A Quilombo Called Canudos - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 56

uneasy relation to both native and national communities. Such communities remained
known but unseen until some event triggered an attack.
Howprevalentandsecret quilombos wereissuggestedbyalandmarkpieceofmodern
legislation. In 1988, the Brazilian constitution recognized the land rights of tradition-
al populations based on their historical territories. Not exactly overnight, but very soon
thereafter, quilombos and their inhabitants “came out ofthe dark,” and scholars and land
officalsbegantodevelopamuchmoreprofoundunderstandingofhowwidespreadthese
communities had been. They were everywhere, in national parks, in cities, in suburbs,
in mountains, at frontiers . . . That they existed and continued to exist speaks to ex-
traordinary powers of defense and resilience. A national mapping exercise of existing
communities formed from quilombos ( communidades remanescentes ) revealed, unsur-
prisingly, that Bahia had the highest number of these types of communities. Enormous
quilombo communities suchasKabinda still exist inGoiás.Morethanfourhundred“re-
sidual” communities can still be found in Pará, 77 while more than a thousand exist in
Bahia. 78 The site of Brazil's space program on the island of Alcântara near São Luis in
Maranhão was overlain on a quilombo community. 79
Beyond the historical ethnographic work that revealed the extent of quilombo presen-
ce, the ubiquity of fugitive communities can be also read in place-names. These include
such obvious toponyms as Morro de Quilombo, Riacho Mocambo, Mucambo (which
was not far from Canudos, and where in fact Conselheiro had repaired a church), 80 and
various other place-names that include “Quilombo da” followed by some other name.
African names such Novo Angola, Cabinda, Calunga, Calabar, or Caiene das Criol-
los (“Cayenne of the Creoles”—Cayenne, the capital of French Guiana, having abol-
ishedslavery),andmanyothersderivedfromBantu,Yoruba,andotherWestandCentral
African dialects litter the landscapes of the north, northeast, and central west of Brazil.
In addition, certain saints especially associated with Africans or natives provide clues
to their early origins: St. Benedict, Our Lady of Rosario, Our Lady Aparecida, and St.
Anthony are particularly important in the African diaspora. That local elites saw Ca-
nudos more as a quilombo than a religious settlement is suggested by a sneering relat-
ive of the Baron of Jeremoabo: “He [Conselheiro] is more powerful than Napoleon! . . .
TodayIintendtonaturalize myselfasanAfrican.” 81 OthersnotedthatCanudoswasfull
of the gente do 13 , black ex-slaves liberated by Isabel's May 13 dictum.
Language of Threat
The jagunços described by da Cunha as “indolent and armed to the teeth” could have
been inhabitants of a Canudos quilombo that predated the community established by
Conselheiro. As da Cunha put it, “Even before the arrival of Conselheiro, this obscure
hamlet, . . . like the majority of the unknown villages in our backlands, contained the