Brazil

Slave uprisings and the formation and defense of runaway slave communities (called quilombos or mocambos in Brazil) were common facts of Brazilian slavery. But whereas quilombos occurred throughout the history of slavery and throughout the vast territory of Brazil, slave revolts occurred primarily in certain areas and in certain periods. Over one hundred quilombos have been identified in the rich mining region of Minas Gerais in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but there is no record of a slave uprising there except for three abortive conspiracies in 1711, 1719, and 1729. Most slave revolts happened in the plantation areas of the Northeast during the first half of the nineteenth century. Some of these were linked to or benefited from divisions that flourished among the free classes after the independence of Brazil in 1822. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the majority of the slave population was concentrated in the prosperous coffee regions to the south. There small but numerous rebellions took place independently of or in combination with the white-dominated abolitionist movement in the last decades of slavery, which was finally abolished in 1888.

The colonial era, however, did see one big slave movement: the large and long-lived Palmares quilombo, founded ca. 1630. Finally defeated in 1694 after having repelled many attacks, Palmares was a runaway community with the stature of an organized, independent state. Nothing like it would ever be allowed to happen again in Brazil.

Often, however, the history of smaller-scale quilombos and that of insurrection merged. Although many quilombos were begun peacefully by small groups of individual fugitives, there were cases in which they developed from slave insurrections. In 1838 in the parish of Pati do Alferes, in the province of Rio de Janeiro, more than 100 slave men and women, the majority from a large coffee plantation, rose and ran away under the leadership of Manuel Congo. Most of these slaves were southern and central Africans from Angola, Mozambique, and the Congo, but a few creoles also joined the movement. Possessing firearms and other weapons, they immediately tried to organize a quilombo in a nearby mountain range but were quickly dispersed, with seven killed and twenty-two arrested on the spot. Manuel Congo was sentenced to be hanged. Although most runaways later were returned to their masters, some managed to escape into the woods.

If there were insurrections that became quilombos, there were also quilombos behind insurrections. Some of the famous nineteenth-century Bahian revolts were initiated by groups of runaway slaves. In 1809 fugitives from the city of Salvador, Bahia's capital, and from plantations in the neighboring sugar zone, the Recôncavo, formed a quilombo on the banks of a river. From there they attacked and nearly took control of the village of Nazaré, a food-producing area. They were defeated by local militias and troops sent from the capital; many died, and eighty-three men and twelve women were arrested. The rebels were Hausa, jeje (Aja-Fon), and Nagô (Yoruba) slaves, some of whom escaped in small groups to live as highwaymen and raiders in the Recôncavo. Five years later, in 1814, a quilombo near Salvador was also involved in an insurrection of captives, mostly Hausas, who worked in whaling warehouses. It was a bloody affair in which perhaps fifty people were killed by the rebels, who were defeated with heavy losses, but only when they were already marching toward the plantation districts. Finally, there was the rebellion of the Urubu (Vulture) quilombo in 1826, which was strengthened by many new escapees in an attempt to occupy Salvador on Christmas eve. But the rebels were denounced and then overcome by militia and regular troops before they were able to begin acting on their plan. During the battle a valiant woman named Zeferina led the warriors, mainly Yoruba slaves.

Bahia was by far the region experiencing the greatest number and the most serious slave revolts. There were more than twenty slave uprisings and conspiracies in Bahia between 1809 and 1835. Most of them were local affairs in the sugar plantation area of the Recôncavo, carried on by slaves protesting against local working or living conditions. At least two of the uprisings were led by Muslim slaves, the one in 1814 mentioned above and a more serious episode in 1835, often called the Malê revolt (from Imale, meaning Muslim in Yoruba). The latter occurred in Salvador. The result of long planning, it was led by Muslim religious preachers. The revolt was intended to begin on 25 January 1835, a Catholic holiday that fell at the end of the Muslim Ramadan. The police heard of the plot only hours before, which was time enough, however, to give them an advantage. But the uprising started anyway. For close to four hours, some 500 rebels fought in the streets and door-to-door, more than 70 dying before the uprising was defeated. The rebels were mostly Yoruba and Hausa slaves and freedmen, who later received punishments that varied from the death penalty (applied to four of them), whippings, prison with work, and deportation to Africa (for the freedmen).

As in other areas of the New World, slave revolts in Brazil, especially those in Bahia, have been explained by the high concentration of slaves in the population and by the fact that the majority were African-born and had common ethnic backgrounds. Thus, the revolts were in part ethnic rebellions. In the case of Bahia, scholars have added the role of Islam as a revolutionary religious ideology. Slave revolts may have been spurred by other ideological elements, such as the influence of the Haitian revolution (haitianismo), the liberal discourse peculiar to a time of decolonization, and after the mid-nineteenth century, abolitionist ideas. The creoles, however, were more in tune with these influences than the Africans.

In Bahia and other northern provinces, for instance, creole slaves joined several revolutionary movements of the free between 1823 and 1840. The movement known as the Balaiada exploded between 1838 and 1841 in the province of Maranhão. It mobilized thousands of poor country people under the leadership of liberal and federalist rebels who, like other rebels in this period, did not seek abolition. Slaves, however, took advantage of the rebellion to carry on their own movement guided by an extraordinary leader, Cosme Bento das Chagas, a black freedman who sought the destruction of slavery and the establishment of a color-blind republic. Faced with defeat, radical liberals eventually had to accept an alliance with slave forces that counted on hundreds of fugitives (quilombolas). But the very presence of slaves in the Balaiada pushed white supporters away. Thus weakened, both slave and free rebels became easy prey for the many troops sent from Rio de Janeiro to put down the rebellion. Chagas was captured and hanged, accused of murder and of leading a slave rebellion.

The 1870s and 1880s, especially the last years before abolition in 1888, saw a significant increase of tensions between slaves and masters, especially in the coffee-growing regions and suburbs of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Recent studies have shown that individual flights and violent crimes against masters and overseers grew in the police statistics of this period, mostly accounted for by African slaves and captives imported from the declining sugar areas of the Northeast. The increasing unrest became a strong argument used by white politicians and ideologues in the abolitionist movement. As abolition approached, small slave uprisings, collective flights, and the formation of suburban quilombos multiplied by many times. Between 1885 and 1888, São Paulo alone witnessed more than two-dozen uprisings, although most were either small, localized, and hastily improvised or only potentially serious conspiracies that never materialized. In the same period, fires on several occasions destroyed plantations in the sugar districts of Campos in Rio de Janeiro. The radicalization of the slave movement radicalized the abolitionist movement, which often supported the former. The last country in the New World to abolish slavery, Brazil would surely have prolonged the system even longer had it not been for the struggle of the slaves themselves.

See alsoSlavery: Brazil .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Raymond Kent, "African Revolt in Bahia: 24-25 January 1835," Journal of Social History 3, no. 4 (1970): 334-356.

Clovis Moura, Rebeliões da senzala (1972).

Lana Lage Gama Lima, Rebeldia negra e abolicionismo (1981).

Maria Januária Vilela Dos Santos, A balaiada e a insurreição de escravos no Maranhão (1983).

Julio Pinto Vallejos, "Slave Control and Slave Resistance in Colonial Minas Gerais, 1700–1750," Journal of Latin American Studies 17 (1985): 1-34.

Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (1985), pp. 468-488.

João Luiz Pinaud et al, Insurreicão negra e justiça (1987).

Luiz R. B. Mott, "Rebeliões escravas em Sergipe," Estudos Econômicos 17 (1987): 111-130.

João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia (1993).

Additional Bibliography

Gomes, Flávio dos Santos. Palmares: Escravidão e liberdade no Atlântico Sul. São Paulo: Contexto, 2005.

Reis, João José and Flávio dos Santos Gomes. Liberdade por um fio: História dos quilombos no Brasil. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996.

Soares, Carlos Eugênio Líbano. A capoeira escrava e outras tradições rebeldes no Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850. Campinas: Editora da UNICAMP: CECULT, 2001.

                                           JoÃo JosÉ Reis