Quilombo

Okay.

We created a new Quilombo.

That's right.

We created a new maroon settlement.

The Quilombo system, a military and social structure that has emerged in this region as both a mechanism for raising warriors and a means of absorbing refugees displaced by war, becomes an increasingly important feature of the landscape during these years.

Villages emptied by Portuguese raids, communities shattered by the collapse of older political arrangements, produce streams of displaced people who attach themselves to warrior encampments, some organized by ambitious military leaders like Cassanier, who operates with a fluid loyalty that shifts between serving Ndongo's interests and pursuing his own independent power.

Mbande must navigate relationships with these Kilombo leaders even as he tries to hold his own kingdom together, and the arrangement is never stable, never fully trustworthy in either direction.

Nzinga, moving through the councils where these matters are discussed, begins in these years to develop the deep understanding of military organization, of alliance building, of the psychology of warrior leaders that will serve her so critically in her own later reign.

She listens.

She undergoes rites associated with the Imbangala's warrior initiation herself, not as a formality, not as theatre, but as a genuine claim to the authority those rites confer.

Word travels fast through the camps of the region.

The Queen of Ndongo has become, in the eyes of the Imbangala, a warleader in her own right, entitled to command their loyalty, not as a foreign monarch borrowing muscle, but as a fellow initiate of the Kilombo.

So this is very non-abstract.

But what we did to prepare for this Quilombo event, which was Capuaristas coming together to learn about farming and land, was that we slaughtered our own sheep for them and chickens.

We harvested all the food from the land and we did an ancestral barbacoa where we were growing, you know, making the spice rubs exactly how they're made and the elders were cooking and teaching.

And the amount of reverence presence of the intergenerational group of about 80 people gathered was just palpable.

much of it treating the decision to organize separately as itself a betrayal of anarchist principle.

A black Brazilian anarchist named Pedro Ribeiro answered that criticism directly in an essay called Senzala or Quilombo, named for the two choices enslaved people in colonial Brazil had faced.

Stay chained in the slave quarters, the senzala, or run for a self-governed settlement like Palmares, the quilombo.

His argument was blunt.

None of this, the black commune as a real, governing, self-defended community, is a new idea Irvin invented in a prison cell.

It has a genealogy that runs back centuries, and it starts, for this episode, in Brazil.

Beginning around 1605, in the forested hinterland of Pernambuco, escaped enslaved Africans built Quilombo dos Palmares, a self-governing community modeled in part on the political traditions of the Kingdom of Congo.

It grew into a confederation of 11 towns and, at its height, a population of more than 30,000 people.