The blacks didn't tolerate the way they were treated. During the whole period of the slavery of Brazil the resistance was constant.
The blacks developed many forms of rioting against the oppression:
A lot of times they preferred to suicide as submitting to humiliating works.
The banzo was a resistance form, and it was also known as " nostalgia of Africa ". The banzo was the black's non identification with the world to which they had been brought. The slave entered in deep depression, he refused to eat, he gobbled earth until the death.
Another form of resisting to the hard work , was the smuggling of gold.
Through the smuggling of gold, the slave, besides hurting the master , got to obtain money to buy their freedom. The freedom was gotten through the alforria letter. The black smuggled the powdered gold in the hair or then, it threaded nuggets in their bowelses.
Another way to resist and to fight for the freedom was the escapes, most of the time done in groups. After they escape from the farms, the blacks were organized in communities hidden in the brushwood. Those communities were called quilombos.
The quilombos marked presence for the whole Brazilian territory, during the whole period of the slavery in Brazil. It inspired the fear of the whites, that feared the rebellions and the assaults that were constantly accomplished by those black fugitives.
The quilombos were a new alternative of life , where the blacks tried to reorganize their life as in Africa.
As form of resisting, the black also murdered their oppressor, generally the feitor and per times their own owner. Whole families of whites were massacred in the escapes.
The suicide could be individual or collective: the collective suicide was not rare. The slave knew that the white lost a lot with the slave's death, because the invested capital was totally lost with the death.
Religious rituals were also a form of denying the values imposed by the whites. Through the preservation of the culture the black reaffirmed its pride.
The individual escape was more difficult, because the persecution was voracious, and the survival was quite complicated in the brushwood.
During the whole period of the slavery, the white feared the black. It was the price that was paid for the oppression and for the sustain of a fragile society, governed by the violence.