Zumbi dos Palmares

Zumbi was born free in the highland forest republic of Palmares — in what is now the Brazilian state of Alagoas — around 1655. Palmares, founded by escaped Africans and their descendants in the 1590s, had by the time of Zumbi's birth grown into a confederation of mocambos containing an estimated twenty thousand inhabitants and the largest free Black polity ever to exist in the Americas. Captured in infancy by a Portuguese expedition, he was raised by a missionary priest at the village of Porto Calvo, baptised Francisco, and taught Latin and Portuguese. At fifteen he returned to Palmares.

Under the reign of his uncle Ganga Zumba, who in 1678 accepted a controversial peace treaty with the colonial governor, Zumbi led the faction that rejected the terms — which required the surrender of all subsequently fled Africans. He deposed Ganga Zumba in 1680 and assumed the title of Zumbi — supreme war-leader — at the head of a republic now committed to total resistance.

For the following fifteen years he repelled successive Portuguese and bandeirante expeditions, defeating columns far larger than his own through fortification of the mountain capital Cerca Real do Macaco and through the discipline of a standing maroon army. In 1694 the bandeirante Domingos Jorge Velho — at the head of an army of nine thousand — broke through the final ring of palisades after a forty-two-day siege. Zumbi escaped with a small remnant and continued the war from the forest for fifteen months further.

He was betrayed by a captured lieutenant, ambushed and killed on the twentieth of November 1695. His head was salted and displayed in Recife to disprove the legend of his immortality.

He is honored here as the last sovereign of Palmares — the longest-lived free Black polity in the history of the Americas — and the twentieth of November remains the Brazilian Day of Black Consciousness.