“Quilombos in general are very big right now,” said Ana Carolina Lourenço, a sociologist and adviser to one recent documentary on Palmares. “Many people want an alternative view, to try to escape the one-sided, one-dimensional vision of our history imposed by the Portuguese and Brazilian elite,” said author Marcelo D’Salete, whose painstakingly researched book, including maps and timelines alongside striking monochrome illustrations, has been widely used in classrooms. Later that month, Brazil’s senate voted to inscribe Dandara in the Book of Heroes in the Pantheon of the Fatherland, a soaring, modernist cenotaph in Brasília.Īngola Janga, a graphic novel charting the rise and fall of Palmares, has won a string of awards.

In March, the victorious carnival parade of Mangueira samba school highlighted Dandara among a lineup of overlooked black and indigenous heroes. Three centuries later, the remarkable saga of Palmares is being seized on once more as a symbol of resistance against Brazil’s rightwing president and the country’s pervasive racism towards its black and mixed-race majority.Ī pair of new television and Netflix documentaries, screened in late 2018 and this June, have examined the legacy of Palmares. Many escaped, forming quilombos, or free communities. In her telling, those killed included Dandara – her adoptive namesake – captain of a band of warrior women, whose husband Zumbi is similarly shrouded in myth as a fearless Palmarian commander.Ībout 5 million enslaved Africans were brought across the Atlantic to Brazil between 15.

“Hundreds threw themselves to their deaths rather than surrender,” said local guide Thais “Dandara” Thaty at the historical site in Serra da Barriga. Palmares allied with indigenous peoples, traded for gunpowder, launched guerrilla raids on coastal sugar plantations to free other captives, and withstood more than 20 assaults before falling to Portuguese cannons in 1695.

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