Thoughts from the quilombo
Séverine kodjo-Grandvaux, October 2025
Reading notes on the work of Antônio Bispo dos Santos
” The earth gives, the earth wants “
Antônio Bispo dos Santos, more commonly known as Nêgo Bispo, was a Quilombola thinker, activist and poet from the Brazilian Nordeste (1959-2023). His book dates precisely from 2023 and Wildprojet Editions published its French translation in March 2025.
” The earth gives, the earth wants ” is a multidirectional book, which does not go in a straight line as we may be used to in Western-style essays. Nêgo Bispo refutes straight-line thinking, the idea that we advance by ” progressing ” from point A to point B.
Besides, time is not thought of at Nêgo Bispo, according to before an after. This is not straight-line thinking, but circular thinking that conceives of time in terms of circularity :” of beginning, middle and beginning “.
” The earth gives, the earth wants ” is therefore not an essay but rather a manifesto.
It’s a style of writing that works a lot with words. In Nêgo Bispo’s work, there is a real reflection on language, because the words we use are based on particular imaginations. Nêgo Bispo is a ” semeur de mots ” who plays ” contrecarrer les mots coloniaux pour arriver à les affaiblir “.
He thus writes that :” to weaken sustainable development, we spoke of bio-interaction instead of coincidence, we spoke of confluence instead of synthetic knowledge, organic ; instead of transport, transfluence instead of money (or barter), sharing instead of colonisation, counter-colonisation and so on. “
Nêgo Bispo thus prefers to speak of milieu rather than environment or ecosystem (the environment, suggesting that nature is something external to us and the term ecosystem based on the idea of a system that refers to something closed).
He’s not talking about exchange but sharing. Nor does he talk about ecology (the term being too academic, western, we’d say) but about bio-interaction or quilombola agriculture.
Rather than talking about politics and democracy, which are relationships that want to manage the lives of others, he advocates other ways of being in community such as that of self-management.
Against politics and culture (which, in fact, are identified with the Western, colonial way of life), he thinks of self-management and the ways of life of the Marrones people, who live in the quilombos.
Another example : he uses the term confluence a lot. And I have to say that I really like this notion of confluence because it conveys the idea of a plurality of a pooling, of a possible meeting, and of a journey together.
Nêgo Bispo says on this subject : ” I am convinced that confluence is the energy that drives us to share, to recognise, to respect “.
And he adds :” when we confluence, we don’t stop being ourselves, we become ourselves and others – we thrive. The confluence is a force that makes us prosper, that increases, that amplifies. “
This notion of confluence could very well germinate in other contexts and allow us to escape this notion of the universal, which has become so problematic, due to its imperialist and colonial use.
” La terre donne, la terre veut ” is a very rich book. I would like to come back to two of its strong ideas : the first is that of cosmophobia, the second of counter-colonial.
Cosmophobia is an illness, a fear of the cosmos, which germinates within Christian monotheism. He writes : ” Cosmophobia is the cause of this cruel system of unnecessary storage, disconnection, expropriation and extraction “.
If we follow Nêgo Bispo in his thoughts, the extractivist capitalist system, globalisation, born of the colonial imperialist model, are intimately linked to this cosmophobia. It’s because we don’t feel organically connected to the cosmos that we can extract more than we need from nature.
I’m reminded of what Carolyn Merchant says in The Death of nature, when she notes that European modernity has killed the cosmos, which ends up being thought of as a machine rather than a living organism.
I had raised this point in Becoming alive : the discovery of heliocentrism was fundamental in the self-perception of White European man, who until then thought he was at the centre of the universe. With the discovery of heliocentrism, he understood that the Earth was just a small planet on the periphery of the solar system. Freud saw this as a major narcissistic wound that partly explains why, at this time, the West cut itself off from the cosmos, inventing a nature separate from culture, a nature emptied of sensibility and transformed into resources to be exploited.
This is what I wrote in Becoming alive. And indeed, from that point of view, the term culture designates a Western specificity in its opposition to nature. Let’s remember in passing that identified with this nature are women, but also peoples who are considered to be living in a state of nature, and who are going to be transformed into resources in the context of slavery and the so-called slave trade.
European modernity has indeed developed a physiophobia, a fear of nature that modern man wants to dominate. This is also shown by Baptiste Lanaspeze in his opus Nature published by Anamosa. And I believe that Modernity and Western civilisation have indeed developed a real cosmophobia, a real fear of the cosmos. Everything is done to ensure that we are no longer organically connected to the cosmos.
This is why, in Becoming alive, I called for a rethink of the fact that not only do we inhabit a planet, Earth, and that it is situated in a cosmos to which we are intimately connected. I also called for a broadening of ecological thinking into a cosmophilosophy, one that understands that considering the human, and even more the human, as the measure of all things, must be seen as outdated or to be overcome. To think about our planetary condition is literally to think about our cosmic condition.
He makes an important distinction. This cosmophobia, this fear of the cosmos, is rooted in, we might say, Western episteme, the episteme that therefore produces a culture separated from nature. This culture is the one that gives rise to the idea of Man (separated from the rest of living things) and gives rise to modern humanism.
Historically, modern humanism has effectively been built in opposition to what it has described as savage, whether this be wild nature or peoples whom it has described as savages, because they are supposed to live in a state of nature, outside civilisation. In both cases, the goal of civilisation was seen as the domestication – and therefore the domination – of the savage. The model of humanity promoted was that of Man, with a capital H, in other words the white European male. Sylvia Wynter specifies the white, European, bourgeois man, whom she calls the homo oeconomicus.
This model has thus denied access to full humanity to women, to so-called indigenous peoples and to those identified as black, since let us remember that the first human rights applied only to white men.
Rather than claiming recognition of full humanity, Nêgo Bispo rejects this category.
” Me, I’m not human, I’m quilombola, [I’m brown], I’m a farmer fisherman, I’m a being of the cosmos, humans are monistic Christians, they’re afraid of the cosmos. “
He explains that resisting this cosmophobia means being in counter-colonisation.
The second very important notion, counter-colonisation refers to a way of life, a way of living outside colonial history. Nêgo Bispo is not a decolonial thinker. For him, the decolonial remains, in a way, linked to the colonial. The decolonial is the deterioration, the decomposition of the colonial. In that sense, it is necessary. But it is not everything, you might say. The counter-colonial is something that is outside the colonial, that has not been colonised, that has not been contaminated by colonisation or the colonial. It’s a way of life that has resisted colonial domination, that has its roots in the ways of life of Afrodescendant peoples. Nêgo Bispo says afro-confluents.
What must be understood is that Nêgo Bispo is a situated thinker. He speaks from the quilombo. He extols the merits of the way of life or ways of living in the quilombo. A way of life that respects nature, that takes from nature only what is necessary and that does not seek to accumulate and store. It’s a life of sharing, which runs counter to the concept of development and of always more. Development which, according to Nêgo Bispo, is ” synonymous with disconnection, it pulls us out of the cosmos, breaks the original “.
Abundance is on the side of sharing, not development, because it is based on the link, the relationship. It is based on a way of life that favours quality relationships between people because, he says, ” there is, on our part, an understanding – and this is cosmological – that everything that is born of nature belongs to everyone “.
Nêgo Bispo shows, through multiple examples, how the Brazilian – colonial – state sought to suppress these quilombola, Afro-confluent ways of life in the name of development. But he shows how these ways of life, these practices and knowledge, which he describes as organic, were not destroyed but only made more precarious. These practices and knowledge have been able to resist, even if they have been weakened.
I have just been talking about organic practices and knowledge. This is an important notion that Nêgo Bispo is developing. And to fully understand what he’s talking about, I’d like to clarify one thing first.
Nego Bispo denies being a theorist. He is a cosmologist, a thinker of the cosmos. I would be tempted to say : a cosmophilosopher.
He is not part of a theoretical approach that would be that of what he calls ” synthetic knowledge “. Synthetic is what characterises Western, colonial society. And there would be an interesting comparison to be made between what Nêgo Bispo says about synthetic thought and what Léopold Sédar Senghor says about analytical thought, which characterises, according to him, Western Reason, in a way continuing Bergson’s thinking on what distinguishes analytical thought from intuitive thought.
.With Nêgo Bispo, synthetic thought is that of monism, duality and binarism. But it is above all that of a thought that detaches itself from nature and ” synthesises the organic ” i.e. that ” considers all life as raw material “.
And he contrasts this synthetic relationship to the world with organic practices and knowledge. These organic knowledges are living, biological knowledges. And he specifies that : ” what is biological, organic is what all lives can access. What life cannot access is not organic, it is a commodity – with or without poison. “
This knowledge is cosmological. It belongs to everyone, whereas synthetic knowledge is what the university produces.
Nêgo Bispo has a very critical analysis of the knowledge produced by the university because he criticises the university for turning knowledge into a commodity. There is a form of appropriation – but also of extractivism – in university practice. And this time, I think there would be a very interesting connection to make with what Paulin Hountondji denounced, in his introduction to the book devoted to Savoirs endogènes. An introduction entitled ” Démarginaliser “.
He writes : ” Ecology is a word used by academics. In the quilombo, there is no ecology, there are the roças of the quilombo, [the roças are the plots of land, cultivated in a traditional and manual way] those of the indigenous villages, those of the riverside dwellers, those of the shellfish fishermen and the fish fishermen, and still those of the nutcrackers ; why does the university use the word ecology, and not agriculture quilombola? Why not say nativeroça? Universities are factories for turning knowledge into commodities, and quilombola agriculture is not a commodity. But the knowledge considered valid is that which the university converts into commodities. “
And he added : ” We invented the roças of quilombo, but they changed the name and now they want to sell us back our knowledge by offering us courses in agroecology and courses in building adobe houses. “
This book, then, is extremely rich, opens up plenty of food for thought, and also has a strong spiritual dimension. And I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Bibliography :
La terre donne, la terre veut, by Antônio Bispo dos Santos, translated from Portuguese (Brazil) by Oiara Bonilla, Marseille, éditions Wildproject, 2025, 160 p.
In resonance :
” Demarginalising ” Paulin Hountondji, in Les Savoirs endogènes : pistes pour une recherche, Dakar, Codesria, 1994, p.1-34
Devenir vivants, Séverine Kodjo-Grandvaux, Paris, éditions Philippe Rey, 2021, 176 p.
Nature, Baptiste Lanaspeze, Paris, éditions Anamosa, 2022, 104 p.
The Death of Nature. Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, Carolyn Merchant, New York, HarperOne, 1980, 384 p.; The Death of Nature. Les femmes, l’écologie et la Révolution scientifique, Marseille, éditions Wildproject, translation from English by Margot Lauwers, 2021, 454 p.
” L’esthétique négro-africaine “, Léopold Sédar Senghor, in Diogène, n°16, 1956.
Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, K. McKittrick & S. Wynter (eds.), Duke University Press, 2015.