A Quilombo Called Canudos - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 53

Canudos, like the “sanctuary state,” the quilombo of Palmares, has a durable hold on
the national mythology of Brazil. The resonance of Canudos lies in its utopian imagina-
tion and its ideas of resistance, citizenship, and autonomy. Canudos and Palmares were
places of ethnogenesis: the re-creation of new cultures, roles, rules, and meanings of
self in the face of immense, almost unimaginable processes of disintegration. 62 In these
places, subjects became citizens. Such refuges or quilombos , and there were thousands,
were, asthehistorian ofslave uprisings, JoãoJoseReis hasputit,sites of“the Invention
of Liberty.”
The term quilombo , as historian Stuart Schwartz points out, has a complex etymology
that places it within aset ofAngolan institutions, andindeed the most famous quilombo ,
Palmares, was known by its inhabitants as Angola Janga (little Angola). Schwartz, who
bases his analysis on the African historical work of Joseph Miller and John Thornton, 63
focuses on the Jaga/Imbangala role in Angolan polity formation. The Jaga were mer-
cenaries, lived on a war footing, and adopted children, usually war booty, from other
groups into their ranks. Over time they created a highly multiethnic warrior cult that in-
corporated large numbers of strangers who lacked a common ancestry into processes of
“ethnogenesis” through novel syncretic social forms and identities. Quilombos in Africa
were organized through ritual affines and hierarchies rather than traditional lineage and
clanobligation.Thesecouldunifyethnicallydiversepopulationsthathadbeentornfrom
their lands, gods, and lineages. 64 They were reinvented in Brazil. Da Cunha was quite
right to see Canudos as a “warrior camp.”
What was important was that quilombo was becoming a synonym for kingdom or
polity . Given the predominance of Bantu (Angolan and Congo) slaves in the Brazilian
and especially Bahian slave economy, the large South American quilombos were under-
stood by slaves as separate places with their own sovereignties, rules, and institutions.
Quilombos were compelling sites of autonomy, cultural blending, and, despite relentless
persecution,freedominthefaceofslavery. 65 Bynomeanscouldtheentiresuiteofritual
practices be reactivated in Brazil, nor would quilombo leaders necessarily become Jaga,
nor only male. Indeed, the foundational myth of Palmares has Aqualtone, an Angolan
queen, as the initiator of the settlement: according to legend, she fled slavery with some
retainers to the mountain retreat of the palm-covered Serra de Barriga, later to give birth
to the Brazilian black cultural hero, the embodiment of black resistance, Zumbi.
There were other symbolic and ritual practices that could integrate diverse ethnicities
into a functioning community. These could have derived from indigenous sources like
the cooperative non-kin sodalities—ritual age groups—so characteristic of Gê societies.
The Catholic Church also was able to meld different beliefs into an array of “double
saints” who had covert meanings and valorized and comforted the fugitives from the
vastdiasporasthatwereshapingBrazil.Burialbrotherhoods— irmanidades —alongwith