In the Charrua and Minuano lands now occupied by the Uruguayan state,
the word "quilombo" is often used as a synonym for disorder.
This definition is not free from a racist bias.
But the word "quilombo" has other meanings
across the vast territory now occupied by the Brazilian state.
Although common in our day-to-day lives, what do we understand here by "quilombo"?
And why does the poet sing "black war, quilombola strategy"?
The first reference we have in the official school system
is to the great Quilombo dos Palmares,
which lasted for a century in the 1600s in Serra da Barriga,
near the current imaginary border of
Pernambuco and Alagoas, northeast of the continent.
However, the subject is taught as a remote and isolated episode in history class,
which ended in extermination.
What few schools tell
is that the "quilombola" practices are still in constant development,
and that the proposed society defended in Palmares
went far beyond the liberation of people kidnapped from the African continent.
With a black majority,
Palmares also received dissident people,
in disagreement with the racist European colonial identity.
Indigenous people, displaced and dispossessed by the colonial invasion,
made up a good part of the population of Palmares.
There is also record of Iberian Moors, Muslims, and Jews
who came during the navigations and opposed the Catholic invasion.
Women considered witches,
homosexuals, transsexuals, and other bodies dissenting from the colonial,
belligerent, and intolerant model imposed by the inquisition that ravaged the region.
The school system does not show the picture of a network insubmissive to the colonial crown,
based on an organization of African roots,
and that was articulated through a method that persists and is adapted until today:
the quilombola strategy.
Resistance in Palmares lasted for decades.
People were born, lived their entire lives, and grew old within the Quilombo.
There is record of its own legislation,
trade and economic relations with the colonial cities,
various leaderships, and even internal disagreements.
Some records state that Palmares had
a population larger than that of the city of Recife.
And this is just one example,
Zumbi and Dandara being the leaders with the most records.
Other examples spread across the continent, from north to south,
wherever there was kidnapping and traffic of black people.
In territories occupied today by the Colombian state,
the region of Palenque was notable for its advances in quilombola strategy,
where Benkus Biohó was a prominent leader.
A great experiment in Quilombola strategy occurred on a Caribbean island,
which culminated in the only slave revolution in the Americas
that managed to defeat and expel the colonizers from their territory.
Resulting in independence and the founding of a republic, today called Haiti.
It is worth pointing out that the historical records
are subject to the colonizers' scientific method
which often tried to dismiss the knowledge
of the African and indigenous cultures.
Orality was, and still is,
an important means of recording and resistance -
passing knowledge from generation to generation.
The populations kidnapped from the African continent and enslaved by Europeans
endlessly resisted.
They sabotaged the plantation mills
and gathered in shelters that were often difficult to access.
There, it was possible to embody their culture without the state,
and to organize new uprisings to free more enslaved people.
There are records of very sophisticated Quilombola methods for insurgent organization,
such as communication by codes during work chants,
direct poisoning
and the planting of poisonous herbs to cover paths in the forest,
as well as the transmission of maps through hair braiding,
and fighting practices disguised as dancing, such as capoeira.
The countless resistances maintained a connection,
weaving a network of information,
through physical, oral, immaterial or extra-corporeal means.
In different ways,
this network of articulation and exchange of knowledge keeps evolving,
and today it also lives in digital forms.
A "quilombola strategy", as Nelson Maca calls it.
The strategy of gathering autonomously outside the colonial reach,
to keep alive a community culture
of integration with the forest, the neighborhood, or the biome where one is,
keeps evolving in contemporary culture.
Currently, several squats and spaces of antiauthoritarian culture
also identify themselves as quilombos.
After a lot of pressure,
the Brazilian State had to recognize
that a great part of its culture only exists because of the Quilombos.
Since 2003,
when it was decreed that Quilombola Lands should be demarcated and titled,
the State began to recognize the rights of this tradition and its territoriality.
In 2009, the first urban Quilombo was demarcated,
The Silva Family Quilombo in Porto Alegre.
Paving the way for a new understanding of the role of this strategy
in the formation of cities.
By 2019,
of the more than three thousand quilombola communities on record
in territory occupied by the Brazilian State,
only 5% had their lands demarcated.
And there is undoubtedly a vast amount of knowledge
and territories of which we have no official record.
In several Brazilian cities,
quilombola alliances and fronts give examples of solidarity,
organizing the defense of memory and territory,
as well as strengthening indigenous struggles and other liberating webs.
Over time, the word "kilombo", rooted in the language of the Bantu peoples,
became a verb in Portuguese: "aquilombar".
To get together with people like you and me.
To live life as it should be, out of the reach of oppressors and free from their laws.
To create one's own form of collective organization.
Recently, poetry literature has brought the term "QUEERlombo"
- the quilombola strategy encompassing queer culture and opening territories
for gender dissent in life and art.
The quilombola strategy has much to teach
for practices in various contexts,
and for various fields of knowledge.
If we have a search for knowledge in common with friends,
why keep feeding the institutions that oppress us?
Why not create autonomous spaces
to live today the way of life that nourishes us, inspires us, and gives us joy?
We have a collective future to build.
Our incendiary thirst has plenty to drink from, right here in our neighborhood.
What are we waiting for?