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By Root 3132 0

The nephew of Ganga Zumba, the king, Zumbi was taken as an infant by Dutch forces during an otherwise unsuccessful attack. He was raised under a European name by a priest in the small coastal town of Porto Calvo, learning Portuguese, Latin, theology, and sciences like navigation and metallurgy. In 1670 the teenaged Zumbi ran back to Palmares and resumed his maroon name and life, though he returned to the priest for sentimental visits. Charismatic, well educated, and knowledgeable about the enemy, he rose quickly to command despite a severe limp from a wound suffered in an early battle. Zumbi, too, may have been a title, rather than a name. It means something like “ancestral spirit”—a reference, perhaps, to his return from the death of colonial life.

A Portuguese assault in 1677 wounded Ganga Zumba and captured some of his children and grandchildren. Weary and saddened, the king negotiated a peace treaty the next year with the Portuguese. He promised to stop accepting new escapees and move out of the mountains if the Portuguese would stop attacking Palmares. Zumbi viewed the pact as a sellout of everything the maroons stood for. Angered beyond measure, he poisoned the king, seized the throne, and tore up the treaty. The war was on again. Colonial militias attacked every year for the next six years, achieving little.

Appalled by the meager results of the forty-year campaign against Palmares, the newly appointed governor-general of the region decided to try a different tack. He had received a request from a man named Domingos Jorge Velho for a license to conquer more Indians. Reluctantly, the governor agreed to meet him.

Jorge Velho was a bandeirante, a backwoodsman. Often the product of a union between a Portuguese man and an Indian woman, bandeirantes used their mothers’ connections to advance the agenda of their fathers—indeed, the term bandeirante means “flag-bearer,” and refers to their role in claiming land for Portugal. Jorge Velho was an exemplary case. A Kiplingesque adventurer, he had assembled a private army and created a kind of private kingdom in southern Amazonia. Hundreds of Indians served him as fieldworkers and soldiers, controlled partly by his promise to protect them from other, worse bandeirantes. Jorge Velho had the gangster’s predilection for boasting of his magnanimity. He seized Indians and their land, he later proclaimed in a letter to the Portuguese court, for the natives’ own good, not merely for profit. By taking natives from the forest, he

domesticate[d] them to the knowledge of civilized life and human society and to association and rational dealings.… If afterward we use them in our fields we do them no injustice, for this is to support them and their children as much as to support us and ours.

The letter’s flowery phrases, as well as the letter itself, were doubtless written for him by someone else; Jorge Velho was illiterate.

As the governor discovered at the meeting, the bandeirante had more in common with the maroons than with other Europeans. He spoke Portuguese so badly that he had to use an interpreter to speak with colonial officials. “This man is one of the worst savages I have ever encountered,” reported the appalled bishop of Pernambuco, who reserved especial ire for the bandeirante’s penchant for traveling with seven Indian concubines “to exercise his lusts.” (The concubines, more than sexual partners, were Jorge Velho’s links into native communities. For the same reason, he also had a Portuguese wife.)

The colonial administration knew that Jorge Velho might be able to break Zumbi, but its officials were reluctant in the extreme to hire him. Only after almost seven years of dithering did the authorities finally cave in. By that time Jorge Velho had them over a barrel—he was their last chance. If he would move on taking care of the Palmares problem, the governor-general promised, the administration would provide his men with gunpowder, bullets, food, a tax-free hand with any booty, a reward for every captured African, and, perhaps most important, full pardons for any previous