Affirmative anticipation

Of all the peoples that make up Brazil, the quilombolas have perhaps the most remarkable story. Like the Saramaka in Suriname or Jamaica’s Maroons, they claim to be descended from groups of runaway slaves who founded settlements, or quilombos, deep in the forests. Most still live in the countryside, farming rice, bananas and other staples, but increasing numbers now live in towns. In the 1988 constitution, drawn up after the end of Brazil’s military dictatorship (exactly a century after slavery was abolished), the quilombolas were granted special guarantees to the title on their land, in recognition of their ancestors’ suffering.

These rights were amplified in a decree from President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2003. A bill that would, among other things, solidify their land claims has passed in Brazil’s lower house and is now in the Senate. However, not everybody is carried away with the romance of it all.

Benedito da Silva (no relation to the president) lives in Ivapurunduva, the largest and best known of the quilombos in São Paulo state, with 400 inhabitants. Mr da Silva says that 20 years ago life was difficult, and many people were leaving. Although Ivapurunduva’s main link with the outside world remains a single payphone, it has acquired some roads and people have started to return from nearby towns. It helps that Ivapurunduva is near a cave that bristles with stalactites, bringing tourists who stop off to buy wooden trinkets.

There are 30 such clusters around the town of Eldorado in the Ribeira valley. The Palmares Foundation—named after a quilombo that survived for much of the 17th century in what is now Alagoas state—recognises 1,408 of these groups, which are present in all but three of Brazil’s 27 states. Since the foundation is attached to the Ministry of Culture, this carries some weight. Many of the groups have declared themselves as quilombolas in “festivals of self-definition”, which were held on Brazil’s annual “day of black consciousness”, November 20th, according to Mauricio Reis of the Palmares Foundation.

Some reckon that this has already gone too far. “It is dividing Brazil into nations of colour,” says Onyx Lorenzoni, a federal deputy from Rio Grande do Sul state. The land affected by the law in the Senate amounts to 1m hectares (2.5m acres), says Mr Lorenzoni, so its progress is of concern to Congress’s rural landowners’ block and to property developers. Porto Alegre, the capital of Mr Lorenzoni’s state, has some long-established quilombola groups who live in the city itself. They are welcome, he says, but he worries about the incentives to create new groups if the law is passed.

One difficulty in resolving these arguments is that historians know little about the experience of slavery in Brazil, despite it being one of the country’s most-researched subjects. The Palmares quilombo left few traces. Slave owners were often illiterate and so, unlike in America, did not keep diaries. Brazil did not produce the kind of autobiographies written by former slaves in America. People who claim quilombola ancestry may indeed be descended from runaway slaves, or their ancestors may have been slaves who were freed and given plots of land by their owners, according to Rafael Marquese of São Paulo University. Many of these subsequently intermarried with the descendants of whites, mestiços and Amerindians.

Brazil has in the past declined to follow America down the path of affirmative action, thanks to the widespread view that the country’s more thorough mixing of the races means that the legacy of slavery in the two countries is fundamentally different. That is debatable, but such questions refuse to go away. The Supreme Court is due to rule soon on whether it is constitutional to establish quotas at Brazil’s universities for different ethnic groups, in a decision that pits the melting-pot view of Brazilian history against the quilombola view. Whether it will be possible in practice to distinguish reliably between different ethnic groups is another question.