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The word quilombo is of Kimbundu origin, one of the languages of Angola. It meant a resting or camping place for nomadic people. In Brazil, where Portuguese colonizers brought some five million people from Africa to work by force, the word quilombo referred to communities organized to escape slavery. The largest and most emblematic is the Quilombo dos Palmares, in the northeast of the country and it is said to have existed between 1580 and 1710. But in Spanish the word quilombo means mess, disorder, place that is difficult to access or brothel. A racist linguistic derivation. “It's an organized mess,” jokes Luis Claudio dos Santos, known as Tuca in Quilombo do Campinho. Is he screamed, retainer of the history of the community. The youngest, 49 years old. “Here, most of us descend from Vovó Antonica, Tía Marcelina or Tía Luiza and until a couple of generations ago we hardly mixed 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 of 45,000 people, located in the Brazilian southeast, between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. It has been recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site since 2019, for being a mixed place of Culture and Biodiversity. Its historic center is a group of white houses in front of a bay of calm waters, protected by mountains covered with jungle. The seemingly idyllic setting was Brazil's largest gold exporting port during colonial times. Shipments of metals and precious stones extracted from the interior of the country arrived there and left by sea for Europe. Thousands of kidnapped people from African countries also arrived.
Antonica, Marcelina and Luiza were two sisters and a cousin who disembarked from a slave ship on the Paraty Mirim beach in the mid-19th century when they were still teenagers. “They worked at the Hacienda de la Independencia, but when the Golden Law was established that abolished slavery in Brazil coincided with the fact that the lands of the sugar cane and coffee plantations of the hacienda were exhausted and the lords abandoned it,” explains Tuca. But the three African women did not leave, they started a community there that resists to this day: The Quilombo do Campinho da Independência, where 550 people live, according to data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).
Albertina dos Santos is about to turn 95 years old, she is the oldest woman in the quilombo and she is overflowing with energy. Her gaze shines between dark-skinned eyelids. She is sitting on the porch of her house, about 15 minutes walk from the center of the community, where she is reached by a track through lush vegetation. “When I arrived at Quilombo do Campinho 68 years ago it was a horrible place, with closed jungle and many dangerous animals, like snakes and jaguars,” she says.
She was born in Camburí, a coastal town 160 kilometers away and, although she prefers the sea, at the age of 25 she got married and came to live in the quilombo, where she gave birth to 13 children. “This has changed a lot since they built the Río-Santos highway in the seventies. It was a huge sacrifice to walk to Paraty with a big belly and several children. We had to cross the river, sometimes with water up to our necks because at that time it was very fast. Remember the few products they brought from town: salt to preserve food, kerosene for light, and soap for cleaning. Once we left at dawn to take our sick four-year-old son to the doctor and we didn't arrive in time. He died in my arms,” she remembers sitting in the iron and plastic strip rocking chair. She met the second generation of the quilombo, the daughters of the matriarchs. “They told a lot of stories about what it was like when the community started during slavery, but I don't remember well,” she admits. She also doesn't remember if any of her ancestors came from Africa. “My parents and grandparents were born in Brazil,” she says.
In 2022, the IBGE investigated Brazilian quilombos for the first time and concluded that 1.3 million people declare themselves quilombolas, and that more than half live in the northeast region. 167,202 of them live in one of the 494 official uilombola territories, such as Campinho da Independência, the first legally recognized in the State of Rio de Janeiro. Since 1999 they have had title to 287 hectares. The territory is also protected by the Environment because 70% is 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 at the end of the eighties, when there were already roads 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 touristy towns on the southern coast of Río de Janeiro and northern coast of São Paulo. “Community-based tourism opposes the logic of mass tourism. It is carried out by traditional communities, which show their culture and history, and generates work and income for the community,” she says.
One of the activities they offer is the guided tour of the quilombo. Today is Thursday and early in the morning a group of about twenty children arrived. “The majority of the public that comes is upper class, from private schools. It is important to plant a seed in these children so that they see that there are several Brazil is within Brazil. They live in their bubble. Through tourism we raise our voices and explain what it is like to live in a quilombola community from the 19th century
to today,” says Elias. It is two in the afternoon and on the second floor of the restaurant building there is a group of adults 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 how to plant, 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 the he screamed Adilsa da Conceição Martins. Behind her hangs a photograph of her mother, Madalena Alves da Silva, next to her father, Seu Valentim Conceição; both leaders of the Quilombo do Campinho.
After putting visitors in context, they take a guided walk through the community. They pass by 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 store. They offer traditional basket weaving workshops for groups, agriculture and jongo, an Afro-Brazilian dance born in the Senzala, accommodation where slaves were imprisoned. “Formerly the jongo It was practiced starting at midnight so that the gentlemen would not see it, because escape strategies were involved and a spiritual cleansing was done with the dance. 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, the month of black consciousness, and the so-called Flip Preta -Flip Negra-, which is an alternative to the well-known International Literary Festival of Paraty (Flip) that It has been celebrated since 2003, but in this case, the theme, references and audience are black.
The tour ends where the visit began, at the restaurant. There is no boss here, it is managed by neighbors and the money goes to the community. It offers dishes with local ingredients, such as fish, taioba leaves and banana, decorated with flowers. They use what they have on hand, buy from local producers and try not to contaminate the land with an ecological sanitation system. One of the star ingredients of the menu is juçara (Euterpe edulis), a fruit of the palmetto palm tree very similar to the popular açaí (Euterpe oleracea). “It is more logical to use the fruit because for the palmetto you have to cut the tree and it takes about ten years to become an adult,” explains one of the workers. The alternative they offer is pupunha (Bactris gasipaes), known as organic palmetto, because it takes less time to grow and its production is more sustainable.
Sustainability and self-sufficiency have always been basic in Quilombo do Campinho, where its inhabitants have had to organize independently. “The abolition of slavery in Brazil was not done well, they left the freed people with nothing and they had to support themselves in a primitive way. Here we have always been very united and we did everything as a group: preparing the land, building a house or hunting. If someone went to the city to buy, he divided it. “Everyone shares with others,” says Tuca. He believes that racism will never end and that community-based tourism is the best tool they have now to not lose their culture, stay in the territory and not have to go out to work outside the quilombo to continue being enslaved.
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