Wanton in the Republic of Muamba – 08/16/2023 – Sérgio Rodrigues

Investigations by the Federal Police are still ongoing, but have already shed new light on the Jair Bolsonaro government. That he had been the most unworthy and deadly in the history of the Republic was already known. That it was basically a gang of smugglers was still not so clear.

More than an extreme right-wing group with a populist and coup-mongering bias –which the group that was in power between 2019 and 2022 was also–, a criminal organization emerges from investigations that used these ideological paints to camouflage common operations of theft, smuggling and trick. It was the Republic of Muamba.

And so this Brazilian word of African origin, in the dictionary since the 19th century, finally reached the first echelon of national life – if you can call that the first echelon, to what point have we descended.

Muamba was born in Kimbundu, a language of the Bantu family spoken in Angola, in which “muhamba” first meant “crate of stems and palm leaves used in travel, basket, load, cart” (Priberam dictionary definition). In Angola, the same word designates a stew made with dendê.

It was from the first meaning, that of a basket used to carry cargo on trips, that muamba gained in Brazil the meanings that would become the main ones among us: first, theft of merchandise stored in ports; then, trade in stolen goods and contraband, in addition to the goods trafficked in this way. To this was added, always in Brazil, a last semantic extension – that of fraud, trickery, coup, gain.

A more restricted sense of the term among us is that of spell, witchcraft, recorded by most scholars as if it had the same origin. However, according to the ethnolinguist Yeda Pessoa de Castro, author of “Camões com Dendê”, in this case the word came from the Quicongo “(m)wanba”.

Muamba was such a success in Brazil, both the word and the shady trade it names, that it didn’t take long to become one of the countless synonyms of cachaça. Here, too, there was a child, a muambeiro, that is, a smuggler or trader of undeclared goods.

It is curious that, despite all this cultural weight, muamba has a timid presence in our literature. Recordings of the word are not easy to find outside the works of authors who have focused more closely on street speech, such as João Antônio and Rubem Fonseca.

“Standing like that, seeing himself inside out and fantasizing about things, Malagueta, an old man with a lot of wit, who under his quiet a lot of muamba was up to no good, was just a shrunken old man”, wrote the first in “Malagueta, Perus e Bacanaço”, from 1963, giving the word the less common sense of coup, ruse.

In the short story “Botando pra Break”, from the book “Feliz Ano Novo”, from 1975, Fonseca uses muamba in the most consecrated sense. An ex-convict complains that no one offers him a job, “only a rascal like Piggy who wanted me to go get some swag for him in Bolivia…”.

The Houaiss dictionary brings at the foot of the entry “muambeiro” a curious note: “Since 1990 the word has been falling into obsolescence (…), replaced by ‘sacoleiro'”.

If muambeiro was really at risk of obsolescence –which I admit I am hearing about for the first time–, this one seems to have been definitively removed by the trepidative messes of Mauro Cid, assistant to the orders of the Republic of Muamba.

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