Capoeira Warrior Women

[olufemi_baina_ayo]

Capoeira Warrior Women

By Maíra Hora
Translation into English by Shayna McHugh
Source: http://www.portalcapoeira.com

Slavery migrated from the countryside to the city and slave men and women became essential in the cities of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, and Minas Gerais; these slaves had to earn money for their own survival and those who were still not free, besides this had to take part of their earnings to their masters. The whites called those who were not fluent in the Portuguese language “boçais” (ignorant, uncouth) and those who were born or arrived after the prohibition of traffic in 1850 “ladinos.” The commerce promoted by these people was of the most diverse variety, from food to domestic utensils. Among the black men and women there was a certain hierarchy to be respected according to income and ethnicity: Malé, Ijexá, Cabinda, Nagô, Bantu… The slave and free women who dedicated themselves to business were often considered inappropriate and immoral for publicly defending themselves from aggressions against them caused by tax collectors of the Portuguese Crown. They aimed to defend their children and markets from the Portuguese abuse. We will speak a little of these warrior women, Aqualtune, Dandara, Eva Maria do Bonsucesso, Teresa de Benguela, Luísa Mahin and others.

1) Aqualtune Filha do Rei do Congo. A princess, Aqualtune commanded an army of ten thousand men when the Congo was invaded. Aqualtune went to the front lines of battle to defend the kingdom. Defeated, she was taken on a slave ship to Recife. She was required to maintain sexual relations with a slave for the ends of reproduction. Pregnant, she was sold to a sugar plantation in Porto Calvo, where she heard of Palmares for the first time. Already in the last months of pregnancy, she organized the escape of herself and some other slaves to Palmares. Alongside her son, Ganga Zumba, she began the organization of a black State, which united different people under the supreme direction of a leader. Two of her sons, Ganga Zumba and Gana Zona, became leaders of the most important villages of the quilombo. Aqualtune also had daughters, the oldest of which, named Sabina, gave her a grandson, born while Palmares prepared itself for yet another Dutch attack. For this, the blacks sang and prayed a lot to the gods, asking that the nephew and heir of Ganga Zumba would grow up to be strong. And to satisfy the god of war, they gave him the name of ZUMBI. The child grew up free and spent his childhood alongside his younger brother, named Andalaquituche, fishing, hunting, playing, along the camouflaged paths that linked the villages to each other. Zumbi knew all of Palmares while still a boy. The years passed and Palmares became a greater and greater power, with over 50,000 free inhabitants, distributed in various villages. Zumbi grew up and married Dandara. Aqualtune, grandmother of Zumbi, Princess of the Congo who arrived in Recife as a slave and was sold for breeding, organized her escape and went to the Quilombo dos Palmares where, because of her noble heritage, she governed one of the villages. The black population in the Quilombo dos Palmares resisted white attacks for almost a century, and women had a fundamental role there, which involved courage, and a spirit of fighting and resistance against the colonizers.

2) Dandara lived in the 17th century, a black woman, warrior of the quilombo de Palmares, which in her time sheltered 50 thousand people in the villages belong to Palmares. She was Zumbi’s wife and the mother of his three sons. She helped Zumbi with war tactics and strategies. She fought in Palmares, where there were various women who played Capoeira in the 17th century.

3) Teresa de Benguela lived in the 18th century. She was the wife of José Piolho, who led the Quilombo do Piolho or Quariterê, in Guaporé, Mato Grosso. When her husband died, Teresa de Benguela assumed the command and revealed herself to be an even more stubborn and implacable leader. A brave warrior, she led a community of three thousand people. The quilombo grew so much under her command that it even gathered Bolivian and Brazilian Indians. This bothered the Portuguese Crown very much, because it would influence the fight of the Bolivians and Americans (English and Spanish) for the passage of goods and the internationalization of the Amazon. The Crown acted rapidly and sent a band heavily armed with firepower to do away with the quilombolas. Captured, Teresa committed suicide. In 1994 came a samba dance of the Unidos do Viradouro by the work of Joãozinho Trinta called Teresa de Benguela – Uma Raínha Negra no Pantanal (A Black Queen in the Pantanal)

4) Eva Maria or Eva do Bonsucesso lived in the 19th century. In 1811, the freed slave woman set up her table of spring greens and bananas on the sidewalk, in Bonsucesso, Rio de Janeiro. Suddenly, a goat who was with a slave grabbed a bundle of greens and a bunch of bananas. Eva ran after the goat with a branch, trying to recover her goods. The white lord, José Inácio de Sousa, master of the slave and the goat, arrived. He was indignant upon seeing the scene and slapped Eva, who had no doubts about returning the aggression. The case went to justice and opened a precedent, and the white lord was condemned to several months in prison, because those who saw the scene sided with Eva do Bonsucesso.

5) Luísa Mahin lived in the 19th century. A slave who was freed in 1812, she belonged to the Nagô-Jejê nation, from the Tribe of Mahi, African Muslims known as Malês. All the slave revolts and uprisings that shook Bahia in the first decades of the 19th century were planned by her, in her house, which became the headquarters of these uprisings. Luísa passed messages written in Arabic to other rebels, through kids who pretended to buy products at her sale table and brought the letters of other planners. She was one of the planners of the Revolt of the Malês in 1835. She became known for her bravery and refusal to submit. She also planned the Sabinada Revolt of Bahia in 1837/38. She was discovered and persecuted, and managed to flee to Rio de Janeiro where she was found, imprisoned, and deported to Angola, Africa. However, no document was found in Angola proving her deportation. It is believed that she escaped and settled in Maranhão, where later the Creole drum was developed, apparently with her help. She left a son here in Brazil, who was the fruit of a union with a Portuguese man, who later sold his own ten-year-old son in order to pay a gambling debt. Refused from a plantation in Campinas because he was Bahian and Bahians were known as rebels, the son ended up in a plantation in Lorena, in the interior of São Paulo state. The boy grew and seven years later was taught by a boarder in the plantation to read and write. With the documents that proved his freedom, he fled to a quilombo close to Lorena and became an abolitionist poet, an important journalist for Brazil. Self-taught, he managed to get authorization to free 500 slaves. His name: Luiz Gama.