Quilombo

A quilombo (Portuguese pronunciation: [kiˈlõbu]; from the Kimbundu word kilombo, lit. 'war camp')^[1] is a Brazilian hinterland settlement founded by people of African origin, and others sometimes called Carabali. Most of the inhabitants of quilombos, called quilombolas, were maroons, a term for escaped slaves.

Documentation about refugee slave communities typically uses the term mocambo for settlements, which is an Ambundu word meaning "war camp". A mocambo is typically much smaller than a quilombo. "Quilombo" was not used until the 1670s, primarily in the more southerly parts of Brazil.^[2]

In the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America, such villages or camps were called palenques. Its inhabitants are palenqueros. They spoke various Spanish-African-based creole languages such as Palenquero.

Quilombos are classified as one of the three basic forms of active resistance by enslaved Africans. They also regularly attempted to seize power and conducted armed insurrections at plantations to gain amelioration of conditions.^[3] Typically, quilombos were a "pre-19th century phenomenon". In the first half of the 19th-century in Brazil, enslaved people typically took armed action as part of their resistance. The colony was undergoing both political transition, as it fought for independence from Portugal, and new tensions associated with an increased slave trade, which brought in many more native-born Africans who resisted slavery.