See also America: Texts and Sources

SLAVE RESISTANCE IN BRAZIL AND ELSEWHERE

• Franklin John Hope From Slavery to Freedom AA Knopf 1980
  • (75 Resistance in Brazil) Republic of Palmares, negro state in Alagoas in NE Brazil, 1603-97
    
    Fleeing the towns and plantations between Bahia and Pernambuco, the negroes penetrated the heavy forests and settled rustic communities in the Rio Mudahu Valley.

   

• Harris, J. E., The African Diaspora in the Old and New Worlds (notes)
  • State of Palmares in the 17th c, 1605-95, autonomous African community estimated at 20,000 inhabitants originally Bantu from Congo - Angola. Sought to model their society on their homeland. Resisted both Dutch and Portuguese. The objectives were not merely vengeance or escape to the hills but to establish areas where Africans would have political control and could defend themselves against their enemies. African religions such as obeah and vodum were important as organizing tools. So too was Islam, especially in Bahia where it helped to solidify the Hausa and Yoruba.

   

• Mattoso, Katia M. de Queiros, To Be A Slave in Brazil 1550 -1888, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, with a foreword by Stuart B. Schwarz, Copyright (c) 1986 by Rutgers, The State University. Reprinted by permission of Rutgers University Press. First published in French 1979.
  • 135     Sometimes slaves reacted to their plight not by running away or committing suicide but by resorting to violence. With the same shovel, hoe, spade, or knife he used on the job a slave could kill the master or the overseer who was always punishing him or his mother or his friend.
    
    136   . . . . The masters never felt secure. . . Whites trembled before the dark forces that they believed Africans capable of unleashing.
    
    142      In the uprising of 1807, the plan was for the slaves from the engenhos of the Reconcavo to join the slaves of the city at the city gates. 

   

• Reis, Joao Jose , Slave Rebellion in Brazil, The Muslim uprising of 1835 in Bahia, Translated by Arthur Brakel, 281pp. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press
  • Joao Jose Reis's Slave Rebellion in Brazil is also the account of a failure. It documents perhaps the most significant slave rebellion in Brazil, the Male Revolt, which took place in 1835 in the north-eastern city of Salvador, Bahia. On a Sunday during Ramadan in January 1835, inspired by Muslim teachers (Muslims were called males in Bahia at this time), and bearing talismans containing texts from the Koran, some 600 black slaves and freed men rose up against the government. They caused considerable havoc in the city, until they were finally routed and brought to trial. Terrified that Bahia might follow the example of Santo Domingo, the authorities hurried to execute sentence. Four of the rebels were sentenced to death, sixteen to prison, eight to forced labour, forty-five to flogging and thirty-four to deportation. Since no one in Bahia was prepared to serve as hangman, the death sentence was carried out by firing squad. So terrible were the floggings, which ranged from fifty to 1,000 lashes, that they had to be administered in instalments, lest the victims succumbed altogether.
    
    Thanks to the sociological detail of the court records the police investigation covered the working and residential conditions, marital status and ethnic background of the conspirators Reis provides such rich and detailed information on the social context of the rebellion and on the conspirators that the reader becomes an eye-witness to the events themselves. To understand the drama of the rebellion, Reis pieces together the political situation of a revolt-ridden Brazil recently independent of Portugal, the crisis in sugar production and the complex ethnic and racial mix of Bahian society, taking great care to remain faithful to the social categories utilized in the documents and therefore current in Bahian society at the time. Although the dominant social cleavage was that between slaves and their owners, it was criss-crossed by other diverse allegiances and conflicts. Not all slave-owners were white, there were almost as many freedmen as slaves, and the non-white population was divided between those born in Africa (pretos), those born in Brazil (crioulos) and those born of inter-racial unions (mulatos). The pretos, for their part, were divided along ethnic lines, re-creating in Salvador the "nations" (naces) to which they had belonged in Africa. Not surprisingly, therefore, the Male Revolt was not a simple white versus non-white affair. It was a rising of West African-born slaves and freedmen, principally men of Yoruba origin who adhered to Islam. These, in fact, represented the great majority of African-born people in Bahia since the illegal slave trade continued to import slaves from what are now Nigeria and Benin. Angolan-born slaves and freedmen did not participate, nor did the crioulos and mulatos. The Angolans, according to Reis, tended to play the system differently, above all in forming maroon communities (quilombos). The crioulos and mulatos had been successfully incorporated into Bahian society and were frequently engaged in the repression of slave revolts. "If Africans organized according to their 'national' ties", writes Reis, "crioulos and mulattos would not be outdone. However, their 'nation' was Bahia and not Oyo, Dahomey, or the Sokoto caliphate."
    
    Slave Rebellion in Brazil, then, is much more than an account of a revolt, although its racy style betrays Reis's admiration for the valour of the conspirators. It is a masterful description and analysis of Bahian society, depicted not as one tidily segregated along "racial" lines but as one which produced multiple identities based on profession, "ethnic" origins and degrees of proximity to mainstream Brazilian culture. In his discussion of the aftermath of the rebellion, Reis shows how the authorities embarked on an increasingly consistent and cruel campaign to enforce "assimilation" at any price. As Reis observes, Any African wanting to stay should leave their roots behind. As far as the Bahian ruling elite was concerned, this was not just the only road to peace for their slave society, it was also the road toward a more civilized future. Whoever disagreed with such an aim, even if they were considered barbarians, needed to be made an example of under laws established in a civilized manner.
    
    What is interesting about this passage is not that it reveals a desire on the part of the Bahian authorities to maintain their power and position that goes without saying but the cultural logic they followed to do so. The "road to civilization" in Brazil was to be paved not with the establishment of distinct and segregated "racial" and "ethnic" communities, each with its own particular style of life, but with assimilation and integration.
  •  
  • Peter Fry TLS December 08 1995
  • Peter Fry is Professor Titular in the Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

   

• Small, Stephen, and James Walvin, African Resistance to Enslavement, in Anthony Tibbles (ed.), Transatlantic Slavery: Against Human Dignity, HMSO, 1994
  • 43 Slaves frequently spat, urinated in and polluted their masters' food . . . Women in particular frequently handed out verbal abuse to whites. Slaves sometimes tried to hurt their owners without getting caught, poisoning their food, harming their children, their property, their animals. . . . running away was not without its consequences: if caught they were severely beaten, disfigured or mutilated. The fate of the unsuccessful runaways stood as a terrible reminder of what might happen to them. 
    
    44 Any unexplained illness, accident or misunderstood gesture or word was construed as a conspiracy and threat. 
    
    45 The many efforts to read and write, and to use a pen as a means of communication, uplift and encouragement, also characterized slave resistance . . . Such efforts, widespread though illegal and severely punished by whites during slavery, carried on relentlessly.
  •  
  • 48 African women were most likely to resist by talking back to slave masters and overseers. They were also more likely to poison slave owners and contaminate their food. Many invoked mystic curses which they believed to be potent.

   

• The Haitian Revolution Revisited
  •  worker-brc-announce@lists.tao.ca
    [BRC-ANN] The Haitian Revolution Revisited 19-12-00
    "This Week in Haiti" is the English section of HAITI PROGRES newsweekly. For the complete edition with other news in French and Creole, please contact the paper at (tel) 718-434-8100, (fax) 718-434-5551 or e-mail at <editor@haitiprogres.com>. Also visit our website at <http://www.haitiprogres.com>.
    HAITI PROGRES
    "Le journal qui offre une alternative"
    * THIS WEEK IN HAITI *
    THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION REVISITED: SELECTIONS FROM "THE BLACK JACOBINS"
    
    Two hundred and nine years ago on Aug. 17, the French colony of Saint-Domingue erupted in a giant slave rebellion. It would mark the beginning of thirteen years of revolution, culminating in the 1804 declaration of independence of Haiti, the first nation in Latin America.
    
    Sixty-two years ago, a Trinidadian scholar named C.L.R. James published an account of that first and last successful slave revolution, entitled "The Black Jacobins." The work has become the definitive English-language account of the period.
    
    In recognition both of the revolution and James, we have reproduced passages from "The Black Jacobins". We encourage any reader who has not read the book to do so, and anyone who has, to return to it. Rarely has any writer so concisely presented and effectively analyzed one of history's most pivotal class struggles.
    
    James' many footnotes detailing his sources have been omitted, and some paragraphing has been added to ease reading. We have retained James' references to the colony as San Domingo:
    
    This Week in Haiti August 16-22, 2000 (Vol. 18, No. 22) "The Property" <http://www.haiti-progres.com/2000/sm000816/xeng0816.htm>
    
    This Week in Haiti August 23-29, 2000 (Vol. 18, No. 23) "The Owners" <http://www.haiti-progres.com/2000/sm000823/xeng0823.htm>
    
    This Week in Haiti August 30-September 5, 2000 (Vol. 18, No. 24) "The San Domingo Masses Begin" <http://www.haiti-progres.com/2000/sm000830/xeng0830.htm>

   

• The Haitian Revolution
  • worker-brc-news@lists.tao.ca 17-10-00
    The American Historical Review
    DATE: February 2000 (Vol. 105, No. 1)
    TITLE:The Haitian Revolution
    AUTHOR: FRANKLIN W. KNIGHT
    COMPLETE ESSAY: http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/105.1/ah000103.html
    EXCERPT:
    The Haitian Revolution represents the most thorough case study of revolutionary change anywhere in the history of the modern world. In ten years of sustained internal and international warfare, a colony populated predominantly by plantation slaves overthrew both its colonial status and its economic system and established a new political state of entirely free individuals -- with some ex-slaves constituting the new political authority. As only the second state to declare its independence in the Americas, Haiti had no viable administrative models to follow. The British North Americans who declared their independence in 1776 left slavery intact, and theirs was more a political revolution than a social and economic one. The success of Haiti against all odds made social revolutions a sensitive issue among the leaders of political revolt elsewhere in the Americas during the final years of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century. Yet the genesis of the Haitian Revolution cannot be separated from the wider concomitant events of the later eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Indeed, the period between 1750 and 1850 represented an age of spontaneous, interrelated revolutions, and events in Saint Domingue/Haiti constitute an integral -- though often overlooked -- part of the history of that larger sphere. These multi-faceted revolutions combined to alter the way individuals and groups saw themselves and their place in the world. But, even more, the intellectual changes of the period instilled in some political leaders a confidence (not new in the eighteenth century, but far more generalized than before) that creation and creativity were not exclusively divine or accidental attributes, and that both general societies and individual conditions could be rationally engineered.
    Copyright (c) 1999-2000 American Historical Association.

   

• Demonstrations for 500 years of Indigenous, Black and Popular Resistance

  • INDIGENOUS ISSUES
    Two thousand people, including 800 indigenous individuals of the Kaingang, Guarani and Xeta peoples, took part, in the ruins of São Miguel Arcanjo (or São Miguel das Missões), state of Rio Grande do Sul, in a demonstration to pay homage to Sepe Tiaraju and mark, for the South Region, the launching of the "500 Years of Indigenous, Black and Popular Resistance" Campaign. The demonstration, which was very mystical, was sponsored by Cimi (Indianist Missionary Council) in cooperation with the indigenous movement and the "Outros 500" Committee. A small indigenous village located in the outskirts of the city was the site chosen by the sponsors of the demonstration to show that the ruins of São Miguel are symbolic in that they reveal the marginalization of indigenous peoples in Brazil today. For the indigenous people who came from Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Parana, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul, Sepe Tiaraju was a martyr in the fight for resistance. In 1756, the Guarani leader and 2,500 warriors were slaughtered by the Spanish and Portuguese armies in the fight to defend their land. Showing no signs of fatigue, the indigenous peoples emphasized through their chants, dances and speeches that they want to occupy the physical, political and cultural space that was denied them in the last 500 years. A particularly touching moment was when the shamans blessed the participants as they hugged each other in solidarity for a long time. Late in the afternoon, the governor of Rio Grande do Sul, Olivio Dutra, arrived and heard reports about the situation of indigenous peoples and lands in the South and Southeast regions. Of the 127 areas that have been recognized by Funai, only 28 have been registered and had their boundaries assured. The indigenous people, together with members of Christian churches and of the 41 organizations that represent the landless movement, female rural workers, individuals affected by dams, blacks and unemployed asked the governor to declare February 7 as a holiday in the state. They also requested a special participative budget for indigenous communities and firm actions of the state government to put an end to the prejudice against indigenous peoples. Because of all that was experienced on this day, one can say that São Miguel das Missões, far from being a historical museum, has become the sound box of a war that is not over yet. With much vitality and hope, indigenous peoples in the South and Southeast have shown that they want to celebrate other things in 500th anniversary of the "discovery".
    Source: Cimi (Indianist Missionary Council)

   

• Zumbi and November 20th:  the Brazilian National Day of Black Consciousness

  • 
    During the era of slavery in Brazil, the enslaved African peoples developed different ways of resisting slavery, oppression and colonization. One story, which marks the history of black Brazilians, is when  a group of forty men and women ran away from their masters, walked many miles through valleys and mountains, and discovered the beautiful, fertile, vast land, located in the northeast of Brazil in the current state of Alagoas. This group of refugees settled in this beautiful land, which was known as Palmares (land of the palm trees).  These runaway African slaves settled in the land of Palmares, forming a village known as the "Quilombo dos Palmares" (the refuge of the black people in the land of the palm trees).  This community thrived for almost one hundred years from 1600 to 1695.
    
    In the Quilombo dos Palmares, the slaves lived the experience of their African culture freely; men, women and children lived in equality respecting one another. The land belonged to all and the harvest from the land was shared equally. The population of Quilombo dos Palmares grew up to 70,000 people. It was believed that there were also poor white and indigenous people who all lived together in harmony in the Quilombo dos Palmares.
    
    Zumbi of Palmares was the leader of this community. Zumbi was a strong, courageous and determined man, who many Afro-Brazilian people today consider to be their hero.  As the leader of the Quilombo of Palmares, Zumbi taught and showed a good example to his people. He was not afraid of the government officials, but kept his community united and strong in the face of colonial opposition. On the other hand, the government officials were very threatened by his leadership skills and the unity that the people in his community had developed. The imperial government was afraid that many slave owners would lose all of their slaves if they learned about Zumbi and his community. For this reason the Governor of the nearby city gave an order for the assassination of Zumbi. He was assassinated on November  20th of 1695.
    
    Throughout Brazil there were many other small quilombos where black people found refuge and lived their culture in liberty. In 1888 the law which declared the freedom of slaves was passed in Brazil.  Actually, contrary to freedom, this law created more suffering and abandonment of the black people. In the quilombos, the black, indigenous and poor white people did not have titles to their land. The land that quilombos held belonged to everyone in common. Most of the blacks that were already living in the Quilombos lost their land, as it was distributed to the big landowners. Many of the black people were pushed out to live on the outskirts of the cities. For some of the blacks who decided to continue living in the quilombos, the land was taken away from them, but they had to pay for the right to live on the land through their hard work. The most common way of paying was to give a half of the year's harvest to their landowners.  This unjust situation of indentured servanthood created poverty and economic problems, especially when the rains were scarce.
    
    The history of Quilombo dos Palmares inspires many black activists who are fighting for their liberation, human's rights, dignity, respect and equality. Zumbi, a famous hero among Afro-Brazilians, left the spirit of courage, good example and persistence in fighting for civil rights. Many Afro-Brazilian movements have been using Zumbi as an example to be followed by everyone. The memory of Zumbi (his way of thinking, acting, and reacting against the oppression of black people) has to be carried into the future for bringing about a change in the racist, Brazilian society which still discriminates against black and indigenous peoples.
    
    Afro-Brazilian peoples and movements in Brazil have been fighting for over 300 years to overcome oppression and discrimination.  It was not until 1995 that the 20th of November was recognized as a special commemorative day in Brazil's calendar.  Now the 20th of November, the anniversary of the death of the hero Zumbi, is a very special day throughout Brazil for Afro-Brazilians to commemorate, celebrate their culture, and use the opportunity to educate and raise black consciousness among those who are not yet aware.
    
    Efu Nyaki and Dennis Moorman are Maryknoll Missioners who work with Afro-Brazilians. This year the Black Movement, with whom Efu and Dennis work, will be promoting a two-week program of activities in primary schools and various communities to celebrate black identity and raise awareness about racial discrimination. The programs will end with a celebration of Afro-Brazilian culture on November 20th.   Thanks to Zumbi who initiated the freedom struggle over 400 years ago, we carry on this legacy today. VIVA ZUMBI DOS PALMARES!
    
     By Efu Nyaki.
    
    NEWS FROM BRAZIL supplied by SEJUP (Servico Brasileiro de Justica e Paz). Number 459, November 22, 2001
    Visit our home page: http://www.oneworld.org/sejup
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OTHER REFERENCES

Carneiro, Edison. O quilombo dos Palmares1630-1695. 1st ed. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1947. 2nd ed. São Paulo:Brasiliense, 1958.

Freitas, Décio. Palmares, a guerra dosescravos. 5th ed. Rio de Janeiro: Graal, 1982.

Irving, T. B. KING ZUMBI AND THE MALE MOVEMENT IN BRAZIL: RESEARCH NOTES. American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 1992 9(3): 397-409.

James, C. L. R, The Black Jacobins (see TheHaitian Revolution Revisited, above)

Kent, R. K. "Palmares: An African Statein Brazil." In Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas.Ed. Richard Price. 1st ed. Garden City, NY: Anchor-Doubleday, 1973. 2nd ed.Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979. 170-90.

Santos, Joel Rufino dos. Zumbi. São Paulo:Moderna, 1988.

Schwarz, SB, Resistance and accommodation in18c Brazil. The slaves view of slavery Hispanic American Historical ReviewDurham NC Duke U Press

Schwarz, S B, The "Macambo" slaveresistance in colonial Brazil Journal of Social History Pittsburgh PA CarnegieMellon 1970

Stedman, J G, Narrative Of A Five YearExpedition Against The Revolted Negroes Of Surinam 1772 7 2 Vols 1796