BRASIL

"The flight of Indians inland, their massacre, and the reluctance of Jesuits to hire them on plantations, led the Portuguese to import African 'labor' from the 16th century onwards. The first Quilombo communities, clusters of 'brown slaves', emerged at the start of the 17th century. The Quilombos, chased to the extremities of Minas Gerais and Goiás, were nicknamed the 'Kalungas', derived from a pejorative African term that became a synonym of 'negro' in Portuguese.

The Indians who preceded them on these remote areas initially showed wariness towards them. Little by little, the pacifist attitude of the Black people, and evidence of their sharing a common enemy, became a source of complicity and spawned mixed-race descendants. In this way, the Kalungas created a self-sufficient society with no notion of individual land ownership and with a model based on ecological balance."

Extract from Zoé Zoé, Femmes du mondes, 2007, Éditions Gallimard