces dismantled Serra do Barriga’s settlement in 1694. But the war was not over. Several fighters managed to escape, including Zumbi, who was killed on November 20, 1695. After being beheaded, his head was brought to Recife to be publicly displayed.⁸⁸ Despite this defeat, official reports from the period reveal that remnants of Palmares remained, and new fugitive communities continued in surrounding regions.⁸⁹

Scholars and writers have spread the idea that before being captured by the Portuguese, Zumbi killed himself, contributing to the construction of Zumbi’s myth, which survived in Afro-Brazilian collective and public memory in the centuries following his death.⁹⁰ Long considered by official history to be a bloodthirsty warrior, Zumbi began to emerge around the 1970s as a symbol of resistance for the Brazilian Black movement, and this new image began also to appear in the Brazilian press.⁹¹ The myth of Zumbi is still alive in Brazil and the Atlantic world, where he appears in a large array of cultural productions such as poetry, music, theater, motion pictures, Carnaval parades, and the visual arts. He is also honored in several monuments around the country.⁹²

Although Zumbi was killed by Portuguese forces and did not die by suicide, as was widespread in popular culture, especially in the famous movie Quilombo (1984), by filmmaker Cacá Diegues, many enslaved men and women did take their own lives to escape the horrors of slavery. One historian has argued that bondspeople who killed themselves in the southern colonies of British North America and antebellum United States had numerous motivations to end their lives, and therefore when doing so, they were not necessarily resisting the evil institution.⁹³ A similar argument can be made regarding enslaved women who carried out infanticide, as many reasons may have motivated them to take the lives of their own children.

Despite which motivations were foremost in the minds of bondspeople who carried out infanticide or suicide, their extreme actions allowed them to exert their limited agency. In the second half of the nineteenth century, in the final two decades of slavery in Brazil, a significant number of enslaved women died by hanging themselves in the country’s deep south. On November 2, 1872, the enslaved woman Selestina hanged herself from a peach tree in the estate of her owner Rosalina Pacheco de Sampaio. On September 7, 1874, the enslaved woman Fortunata, along with her two-year-old son Antônio, owned by Leonardo Paulino de AraĂşjo, were found hanging from a tree on his property. Josefa, an enslaved woman owned by Captain FelĂ­cio Nunes Garcia, also hanged herself, on December 26, 1875.⁹⁴ We will never know exactly why all these women took their own lives because surviving documents reporting their deaths were not intended to underscore their owners’ daily physical and mental abuses but precisely to conceal these brutalities.

Nonetheless, there are exceptions. In the final two decades of slavery in Brazil, the courts were increasingly concerned about how slave owners treated bondspeople. Consider the case of Bemvinda, an enslaved woman owned by Francisco Máximo da Silveira, also in Rio Grande do Sul, who hanged herself from a quince tree. Although surviving records do not reveal Bemvinda’s age when she took her own life, we can assume she was a young woman. During the quick investigation, her owner was asked how he could explain the bondswoman’s suicide. He responded that her mistress (senhora) reprimanded her because she was asked to move away from her mother, and he believed that this was “the motive that led her to hang herself because she had very serious judgement.”⁹⁵

It is hard to draw definitive conclusions from only this sentence, but it is implausible that a single reproach would lead someone to suicide. Bemvinda was separated from her mother and wanted to live with her. For how long had mother and daughter been living apart and why? The documents do not answer these questions. But entire books could be filled with the cases of women slave owners who abused enslaved women.⁹⁶ We can only assume that her mistress’s admonition was just one in a long series of abuses, and as in other similar cases such as Maria’s story examined in chapter 12, the judicial authorities were not interested in uncovering more details. As noted by Michael Gomez, suicide could be considered the “ultimate form of resistance” because in practical terms, when bondspeople killed themselves, they were directly hurting the interests of slave owners who in losing a life lost their human property.⁹⁷