by Jean-Olivier Tchouaffe, PhD, Radio-Television Film, University of Texas at Austin
Carlos Diegues’s QUILOMBO (1984) contextualizes 17th century Brazil, the biggest slaveholder power of the time, and the heroic resistance that system created. Quilombo, therefore, is a term referring to self-governing communities created by runaway slaves, also known as Maroons, throughout the Americas and how they confronted the 17th century Brazilian slave system. Diegues uses the movie to render a strong homage to the mythic Quilombo Republic Dos Palmares, a hill of Palm trees deep in the Northeast forest of Pernambuco, Brazil – presenting logistical difficulties of access for the Portuguese slave masters and their cronies’ armies, thus, providing the potential for these former slaves to live their lives as they see fit.
The movie’s goal is to challenge the stereotypes of the slave as a willing or naïve accomplice of his own subjugation. Rather, QUILOMBO (1984) testifies to the tremendous courage and creativity of the Quilombo Republic of Palmares’ campaign for a true racial democracy which provided the tools to resist, for almost a century, Portugal and its allies’ constant attempts to reclaim that place . Those Africans, consequently, took their destiny into their own hands, despite the very likelihood of defeat and the cruelty of their lives being cut short as a consequence. They summoned the combative energy to push Brazil from being the biggest embodiment of slavery of the time to a place where radical possibilities for an alternative model of democratic governance could have taken up roots .
In QUILOMBO, this passion is realized through the idealism of the citizen of Palmares, their embrace of syncretism – mixing African deities and Christian theology coupled with practices of racial democracy including not only Blacks but indigenous natives and Whites making their own rules in a time when these forms of governance were not even conceived – is a powerful argument claiming that the march of history is far more complex than White supremacist myths and ideologies underpinning the whole system of slavery . This passion is a radical statement against all forms of oppression.
It is important to note that some aspects of QUILOMBO, twenty-three years after its release, feel dated such as the acting of capable Black professional actors such as the magnificent Zeze Motta (Dandara), Tony Tornado (Ganga Zumba) and Antonio Pompeo (Zumbi). One gets the feeling that Diegues could have gotten more from them in order to fully flesh out their characters in order to properly dramatize the historical moment. It is important, however, to note that it is a well structured film and the soundtrack from Gilberto Gil provides the right kind of energy for the story.
QUILOMBO, moreover, set in the 17th century, aims to be a metaphor about the actual contemporary condition of Blacks in the African Diaspora and the difficulties of achieving true equalities in these societies. Brazil seems to be the perfect place to begin these reflections because it is the second country in the world, after Nigeria, to hold the biggest concentration of people of Africans descent. Thus, Brazil is the right place to begin challenging self-perceptions about race.
Consequently, QUILOMBO tackles the problem of utopia in the glare of slave and authoritarian regimes fuelled by the brutality of ideological and spiritual miseries. The drastic contrast between utopia and these miseries is to shock the viewers into seriously thinking about slavery as a tale of borders, spiritual borders, mental borders, value systems borders, physical borders, racial borders and the instable nature of these borders. The goal is to appreciate at its real value the passion for liberty and democracy and the extent to which people will put their lives on the line in order to build a just society.
This process also applies to the USA with MLK’s speech “I Have a Dream” where he saw the United States as a nation of Quilombos in his quest for a true racial democracy. As with QUILOMBO, MLK called for going to deep places where racial divisions will be dissolved because the Quilombos are by essence the zero tolerance point of racial prejudices. The fact that racial prejudices are still facing a hard death, thus still an ingrained and confrontational issue today, only serves to highlight MLK and Diegues’ visions and how far behind the contemporary world is on this issue.
