João José Reis Rebelião Escrava No Brasil Black Muslim Slave Revolt in Brazil

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Rebelião Escrava No Brasil
A Historia do Levante Males em 1835

by

João José Reis

Trade PB. 8vo. Editora Brasiliense, Sao Paulo, Brasil, 1986. 220 pages. Text in Portuguese.

Wrappers lightly worn with some light shelf-wear to the extremities present. Book is free of ownership marks. Text is clean and free of marks. Binding tight and solid.

On the night of January 24th to 25th, 1835, in Salvador, while Catholics celebrated the feast of Nossa Senhora da Guia in the Bonfim church, black Africans celebrated Ramadan in their slave quarters. The celebration evolved into a revolt, in which not exclusively Muslims participated, but which was conceived and led by them. The uprising involved around six hundred people, the equivalent of 20 thousand people in Salvador today. The revolt ended with many injured, hundreds of prisoners, as well as more than seventy rebels and ten of their opponents dead. The majority of the rebels were members of the Nagô nation, in whose language, Yoruba, Muslim is Imale. Hence Malês, the Portuguese-styled Yoruba word. The objectives of the rebels were not completely clear: they wanted an end to the slavery of Africans, but it is not certain that they aimed to extinguish slavery as a work system in Brazilian society. There are testimonies that accuse them of having planned the enslavement of mulattoes and the massacre of whites and blacks born in Europe and Brazil. The author discusses the religion, writings, diet, clothing and forms of organization of the Malês. The book also analyzes the historical context of the rebellion: it exposes the social and economic structures of the time, the rebellion of free men, the series of slave revolts that took place in Bahia since the beginning of the 19th century and the specific nature of urban slavery.