The Earth Gives, the Earth Wants, Antônio Bispo dos Santos, translated by Alex Brostoff and Jamille Pinheiro Dias, 2026, Polity Press.
It is often assumed that the most legitimate voice in defence of Brazil’s diverse ecosystems is that of the Indigenous peoples who occupy the remote areas most readily targeted for resource extraction.
In the often deadly assault against the country’s natural environment and its defenders by the neocolonial Brazilian far-right under Jair Bolsonaro, this sometimes led to other targets of racist violence being overlooked.
Prominent yet often forgotten victims of state and corporate brutality have been the Quilombolas— Brazilian Afro-descendant communities who fight to protect their rights to ancestral lands and its natural riches.
This oversight is unfortunate and unrealistic, because Afro-descendants make up 50% of Brazil’s population, and of those, some 16 million are Quilombolas—members of a Quilombo or an historical community of former escaped Black slaves who resisted the slavery regime for 300 years.
Indeed, this figure greatly exceeds Brazil’s classified Indigenous population of 1.7m people divided into 391 ethnic groups, according to the 2022 IBGE census.
It goes without saying that the levels of poverty and marginalisation endured by Quilombolas remain unacceptable, and a contemporary legacy of structural racism, exploitation and past slavery.
Disproportionate numbers of Quilombolas still lack access to clean water and sanitation, adequate food, education, and healthcare—and their marginalisation has made them reliant on what the land provides, putting them in the front line of extractivism.
Yet the vulnerability that comes from poverty and inequality did not stop Jair Bolsonaro rallying the machinery of state to crank up the racist oppression of Quilombolas alongside other environmental defenders.
Indeed, his racist tirades often singled out this unique social group, as in 2017 for example, in a speech at Rio de Janeiro’s Clube Hebraica, a Brazilian-Jewish social and recreational club that led to formal accusations of hate speech.
The then presidential candidate was reported as saying: “If I become President, not one centimetre of land will be marked out for indigenous reserves or Quilombola.
“I’ve been to a Quilombo”, he added with toxicity, “the Afro descendants there do nothing… even as breeders, I don’t think they’re any use to us anymore.”
If the Quilombolas ever had a spokesperson, thinker and poet with international standing, it was probably Antônio Bispo dos Santos, who died aged 63 in 2023.
Known as Nêgo Bispo, he was known best for his concept of “counter-colonisation” to confront cultural domination, a notion that he developed independently of the term “decoloniality” that was in use elsewhere in Latin America.
The aim of counter-colonisation is to reinforce the culture and social organisation of Afro-Pindoramic (a reference to the Tupi-Guarani name for territory later called Brazil) peoples—particularly Indigenous and Quilombola communities.
This is no philosophical vanity—if anything, the Quilombola comprise one of the most authentic representations of Brazilian cultural independence, having resisted the bloody efforts of Portuguese imperialism to eradicate them, often alongside their natural Indigenous allies in this counter-colonial struggle.
The Earth Gives, the Earth Wants brings together Bispo’s reflections on a range of topics, from cities and “cosmophobia”—a Euro-Christian monotheistic worldview estranged from the living cosmos—to “confluence” and “transfluence”.
The latter terms contrast the harmonious coexistence of diverse elements that reflect the pluralistic worldview of traditional peoples with the the transformation of natural elements associated with Eurocentric and monotheistic perspectives that impose a singular worldview.
The chapter on architecture and counter-colonialism in which Bispo considers the virtues of Quilombo spatial design and the impact of Brazilian state housing projects on them and favelas is enlightening.
He writes: “For us, a house is the place where we’re going to spend the better part of our lives. The house has to be part of our bodies. We have to sweat in that material, we have to feel our smells in our homes.
“Colonial architecture, a synthetic kind of architecture, doesn’t let us do that. Those people need to make houses with smooth, flat, linear walls.
“Colonial architecture eliminates art, since it’s a mechanised mode of knowing; it isn’t handmade, it has no life.”
This books offers an intriguing glimpse into the mind of a marginalised thinker who from the outset chose to reject the colonial commonplace and apply ancient knowledge to his people’s endeavour to live a good life. It will stand alongside and complement works by like-minded Brazilian environmental champions, such as Ailton Krenak, as an indigenous work of philosophy that we would do well to contemplate if we are ever to confront the damage inflicted by colonialism.
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Categories: Brazil, South America