Laura Cardoso Moreira, Children of the Malê: The Revolt in Pernambuco and the Twilight of Slavery (São Paulo: Nova Fronteira, 1995)
… Few slave revolts have caught the popular imagination as much as the Marianada of Pernambuco and northern Bahia, and it’s easy to see why: a mystic leader who’s been called Brazil’s Joan of Arc; an apocalyptic warrior cult with echoes of Arthurian legend; the saints fighting alongside the old gods. It has been immortalized in films, books and above all songs, from the clandestine chants of the last days of slavery to the pulsing
novo lundu melodies of today. That so much of the rebellion is shrouded in mystery has only increased its allure.
What, then, do we really know about the Marianada? Its genesis is surely in the legend of the
yamali, which arose among rural slaves in the sugar country in the 1840s. It was said that the
yamali had risen against the slave-masters and been taken to heaven by their strange god, someday to return and fight for the slaves who remained. No doubt this was a memory of the great Malê rebellion of 1835-37, distorted by distance, time and what must have seemed, to the fugitive
quilombo dwellers who traded with the Malê, like a sudden and mysterious disappearance. The urban slaves and freedmen knew what had really happened to the Malê, but the rural ones, isolated on their plantations, were left to imagine and to dream. These they did, and their dreams were taken up by the
mães-de-santo, the priestesses of the
candomble.
The
mães were not the first to call for rebellion in the name of the
yamali; there had been sporadic revolts in Pernambuco and Paraiba throughout the early 1850s. It was the priestesses, however, who solved the perennial problem of slave revolts: that the more people who knew of plans for an uprising, the greater the odds that someone would talk out of turn. Slaves would brag, or they would warn a kind master to stay clear, and then the revolt would have to start prematurely or not at all. The
mães had seen many rebellions fail this way, so they kept their designs a close secret within their own sisterhood, and waited for their moment.
That moment came in November 1857, for reasons that will be forever unknown. Maybe the
mães learned that much of the regular army had been called away to fight in the Second Platine War, and that the region was defended only by militias and a skeleton garrison. Possibly some unthinkable atrocity by master toward slave was the catalyst. Or, maybe, the priestesses simply decided they’d had enough. But while the reason may be in doubt, the outcome is not: in the space of a night, torch-bearing runners carried the word from plantation to plantation, and by morning, an entire district was aflame with revolt. Although many of the slaves were doubtless surprised by the call to rebellion, they answered it without hesitation, and they gathered themselves into an army.
Of this army’s nominal commander, little is known. Even her name is uncertain; in some stories, she is called María, in others Mariana. What all agree on is that she was a woman, a
mãe-de-santo, and an American - a slave brought to Brazil during the short-lived trans-Caribbean slave trade of the 1840s and 1850s. If so, she was nearly unique among American slaves, who kept to themselves and followed their own rituals; there are no reports of any others being taken into the
candomble priesthood before the liberation. The combination of American birth and initiation as a
mãe is unlikely enough that many modern historians have strained to find other origins for her, but the contemporary sources are united in their description.
How much control she really had over the rebellion is also a mystery. She was certainly the one who had first called for revolt; she was the titular leader, the one whose name the warriors called when they joined battle; the orders she gave when in holy ecstasy had the force of law; and the council of
mães at the center of the slave army carried great weight. But at the day-to-day level, command was divided a bewildering number of ways: by plantation, by ethnic origin, and most of all by the religious brotherhoods that existed before the revolt or sprang up through its communal rituals. The
irmandades became regiments: here, a brigade fighting under the banner of St. George; there, a company dressed in the red-and-white raiment of Xangô,
orixá of war; elsewhere, a battalion of warrior women wearing horned hats in devotion to the storm-goddess Yansã.
Possibly the brotherhood that put the most defining stamp on the revolt was the cult of the
yamali, which appeared during the second week and took part in every battle thereafter. These believed that the
yamali had possessed them in order to return to earth and fight against the slave-masters. They took Ulua as their god, dressed in white robes and turbans as they thought Muslims must dress, and painted their weapons - machetes, sickles, muskets when they could get them - in red to take on the power of the
yamali’s flaming swords. What little they knew of the Muslim slaves’ practice, they followed, in the hope that by honoring the god of the
yamali, they could worship, and thus become, the
yamali themselves.
Evidently one or another of the cults’ prayers were heard, because the army of the Marianada was able to cross the magic threshold of slave revolts: by the time the district militia forces could be organized against them, they were strong enough to win. They were poorly armed and haphazardly led, but the militiamen were little better: they were landowners who served part-time rather than professional soldiers, and they were led by
coronels who owed their commands to social position rather than merit. And the slaves outnumbered the militia and fought fanatically, undeterred by heavy losses. The Marianada snowballed from district to district, gathering troops from northern Bahia, Paraiba and Alagoas as well as Pernambuco, and defeated the scattered forces raised by the provincial
coronels. On New Year’s Day 1858, the army of slaves marched into Recife, besieging the regular garrison in the fortress and seizing control of the port.
During the six weeks that the Marianada held Recife, several thousand freedmen left the city on foreign ships, working their passage or paying for it with loot. Some went to England, some to Liberia, more to the French freedmen’s colony at Gabon. Others washed ashore in Ouidah or Porto Novo, joining the Afro-Brazilian diaspora already there. A few looked for the
yamali; a very few found them.
Those who remained now faced the dilemma of Spartacus: should they seek refuge or victory? Some, inspired by the messianic fervor of the
yamali-cult, wanted to march south through Minas Gerais and São Paulo provinces, ridding the nation of slavery as they went. Another faction argued that the army should march west to join the scattered
quilombo settlements, establishing a mountain republic beyond easy reach of the Brazilian regulars. Yet a third group argued for fortifying Recife and making a stand there.
Ultimately, they chose the worst option: all of them. About a third of the ex-slaves struck out for the mountains. Another third marched south toward the regular forces that were being rushed up from Uruguay to meet them, leaving the rest behind in Recife. Mariana herself, according to most sources, spoke in favor of finding a mountain refuge, but when most of the army insisted on staying, she joined the force that was marching down through Bahia.
Incredibly, that army won its first battle against the regulars. The force that met them a hundred miles north of the Minas Gerais border was only a single brigade, and the slaves outnumbered it by more than ten to one. With Mariana herself leading, the
yamali-cult charged into the teeth of the artillery, dragging cavalrymen off their horses and overwhelming the imperial brigade with sheer numbers. At the end of a bloody day of battle, the regulars were annihilated. But victory had come at the cost of almost half the freedmen’s force, and at the second battle just inside Minas Gerais - where they faced an imperial contingent 10,000 strong - it was their turn to be massacred. They sold their lives dearly, using the captured cannon against the regular cavalry and standing their ground to the last man, but in the end, all of them were either dead, prisoners or fugitives fleeing desperately for the badlands.
The end came for the ex-slaves in Recife two weeks later. Many had already deserted the cause at the news of the approaching army, going to ground on nearby plantations or seeking refuge in the mountains of Alagoas. The rest, about five thousand in all, barricaded themselves in the city, turning buildings into fortresses and forcing the regulars to clear them out one street at a time. The next six days were a nightmare of urban fighting, but at the end of it, the Brazilian flag flew again over Recife.
That was the end of the Marianada as an organized revolt, although scattered guerrilla resistance would continue for more than two years. More than forty thousand slaves had succeeded in reaching the
quilombos, however, and attempts to root them out of the badlands would prove futile. Mariana was never captured, and her body was never found; her fate remains a mystery, and charismatic leaders would claim to have received her blessing, or to be her reincarnation, for generations to come…
… The immediate reaction to the revolt was swift and brutal. The white public was panicked by the scale of the rebellion and enraged by lurid tales of murder, rape and mutilation (there actually were remarkably few revenge killings) and black magic (which, from the Church’s viewpoint, was somewhat more accurate). The
candomble was banned throughout Brazil, and practice of its rituals or initiation as a
mãe-de-santo were made punishable by imprisonment or death. The dwindling Muslim congregations that remained after the Malê revolt were also driven underground. Known rebels were executed, often without trial, and harsh laws were enacted to prohibit assemblies of slaves or free blacks. Brazil had always had a large class of manumitted slaves, and had been far more tolerant of freedmen than the southern United States, but that tolerance was badly eroded in the post-Marianada repression.
In the longer term, though, the Marianada accelerated the decline of slavery. Of the million and a half slaves in Brazil, more than a tenth had taken part in the revolt, and three quarters of those had either escaped or been killed. The sugar plantations suddenly found themselves without enough labor to work the land - and with the transatlantic slave trade gone, the trans-Caribbean trade declining and the rate of natural increase well into negative numbers, there were no easy ways to replace them. Some of the planters gave up and sold their slaves to Minas Gerais or the coffee country in São Paulo, where slavery was still strong and slave ownership common at all levels of society. Others, slowly at first but with increasing frequency during the 1860s, entered into agreements to free their slaves provided that they continue to work on the plantations for pay for seven to fifteen years.
The provincial governments also encouraged immigration from Italy, Spain, Greece and even the Balkans, hoping to recruit a new force of agricultural laborers to replace the slaves. Many of these, however, recoiled when they learned that they were expected to do “slave work,” and migrated to the industrial cities instead. Some of the sugar planters - once the loudest exponents of slavery - began to speak quietly about abolition, seeing it as the only way for agricultural work to lose its stigma.
These planters were still in a distinct minority. In the coffee country, and in the coastal cities, slavery remained overwhelmingly popular (except, of course, among the slaves) - so much so, in fact, that there was no organized abolitionist movement until after 1860. In the aftermath of the Marianada, however, the economic pressures against slavery became inexorable, and the cause of abolition would soon find a powerful patron in Isabel, Princess Imperial.
The patronage of the still-teenage princess would intersect with another of the Marianada’s effects: the decline of
coronelismo. The great slave revolt had proven the militias woefully inadequate to defend their districts against any kind of organized rebellion, and with that proof came a decline in the
coronels’ semi-feudal dominance and a demand for central administration and protection. But the local bosses wouldn’t give up their control without a fight, and as the 1860s progressed, the struggle between the
coronels and the imperial government became more and more intertwined with abolition…
