Death by suicide of Dandara dos Palmares to refuse enslavement

Dandara was a female warrior who helped defend Palmares, a maroon community (quilombo) in northeastern Brazil in the late 1600's. Palmares is generally regarded as the largest and longest-lived fugitive community in Brazil, consisting of free born people of African heritage, formerly enslaved persons, as well as Indigenous inhabitants, mixed race people, and some whites. Scholar Erica Lorraine Williams writes that Palmares was several village style communities united together to resist enslavement and Portuguese colonialism, with some of the African inhabitants being from west central African regions, such as Angola with a likely Bantu influenced culture. In 1678, Ganga Zumba ,the leader of Palmares accepted a peace treaty with the Portuguese. Williams writes that Dandara "opposed the terms of the treaty, fearing that moving to the Cucaú Valley would lead to the destruction of the Republic of Palmares and a return to slavery. She most likely convinced Zumbi, her husband and Ganga Zumba’s nephew, to oppose the treaty as well." While the scholarly record is inconsistant, some sources list today as the day of her death and state she left off a cliff, preferring suicide to a return to enslavement. Today we remember Dandara's opposition to slavery and her resistance to peace deals which would have enabled the continuation of slavery as an institution.