Zumbi would become a fearless war leader who took command of the Republic of Palmares, a free and independent state within the occupied Brazilian territories. His fellow enslaved contemporaries said he was a demigod, inhabited by the ancestral African spirits.
Born around 1655 in one of the federated states of Brazil, Pernambuco, where several Palmares communities lived (same region). Captured as a child, he was taken away by Portuguese soldiers during a military expedition. Escaping death, he was entrusted to a priest who baptized him under the Christian name Francisco. Raised by the abbot, he learned Latin and Portuguese until the age of fifteen, after which he escaped and returned to Palmares.
A skilled strategist, he led the revolts of several slaves against the assaults of the Portuguese army. Around 1678, the governor of Pernambuco, overwhelmed by the mutinies, proposed that these rebel slaves surrender without reprisals on the condition that they return to forced labor. Zumbi obviously refused to submit and, from that moment on, permanently assumed the role of leader of the resistance, which organized itself beginning in 1680. Betrayed by one of his fellow warriors, Ganga Zumba, who accepted the governor’s offer, it is said that Zumbi had him assassinated.
Founding the free Republic of Palmares, a state made up of insurgent runaway slaves, he bravely and effectively defended this territory until 1694. Admired and respected by his people, he was nevertheless betrayed by his own and captured following a deadly assault led by the Portuguese. He died beheaded on November 20, 1695.
