Liberdade por um fio: Historia dos quilombos no Brasil (review)

“Flight is inherent to slavery,” observed Agostinho Perdigão Malheiro in his 1866 study of Brazilian slavery; João José Reis and Flávio dos Santos Gomes go him one better, describing “flight and the formation of groups of runaway slaves” as “the most typical” form of slave resistance. (9, 83) The encampments and settlements (known in Brazil as quilombos or mocambos, terms of Angolan origin) created by these runaways are often cited as heroic examples of slave struggle against the forces of oppression. Historians Reis and Gomes, both of whom have published important monographs on Brazilian slave resistance, ¹ agree that the quilombolas (inhabitants of quilombos) were heroic But they also caution that to view the runaways primarily as heroes is actually to “diminish the richness of their experience. Let them be celebrated as heroes of freedom; but what we celebrate in this volume is the struggle of men and women who, in order to live in freedom, weren’t always able to act with the certainty and coherence normally attributed to heroes.” (23) In order to explore the diversity of quilombo experience, the editors have brought together seventeen richly informative essays that cover the full temporal (from the early 1500s to 1888) and geographical (from the southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul to the northern states of the Amazon) range of Brazilian slavery. The resulting volume gives us a vivid picture, not just of the breadth and magnitude of the quilombo experience, but of the debates currently driving research on runaway communities One area of debate centers on the communities’ political, social, and economic structures Here, the authors readily admit, the evidence uncovered to date is quite scanty and fragmentary. Pedro Paulo de Abreu Funari, writing on recent archaeological excavations at the seventeenth-century quilombo of Palmares, concludes that those excavations have not yet yielded “data sufficient to reinterpret Palmares as an archaeological macro-site, or, even less, its political organization...” (46) Several essays cite Portuguese descriptions of monarchical systems of government in the larger, more established runaway communities But it remains unclear whether those descriptions more closely reflected quilombo governance or the imposition of Portuguese political categories on quilombo society. Observors also differed in their description of the power wielded by those “kings.” While some described highly authoritarian regimes in which monarchs ruled through harsh punishments and discipline, others described more egalitarian systems in which elected monarchs ruled “in the style of a Republic,” as a 1767 document put it, or through democratic consensus. (252, 458).

Much more evidence survives on the economic structure of the communities. Those that succeeded in attaining any size and longevity did so by constituting themselves as productive economic units, so much so that quilombo production frequently played a significant role in regional economies. Runaways in the gold-mining zones of Minas Gerais (see essays by Carlos Magno Guimarães and Donald Ramos), Goiás (Mary Karasch), and Maranhão and Pará (Matthias Röhrig Assuncão) supported themselves by seeking out new gold deposits in remote areas and mining those unclaimed veins. The quilombolas’ success in finding such deposits was one reason why slavehunters pursued them so closely, in the hopes of recovering not just escaped slaves but their mines as well The more established settlements also practiced extensive agriculture, which in many cases was sufficiently productive to generate surpluses for sale to local merchants, from whom the quilombolas bought salt, alcohol, cloth, weapons, and other goods. Royal officials angrily denounced the resulting ties between retail merchants and the runaway communities, charging the merchants with informing the runaways when government troops were coming, which enabled the communities to flee and escape capture. (272–77, 417, 448–49)

Ties and alliances also existed, surprisingly enough, between runaways and landowners. Quilombolas sometimes earned cash by working for...