Zombibudi Wars

The Zombibudi Wars were a series of conflicts in Bahia in the 17th to 18th centuries. They involved raids and conquests by various polities and armies centred on sodalities loosely grouped together as 'Zombibudi', literally 'gnawing god'. These lodges held little in common for actual beliefs, but shared, whether through creeds and rites emphasizing warfare and bloodletting themselves, or destruction caused in the course of attempting their political ambitions, a reputation of terror.

The first Zombibudi can find a common origin in Dovoba, a province of the Aguda Empire in modern Mabifia. This region, always a cultural frontier, had a highly syncretistic society blending the practice of fetishism, Badi, and Irfan, which was also becoming heavily militarized in wars against Kambou and Munzwa. Increasing freedoms given to Agudan soldiers from the periphery as warlords made various sodalities almost openly become units, and expand to become sprawling forces encompassing most Dovoban men.

While in Dovoba these sects engaged in mutinies and rebellions as early as the 1650s, the start of the Zombibudi era is usually marked by the career of the general Kimalawezi, who after conquering Kambou in 1691 rebelled against Aguda in 1694 and established an independent Zombibudi state. Raids and conquests spread throughout Bahia, echoing the Bahian Consolidation. Most sodalities were eventually defeated and scattered, but some managed to establish new states, although these were generally unstable. Kimalawezi's state, for example, was usurped by several different lodges until its collapse into further warlordism in the 1720s.

From the 1740s hourege rulers generally found a firmer footing against the Zombibudi, most of whom were no longer as effective as the ex-Agudan troops of earlier times, while states established by successful sodalities were able to stand their ground against challengers. In Mabifia the rise of the Tabera movement attempted to produce a new social order that would restore rational social organisation and explicitly end the terror posed by sodalities, which collaborated with a resurgent Kambou under the Tuldeyuri dynasty to reunify the region by 1760.

The Zombibudi caused considerable upheaval that accelerated the decline of Bahian civilization and the expansion of Euclean colonial interests. The displacement and enslavement of refugees and captives contributed to a considerable growth in the Transvehemens slave trade. Sodalities established during the period remained or became dominant in many Bahian countries during the Toubacterie, including the Abasoremwezi.