ABACATAL (dpa-AFX) – Shortly after his arrival at the World Climate Conference in Brazil, Federal Environment Minister Carsten Schneider visited a Quilombola community in the Amazon region – this is what the descendants of African slaves who escaped from the Portuguese colonial power call themselves. Even today, almost 240 years after the abolition of slavery, many live in often isolated settlements and try to preserve their simple way of life.
“I’m curious about how they live here in harmony with nature,” said the SPD politician to local leader Vanuza Cardoso, whose family lives in the Abacatal settlement in the sixth generation. She showed Schneider and his delegation an old, roughly paved path down to the river that their enslaved ancestors would have had to build with the lashes of their whips. Today it is revered as a holy, spiritual place.
The slave ownership regime established by the Portuguese was only abolished more than 300 years later, in 1888. Until the middle of the 17th century, initially primarily indigenous people were forced to work, then more and more Africans. Over the centuries, around five million Africans were deported to Brazil to work in the sugar or coffee industries.
Thanks for preserving the “natural treasure” of the rainforest
Schneider thanked the fact that indigenous and other traditional communities such as the Quilombola protect the “natural treasure” of the Amazon rainforest, which is “the lungs of the earth.” He expressed concern about impressions he had gained that morning while flying over the rainforest in the state of Pará. There are huge cleared areas to see and also large gold mines whose operators are polluting the water with mercury. “So destruction on a huge scale. And on a scale that – unless you see it with your own eyes – I couldn’t have imagined.”
Around 1.3 million Quilombola live in Brazil, around 70 percent of them in the northeast, where Belém is also located. It was only the constitution of 1988 that guaranteed the Quilomboa communities the right to officially own their traditional territories./toz/DP/zb