The Black kingdoms of America (part 3)
An Angolan kingdom rises in the Brazilian forest and joins the colonial power struggle.
Missed an earlier post? Here’s part 1 and part 2. Read this already? Here’s part 4 and part 5.
Palmares
The enslaved Africans who worked Pernambuco’s plantations were armed with resistance to tropical diseases and not infrequently combat experience. Highly relevant combat experience at that, since it wasn’t just in a tropical theater, but against people armed with Portuguese guns.
Unsurprisingly, then, they escaped in droves. Considering that the planters consistently imported yet more slaves to replace the escapees, the droves became—what’s bigger than a drove?
Almost as soon as Portuguese Brazil was founded, a parallel colony emerged alongside it in the forest, separated by no more than a few miles. This one was run by Africans, according to African—specifically, Angolan—systems of government, defense and agriculture.
Palmares’ origins are semi-mythical, but according to the information we have, it was founded by a warrior-princess named Aqualtune. She was either Kongo (according to stuff on the internet) and captured in battle by the Imbangala, or vice-versa (according to Mann). Either way, around 1605, she was taken to Brazil.*
Within a year she and 40 fighters loyal to her had escaped into the interior, where they founded a settlement on supremely defensible terrain. Here’s Mann:
Twenty-five miles from the coast, a series of abrupt basaltic extrusions dominates the plain like a line of watchtowers. Their sheer, cliff-like walls reach hundreds of feet up to flat summits with dizzying views of the surrounding plain. One of these tall hills was the Serra da Barriga—Potbelly Hill. On its peak was a pool of cool water, sheltered by trees, perhaps fifty yards across, with an indigenous community around it. Here Aqualtune founded Palmares.
By 1630, perhaps 30,000 fugitives had settled there, many having exploited the opportunity of a Dutch raid to escape.
At its height in the 1650s, the state comprised something like 28 villages spanning 10,000 square miles (that is, New Jersey and change), with a capital at Macaco on Serra da Barriga. Palmares’ population likely rivaled that of Anglophone North America at the time, though unsurprisingly, estimates vary widely and—inconveniently—all seem to refer to different decades, so the range isn’t just large, but two-dimensional.
For its time and place, though, even a low-ball estimate of 11,000 people would qualify Palmares as, in demographers’ jargon, no joke.
Aqualtune’s son Ganga Zumba—almost certainly a title rather than a name, but it’s all we know him by—ruled Palmares as a king. An anonymous Portuguese (or mestiço†) visitor to the community in the 1670s gave this description, translated by Robert Nelson Anderson:
They acknowledge themselves to be obedient to one called Ganga-Zumba, which means Great Lord. This one is held to be king and master of all the rest, both natives of Palmares as well as those who come from the outside. He has a palace, houses for his family, and is attended by guards and officials that royal houses usually have. He is treated with all of the respect of a king and with all of the honours of a lord. Those that come into his presence put their knees to the ground and clap their hands as a sign of recognition and protestation of his excellence. They address him as Majesty and obey him out of admiration. He dwells in his royal town, which they call Macaco [‘Monkey’], a name derived from the death dealt to one of these animals in that place. This is the principal town among the remaining towns and settlements. It is wholly fortified by a palisade with embrasures from which they could safely attack combatants. All around the outside was sewn with iron caltrops and such cunning pitfalls that it had imperilled our greatest vigilance. This town occupies a broad area; it is made up of more than 1,500 houses. There is among them a Minister of Justice for the necessary actions, and all of the trapping of any republic is found among them.
Looking back at this period, we might ask ourselves who was really colonizing Brazil.‡ Likely the Portuguese asked themselves. The situation, Mann points out, was beginning to look like it did on the east side of the equatorial Atlantic: a coastal enclave of Europeans enjoying profitable trade with Kongo and Imbangala states—with no hope of directly exploiting the vast, hostile, inaccessible interior.
But if 17th-century Pernambuco was a mirror image of 17th-century Angola in certain ways, in other ways it was entirely different.
Much as the world was swirling and blending in surprising ways during this era (Read. 1493. Y’all.), there was precisely zero Tupi presence in southwestern Africa. Slavery, genocide and serial epidemics be damned, indigenous people—who mostly spoke the Tupi language but otherwise shared little in the way of a common ethnic identity—remained a major presence in Pernambuco.
Many of Palmares’ people were Tupi-speaking natives, and the kingdom was a fascinating hybrid of the two cultures. (Not counting a few disaffected, marginalized, fugitive and eccentric Europeans who also lived there.)
Palmarinos grew a medley of African and indigenous crops. Their metallurgy was African (and highly sophisticated, capable of producing guns and ammunition). Their architecture was Tupi. Their religion had it all: indigenous, African animist and African Christian (King Nzinga-a-Nkuwu of Kongo was christened João I the year before Columbus sailed, and many Africans brought to the New World had been in the Catholic fold for generations).
The military and political leadership of Palmares was one and the same, and it was African. While a strong warrior culture characterized the tribes many in Palmares were born into or descended from—the Imbangala in particular—local conditions more or less required militarism.
After all, Lisbon did not appreciate this political and military rival to their colony, especially since it was founded by people they regarded as chattel. The Portuguese (and Dutch) launched at least twenty attacks against Palmares from 1643 to 1677. The Palmarinos beat back the would-be slavers every time. Or rather, they hunkered down to wait out sieges in Macaco, which was heavily fortified, as the passage cited above shows.
The Portuguese experience in these expeditions recalls that of the French and Americans in Vietnam: bumbling jungle campaigns against defenders far more at home in that environment than their attackers—so much so that when they wanted to, they could be all but invisible.
The Portuguese wouldn’t lose engagements, because they didn’t get to fight them. They’d just be steadily picked off by unseen archers, impaled on booby traps, or silently dragged into the forest—along with some choice supplies—while their units slept.
Meanwhile the planters on whose behalf these campaigns were ostensibly waged sold weapons to Palmares for food, an arrangement the soldiers no doubt hated. Some planters, in fact, favored peace with Palmares. They appeared to accept, if perhaps they wouldn’t put it in these terms, that Brazil would be home to at least one white and at least one Black state going forward.
Many planters, of course, favored the official policy of eliminating the Black kingdom.
And in the end, that’s what happened.
A devastating raid in 1677, according to the controversial but generally accepted history, broke Ganga Zumba’s will to fight, and he negotiated a peace with the Portuguese: no new escaped slaves would be admitted to Palmares, and the community would leave its highland redoubt for the Cucaú Valley, where colonial authorities could keep a better eye on it. The Portuguese, in return, would stop their attacks.
At this point—again, according to the accepted version—Ganga Zumba’s hardline nephew, who had been captured and educated by colonists as a boy, poisoned the king, took power and resumed hostilities. The old cycle of constant, mostly ineffectual Portuguese attacks resumed. The new king’s name was Zumbi.
Eventually, the colonists decided to take a new approach. They sought the services of one Domingos Jorge Velho, a half-Portuguese, half-indigenous mercenary. (The mestiçagem underway in Palmares was proceeding apace in Portuguese-held Brazil).
A brief digression, if you’ll indulge me. Velho was of a type that has long plagued the Amazon: a megalomaniacal eccentric who carves out a weird fief at the edge of the “civilized” pale. To this day, in the remotest areas of the Amazon (from a Euro-American perspective), you will find priests, preachers, teachers and healers constructing and abusing little kingdoms of poor, illiterate indigenous people. They may—like Jorge Velho—have several wives, or may claim complete sexual monopoly over the community’s women. Or children. Messianic proclamations are common, as is a form of feverish “civilizing” mission—tropical manifest destiny. Grandiose building projects often follow (especially roads), subjecting the jungle kings’ subjects to something like the corvée, if not slavery.
I don’t mean to apply that entire description to Jorge Velho—I doubt any one person has ever embodied all those terrible qualities—but it’s useful to situate him in a long lineage of half-or-more-crazed prophets and fortune-seekers.
After years of negotiating with skeptical colonial authorities, Jorge Velho set out in 1692 at the head of a mostly indigenous army, supplemented by mestiço soldiers, as well as a African-Portuguese and Portuguese-Portuguese. Disease and hunger reduced his force from 1,100 to 645 before it reached Palmares, where he laid siege under tortuous, unseasonably rainy conditions.
In the end the invaders breached the defenses and took Macaco. Zumbi escaped and tried to continue the resistance from hiding, but was betrayed and killed in 1695. The fortifications of Palmares were destroyed. According to Anderson, 500 of its people were killed and 500 taken prisoner, but I haven’t found information on what became of the prisoners, or the presumably thousands of other people who must have fled.
Ninety years after Aqualtune’s flight from slavery, the Black kingdom of Pernambuco had fallen.
Next time, The Black kingdoms of America (part 4): Black Troy?—it’s easy to romanticize Palmares. But that can give you the wrong idea.
Notes
* The question of the ethnic identities of Palmares’ African residents is complex, and I confess to having mostly given up on it. My sources tend to focus on the New World and to avoid extensive discussion of the political and cultural realities of 17th-century Angola. I’ve added “know something about the political and cultural realities of 17th-century Angola” to my goal hoard, but if I insist on doing that first, I’ll never send this email. Here’s what I do know. It’s safe to say that Palmares’ people did not think of themselves as “Angolan.” This is a political label furnished by the Portuguese, who first established a presence in that area in the 15th century. “Kongo” and “Imbangala” are also political labels, albeit indigenous ones: the first refers to a kingdom founded in the region in the 14th century, the second to a clutch of hyper-militarized groups who around this time would form the Kasanje kingdom. Kilombo comes from the word for an Imbangala men’s initiation camp (based on my skimpy reading, picture a Spartan agōgē). Linguistically, the word kilombo is Kimbundu, a Bantu language that is still widely spoken in Angola. My sources tend to hand-wavingly insist that a “variety” or some such word of African ethnic groups was represented at Palmares, so I’ll follow suit. Given the extreme lack of documentary evidence about the community, it’s probably the best we can do.
† Mestiço is the Portuguese equivalent of the Spanish mestizo (and French métis): a person of European and indigenous heritage. I’ve followed a practice common among modern historians in using this term to refer to African-Indian people as well, but colonial societies had a vast and unsettlingly precise taxonomy to cover every permutation of Africa, Europe and America over multiple generations—they wouldn’t have used mestiço nearly so broadly. The process of creating a mestiço/mestizo/métis society is mestiçagem/mestizaje/métissage.
‡ “Colonizing” has deservedly become a dirty word, so it’s worth emphasizing that while the Portuguese chose to go to Brazil, the Angolans didn’t.