Zumbi: King of Free Men

Do you know where the word zombie comes from?

Zumbi dos Palmares was the last of the leaders of the Quilombo dos Palmares, in the present-day state of Alagoas, Brazil. — Gorivero, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

This is the story of Zumbi — or Nzambi, meaning ‘a god ‘— the Afro-Brazilian hero, leader of non-slaves, and the king of free men. To understand his story we must first know the land that nurtured the man.

The setting is Brazil in the Colonial era.

The young Portuguese colony that is now known as Brazil was divided by the Portuguese emperor into fourteen slices of land. To each one of these slices, the Portuguese empire gave the name of capitanias (captaincies). One of the biggest capitanias was called Capitania de Pernambuco.

At the Capitania de Pernambuco, most of the revenue came from slave farms. A big part of the people who worked at these farms was forced by the Portuguese to work as slaves brought from traditional and ancient African tribes.

Several of these Africans were ordinary folk kidnapped from their families and land to engage in forced labor in European endeavors. Some of the people dragged from Africa were kings and queens, princes and princesses. The nobility that never crumbled and often rose unshaken by adversity.

Quilombos

The quilombos were autonomous communities, formed by escaped slaves of Brazilian plantation owners during the colonial era. The…