ZUMBI DOS PALMARES MONUMENT

MONUMENTO A ZUMBI DOS PALMARES 

Address: Avenida Presidente Vargas, canteiro central, Praça Onze, Rio de Janeiro, RJ
Themes: State Racism and Black Resistance; Political-cultural Resistance and Memory
Translated from the Portuguese by Benjamin Brooks

The Monument to Zumbi dos Palmares, located on President Vargas Avenue, is the center of an architectural complex that aims to honor the presence of Black culture within the history of the city of Rio de Janeiro.The monument to Zumbi dos Palmares is 23 feet tall; a pyramid of white marble supports the statue of his head, made of nearly two tons of bronze.

Zumbi was one of the last leaders of the Quilombo dos Palmares and stands as a symbol for the resistance to slavery. In addition to the Sambódromo and the Municipal School of Tia Ciata, the monument revives the memory of Plaza Eleven, known as “Little Africa” up until Pereira Passos became mayor of the city in the early 20^th century and enacted a series of urban reforms.

The three structures symbolize the history of political resistance, the struggle for freedom, and the fight against racist and arbitrary urban interventions. Similarly, the performance and gatherings around samba, played and danced to in public, along with capoeira, maculelê, and many other Black cultural references, represent important elements of the movement. Fruit of the Black Movement’s labors, the Zumbi Monument was originally envisioned to stand in Carioca Square, where the stone base was set in 1982. The project was transferred to the Flamengo Park in 1983 by State Representative José Miguel (PDT), but only in 1986 was the monument finally built in Plaza Eleven, during the Leonel Brizola and Darcy Ribeiro government. The latter, declared at the monument’s inauguration:

[…] Let’s make this face bigger (the original at the Museum of London is a foot high) instead of making a portrait of the hypothetical Zumbi (decapitated on November 20, 1695) because this hero embodies the dignity and beauty of the Black face. For this, we celebrate Black people’s participation in the construction of Brazil and the fight for freedom (Darcy Ribeiro apud Soares, 1999, p. 127).

The monument was inaugurated on November 9, 1986 with the aim to represent Black consciousness, but the place was also used for public acts that sought to memorialize the broad processes of Black expression, reflection and critique, as institutionalized racism continued on in Brazil. An emblematic example of this was the 1988 March against Fake Abolition. This was the second milestone at a national level for the present-day fight against racism following the 1987 protest on the steps of the São Paulo Municipal Theater, a foundational act of the Unified Black Movement.

On May 11, 1988, the “Black March against Fake Abolition,” in Rio de Janeiro united more than 5,000 people that intended to walk from Candelária to the Zumbi dos Palmares Monument. However, more than 600 heavily-armed soldiers manned barriers to impede the march. It was 1988 – the centennial of the formal abolition of slavery – and the military harshly repressed a public, anti-racist demonstration, one that critiqued the flaws of instituted abolition of slavery on May 13. On one hand, the Zumbi Monument and a march for equality and freedom; on the other, the Statue of Caxias – patron of the Army – and state repression that stalled the progress of the march.

In front of the IPCN (Institute for Research and Black Culture), around the time of the March, Januário Garcia gave his testimony to the Truth Commission in Rio:

[…] In ’88, we marched on May 13, the March of Fake Abolition, and it was so strong that the 4^th Army Batallion showed up in the streets with tanks to stop us because we had raised a very important question at the time, which was the war with Paraguay. We raised the question of Black platoons that went to war without weapons, barefoot, the ones Caxias sent to their deaths. And the Bishop Dom Hipólito, while in the city of Duque de Caxias, suggested changing the name of the municipality because it was named after a psychopath. Then, Brother David, who was the priest of the São João de Meriti Church, said that we were going to march from Candelária to the Zumbi monument, but that we would stop in front of the Pantheon of Caxias and make ourselves heard. That was it, man. It was the army that came out to the street. […] We were in Candelária, and if you were a guy who was marching, the farthest you could go was Uruguaiana; we couldn’t go any further. And the Army coralled people in the Central Station, all over the place, anyone with paper in hand, flag in hand, they’d just take them, hit them, took them away. Then the time came, the commander arrived […] I don’t know if he was a coronel, I don’t remember, and he said that we couldn’t head towards the Zumbi monument, he said that we had to go towards Cinelândia. And we said, no, that we were going to the monument. He said he’d stop us, whatever, whatever. And in that moment, I got into the argument, I was the president of the IPCN at the time and this meeting was planned entirely within the IPCN, the coordination was done within IPCN and I answered politically for the IPCN at the time. I said, coronel, it’s like this, we will march as far as Army’s racism allows us, but we are going in that direction. And we went, we went up until a certain point. When we got there, there was a police unit waiting that wouldn’t let up. They’d set up a barrier, had a police vehicle, everything, and we couldn’t get through (Januário Garcia. Testimony to the CEV-Rio on May 2, 2015). 

In the same vein, Jurema Batista, who also participated in the march, explains what took place in an interview with Ricardo Brasil on Cultne on TV:

It was the thing for the 100 years after the abolition of slavery, the government was commemorating the way slavery had ended, as if we were living well, while we in the Black community organized on the streets to assert that true abolition never happened. While Blacks are disproportionately imprisoned, killed by stray bullets, and out of schools, we do not live in a comprehensive democracy. Especially in that moment, a lot of things have changed since back then and a lot still needs to be changed, but that year, 100 years later, 1988, was even worse than it is today. And we went to the streets, it was a peaceful protest, to protest the condition of the Black Brazilian 100 years after abolition. And to our surprise, we didn’t expect it, but the Army was in the in the streets blocking our way. We did it; in the video you can see people yelling, “No,” “We fight against oppression,” and we didn’t want to stop and we fought. The next day, it was on the front page of all the papers, and we left there stronger than before. […] Our fight, like it was during slavery, is against a society that sees us as a threat even when we come in peace. I didn’t have an AR-15, I came in peace. The women had flowers in their hair (Jurema Batista. Interview with Ricardo Brasil con Cultne on December 9, 2015).

The Army’s overreaction stood in stark contrast to the measures taken a hundred years earlier: “A hundred years ago, the Army refused to stop a march of slaves that sought liberty. Do not stop the descendants of slaves searching for freedom today, those who continue to seek the full benefits of that freedom from the country that still denies them” (Amauri Mendes. Interview with Ricardo Brasil with Cultne on December 9, 2015.). The monument, built in the period of political opening, intended to represent the memory of Black consciousness. Yet, it represented, in 1988, the presence of racism and the excessive response by the armed forces in a march for freedom and equality.