The World полностью

Slaves had resisted from the start, but revolts were crushed ferociously. The other choice was to ‘head to the bush’, but they needed somewhere to go. Slave catchers – capitães do mato – were dismal manhunters, righteously protected by St Anthony, paid by masters to retrieve or kill escaped slaves, travelling with their leather bags in which they stowed the slave’s head to be presented for payment. But since early in the century runaway Brazilian Maroons had created quilombos – rebel slave communities – named after the Imbangala war camps of Angola. In these macombos – hideaways – ex-slaves built villages, lived on palms, beans and chickens, and became expert guerrillas, using guns and capoeira, a discipline that is both dance and martial art. Early in the century, forty slaves from one estate had fled and formed a quilombo near Recife at the eastern extremity of Brazil that they named Palmares after the palms they ate. Known as Little Angola since so many Palmarians were Bakongo, its elected leaders were often princes from Africa whose prestige continued into their slave lives. When the Dutch were defeated, the Portuguese tried to crush Palmares, launching over twenty attacks, all of which failed. ‘It is harder,’ reflected a Portuguese governor, ‘to defeat a quilombo than the Dutch.’

When Princess Aqualtune and her sons Ganga Zumba and Ganga Zona were enslaved, they were placed on a sugar plantation, Santa Rita, in Pernambuco, north-eastern Brazil, not far from Palmares where their sister Sabina, enslaved earlier, was already living. Soon after their arrival, Ganga Zumba and his family escaped to Palmares where this grandson of a manikongo, aged around thirty-five, an experienced fighter, was chosen as king. His name is unknown – Ganga Zumba is a title based on the Kikongo for great lord – but he placed his brothers and his mother Aqualtune in charge of the different villages as he repeatedly defeated Portuguese attacks, attracting more rebel slaves until he was ruling 30,000 people (Rio had 7,000 citizens) and a territory the size of Portugal. He held court in a small palace with three wives (two black and one mixed-race), guards and courtiers, advised as in Africa by older females, his mother and a matriarch named Acotirene.

The king was greeted with kneeling and clapping as in Kongo. Each town, fortified with palisades and traps, had a chapel with a priest, yet this was a hybrid creole Catholicism which tolerated polygamy and Bakongo rites. Ganga Zumba promoted his nephew Zumbi. While the dates and relationships between the family are uncertain, Zumbi, born in Palmares in 1655 before his uncles arrived, had been captured on a raid by the Portuguese and raised by a priest António de Melo. Baptized as Francisco and taught Portuguese and Latin, he impressed his teacher with ‘a skill which I never imagined in the black race, and which I have very rarely seen among whites’. At fifteen, he escaped back to the quilombo where he took the name of Zumbi, linked to the immortal nocturnal spirits in the Bakongo cult of ancestors. Now his uncle appointed him commander of the Palmarian army.

By the late 1670s, Zumba’s Palmares kingdom was famed throughout the Americas, encouraging other rebellions. In 1677, Ganga Zumba was wounded in an assault, in which some of his family were captured. The next year, the Pernambuco governor Pedro Almeida, offered a peace deal in which those born in Palmares would remain free if they recognized the crown, while recent runaways would be returned to their masters.

Exhausted by fifteen years of war and twenty campaigns, Ganga Zumba decided to negotiate, but his nephew Zumbi opposed the return of any runaways. When Zumba signed the agreement, Zumbi, advised by his wife Dandara, poisoned his uncle and was elected king.

THE WORLD SEIZERS: SHIVAJI, AURANGZEB AND THE POETESS

Zumbi repeatedly repelled Portuguese attacks, almost one a year, yet he had not forgotten his priest teacher, secretly visiting him three times at great personal risk. Even Almeida admired Zumbi, a ‘black man of singular valour, great spirit and rare constancy, the overseer of the rest, because his industry, judgement and strength to our people serve as an obstacle; to his, an example’.

In September 1657, as the Ganga dynasty ruled Palmares,^* the world’s greatest potentate Shahjahan did not appear at the balcony for the jharokha at the Red Fort: he was ill.