Descendants of Runaway Slaves Struggle to Continue African Way of Life : Brazil: Development threatens their land in the Amazon rain forest. They are lobbying to secure what they were promised.

Deep in the Amazon rain forest, isolated villages struggle to survive and preserve the African customs of the runaway slaves who founded them two centuries ago.

The villagers till the land communally, as their ancestors did. Parents tell their children tales of slavery passed on for generations and teach them African dances.

“We have motors for our boats, gas lanterns and other improvements, but we have roots and traditions we want to maintain,” said Antonio Printes as he and companions cleared a patch of jungle.

Now, the villagers say, their way of life is threatened.

Brazil’s 1988 constitution promised that the villages, called quilombos , would be given title to the land they had traditionally worked.

Mining projects and a newly created national forest have encroached on quilombo land, however, and a consortium led by Alcoa and Shell proposes a new bauxite mining operation.

“If these companies drive us away, we’ll lose our liberty and be back to the times of slavery,” said Printes, 56. He and about 6,000 other descendants of runaway slaves live in the region.

His home is Abui, one of their two dozen villages on the Trombetas River, near Brazil’s northern border with Guyana. The nearest town is Oriximina, about 16 hours downriver by motorboat or three days by canoe.

Portuguese colonizers began bringing African slaves to Brazil in the 17th Century and did not free them until 1888. Resistance among the slaves was endemic, and runaways established the quilombos , or free communities, in many parts of the country.

The most famous quilombo was Palmares, founded about 1630 in the arid northeastern outback. Its residents, who numbered 20,000 at one point, repelled attacks by government forces for more than six decades before a huge assault in 1695 ended their resistance.

Runaway slaves from cocoa plantations near Santarem, a few hundred miles to the south, settled near the Porteira waterfall on the Trombetas in the early 19th Century. When landowners formed militias to recapture the land, the blacks retreated up the river valley.

Carlos Printes, Antonio’s son, said the runaway slaves had contacts with white traders in Santarem who offered them protection and bought their goods.

“On one trip to the city, they heard about the law that said the blacks were free and went back and told the others,” he said. “Then they came out of the forest and founded the riverfront communities we live in now.”

Sagrado Coracao (Sacred Heart), a few hours downriver from Abui, is one of the largest villages. About two dozen families live in mud-and-wattle huts built a few hundred yards apart along the river in the shade of cashew trees 90 feet tall.

They plant rice, beans and manioc, a starchy edible root. The tuber is peeled, passed through a wheel-driven grinder, squeezed through a long straw hose to force out the water, then dried in clay ovens to make a flour served with all meals.

“The blacks learned to make manioc flour from the Indians, who were also afraid of the whites and helped our people survive in the forest,” said Maria Teresa Cordeiro, 96, Sagrado Coracao’s oldest resident.

Fish is plentiful, and the men hunt deer, wild pig, armadillo and other game. “We don’t have much, but you only go hungry here if you don’t look,” Cordeiro said.

Sagrado Coracao’s small adobe chapel and one-room wooden schoolhouse are on one of hundreds of islands that dot the river. Children paddle to school in canoes and study until midday.

There is no doctor or clinic in the village. Jungle remedies are used for minor ailments.

“We treat a cold with a tea made from lime-tree leaves and coffee leaves,” said Rosa Viana, 63, who learned of the medicines from her grandmother, a former slave. “To drive away spirits and the evil eye, we burn herbs and plants.”

Because the community’s history has been passed down through the generations, residents still have bitter memories of slavery.

Slave traders “tricked the president of Africa by telling him there was gold and wood here, and persuaded him to send blacks,” said Rafael Viana, 71, Rosa’s husband. “But after they arrived, they were treated like cattle and chains were put on their hands and legs.”

Viana, a short, balding man with a stubbly white beard, recounted tales his grandfather told him of the slave days. He spoke of the “torture of the lantern,” when blacks held burning candles in their bare hands to illuminate the mansions of the masters.

“The whites said the slaves weren’t Christians and treated them like animals,” he said. “They beat them until they bled and then put salt in the wounds.”

Villagers have pride in the past and in their roots.

The ancestors “set an example for us because, as hard as the whites tried, the slaves were able to remain free,” said Pedro Viana da Cruz, 59. “Today, blacks face discrimination and we still have to struggle for our liberty.”

Rafael Viana added: “We love the African nation because we have African blood.”

One evening, villagers traveled by canoe to the Sagrado Coracao community center on a nearby island.

Cruz sang and strummed a handmade ukulele, accompanied by a boy playing a drum made of pigskin stretched over the frame of a large oil can.

At center stage, a couple danced the lumdum , which slaves brought to Brazil from Africa. With arms outstretched, the couple glided across the floor like soaring birds.

During a break, Cruz said the greatest concern among villagers on the Trombetas is being able to stay where they are.

Mining has polluted waterways and driven game away. The Saraca-Taquera National Forest, created in 1989, greatly reduced the area where blacks are allowed to fish, hunt and gather herbs and food.

With the help of the Roman Catholic Church in Oriximina, residents are lobbying the government to set the boundaries of their villages before considering the $200-million proposal of the Alcoa-Shell consortium.

“This is our native land,” Cruz said. “We won’t give it up.”