Dandara dos Palmares

Dandara — whose birth name and birth year were not recorded by the Portuguese chroniclers from whom the only contemporary documents survive — emerges in the archive of Palmares in the second half of the seventeenth century as the partner of Zumbi (placed in this archive) and as a sustained commander in her own right within the maroon confederation. She bore three sons by Zumbi — Motumbo, Harmódio and Aristogíton — and is named in colonial despatches alongside the other captains of the republic.

The few surviving accounts describe her training in capoeira — the Afro-Brazilian martial discipline that emerged within the quilombos — and her command of one of the women's contingents that defended the outer palisade of Cerca Real do Macaco during the bandeirante sieges of the 1690s. She is named in the colonial record as one of the negotiators who, in 1678, argued against acceptance of the treaty offered by Governor Pedro de Almeida — siding with Zumbi against Ganga Zumba and helping to consolidate the absolutist resistance party that would govern Palmares through its final fifteen years.

When the army of Domingos Jorge Velho breached the inner walls of the capital on the sixth of February 1694, Dandara was among the defenders captured. Rather than be returned to enslavement she threw herself from a cliff into the gorge below. Her death — preserved in oral tradition for more than three centuries before entering the written historical record — became one of the founding episodes of Afro-Brazilian women's resistance literature and the subject of twentieth-century monuments in Salvador, Recife and Maceió.

She is honored here as the warrior-strategist of Palmares and as the matriarchal partner of its last sovereign.