The Black kingdoms of America (part 4)
It’s easy to romanticize Palmares. But that can give you the wrong idea.
Missed an earlier post? Here’s part 1, part 2 and part 3. Read this already? Here’s part 5.
Black Troy?
The Palmarinos’ story is incredible. The dignity and tenacity of thousands of people, dragged a third of the way across the globe in chains, who escaped their oppressors to found an independent community on an unfamiliar continent—then go on to defend it against relentless attack for nearly a century … it’s hard not to romanticize that at least a bit.
A Victorian-era Portuguese writer cited by Anderson resisted the urge precisely not at all when he wrote, “Of all of the historical examples of slave protest, Palmares is the most beautiful, the most heroic. It is a black Troy, and its story is an Iliad.”
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with such misty-eyed moments, but they can lead to misconceptions.
Casting Zumbi as a new Hector doesn’t shed any light on what actually happened in Palmares and beyond, because as fascinating as his epic is, it’s entirely atypical of the thousands of New World communities founded by escaped slaves since the dawn of the 16th century.
It has been far more common overall for quilombos to remain small, discreet and remote. And while less than Homeric, this strategy has proved better at affording freedom and dignity to more people over more generations.
The basic approach has been to avoid contact with the Euro-American world as much as possible. Brazil’s military regime was taken by surprise when, in the 1960s, it launched a massive (and hugely destructive) infrastructure push in the Amazonian interior and found that more than 70 years after emancipation, quilombos still existed. And not just a quaint remnant. Today, researchers cited by Mann estimate, perhaps 5000 Brazilian quilombos occupy a (non-contiguous) area the size of Italy.
They suffer the same depredations at the hands of loggers, miners, ranchers, farmers and traffickers of every sort as their indigenous neighbors.
Two paths, representing opposite extremes. On the one hand, Palmares, the proud, martial, conspicuous Angolan kingdom in exile; on the other, thousands of remote hamlets fleeing the slavers’ world, forgotten by design.
But there’s another path, one a maybe-surprising number of Black communities in the New World have successfully trod: fighting for and permanently winning freedom.
Of course there’s Haiti, the only state ever founded through a slave revolt.* But we’ll leave aside that story aside, because it’s relatively well-known, because the few paragraphs I have space for wouldn’t do it justice, and because—no promises—I’d love to come back to it.
Take the community we started this story with, the earliest known non-indigenous settlement on the mainland Western Hemisphere. Thirty years after Balboa’s visit to the area, Panama would become critically important to the Spanish empire as a transit point for the embarrassment of silver being mined at Potosí in Bolivia (by horrifically treated enslaved African and indigenous people).†
The Spanish died in this isthmian mosquitoscape even more quickly than the Portuguese died in Brazil. They could not simply abandon the area, though: it was the best way to get silver from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
They resorted first to enslaving indigenous locals, but Old World diseases ravaged that population. They imported indigenous slaves from elsewhere in the empire, who suffered the same fate. Enslaved Africans, though, survived, numbering seven to every one European in 1565—just 20 years after the discovery of Potosí.
Obviously they fled slavery in droves.
Soon Panama’s white population was drastically outnumbered, not just by slaves, but by former slaves, who constantly raided Spanish mule trains, taking silver and whatever else they wanted. Often they threw the money into the river, because they had little use for it and because the Spanish really super hated that. For a while they allied with the Sir Francis Drake and other anti-Spanish pirates.
In 1581, Spain finalized a treaty with the Panamanian maroons—represented by King Luis Mozambique and another leader named Domingo Congo—who agreed to stop harassing Spanish mule trains in exchange for freedom (which they already had) and an end to Spanish counterattacks.
Decades into an intractable, immensely costly conflict with their former slaves, the Spanish capitulated. And declared victory.
This would become a pattern: Black people taking back their freedom and keeping it, white people characterizing any agreements that resulted, generally after decades of failed military action, as a win. Such spin is part of why the history of marronage isn’t widely known or understood, despite sitting cheek-by-jowl in the documentary evidence with things Keats wrote poems about.
Some events are harder to spin, though. Gaspar Yanga, an escaped slave who had previously been a military leader in what’s now Ghana, led a group of maroons in Mexico at the turn of the 17th century. The colonists attacked in 1609, took Yanga’s settlement—and found that the enemy had, as best they could tell, melted into the jungle. Eventually the colonists realized they couldn’t win this kind of war—not decisively—and sought a deal.
They apparently didn’t have much leverage. Yanga presented 11 demands, all of which were met in a 1618 treaty, and the people of the town—later renamed Yanga—have been free for the past 400 years.
Perhaps the most striking example of European capitulation to free Black demands—again, besides Toussaint defeating Literal Napoleon—is the long, futile Dutch campaign against escaped slaves (and their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren) in Suriname. Having fought since the 1670s, Dutch officials finally signed a treaty with their Black counterparts in 1762—and drank their own blood in a no-doubt humiliating African gesture of defeat.
I know of a few more examples. (And judging by my ignorance of Palmares well into adulthood, I think it’s safe to say there are many more examples I don’t know I don’t know.)
But I’ll include just one more. Esmeraldas, an African community founded when a slave ship was stranded in Ecuador in 1553, dealt the Spanish the kind of defeat we’re becoming pretty familiar with at this point: prolonged (1583-1587), pestilential (of the 100-ish-strong Spanish force, 14 died of fever), and in the eyes of its own participants, pointless (20 more soldiers mutinied).
As the Spanish bumbled towards them, the maroons would simply pull back deeper into the rainforest, attacking when it suited them. This wasn’t the colonists’ first attempt at subduing Esmeraldas, either.
In 1599 judge Juan Barrio de Sepúlveda of the Quito Audiencia (part of the Viceroyalty of Peru) signed a treaty with the Esmeraldeños. According to Charles Beatty Medina, Sepúlveda wrote to the King of Spain—who perhaps wondered why his conquistadors could topple the Aztec and Inca empires but not this group of fugitive slaves—and counseled him against any plan that would provoke Esmeraldas’ leaders.
“The audiencia finally learned,” Medina writes, “that peace could be made only on maroon terms.”
Troy fell. Many quilombos never did.
There are other lessons to be learned from Esmeraldas, though, which are less inspiring.
We might assume, from our 21st-century vantage point, that escaped slaves rejected the practice of slavery. The evidence for Palmares is sparse and inconclusive. But any self-respecting Imbangala warrior of the 17th century went into battle fully intending to force his enemies into central African-style bondage—or to sell them into far more brutal and lethal Portuguese chattel slavery. Palmares’ elite culture was in the main Angolan, so it would represent a sharp break from the accustomed social order if they didn’t practice a form of forced labor.
The evidence from Esmeraldas, on the other hand, is perfectly conclusive. There, according to Medina, maroon leaders embraced “European methods of labor exploitation,” competing fiercely and unapologetically with the Spanish colonists to force indigenous captives into slavery.
When Indians fled this subjugation—becoming maroons from maroons and in effect choosing Spanish exploitation as their only alternative—the Esmeraldeños would launch brutal punitive raids, killing and mutilating fugitives and burning their villages down.‡
They were playing the same brutal game as the Spanish elite in Quito—and against them. These raids, Medina argues, weren’t just meant to terrorize indigenous subjects and “deter future escapees,” but to lay down territorial boundaries with the Viceroyalty.
Modern ideas about what resistance looks like are an unreliable guide to the early colonial period in Central and South America. (As is Bronze Age Mediterranean mythology.)
But it’s hard to map our 21st-century assumptions onto these realities precisely because our ideas were just beginning to form in the 16th and 17th centuries. The hideous crucible of New World slavery and genocide—and resistance to it—would grow even hotter in the coming centuries.
Next time, The Black kingdoms of America (part 5): a New World—three worlds collided when Columbus landed. The meeting of Africa and indigenous America played an enormous part.
And if you missed it, check out The really big one—what can we learn from the Black Death?
Notes
* Unless Exodus is accurate?
† By the way, if you’d like to read all about the catastrophic, epochal effects this influx of Bolivian silver had on China, Mann’s your guy. 1493. Super trippy stuff.
‡ Technically, the Spanish had stopped enslaving indigenous people (but not Africans) at this time. The slavery I’m referring to is not the same sort of slavery the Spanish practiced prior to de las Casas’ abolitionist campaign, but rather slavery by a clutch of other names: reducción, encomienda, mita, repartimiento, hacienda or, when you didn’t feel like specifying, servicio. While these were legal concepts that differed from outright esclavitud, explaining how they aren’t really slavery would just be to fall for the crown’s Orwellian rebranding.