ExecutedToday.com

On this date in 1792, Joaquim José da Silva Xavier — better known to Brazilian history as Tiradentes — was hanged in Rio de Janeiro and his body quartered for public exposition.

Pedro Americo’s 1893 Tiradentes Esquartejado delivers what it promises.

Tiradentes — “tooth-puller,” a scornful nickname its owner has made glorious, alluding to the span of his itinerant career spent in dentistry — had participated in a conspiracy to detach the province of Minas Gerais from the Portuguese empire.

The Inconfidência Mineira featured the unpromising combination of a large number (the conspiracy was betrayed from within) of middle-class intellectuals (Tiradentes was of an unusually low social strata) without a common programme or a practical notion of what to do once they had seized power. That the Portuguese monarch felt at liberty to commute every other death sentence seems a measure of the plotters’ — if one may put it this way — toothlessness.

Tiradentes was obstinate in maintaining responsibility for the plot, although he wasn’t the leader in particular; for his resulting pains on the scaffold, he traded dentistry for immortality. Now officially recognized as a hero of Brazil, his name adorns the square where he was dismembered and (like Zumbi dos Palmares) his execution date is a public holiday.

When the tides of national fervor made such a rehabilitation politic, the would-be free state of Minas Gerais likewise adopted the conspirators’ banner as its own flag: the motto reads “Liberty, although overdue”.

On this date in 1695, Zumbi dos Palmares, the last leader of Brazil’s most famous free colony of fugitive slaves, was captured by the Portuguese and summarily beheaded.

From the very beginning of European settlement in the New Wold, Maroon communities of escaped slaves, free-born blacks, Indians, poor whites, and mixed-race outcasts formed at the fringes of slave states.

Colonial power did not welcome their presence.

Consequently, the community of Palmares faced repeated harassment from the Portuguese and the Dutch West Indies Company from the time of its establishment around 1600 — even as it burgeoned into a kingdom of over 30,000 inhabitants.

Zumbi, a black free-born in Palmares, was kidnapped by such a sortie and raised with a missionary priest who taught him Portuguese and Latin. At 15, he escaped and returned to Palmares, quickly rising to prominence and in 1678 overthrowing his adoptive uncle King Ganga Zumba when the latter attempted to accept peace under Portuguese rule.

Zumbi’s skepticism was vindicated when the followers of Zumba who had defected to Portugal were re-enslaved, but free Palmares soon faced intensified Portuguese pressure. In 1694, artillery finally battered its largest settlement into submission — forcing its ruler into the bush, where he long eluded capture.

In Zumbi’s honor, November 20 is a Brazilian celebration of national pride and especially pride for those of African descent … while the king who would not be a slave has lent his name, somewhat paradoxically, to an international airport.