‘Little Angola’ of Latin America: The Secondary Politogenesis in the Communities of Fugitive Slaves

скачать Автор: Pakin, Alexandr V. - подписаться на статьи автора
Журнал: Social Evolution & History. Volume 24, Number 1 / March 2025 - подписаться на статьи журнала

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30884/seh/2025.01.03

Alexandr V. Pakin, Independent Researcher

ABSTRACT

The present article raises an interesting question, namely the secondary politogenesis and the re-creation of traditional African forms of social and political organization in the communities of runaway slaves (the so-called cimarrones) in Latin America in the first half of the seventeenth century. The article is devoted to the problem of revivalism (restoration) of traditional social and political structures in the communities of fugitive slaves (cimarrones) in colonial Latin America. The author studies a number of such communities in the first half of the seventeenth century and shows the link between the traditional structures and the Central African traditions of the Bantu people. I also examine the close connection of these phenomena with the development of the slave trade in the period of the union between Portugal and Habsburg Spain (1580–1640), in particular, with the Portuguese slave wars in Angola. The connection between these events and the examples of secondary politogenesis, as well as with the Bantu type of military leadership, allow the examples of such communities to be considered as unique phenomena, characteristic only of this historical period, which ended with the destruction by the Portuguese colonists of the early state of Palmares in colonial Brazil (1696).

Keywords: maroon, Latin America, Afro-American, early state, secondary politogenesis.

AFRICANS IN THE NEW WORLD:
THE STATE OF THE PROBLEM

The Africans came to the New World with the Spanish conquerors in a variety of statuses – soldiers, domestic servants – but the majority were imported slaves. In the cities slaves usually learned the Spanish language quickly and often bought themselves out, joining a numerous Diaspora of personally free ‘negroes and mulattoes’. The slaves on the plantations, however, never had such opportunities. They used to organize rebellions and fled in large numbers, forming the communities of fugitive slaves of different size and complexity outside the ‘Republic of the Spanish’.

The situation in the Luso-American and the Spanish-American worlds differed due the different proportions of the Creole, African and Indian populations, and the policies of the local authorities. Such a specific experience of the African survivalism as the fugitive slave community took different forms.

The subject of the present research is the revival of traditional African social and political patterns of organization in the communities of runaway slaves.

The phenomenon of such communities in Latin America is important for modern political anthropology as a specific form of secondary politogenesis. Politogenesis is defined as ‘…a process of separation of the political dimension within a society and formation of the political subsystem as a relatively autonomous subsystem, a process of emergence of special power forms of social organization, which is connected with the concentration of power and (both external and internal) political activities and their monopolization by certain groups and strata’ (Grinin, Korotayev 2009: 93). There is also an amalgam term ‘potestarity’, used by Russian ethnologists fr om St. Petersburg, which was in fact the Soviet-era way of ‘deceiving’ the Marxist terminology, supported by the political system and censorship.

One of the main features that reveal the presence of a complex organization is the systematic raids that require the military organization. So, the war factor, proclaimed by Robert Carneiro as the most essential for the primary politogenesis of states and chiefdoms, seems to be the most essential in our case of the secondary politogenesis (Grinin, Korotayev 2009: 70). The ‘peaceful’ communities remained ‘simple’ – they lacked internal hierarchy and never formed unions, comparable to the chiefdoms and Early States.¹ The peaceful communities tended not only to accept the offer of surrender in exchange for the status of the ‘free negro’ villages, but may have even come to an agreement with their slave masters to return to the work in the hacienda (McFarlon 1986). So we propose the term ‘raiding communities’ for those cases wh ere secondary politogenesis took place. Their social organization is characterized by the institutionalized war leader and the division of the population into groups of warriors and exploited peasants. Such a community was capable of active politogenesis, forming a society as complex as the chiefdom and even the early state.²

Other factors, such as economy and exchange, did not develop – they remained agrarian communities, and in most cases did not re-establish any lineage structures due to the lack of time or the lack of female population. Nevertheless, the social dominance of the ‘raider’ warriors over the peasants and the recognition of the self-appointed ‘kings’ or queens are the most visible characteristics. That is why Henri J. M. Claessen's term the ‘Early State’ seems to be a more appropriate term for the most developed community, the ‘Republic of Palmares’ in Brazil – the restoration of the political hierarchy and division into warriors, peasants and ‘rulers’ is well enough to testify this definition as relevant for the case of the study. In some cases, we can testify the political dominance of the ‘main’ village over few local communities (Carneiro 1977: 733–34; Claessen 2006).

It is important to emphasize that all cases of the African revivalism among Latin American slaves are the cases of the secondary politogenesis (see, e.g., Siim 2021). However, the Brazilian ‘mocambu’ (‘hideout’) societies are more likely to refer to non-hierarchical communities of runaway peasants, which, although very numerous, do not refer to the case. According to the sources, the military or bandit activity is the only circumstance that reveals the existence of inequality and hierarchy.

The mass emergence of fugitive communities of Africans of an evidently raiding nature falls into the period of the Portuguese aciento in the transatlantic slave trade, the period of the union of Spain and Portugal between 1580 and 1640. It was the union of their colonial empires – an old market for African slaves, Spanish and Luso- America, and the slave-trading Portuguese colonies in Africa. The growing Portuguese slave trade in Central Africa led to the dominance of the Bantu-speaking peoples of the Congo, Angola and Zaire in the importation of slaves. This was the most essential condition for the emergence of complex communities and the revival of types of native African social and political organization in the New World.

The phenomenon of communities of fugitive slaves was well studied, as were the problems of the cultural and social adaptation of the ‘negro’ population in the New World. We can point to a number of recent fundamental studies of the problem and related issues (Tardieu 2017; Newson 2007; Sweet 2003; Wheat 2009). Early works are also still relevant to the study (Villa-Vilar 1977; Schwartz 1968; Davidson 1966; Klein 1986; Boyd-Bowman 1969; Aguirre Beltran 1972). The specific role of the Bantu people has also become a subject of recent research (Ngou-Mve 1997, 2003). Other studies of the phenomenon of marronage deal with the late, ‘peaceful’ agrarian communities (see Schaffer 2005; McFarlon 1986).

A major advance has been recently made by David Wheat and his colleagues in creating the Slave-trading Voyages Database with the newly collected archival statistical data allowing tracking the changes in the provenance of slaves (Wheat 2009).

Armed slave rebellions were numerous from the earliest years of the colony, but the ethnic diversity always remained the main obstacle to the recreation of any traditional African organization within the fugitive communities. They were also short-lived – aggressive communities became the target of armed expedition and most of them were destroyed. That is the reason why all the examples prior to the aciento period do not present relevant cases.

We believe that the following factors are essential for successful attempts to revive the African patterns of social and political organization in the Americas – the dominance of a single ethnic group, the large number of fugitives, the short period, or lack of their acculturation in colonies (bozal negro), and a people with the military experience. It is well known that the first rebels in Haiti and Puerto Rico were Wolof (‘jelofe’) warriors. These factors were very characteristic for the aciento period of 1580–1640, due to the coincidence of a number of historical events – the coming together of colonial empires (slave source and slave market), the outbreak of local warfare in Angola 1600–1630, inspired and prayed for by the Portuguese, and an essential influence of the Bantu social and cultural patterns as a result of their dominance in slave importation. The Brazilian experience seems to be an exception for Latin America, since it experienced the growth of rebellious quilombo-like warrior camps until the middle of the eighteenth century. It was also heavily related on the importation of Bantu slaves in the periods beyond the times of the Spanish-Portuguese Union, and their percentage was exclusively high in comparison with other regions of Latin America or English and French colonies. It is also characterized by ‘negro’ Diaspora as the main exploited part of the population, unlike Spanish America with millions of Indians. This fact even led to the decline and cessation of the slave trade in colonial Mexico even before the independents (Florentino and Amlatino 2012; Schwartz 1987).

We should focus on the importance of the correlation between these factors, which has been underestimated by researches because there are a few well-studied cases due to the lack of data on the organization of most communities.

THE ETHNIC FACTOR AND THE FORMS OF ADAPTATION OF THE POPULATION OF AFRICAN ORIGIN IN THE NEW WORLD IN THE ACIENTO PERIOD (1580–1640)

The importation of the African slaves for heavy labour was planned by the conquerors in their treaties with the Crown (Fortuna 1972: 143, 147–148). Portugal had a monopoly over Spain in the slave trade in Africa since the peace treaty of 1479, and the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) confirmed its exclusive rights to conquer the African continent. The geography of their slave trade quickly spread from the Guinea coast to the Congo River (Hair 1980: 120–121). During the Union with Spain (1580–1640), the transatlantic slave trade officially became the monopoly of the new ‘Portuguese subjects’. This period is known as the ‘aciento period’, since all trading operations had to be carried out only on the basis of official treaties with the Crown (aciento).

The forms of ‘legal’ organization of the Diaspora of African origin were identical in the colonies of the two Pyrenean countries. Negroes and Mulattos, even if they were freed, were discriminated against – they could not become members of the city cabildo governance or become the members of the religious orders. Nor did they have a right to bear arms, except in the militia. The Cofradia, the brotherhood of the local ecclesiastical cult of the saint, was the general exception. It allowed Africans to organize and legally elect their own ‘judges’. ‘Black cofradias’ often became the refuge of the only African ethnic group (Zambrano 2008; Sweet 2003: 207). Often the cof-radia would elect the self-styled ‘king’ who would then secretly send his illegal ‘overseers’ to all the ‘tribesmen’ in the area. This type of organization was officially recognized in Cuba as a cabildo de naciòn from the eighteenth century (Alexandrenkov 1998: 120). It was also known as ‘reinado’ in Brazil and still existed even in the mid-nine-teenth century (Ribeiro 1958: 473).

The situation on the plantations and in the countryside differed from that in the cities – the concentration of the black population was very high as was the gender imbalance – it was a male population. Rural plantations became the main source for fugitive slaves. Catechization was usually neglected or even forbidden by the masters in Spanish America, despite the demands of the Crown.

The revival of traditional African forms of organization was only possible in the independent communities of fugitives. The authorities fought against them with an ‘armed hand’. They formed an essential part of the Latin American social landscape, together with the numerous diaspora of free African descendants in the cities, the ‘black’ militias, or the ‘black’ population of slave owners' plantations. Too many slaves used to escape recapture, and the places of ‘black’ population concentration (plantation regions and slave trading cities such as Veracruz and Cartagena-de-Las-Indias) were surrounded by settlements of runaways.

In the Spanish colonies, the escaped slaves became known as ‘cimarrones’ after the first mass escape from the Hagua mines in Cuba in 1526 – the word applied to ‘wild’ Indians (Lopez Velasco 1971: 115). It was adopted in the English colonies in the form of maroon.

The ethnic composition of the imported slaves constantly changed throughout the Colonia. Prior to 1575, the ships used to arrive from ‘the Guinea rivers’ and San-Tome and usually brought with them up to forty languages per voyage (Wheat 2009: 219–222, 224). The situation changed with the establishment of the Portuguese colony of Luanda in Angola, which gave a new impetus to the slave trade and led to an increase in the involvement of the Bantu people. The Portuguese began to intervene or provoke local wars. Only between 1603 and 1607 did they take part in twelve wars (eight – in Kisama, four – in Mbuila). Five of them took place in 1607 (Ngou-Mve 2003: 19). Around 1613, Angola's governor, B. Baño Cordoso, formed an alliance with the local aggressors, imbangala (‘banguela’) against the Congo and the Mbundu's Early State, Ndongo. The Imbangala were better known as the ‘yaga’ people, as they were referred to in the Congo king's correspondence with the papacy (Miller 1972: 565–66).

During these wars the slave trade increased drastically, while the Mbundu were obliged to pay tribute in slaves. The greatest number of the slaves exported falls on the years 1617–22, when 16 local wars took place in Angola – more than 50,000 men. The struggle of Angola's national heroine, Nzinga Mbandi Ngola (baptized Anna da Sousa), daughter of the Ndongo king, Ngola Kiluangi (reigned 1581–1617), for the restoration of the kingdom, provided many victims for the slave traders. This situation continued until the smallpox epidemic of 1630, which forced the Mbundu to leave their inhabited area (Ngou-Mve 2003: 25–26).

Such a large influx of captive Bantu into a slave market encouraged the Audiencia of Mexico in 1609 to openly protest to the King of Spain against Portuguese traders, asking for a reduction in the number of licenses granted (Ngou-Mve 2003: 19; Newson 2007: 58). The increasing importation of slaves from Angola and Congo was studied by David Wheat for Cartagena-de-Las-Indias. This city was one of the largest slave markets in the Spanish colonies for Peru, Colombia and Venezuela. In the first twenty-five years after the foundation of Luand, half of the 42 ships came from the Upper Guinea (20 ships) and the Cape of Green Island (13 ships). During the ‘Spanish Peace’ (1601–1616), the piracy activity was reduced to 39 ships. But in 1617–1625 only a third of them came from the rivers of Guinea, the rest came from Angola. For the period of 1573–1625, a half of the ships (199 of 436) came from Congo and Angola. Overall, Cartagena imported an estimated 73,210 people in 1573–1625 (Wheat 2009: 110, 253–55). The Brazilian slave trade also grew after the foundation of Luanda. Between 1550 and 1575, ‘only’ 10,000 African slaves were imported, but between 1575 and 1600 this figure rose to 40,000 (Metcalf 2005: 383).

The Crown's approach to the cultural adaptation of ‘negroes’ was paradoxical. The Royal Decree of 11 of May 1526 forbade the import of ‘ladino’ (Spanish-speaking) slaves because they ‘hindered the authorities’. Only the import of the ‘wild negro’, the bosal, was allowed (Fortuna 1972: 161). The pagans were also preferred as they were more adaptable to the true Christian Doctrine.

In the cities, slaves ‘enjoyed’ the same conditions as free hired workers, albeit with lower payment (Harth-Terre 1961: 331–332). The ‘tribal’ identity was maintained through marriage to their tribesmen. Yet, this preserved ethnic identity was, in Van Normann's terms, neo-African, for it was the unity through the country of origin that was reflected in their new names (such as Juan ‘Angola’ etc.) (Van Norman 2005: 199). The practice of self-buying out of slavery was encouraged by the Crown and the cities experienced a fast growth of the free ‘negro’ and ‘mulatto’ population. They served as hired workers and in local militia (Boyd-Bowman 1969: 150).

THE BANTU IN THE NEW WORLD AND THE PROBLEM
OF THE REVIVAL OF THE AFRICAN SOCIAL AND
POLITICAL ORGANIZATION

The mass importation of Bantu was the main reason for the emergence of the raiders communities, whose social and military organization reflected Central African patterns. It implied the rule of the military leader and a social hierarchy that includes the sacred leader (the main authority in the matters of the customary law), as well as a division of the community into raiders-warriors and peasants. The similarity of the social structures of different Bantu states was the key factor in the emergence of ‘complex’ Maroon communities throughout Latin America. Some new ‘polities’ are also characterized by the presence of political domination of the ‘capital’ over a number of settlements – which was not the rule for peaceful ‘Palenque’ or ‘mocambu’ communities without domination of military leaders.

The position of the Bantu in the slaveholding society of the New World was specific. The division between ‘urban’ and ‘countryside’ ‘negro’ in Latin America was in fact, already, ethnic. The Bantu were not welcome in the cities. For example, Peruvian ‘masters’ in the first half of the seventeenth century preferred ‘Guinean Negroes’ in the cities. The ‘Angolan’ Negroes were mainly found in the countryside (Newson 2007: 68). The Bantu were considered unruly, thieving and lazy in virtually all the slaveholding colonies of different nations (Lowenthal 1952: 26). The popular ‘sociology’ of the Spanish colonies itself was very simple – Spaniards were considered as the most capable, Indians as lazy and voluptuous, Negroes as cruel and anarchic.

The baptization of the Congolese and Angolans began back in Portuguese Africa. The Kings of ‘Bacongo’ were baptized in 1491 and there were a number of local Congo Christians and a bishop of local origin (since 1534) (Olderogge and Potekhin 1954a: 263; 1954b: 478). Almost all the slaves who arrived from the Congo and Angola had already been ‘catechized’ in some way and had some knowledge of the Doctrine – which was not the rule for the arrivals from the Guinea coast (Newson 2007: 101–103).

Upon the arrival in Cartagena-de-Las-Indias, they usually found themselves in the hands of the local Jesuit mission, which was dissatisfied with this ‘humiliation’ of catechization. In the early seventeenth century, it was the mission of Alonso Sandoval, who left a description of the slave trade in the Spanish Colonies.³ The mission had to rely on the team of ‘negro’-translators, each of whom spoke a number of languages. They used kikongo, spoken in the lower Congo basin, to communicate with the new arrivals from Congo and Angola. It became known as the language of Angola (Wheat 2009: 270). For Brazil, the local Bantu lingua franca was that of the Mbundu (Sweet 2003: 250). The number of ‘Angolans’ encouraged the Peruvian Jesuits to publish the vocabulary of the ‘Angolan language’ in Lima in 1630 in a number of 1500 copies. The slave owners sabotaged their efforts, insisting that learning Spanish would be enough for their slaves. So the Peruvian Jesuits left the idea of learning and teaching ‘Angolan’ language to the missionaries (Wheat 2009: 110, 253–55). Unlike Brazilian, Portuguese and Italian missionaries, Spanish missionaries only worked among the Indian population. That is the reason why the only Brazilian Jesuits were experts in the spiritual world of the ‘negro slaves’ that remained virtually ‘undiscovered’ by the Spanish American missionaries (Ribeiro 1958: 460).

THE FORTIFIED SETTLEMENTS AND THE PROBLEM
OF THE ORIGIN OF THE CIMARRONS' SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN THE ACIENTO PERIOD

The regular settlements of fugitive slaves in Spanish America were called palenque (Spanish word for ‘fence’). Nevertheless, Leon Marques, a visitor to Cartagena in 1601, applied the word ‘fortress’ to this type of settlement (Wheat 2009: 141). The original pattern was probably a regular warrior camp surrounded by a wooden palisade. It is also highly probable that during the constant warfare in Angola, every settlement in the early seventeenth century was fortified.

The main social institution that attracted the researches in connection with the question of ‘re-africanization’ of fugitive slaves in Americas was the quilombo – a fortified warrior camp of the Angolan imbangala. Joseph C. Miller, before the analysis of the oral tradition of the 1960s, believed that their expansion began as a result of the establishment or seizure of control over the warrior training camps in the poly-ethnic confederation of Lunda, neighbors for the Mbunda and Ngola (Miller 1972: 565).

The quilombo was a regularly organized warrior settlement-camp, surrounded by a double wooden fence with the ‘pretoria’ of the military leader in the center (Miller 1972: 566). Imbangala (port. ‘ban-guela’, ‘benguela’) was first mentioned by the Portuguese in the 1560s. The English sailor Edward Battel, a prisoner of the Imbangala, stated that the first quilombo camp was founded by Elembe, the ancestor of Calanda, with whom he travelled in 1600–1601. Miller identified them with the Cota Calanda Imbe of the Lunda confederation and the Kulembe of the late tradition (Miller 1972: 564).

According to Alonso Sandoval's Bantu informants, the imbangala restored and replenished their numbers by capturing the youth of the enemy, and nothing else – they were cut off from lineage structures or local communities and forbidden to have families. They were also known as ‘drunkards and cannibals’ (Ngou-Mve 2003: 19). The Italian missionary Antonio Cavazzi noted that they obeyed only their military leaders (Cavazzi 1687: 205–208). It is precisely these people who never fall into the hands of slave owners – at that time they were ‘allies’ of the Portuguese.

The acceptance of imbangala rites by the kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba (the main victims of the Portuguese) was connected with the activity of Nzinga Mbanga, the famous daughter of the king of Ndongo, Ngola's Kiluangy (ruled 1581–1617). After the union of Ndongo and Matamba in 1622, Nzinga married an imbangala (yaga) leader, Cangola, and founded a quilombo, accepting other ‘yaga’ rites (Cavazzi 1687: 208). Ngou-Mve noted that the acceptance of yaga rites was not limited to Angola – many ‘authentic’ settlements of their ‘heirs’, proud of their origins (toponyms ending in ba-jag, yak’a), can be found in Gabon and Congo (Brazzavile) (Ngou-Mve 2003: 27).

THE BANTU OF NEW SPAIN.
THE ‘KINGDOM’ OF THE YANGA

In 1560–1580, the cimarrone gangs terrified Mexico from Guadalajara to Zacatecas, joining the Chichimec Indians (Ngou-Mve 2003: 30). After armed repression, the center of the new rebellions moved to Veracruz, the major center of the slave trade and plantations (Davidson 1966: 244–46).

It was here, in the depths of the Veracruz and Oaxaca wilderness, that the palenque of ‘king Yanga’ was founded. It may have happened 30 years before the clash with the governor's forces in 1610. The ‘kingdom’ counted more than one settlement. The main settlement had 60 houses for about 90 adult male Africans and 24 women – blacks and Indians. This was undoubtedly the result of the disproportionate number of males imported as slaves (Davidson 1966: 240). The slave owners' demands to import more women were never met because of the polygamy of the indigenous Africans. There was a strict division of labour among the Yanga's subjects – some of them only farmed, while others participated in raiding (Davidson 1966: 249–50).

The treats of a Bantu culture are reflected in the military customs of this palenque, like the use of drums for long-distance communication – the ‘jungle telegraph’, used even by commoners in the Congo or Angola. Ngou-Mve considered that the fact that an ‘Angolan’, Francisco de la Matosa, was involved as a military leader was good enough to confirm a Bantu origin of the social pattern of the Yanga kingdom (Ngou Mve 1997: 38–44).

Such war-adapted fugitives were able to reorganize and coordinate their actions. In Colombia, the main center of slave trade, the palenque Limon, Polini and Sinaguare existed during the aciento period. They had a labor division based on social inequality among their members – the cimarrones of Limon hunted people for labor force to turn them into enforced laborers (Wheat 2009: 184–185). Some of them, after working as farmers, later became the members of the raiding parties. In 1634, three palenques joined forces, chose to proclaim ‘a black woman Eleonora’ as their queen, and retreated inland. The new ‘kingdom’ had a large number of people in its communities. During the attack on the main settlement, 313 captives were taken, while other survivors fled (Rodriguez 1979: 168–170). However, there is no clear evidence of the Bantu influence.

THE REPUBLIC OF PALMARES:
‘LITTLE ANGOLA’ (ANGOLA YANGA)

The most spectacular case of African revivalism in fugitive communities is the early state of Palmares in colonial Brazil. When Portugal joined Spain, it made new enemies – the Dutch started to seize the former Portuguese colonies. In 1637 they captured Luanda and in 1641 they occupied Pernambuco in Brazil. They did not intervene in the organization of the slave trade, but the invasion provided many opportunities for slaves to escape (Greenfield 1969).

The main occupation of the Portuguese in Brazil in the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries was sugar planting. The colonies also depended on the importation of African slaves. In the famous words of the Portuguese diplomat at the time of the Dutch wars, Father Domingo Vieyra, ‘…there is no Pernambuco without Negroes, and there are no Negroes without Angola’ (Boxer 1948: 510). The flows of the Atlantic Ocean made the Brazilian colonies the most convenient stop for the Angolan slave ships. The proportion of the slaves from Congo and Angola was extremely high, reaching 90 per cent by the 1680s (Mercie 1984; Sweet 2003).

The legal self-organization, as in Spanish America, was only allowed for the black population within the cofradias, which had been established since 1552. The Indians, Africans, and Europeans used to establish cofradias only for their ethnic group (Mulvey 1982: 41–42).⁴

It was during the wars for control of Pernambuco that reports began to appear of the ‘Republic of Palmares’ – the largest and only regularly organized African polity ever created in the New World. It was a full-fledged early state influenced by Central African patterns. The word ‘Republic’ was then used to refer to any organized communities as distinct from a ‘kingdom’ or feudal possession.

During the late wars against the Portuguese up to 1676, Palmares was already a complex community. It had a ‘royal’ capital, Macaco, and eight subject settlements, stretching to the north and north-west from the Portuguese settlements of Pernambuco. It was already an early state under the rule of ‘king Zumbi’, a sacred leader with the title nganga a zumbi. This title is of Bantu origin and used to be given to the ritual specialists, able to pacify angry ancestral spirits or the spirits of the ‘forgotten’ dead who had not received sacrifices (Sweet 2003: 154). His ‘royal’ settlement (modern Sierra de Barriga) is said to have taken its name from ‘the assassination of this animal’, i.e. the ritual sacrifice of monkey. The population of the ‘republic’ called it Angola Janga – ‘Little Angola’ (Anderson 1996: 559). There was also a royal etiquette – kneeling and clapping before the king (Anderson 1996: 553–554). The king never allowed the appearance of ‘sorcerers’ (who were feared by the Africans). The royal settlement, however, had a Catholic chapel and the priest of the most ‘ladino’ members; and three statues of Catholic saints (Jesus, Our Lady and Snt. Blas). The methods of population control were simple and very ‘African’ – warriors hunted down and killed their own runaways (Anderson 1996: 553).

Palmares had nine settlements – Zambi, Acotirene, Tabokas, Dambrabanga, Subupira, the ‘royal’ enclave of Macaco, Osenga, Amaro and Andaloquituxe. The population is estimated at 20,000 people (Orser and Funari 2001: 68). Macaco, under the direct rule of the king, had 1,500 houses. Subupira, on the Cachingu River, was designated as a military training camp under the king's brother, ‘Ghana Zona’, and had 800 houses (Anderson 1996: 553). It was used to train young warriors and was the only closest analogue to the Quilombo camp. Only four settlements were governed by ‘cabo’, the military chief – Osehga, Daprabanga, etc. Others were governed by royal relatives – ‘Acotirene’, which was also the name of the king's mother, Andaloticuxe – his nephew, etc. The royal lineage was the key element in the political organization. Nevertheless, ethnic diversity influenced the government pattern – a king's son-in-law, ‘Ganamuissa’, was called ‘Chief of all the people from Angola’, that means there were others ‘groups’ (Lara 2010: 9). It is quite possible that there was interaction with other cultural groups – ceramic materials from the Macaco ruins in Sierra da Barriga were represented by the polished losal pottery, as well as European and Indian types (Orser and Funari 2001: 67).

‘The Negroes from the Congo and Angola’ of Palmares were particularly feared by their king, which explains the origin of his power (Anderson 1996: 554). According to Robert Nelson Anderson and Stuart Schwartz, all the reports of the commanders of the military expeditions point to the imbangala ethnos as the prototype of Palmares. But this is not correct – Yaga's neighbors in Africa only accepted its military organization. James Sweet emphasizes that all Bantu warriors used to break all ties with the lineage organization after joining the military camp (Sweet 2003: 50). The ‘king’ title ‘nganga a nzumbi’ had no meaning for the lineageless imbangala (Sweet 2003: 154).

It remains uncertain when Palmares was formed as an early state – Silvia Lara and others believe that it was in the process of being formed as a typical African state. Fugitive communities in this area appeared no later than in 1606. It is likely that most of the inhabitants of Palmares were escaped slaves from the time of the Dutch conquest in 1641, or their descendants.

Since Miller's 1961 publication on imbangala, there was a tendency to claim that almost every Maroon settlement is a quilombo camp of the imbangala type (see Schwartz 1987; Ngou-Mve 2003: 20). But the Portuguese ‘negro slaves’ used to come from four different kingdoms (Congo, Loango, Ndongo and Matamba) and Palmares had only one warrior camp, ruled by the king's brother, ‘Gana Zona’. He was not the supreme military leader – it was another person, the king's nephew, Zumbi, who was canonized as the Brazilian national hero in 1978. When the king surrendered to the Portuguese, Zumbi managed to capture and poison him in what may have been an African-style ritual regicide (Anderson 1996: 559). In 1694 the expedition of the bandeirants took the capital of Palmares, Macaco. Three hundred defenders were killed and 400 were taken prisoners. Zumbi, who had the reputation of being ‘immortal’, was ambushed and killed on 20 November 1695.

* * *

It seems the phenomenon of the recovery of traditional African social structures in Latin America was in fact limited to the period of the Portuguese wars in Angola, from 1575 to the 1630s. It was during this period that the number of equestrian societies was recorded. Unlike the fugitive communities, which chose to accept the authorities' offer to surrender and become a settlement of ‘free negroes’, they resisted any attempt to subjugate them.

We can confirm that the slaves transported to Latin America during this period were mostly of the Bantu origin. However, there are no clear types of organization – in most cases we can report some characteristic ‘African’ features. In most cases, their spoken language remains an open question. They had social inequality based on occupation divisions, recognized military and religious leaders, and in some cases – a complex territorial structure. But their mixed origins and short existence did not allow them to evolve – only Palmares remains the evidently ‘African’ type of a typical emerging early state, with a separate military organization and a sacred king, clearly of theAngolan type.

The ‘negro’ refuge communities of Latin America, that followed the Bantu militarized pattern, first recreated a military organization with the domination of the warriors over the agriculture population. Its essential feature – the military leadership represented by an ‘Angolan’. They were aggressors against the European and Indian populations.

With the end of the Portuguese monopoly in the Spanish colonies, the asento concessions fell into the hands of the ‘Italian subjects’ of the Spanish crown, who entrusted the transportation to French and English merchants, who used to operate in the Gulf of Guinea, who bought Mandingo. The Bantu continued to be transported via the contraband routes from Brazil. This meant a change in the cultural patterns of the black population of Americas.

The most important legacy of the Maroon communities is the new settlements of ‘free negroes’ on the map of Latin America. Some of them, like Cuijla in Mexico, managed to preserve their traditional material culture.

The irony is that the only ‘Negro’ state that exists today, that was ever created by the rebel ‘negro slaves’, the Republic of Haiti, never relied on the revival of any ‘African patterns’ of political organization. It gained its independence by accepting the bourgeois constitutional form of state organization. The fugitive raiding communities disappeared in the fight against the colonial authorities, or surrendered for the status of ‘free village’ and their inhabitants were acculturated.

The most successful example of the newly-emerged Bantu-type state in the New World, the early state of Palmares, still serves on the agenda of national cultural policy in one of the leading modern Latin American states, the Republic of Brazil. It became the official symbol of ‘black Brazil’. Its last warlord, Zumbi, was proclaimed a ‘national hero’ in 1978 and the day of his death, 20 November, is celebrated as ‘Black Conscience Day’ (‘Zumbi Day’) (Anderson 1996: 560; Olser, Funari 2001: 69).

In conclusion, we can confirm that all cases tend to be cases of secondary politogenesis, regardless of whether they refer to the emerging Early State (as Palmares) or the chiefdom-like (composed of several villages without the complexity of a developed hierarchy). All these societies already had a Bantu pattern of social organization as a prototype (see Grinin 2009: 115).

Nevertheless, in most cases the separation of military and civil authorities was not always a sign of a specific ‘African’ pattern in the organization of the community of escaped slaves. The colonial organization of the Spanish and Portuguese societies also served in most cases as a pattern for the fugitive community, which rather depended of the degree of ‘ladinization’ (Spanish or Luso-speaking) of the organizers (McFarlon 1986: 135–146). We therefore do not share the enthusiasm of Stuart Schwartz, who interprets the presence of the military leader as a sign of a Bantu-quilombo warrior camp pattern. Communities before 1575 had a more ‘mixed’ ethnic population, a fact confirmed by Wheat's statistics on slave importation. This made any real revival of an African pattern impossible…

Fig. 1. ‘The Mulattos of Esmeralda’ – famous Ecuadorian maroons, surrendered their settlement to the Spanish Crown in exchange for nobility and the position of governors. Sanches Galque, Quito, 1599. Madrid. Prado Museum.

The ‘ladinization’ of the ‘negro’ escaped slaves implied another way of resistance – even if it was not ‘peaceful’, it usually copied colonial patterns, implying also an alliance with the local encomienda Indians.⁵ In most cases, the sources do not allow revealing the presence or the ethnic pattern of revived African structures, as with most of the ‘late’ (18^th century) Brazilian communities. ‘Negro ladino’ slaves could revive colonial patterns that also recognized the division between military (‘capitan’) and ‘secular’ (‘gobernador’) authorities. It was a major misunderstanding for any enthusiast of the theory of the revival of specific imbangala ‘quilombo’ camps for any period after the wars in Angola in the early seventeenth century. For it was certainly not a pattern for the eighteenth century, when the imbangala migrated far from the neighborhood of their Portuguese ex-‘allies’ and became ‘victims’, not slave hunters, in the slave trade. Case studies show that by this time they accounted for only 12 per cent of the Brazilian slaves. C. Miller's article on imbangala was a ‘temptation’ for the unsupported and intensified ‘comparisons’ (Miller 1961; Schwartz 1978; Ramos 1988: 56).

The only period of real revival of African patterns of political and social structures in Latin America relates to a period of intense warfare in Angola in 1575–1630 and the union of the Portuguese and Spanish colonial empires. This was a period of dominance of the Bantu refugees in the importation of slaves to the Luso and Spanish Americas. That is why the example of the emergence of the early state of Palmares was never repeated.

NOTES

¹ See, for example, the work of McFarlon (McFarlon 1986).

² The neo-evolutionary term, proposed in the 1970s by Henri M. Claessen and Peter Skalnik for the first early states. The theory of early state was formulated as a response to the inadequacy of the existing Marxist and neo-evolutionary terms (Claessen 2006).

³ Sandoval, Alonso de. De instauranda Áephiopum salute. ‘Un tratado sobre la esclavitud’. Madrid. 1987.

⁴ This was not the case in Spanish America (Zambrano 2008).

⁵ Like the ‘negro Miguel’ mutiny in early Venezuela (1553 a.d.) (Oviedo y Baños 2004: 156–160).

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