Hausa slaves led most major Bahian uprisings across two centuries.

Evidence

Hausa slaves were, no doubt, quite active as insurrectionists. Jose Rodrigues has written quite recently: “The least submissive Negroes in Brazil were the Hausas; they headed all uprisings in Bahia and in Brazil, being especially prominent in those of 1720, 1806, 1809, 1813, 1814, 1822, 1826, 1835, and 1838.” In Reconcavo, for instance, where Hausa had been sent to augment the slave labor of the engenhos, “quilombos were growing at an alarming rate all over the province by the turn of the nineteenth century. The fugitive slaves moreover were no longer avoiding even the towns, sometimes hiding within them and at other times ‘descending to loot them.’” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 763

Categorization

• XREF: The quilombo and runaway-slave dynamics parallel resistance patterns in Robinson’s wider argument about African retention in diaspora.