Joseph Pereira | Maroons in the Americas

Marronage, or the process of fleeing enslavement, had been a reality from the early days of European colonising of the Western Hemisphere. It is in no way surprising that people would seek to escape enslavement and all the human exploitation that went with it.

The word itself is an English derivation from the Spanish cimarrόn, which means wild or untamed. The Spaniards started to use cimarrόn to describe those who were fleeing enslavement from as early as the first decade of the 16th century, on the island of Hispaniola. As European colonising of the Americas and enslavement of Africans spread, so, too, did marronage. The culture of resistance to enslavement took many forms, subverting the European project in many different ways, the highest of which were revolts. But the most successful of forms of resistance throughout the America was marronage.

DIFFERENT FORMS OF MARRONAGE

While we tend to think of marronage as resulting in enslaved Africans and their descendants forming communities or villages in the mountains, there were all forms of marronage, even where there were no mountains. For example, in Puerto Rico, maroons found escape in the swamps near San Juan. In Barbados, there were reports of “urban” maroons hiding in the very heart of Bridgetown. Perhaps the most interesting account we have of solitary marronage is to be found in the book, Biografía de un Cimarrόn (1968), in which the Cuban, Esteban Montejo, who was born enslaved, recounts to Miguel Barnett his own experiences, first as an enslaved person, then as a defiant “runaway” and his solitary life for years in the Cuban forests, then his life after abolition was declared in Cuba in 1880. Montejo’s experiences as a maroon are unusual as a solitary person surviving in hiding in the forest, distrustful of any direct human contact, even with other “runaways”.

PALENQUES AND QUILOMBOS

However, there were several Maroon communities or palenques that thrived for a while in Cuba, especially in the mountains in the east of the island near Santiago. Such palenques as El Frijol, Moa, Bumba, and Muluala are documented and reflect the extent of marronage in Cuba. But, throughout the Americas, we have well-documented accounts of Maroon communities. Richard Price published a seminal work in 1973 on Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas. He would go on to publish in 1983 an account of the Saramaka Maroons in Suriname, whose communities still exist with their Maroon culture. In both the colonies of French Guiana (now Cayenne) and Dutch Guiana (now Suriname), the colonisers made countless efforts to defeat the Maroons, but, by the 1760s, the Dutch finally concluded peace treaties with the two largest Maroon groups: the Ndyukas and the Saramakas, and with the much smaller Matawai.

However, in the Americas there were other far earlier Maroon communities whose existence the colonisers tried to destroy but were forced eventually to conclude peace treaties of recognition. We would be familiar with the Treaty that the Jamaican Maroons, Captain Cudjoe and his other captains, signed with the British in 1738. This came after years of Maroon guerilla resistance to all attempts to destroy them. It recognised the autonomy of the Maroons and guaranteed them a “perfect state of freedom and liberty” in the designated zone within the Cockpit Country. This was almost 100 years before enslavement was abolished in the British colonies. In the following year, another treaty was signed with Quao, covering the Maroon communities in the Blue Mountains. Oral tradition recalls that Nanny, declared a Jamaican national heroine in 1982, opposed such a treaty, but it did allow Maroons to live unchallenged in their freedom.

We have seen how the Dutch and the British had to seek peace with the Maroons in Suriname and Jamaica, respectively. But even before these was the case of the Spanish colonisers in Mexico who, after years of trying to dislodge them, had to sign a peace treaty with the Maroons in the area of Yanga (named after its chief) who had led the development of Maroon palenques in the Zongolica mountains near Orizaba, from as early as 1605. The Spaniards had to recognise their independent free community in a formal treaty in 1630, although there was evidence of informal acceptance of their autonomy for years before that. Yanga’s palenques may well be the earliest documented in the Americas, and the 1630 treaty the first by any European coloniser.

COMMON TREATY CLAUSE

Among the clauses in that treaty was one that required the free Maroons to return any new “runaways”, This is similar to a clause the Jamaican Maroons signed with the British in the following century. In both cases, this clause was observed selectively – the Maroons sending back some but keeping those who they had better relations with. It is a clause that has given rise to much contention regarding “sell-out” of their enslaved African brethren, but, when one reads of the various complaints by the colonisers regarding breaches of this clause by the Maroons, one realises the tactical motives behind agreeing to such a clause. It is of note that such a clause also was part of the treaty with Ganga Zumba in Brazil and with the San Basilio Maroons in Colombia.

The Portuguese also soon found that the enslaved in Brazil were not going to accept enslavement docilely, and, from as early as the end of the 16th century, palenques (or quilombos as they were called in Brazil) were being developed in the Pernambuco area of north-eastern Brazil (now the state of Alagoas) by those escaping the sugar plantations being expanded there. Throughout the 17th century, several quilombos developed and thrived as settlements of free people. The best known of these was the federation of quilombos called Palmares, said to number tens of thousands of inhabitants. After attempts to destroy them, the Portuguese colonisers had to settle for a peace treaty in 1678 with the then leader, Ganga Zumba, recognising their freedom and his sovereignty. Once again, there was a clause requiring the Maroons to return new “runaways”.

In Colombia, too, palenques developed early in the colonial life, mainly in the Santa Marta mountains on the Caribbean coast near Cartagena. The best known of these was San Basilio, as it came to be called, which the Spanish Crown eventually recognised by treaty in 1791, guaranteeing the Maroons their freedom if they stopped accepting new escapees.

MAROON HERITAGE

The main overall point in looking at the history of Maroon communities in the Americas (whether San Basilio or Yanga, Saramaka or Palmares, or Accompong or the Blue Mountain communities) is the incessant determination of so many enslaved Africans to free themselves from a pernicious system and establish their free villages along African social and cultural lines. This to the point where all main European colonisers: British, Spanish, Dutch or Portuguese, had to accept recognising their free states and the Maroons as free people. In more recent times, these Maroon historical heritages have become a source of revalidation and recognition by African descendants in these countries as they celebrate those heroic struggles for freedom and use them as inspiration for ongoing struggles against forms of oppression in their societies today.

Joseph Pereira is former deputy principal of The University of the West Indies and lectured in Latin American and Caribbean Literature at UWI Mona. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com