Who was Zumbi dos Palmares?

Free villages in the palm hills

In the 1600s, sugar made Pernambuco, on Brazil’s northeastern coast, one of the richest corners of the Portuguese empire. Every sugar mill ran on the labor of enslaved Africans. Some of them fled inland, to hills covered in palm forest, and built villages there, called mocambos. The settlers lumped them all together under one name: Palmares, “the palm groves.”

Palmares was never a single town. Its mocambos, among them Macaco, Subupira and Mouza, moved around for almost a century, between southern Pernambuco and today’s state of Alagoas. People grew maize and manioc, worked forges and traded with their neighbors. Many came from the region of Angola and spoke Kimbundu. Children were born there who never knew captivity. How many people lived in Palmares at its height, no one can say: the documents speak only of thousands.

The deal he refused

Dutch and Portuguese expeditions failed against Palmares for decades. Then, in 1675 and 1677, the governor’s troops burned mocambos and captured relatives of the chief, known in the history books as Ganga Zumba. The historian Silvia Lara, rereading a manuscript of 1678, argues that the right name is Gana Zumba: in Kimbundu, gana means “lord.” In 1678 he sent envoys to Recife and accepted terms: freedom for everyone born in Palmares and land at a place called Cucaú. The price was handing over everyone who had fled the mills.

Zumbi would not hand anyone back. He took the lead of those who stayed in the hills. The deal fell apart in under two years. Ganga Zumba was murdered in 1680, by poison according to tradition, and some of Cucaú’s settlers were enslaved again.

The fall of the Serra da Barriga

For fifteen years Zumbi held off one expedition after another. In 1694, after a long siege, troops under Domingos Jorge Velho, a bandeirante, one of the São Paulo frontiersmen who led armed expeditions into the interior, took the main stronghold on the Serra da Barriga. Zumbi got away, wounded. Betrayed by a captured companion, he was found and killed on November 20, 1695. His head was put on display in Recife.

The governor wrote to the king that Palmares was finished, and so was the myth that Zumbi could not die. He was wrong twice. The last mocambo, Mouza, held out until 1714. And the man became a legend.

A hero with no portrait

Nobody painted or drew Zumbi while he lived. Antônio Parreiras’s portrait dates from 1927, and every statue of him is an interpretation. What survives about him was written by his enemies, such as the Relação das guerras feitas aos Palmares, an account of the wars against Palmares written in 1678, which Lara found again in Lisbon’s national archive in 2009.

Brazil’s Black movement kept his memory alive. In 1996, three hundred years after his death, Law 9.315 entered his name in the Book of Heroes of the Nation. The day he died is now a national holiday, the National Day of Zumbi and Black Consciousness: the story of that choice is in Why is Brazil’s Black Consciousness Day on November 20?. A memorial park stands today on top of the Serra da Barriga. For the law that finally ended slavery in 1888, almost two centuries after Zumbi, see What was the Lei Áurea?.