Backlands: The Canudos Campaign (Penguin Classics) [Paperback]

The war of Canudos, Brazil's deadliest civil war, was in itself a remarkable, almost surreal event.
In the final years of the nineteenth century, in the depths of the Bahia "sertão", the barren inland portion of the Brazilian Northeast, where the state was represented only by the tax collector and local people trying to eke out a living were pretty much left to their own devices, a village (Canudos) rebelled against the newborn Brazilian Republic and withstood several military expeditions sent to subdue it.
It was led by a man known as António "the Counsellor" who, after several business failures and being left by his wife, finally found his calling, as a religious leader and had wandered the Brazilian wilderness for decades. It was motivated by a fierce, superstitious, millenarian and irrational brand of religion, denounced by the official Church, but also by the will to establish a fairer economic and social system. It was the heir to centuries of tension between powerful and powerless, rich and poor, landowner and penniless farmer, master and slave.
Canudos eventually succumbed to the might of a military force more than four thousand soldiers strong, led by several generals and equipped with heavy artillery and the best weapons available. It was the fourth one that was sent against it. Even then, it took many months for the village to be taken.
The villagers were backwoodsmen, including some known brigands and criminals "converted" by the "Counsellor's" preaching, recently freed former slaves (slavery had been abolished less than ten years earlier), poor subsistence farmers and the like. They were armed with ancient weaponry and aided only by their knowledge of the land and their ability to use its scarce resources. Yet, using guerrilla tactics and mostly avoiding open combat, they successfully defended themselves and staggered the country by completely routing the third military expedition sent against their home.
In that occasion some thirteen hundred troops assailed the village, led by a colonel famous for his ruthlessness (a reputation earned by executing defenceless prisoners in southern Brazil). However, when only a few ragged and nearly demented survivors made it back to safety, with the commanding officer and his deputy both killed in combat, the whole country was well and truly shocked.
As always in war, wild rumours began to circulate, of foreign (British) involvement, of a mass monarchist uprising in the making. Anti-monarchist riots broke out in Brazilian cities and at least one known monarchist was killed.
The country, it seems, couldn't come to terms with the fact that a few illiterate, poor, superstitious peasants could fight. Those living in far-off cities obviously didn't know anything about those who, although living in what could well be a different planet, were their own countrymen.
Canudos fought to the end. The last trench was held by three or four men, who, with the "Counsellor" already dead, thought nothing of pitting themselves against thousands of soldiers, their weaponry, their artillery.
The army was unusually cruel to whatever Canudos villagers that fell within its grasp. Thousands of those that surrendered or were taken prisoner were killed, often by having their throats slit, including men, women and children, young and elderly, combatants and non-combatants. The "Counsellor's" body was dug up and defiled, his head severed and sent to Bahia for "scientific" examination, as a result of which, to no one's surprise and the Government's approval, he was posthumously declared to be mad.
Euclides da Cunha covered part of the final campaign as a reporter, and wrote his book some five years later.
It is a somewhat challenging book, its initial part being a detailed description of the "sertão", including flora, fauna, people and their customs, and a powerful evocation of the effects of the region's regular droughts. It's somewhat encyclopaedic and may put off some readers. Also, many (myself included) will gasp at Euclides da Cunha embracing the racial prejudice of his day and its pseudo-scientific justification.
Yet those that persevere will be richly rewarded. Euclides da Cunha is magisterial in his recounting of the whole Canudos saga, the story of two parts of the same country separated by a few thousand kilometres of arid land and, seemingly, two or three hundred years in what concerned customs, religion and tradition.
The "Counsellor's" apocalyptic preaching, the fanaticism of his followers, the army's grim determination in avenging their fallen comrades and punishing the villagers to "avenge the national honour", the whole, remarkable, story of the Canudos War, all are told in breathtaking detail.
In the end, the army prevails and with it, supposedly, modernity. The superstitious backwoodsmen are defeated. Yet for Euclides da Cunha a crime had been committed. A crime that stained a whole nation, for the ruthless repression of the Canudos insurgents showed that the supposedly modern and progressive "half" of Brazil was equally capable of fanaticism and barbarism, of murder and massacre, not to mention sanctimony and self-righteousness.
This book is well and truly an epic, an epic of the Brazilian people in the late nineteenth century, of their qualities and faults and Euclides da Cunha may well be called the Brazilian Homer.
Although fully aware that it can be a difficult read, I unreservedly recommend it to all that may be interested in the history, culture and people of that great, wondrous, always mystifying country that is Brazil.