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The word Quilombo has its origins in Kimbundu, one of the languages of Angola. It meant a rest or camping place for nomadic peoples. In Brazil, where Portuguese colonizers forcibly brought about five million people from Africa to work, the word quilombo referred to communities formed to escape slavery. The largest and most symbolic is the Quilombo dos Palmares in the northeast of the country and is said to have existed between 1580 and 1710. But in Spanish, the word quilombo means chaos, disorder, hard-to-reach place or brothel. A racist linguistic derivation. “It's an organized mess,” jokes Luis Claudio dos Santos, known in Quilombo do Campinho as Tuca. It is Griô, keeper of the community's history. The youngest, 49 years old. “Here most of us are descended from Vovó Antonica, Tía Marcelina or Tía Luiza and until a few generations ago we had little contact with people from outside, we are all cousins,” he says at the entrance to the quilombo where he lives , 20 kilometers from Paraty.
Paraty is a tourist city with 45,000 inhabitants and is located in southeastern Brazil between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Since 2019, it has been recognized as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO because it is a mixed place of culture and biodiversity. Its historic center consists of a group of white houses fronting a bay of calm waters protected by jungle-covered mountains. The seemingly idyllic setting was Brazil's largest gold export port during the colonial period. Shipments of metals and precious stones mined from the interior arrived there and traveled to Europe by sea. Thousands of kidnapped people from African countries also arrived.
Roda de jongo at the Flip Preta Literature Festival 2023 at the Quilombo do Campinho.Coletivo Audiovisual da Juventude Quilombola
Antonica, Marcelina and Luiza were two sisters and a cousin who disembarked from a slave ship on the beach of Paraty Mirim in the mid-19th century when they were still teenagers. “They worked in the Hacienda de la Independencia, but when the Golden Law came into effect, the abolition of slavery in Brazil coincided with the fact that the land of the Hacienda's sugar cane and coffee plantations was exhausted and the masters abandoned them,” explains Tuca. But the three African women did not leave; they founded a community there that continues to resist today: the Quilombo do Campinho da Independência, in which, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), 550 people live.
Albertina dos Santos will soon be 95 years old, she is the oldest woman in the Quilombo and is bursting with energy. His gaze shines between dark-skinned eyelids. She sits on the porch of her home, about a 15-minute walk from the center of the community, reached via a path through lush vegetation. “When I arrived in Quilombo do Campinho 68 years ago, it was a terrible place with closed jungle and lots of dangerous animals like snakes and jaguars,” he says.
Albertina dos Santos, 95 years old, resident of the municipality of Quilombo do Campinho.Paula López Barba
She was born in Camburí, a coastal town 160 kilometers away, and although she prefers the sea, she married at the age of 25 and moved to Quilombo, where she gave birth to 13 children. “That has changed a lot since the Río Santos highway was built in the 1970s. It was a big sacrifice to walk to Paraty with a big belly and several children. We had to cross the river, sometimes the water was up to our necks because the river was very fast at that time. Remember the few products they brought with them from the city: salt for preserving food, kerosene for light, and soap for cleaning. Once we set out at dawn to take our sick four-year-old son to the doctor and didn't arrive in time. “He died in my arms,” she remembers, sitting in the rocking chair made of iron and plastic strips. She met the second generation of Quilombo, the daughters of the matriarchs. “They told a lot of stories about what it was like when the community was formed during slavery times, but I don't remember exactly,” he admits. He also cannot remember whether any of his ancestors came from Africa. “My parents and grandparents were born in Brazil,” he says.
In 2022, the IBGE studied Brazilian quilombos for the first time and concluded that 1.3 million people identify themselves as quilombolas and that more than half live in the Northeast region. 167,202 of them live in one of the 494 official Uilombola areas, such as Campinho da Independência, the first legally recognized area in the state of Rio de Janeiro. Since 1999 they have owned property rights to 287 hectares. The area is also environmentally protected as it consists of 70% Atlantic forest, one of the most diverse and threatened biomes in the world.
Self-sufficiency and community-based tourism
Daniele Elias Santos was born in Quilombo do Campinho in the late 1980s, when there were already streets and electric lights. She is now president of the AMOQC Neighborhood Association and coordinator of the Nhandereko Network of Community-Based Tourism, made up of indigenous peoples and traditional Caiçara and Quilombola communities in the area of Angra, Paraty and Ubatuba, very tourist towns on the southern coast from Río de Janeiro and north coast of São Paulo. “Community-based tourism contradicts the logic of mass tourism. It is carried out by traditional communities who show their culture and history and create work and income for the community,” he says.
One of the activities offered is the guided tour of the Quilombo. Today is Thursday and a group of about twenty children arrived early in the morning. “The majority of the audience that comes is upper class and comes from private schools. It is important to plant a seed in these children so that they realize that there are multiple Brasils in Brazil. They live in their bubble. Through tourism, we raise our voice and explain what it is like to live in a quilombola community from the 19th century to today,” says Elias. It's two o'clock in the afternoon and on the second floor of the restaurant building a group of adults is sitting in a circle on the floor in front of three women. “Our teachers were the oldest people in the quilombo who told the story, taught us planting, the use of medicinal herbs and crafts. There was no school, they brought us teachers when there were elections and they taught us in a house for about three months to get votes,” says Griô Adilsa da Conceição Martins. Behind her hangs a photo of her mother, Madalena Alves da Silva, with her father, Seu Valentim Conceição; both leaders of the Quilombo do Campinho.
The municipal school of Quilombo do Campinho. Paula Lopez Barba
After being contextualized, visitors take a guided walk through the community. They pass the soccer field and several houses until they reach the core, where most of the public buildings are located, such as the health center, the municipal school, the neighborhood association, the library, the Catholic church and a craft shop. They offer traditional group basket weaving workshops, farming and jongo, an Afro-Brazilian dance that was born in Senzala, a place where slaves were imprisoned. “Jongo used to be practiced from midnight so that the gentlemen wouldn’t see it, because escape strategies were involved and the dance was a spiritual purification.” Now we have a resistance group,” says Elias. They also organize cultural events open to the public, such as the Black Culture Festival in November, Black Consciousness Month, and the so-called Flip Preta –Flip Negra-, which is an alternative to the well-known International Literature Festival of Paraty (Flip), which has been celebrated since 2003 , but in this case the subject, references and audience are black.
The tour ends where the visit began, in the restaurant. There is no boss here, it is managed by neighbors and the money goes to the community. It offers dishes made with local ingredients such as fish, taioba leaves and bananas, decorated with flowers. They use what they have available, buy from local producers and try not to pollute the land through an ecological sewage system. One of the main ingredients on the menu is juçara (Euterpe edulis), a fruit of the palmetto palm, which is very similar to the popular açaí palm (Euterpe oleracea). “It is more logical to use the fruit, because for the palmetto you have to cut down the tree and it takes about ten years for it to grow,” explains one of the workers. The alternative they offer is Pupunha (Bactris gasipaes), known as organic palm because it takes less time to grow and its production is more sustainable.
Sustainability and self-sufficiency have always been basic requirements in Quilombo do Campinho, as residents had to organize themselves. “The abolition of slavery in Brazil was not done well, they left the freed people nothing and had to feed themselves in a primitive way. Here we were always very united and did everything as a group: preparing the land, building a house or hunting. When someone went into town to buy something, they divided it up. “Everyone shares with others,” says Tuca. She believes that racism will never end and that community-based tourism is the best tool available to them now to avoid losing their culture, staying in the territory and not having to work outside the quilombo to remain enslaved become.
Appearance of the craft shop in the municipality of Quilombo do Campinho. Paula Lopez Barba