Introduction

1500—Landing in Brazil of the first Europeans, under the leadership of Pedro Alvares Cabral

1538—Introduction of enslaved Africans to Brazil

1695—Destruction of Palmares and assassination of Zumbi

1888—Abolition of slavery in Brazil

1995—300th Anniversary of the death of Zumbi

... what’s past is prologue.

  —William Shakespeare

There is no such thing as was—only is.

  —William Faulkner

This special bilingual African Brazilian issue of Callaloo is yet another installment in our efforts to provide an international forum in which voices of the African Diaspora address each other and the world. In this issue of the journal, a chorus of black Brazilian voices speak, for the first time, to English-speaking readers, many of whom may know Brazil only through images, via the media, of its samba, carnivals, rain forest, bassa nova, and lambada. It is our hope that this issue of Callaloo will provide our readers another dimension of Brazil: African Brazilian voices speaking for themselves, about themselves, and about their nation as a whole. It is also our hope that this issue will assist all of us in expanding our knowledge of Brazil, especially Black Brazil—its life, culture, and history.

The appearance of an African Brazilian issue of Callaloo at this time marks the observation of an event that is very important to all peoples who are heirs of the Middle Passage and its consequences. (It is fitting here to note that Brazil has the largest concentration of people of African descent outside Nigeria.) During the month of November 1995, people of African descent throughout Brazil are observing the 300th Anniversary of the death of Zumbi, that seventeenth-century black freedom fighter who, for his fierce leadership in war to protect Palmares, has became a national and international symbol of liberation. For African Brazilians, it is Zumbi—not Princess-Regent Isabel who, in 1888, signed the Golden Law which supposedly abolished slavery in Brazil—who is the symbol of their emancipation. He is a living force in their lives.

Some North American readers of Callaloo will, no doubt, ask who is Zumbi? What is Palmares? Palmares, whose origins date back to 1605 or earlier, was a quilombo, an organized settlement to which blacks escaped enslavement and white assimilation in colonial Brazil. As histories of colonial South America attest, Palmares of Pernambuco was not the only seventeenth-century maroon society in Brazil; there were many others—in Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Minas Gerais. What makes Palmares different from other quilombos is that at its zenith its inhabitants numbered more than 30,000 quartered in ten villages. As a symbol of freedom, Palmares, unlike the other quilombos, was not only a refuge for enslaved Africans; it was also a free society for other marginalized peoples of Brazil, including Amerindians and poor whites. The most distinguishing feature of Palmares is its long life: under the governance of forms of African laws which provided an elected leader, Palmares prevailed as a Black Republic for almost one hundred years, in spite of the various assaults which the Portuguese and the Dutch advanced against it. It was not until November 20, 1695, some one hundred and fifty-seven years after the first enslaved Africans landed in Brazil, that Palmares was destroyed. Zumbi, the war minister, was wounded, captured alive, and decapitated by bandeirantes from São Paulo. To demythologize the power of Zumbi and “kill the legend of his immortality,” the white community displayed his limbs and his head in different public sites. As some of the texts in this special issue of Callaloo demonstrate, those efforts were in vain; Zumbi lives not only in African Brazilian literature and art but also in the lives of the Brazilian people themselves. In fact, Zumbi is a force propelling African Brazilians in their efforts to create the true Abolition in Brazil.

This special issue of Callaloo is not only a testament to the persistence of the memory of Zumbi and the continuing need for liberation in Brazil—and throughout the Americas; it is also an introduction to an emerging literature which has never before been translated extensively into the English...