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The mocambos (from mocambo, literally Huts) were village-sized communities mainly of runaway slaves in colonial Brazil, during Portuguese rule.
A mocambo differed from a quilombo in size; a quilombo, like the Quilombo dos Palmares, might embrace many distinct mocambos. The terms were not always used consistently, however.
The most common form of slave resistance in colonial Brazil was flight, and a characteristic problem of the Brazilian slave regime was the continual and widespread existence of fugitive communities called mocambos, ladeiras, magotes, or quilombos. The three major areas of colonial Brazil where the fugitive communities stayed were: the plantation zone of Bahia, the mining district of Minas Gerais, and the inaccessible frontier of Alagoas, site of Palmares, the largest fugitive community. [1]
Mocambos mean exile communities established by formerly enslaved (fugitive) Brazilians between the 18th and 19th century. The purpose of these settlements was to protect the refugees from the Portuguese opposition. The main way they did so was being located in places that were difficult for the punitive military expeditions to find.. Mocambos were a threat to the economy and the social fabric of the slave regime, because as the colonial slave regime fed off the labor of the enslaved they turned the parasitic economy of the slave regime on its head, relying on theft, extortion and raiding to survive. Though the minority of communities lived off agriculture and arms trade. Mocambos did not submit to the control of the government, and because of the high percentage of the Brazilian population made up of enslaved people (around one third), the number and the importance of Mocambos was continually increasing. For this reason mocambos were targeted for annihilation by punitive military expeditions. When one was found the soldiers would execute all the adults and enslave any surviving children (born in the Mocambos), declaring them property of the leaders of the exterminating expeditions. [2] [3] [4]
Runaway communities flourished in almost all areas of Bahia, whose geography aided escape, and the result was a great number of fugitives and mocambos. In plantation zones, slaves often made up over 60 percent of the inhabitants. They lived in bad conditions in terms of food and housing and they had to deal with particularly cruel or sadistic masters. The region of Bahia in which appeared a great quantity of mocambos was the southern towns of Cairù, Camamù and Ilhéus. In these towns there was the most part of the production of manioc, the basic subsistence crop of Brazil. A second and still unstudied method of slave control and capture in Brazil was the calculated use of Indians as slave catchers and as a counterforce to mocambos and possible slave resorts. [5]
Maroon Societies is a systematic study of the communities formed by escaped slaves in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States. These societies ranged from small bands that survived less than a year to powerful states encompassing thousands of members and surviving for generations and even centuries. The volume includes eyewitness accounts written by escaped slaves and their pursuers, as well as modern historical and anthropological studies of the maroon experience. For this edition, Richard Price has written a new preface reflecting recent changes in both maroon scholarship and in the lives of contemporary maroons throughout the Americas. [6]
The Underground Railroad was used by freedom seekers from slavery in the United States and was generally an organized network of secret routes and safe houses. Enslaved Africans and African Americans escaped from slavery as early as the 16th century and many of their escapes were unaided, but the network of safe houses operated by agents generally known as the Underground Railroad began to organize in the 1780s among Abolitionist Societies in the North. It ran north and grew steadily until the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863 by President Abraham Lincoln. The escapees sought primarily to escape into free states, and from there to Canada.
A slave rebellion is an armed uprising by slaves, as a way of fighting for their freedom. Rebellions of slaves have occurred in nearly all societies that practice slavery or have practiced slavery in the past. A desire for freedom and the dream of successful rebellion is often the greatest object of song, art, and culture amongst the enslaved population. These events, however, are often violently opposed and suppressed by slaveholders.
Colonial Brazil comprises the period from 1500, with the arrival of the Portuguese, until 1815, when Brazil was elevated to a kingdom in union with Portugal. During the 300 years of Brazilian colonial history, the main economic activities of the territory were based first on brazilwood extraction, which gave the territory its name; sugar production ; and finally on gold and diamond mining. Slaves, especially those brought from Africa, provided most of the workforce of the Brazilian export economy after a brief initial period of Indigenous slavery to cut brazilwood.
A quilombo ; from the Kimbundu word kilombo, lit. 'war camp') is a Brazilian hinterland settlement founded by people of African origin, and others sometimes called Carabali. Most of the inhabitants of quilombos, called quilombolas, were maroons, a term for escaped slaves.
Zumbi, also known as Zumbi dos Palmares, was a Brazilian quilombola leader and one of the pioneers of resistance to slavery of Africans by the Portuguese in colonial Brazil. He was also the last of the kings of the Quilombo dos Palmares, a settlement of Afro-Brazilian people who liberated themselves from enslavement in the present-day state of Alagoas, Brazil. He is revered in Afro-Brazilian culture as a symbol of African freedom.
Maroons are descendants of Africans in the Americas and Islands of the Indian Ocean who escaped from slavery, through flight or manumission, and formed their own settlements. They often mixed with Indigenous peoples, eventually evolving into separate creole cultures such as the Garifuna and the Mascogos.
Palmares, or Quilombo dos Palmares, was a quilombo, a community of escaped slaves and others, in colonial Brazil that developed from 1605 until its suppression in 1694. It was located in the captaincy of Pernambuco, in what is today the Brazilian state of Alagoas. The quilombo was located in what is now the municipality of União dos Palmares.
Nganga Nzumba was the first leader of the massive runaway slave settlement of Quilombo dos Palmares, or Angola Janga, in the present-day state of Alagoas, Brazil. Zumba was enslaved and escaped bondage on a sugar plantation and eventually rose to the position of highest authority within the kingdom of Palmares, and the corresponding title of Ganga Zumba.
Gaspar Yanga — often simply Yanga or Nyanga was an African who led a maroon colony of enslaved Africans in the highlands near Veracruz, Mexico during the early period of Spanish colonial rule. He successfully resisted a Spanish attack on the colony in 1609. The maroons continued their raids on Spanish settlements. Finally in 1618, Yanga achieved an agreement with the colonial government for self-rule of the maroon settlement. It was later called San Lorenzo de los Negros, and also San Lorenzo de Cerralvo.
A slave catcher is a person employed to track down and return escaped slaves to their enslavers. The first slave catchers in the Americas were active in European colonies in the West Indies during the sixteenth century. In colonial Virginia and Carolina, slave catchers were recruited by Southern planters beginning in the eighteenth century to return fugitive slaves; the concept quickly spread to the rest of the Thirteen Colonies. After the establishment of the United States, slave catchers continued to be employed in addition to being active in other countries which had not abolished slavery, such as Brazil. The activities of slave catchers from the American South became at the center of a major controversy in the lead up to the American Civil War; the Fugitive Slave Act required those living in the Northern United States to assist slave catchers. Slave catchers in the United States ceased to be active with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment.
Dandara was an Afro-Brazilian warrior of the colonial period of Brazil and was part of the Quilombo dos Palmares, a settlement of Afro-Brazilian people who freed themselves from enslavement, in the present-day state of Alagoas. After being arrested on February 6, 1694, she committed suicide, refusing to return to a life of slavery. She is a mysterious figure today, because not much is known about her life. Most of the stories about her are varied and disconnected. She and her husband Zumbi dos Palmares, the last king of the Quilombo dos Palmares, had three children.
San Basilio de Palenque or Palenque de San Basilio, often referred to by the locals simply as Palenke, is a Palenque village and corregimiento in the Municipality of Mahates, Bolivar in northern Colombia. Palenque was the first free African town in the Americas, and in 2005 was declared a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO.
A quilombola is an Afro-Brazilian resident of quilombo settlements first established by escaped slaves in Brazil. They are the descendants of Afro-Brazilian slaves who escaped from slave plantations that existed in Brazil until abolition in 1888. The most famous quilombola was Zumbi and the most famous quilombo was Palmares. Many quilombolas live in poverty.
Slavery in Brazil began long before the first Portuguese settlement. Later, colonists were heavily dependent on indigenous labor during the initial phases of settlement to maintain the subsistence economy, and natives were often captured by expeditions of bandeirantes. The importation of African slaves began midway through the 16th century, but the enslavement of indigenous peoples continued well into the 17th and 18th centuries. Europeans and Chinese were also enslaved.
There were significant slave revolts in Brazil in 1798, 1807, 1814 and the Malê Revolt of 1835. The institution of slavery was essential to the export agriculture and mining industries in colonial Brazil, its major sources of revenue. A marked decrease in the Indian population due to disease necessitated the importation of slaves early in the colonial history of Brazil with African slaves already being enslaved in greater amounts than Indian slaves on sugar plantations in the Bahia region by the end of the 1500s. A gold and diamond boom in the interior of Brazil in the mid-eighteenth century precipitated a significant increase in the importation of African slaves.
The Cimarrons in Panama were enslaved Africans who had escaped from their Spanish masters and lived together as maroons. In the 1570s, they allied with Francis Drake of England to defeat the Spanish conquest. In Sir Francis Drake Revived (1572), Drake describes the Cimarrons as "a black people which about eighty years past fled from the Spaniards their masters, by reason of their cruelty, and are since grown to a nation, under two kings of their own. The one inhabiteth to the west, the other to the east of the way from Nombre de Dios".
Slavery in Latin America was an economic and social institution that existed in Latin America before the colonial era until its legal abolition in the newly independent states during the 19th century. However, it continued illegally in some regions into the 20th century. Slavery in Latin America began in the pre-colonial period when indigenous civilizations, including the Maya and Aztec, enslaved captives taken in war. After the conquest of Latin America by the Spanish and Portuguese, of the nearly 12 million slaves that were shipped across the Atlantic, over 4 million enslaved Africans were brought to Latin America. Roughly 3.5 million of those slaves were brought to Brazil.
Cerca do Macaco, also called "Cerca Real dos Macacos" or just "Macaco", was a historical settlement located on the peak of the Serra da Barriga in the state of Alagoas, Brazil. It was the main settlement of the Palmares, an established group of fugitives and escaped slaves.
A slave catcher was a person employed to track down and return escaped slaves to their enslavers. Slave catchers were active in Brazil, both during the period it was a Portuguese colony and after it became an independent nation. Unlike in North America, indigenous Brazilians occasionally became slave catchers as well. Escaped slaves in Brazil formed quilombos, which slave catchers frequently raided, resulting in most of them becoming abandoned or destroyed. The institution of slave catching in Brazil similarly disappeared after the passage of the Lei Áurea by the Brazilian General Assembly in 1888, which abolished slavery in the country.
Zeferina was a female leader of an 1826 slave revolt, the Revolt of Quilombo do Urubu, outside Salvador, Bahia.