Tereza de Benguela: Queen of the Unforgotten

In today’s Brazil, the image of a Black woman leading a sovereign community, negotiating trade, and resisting colonial violence is not just a historical footnote—it’s a necessary provocation. As systemic racism continues to shape who has land, power, and protection, the legacy of Tereza de Benguela offers more than inspiration; it offers a blueprint.

She reminds us that Black leadership is not new. That the fight for self-governance, dignity, and economic autonomy has deep roots in the soil of resistance. And that Black women, far from being silent spectators of history, have long been its most determined architects.

Her name resurfaces every July 25th—not out of nostalgia, but because her vision still challenges the present. In a country where Black women face the highest rates of femicide, police violence, and economic exclusion, remembering Tereza is not symbolic—it is strategic.

Before the word “intersectionality” existed, she lived it.

The Queen of Quilombo Quariterê

In the 18th century, deep in the heart of what is now Mato Grosso, Tereza de Benguela led a quilombo—a community of fugitive enslaved people—called Quariterê. After the death of her husband, José Piolho, she assumed leadership and transformed the settlement into a formidable zone of resistance.

Tereza organized a parliamentary-style government, oversaw textile production, managed an arms trade, and forged strategic alliances with Indigenous groups. The community grew into an economic and political entity that challenged Portuguese colonial power for nearly two decades.

She was not merely surviving in the margins—she was building an autonomous society, structured, defended, and guided by a Black woman’s hand.

In 1770, colonial forces destroyed Quariterê, and Tereza was either captured and executed or died by suicide to avoid recapture. While her body disappeared into the machinery of empire, her name refused to vanish. It traveled in whispers, in oral stories, in the quiet pride of those who remembered.

A Name Once Erased, Now Written in Fire

For centuries, Tereza’s story was buried—ignored by Brazil’s official history, which glorified colonizers and rendered enslaved people as faceless labor. Her name rarely appeared in textbooks, monuments, or civic memory. It wasn’t until the late 20th century, when Black feminist movements and Afro-Brazilian scholars began demanding the rewriting of national narratives, that Tereza de Benguela was restored to her rightful place: not merely as a symbol of resistance, but as a foundational political figure.

Organizations like Geledés – Instituto da Mulher Negra, founded by Sueli Carneiro, and the Articulação de Organizações de Mulheres Negras Brasileiras (AMNB) played key roles in rescuing her memory. Through educational campaigns, publications, and street activism, these collectives connected Tereza's legacy to contemporary struggles for racial and gender justice. The landmark Marcha das Mulheres Negras in 2015 brought more than 50,000 Black women to Brasília, many carrying images of Tereza and invoking her leadership as a spiritual and political anchor.

At the intellectual front, scholars such as Beatriz Nascimento reframed quilombos not as peripheral zones of survival, but as strategic, autonomous political experiments. Djamila Ribeiro, Vilma Reis, and Conceição Evaristo further re-inscribed Tereza into Brazil’s cultural consciousness through essays, lectures, literature, and public advocacy—insisting that the memory of Black women must not only be preserved but centered.

Their collective work culminated in the official recognition of July 25th, enacted in 2014 under President Dilma Rousseff, as the National Day of Tereza de Benguela and Black Women. This date now joins the broader International Day of Afro-Latin American and Afro-Caribbean Women, amplifying her name across borders and generations.

Across Brazil today, the date is honored through marches, poetry readings, community dialogues, and public tributes. In Salvador, Porto Alegre, Rio de Janeiro, and beyond, her name is painted on murals, projected onto buildings, and shouted into microphones.

It is no longer hidden.

More Than Memory—A Living Strategy

To evoke Tereza today is to expose the unfinished revolution of abolition. More than 135 years after slavery officially ended in Brazil, its scars remain fresh: over 56% of Brazilians are Black or mixed-race, yet they continue to be underrepresented in politics, underpaid in the workforce, and overrepresented in prisons.

Tereza’s vision—a Black-led, self-sustaining, and inclusive community—stands in stark contrast to the structural inequalities that define modern Brazil. Her name becomes a rallying cry not for mourning, but for imagination. For what is still possible.

In recent years, Black women leaders such as Marielle Franco, Vilma Reis, and Erika Hilton have invoked her name as a spiritual compass. Feminist collectives, landless workers, quilombola associations, and favela movements draw on her story not as legend, but as precedent.

She lived the future they are still trying to build.

"Your Name Will Echo"

In the song Carlos e Tereza, by the band El Efecto, a verse has become a refrain at protests and commemorations:

“Teu nome há de ecoar
No condomínio e na favela
Na avenida e na viela
Na cidade, no campo, na rua ou na cela
Teu nome há de ecoar.”

"Your name will echo
In the condo and the favela
In the avenue and the alley
In the city, the countryside, the street or the cell
Your name will echo.”

The power of Tereza de Benguela lies in this echo. It carries the weight of the past, the urgency of the present, and the dream of a freer tomorrow.

In her name, we remember not only what was, but what still must be.