cimarrónes

Maroons are descendants of Africans in the Americas and islands of the Indian Ocean who escaped from slavery, through flight or manumission, and formed their own settlements. They often mixed with Indigenous peoples, eventually evolving into separate creole cultures such as the Garifuna and the Mascogos.

Etymology

''Maroon'' entered English around the 1590s, from the French adjective , meaning 'feral' or 'fugitive', itself possibly from the American Spanish word , meaning 'wild, unruly' or 'runaway slave'. In the early 1570s, Sir Francis Drake's raids on the Spanish in Panama were aided by "''Symerons''", a likely misspelling of '. The linguist Leo Spitzer, writing in the journal ''Language'', says, "If there is a connection between Eng. ''maroon'', Fr. ', and Sp. ', Spain (or Spanish America) probably gave the word directly to England (or English America)."

Alternatively, the Cuban philologist José Juan Arrom has traced the origins of the word ''maroon'' further than the Spanish ''cimarrón'', used first in Hispaniola to refer to feral cattle, then to Indian slaves who escaped to the hills, and by the early 1530s to African slaves who did the same. He proposes that the American Spanish word derives ultimately from the Arawakan root word , construed as 'fugitive', in the Arawakan language spoken by the Taíno people native to the island.

History

Colonial era

In the New World, as early as 1512, African slaves escaped from Spanish captors and either joined Indigenous peoples or eked out a living on their own. When runaway slaves and Amerindians banded together and subsisted independently they were called "Maroons". On the Caribbean islands, they formed bands and on some islands, armed camps.

The earliest Maroon communities of the Americas formed in what is now the Dominican Republic, following the first slave rebellion on 26 December 1522, on the sugar plantations of Admiral Diego Columbus. A typical Maroon community in the early stages usually consisted of three types of people:

* Most of them were slaves who ran away directly after they got off the ships. They refused to surrender their freedom and often tried to find ways to go back to Africa.
*The second group were slaves who had been working on plantations for a while. Those slaves were usually somewhat adjusted to the slave system but had been abused by the plantation owners – often with excessive brutality. Others ran away when they were being sold suddenly to a new owner.
*The last group of Maroons were usually skilled slaves with particularly strong opposition to the slave system.
Maroon communities faced great odds in surviving the attacks by hostile colonists, obtaining food for subsistence living, as well as reproducing and increasing their numbers. As the planters took over more land for crops, the Maroons began to lose ground on the small islands. Only on some of the larger islands were organised Maroon communities able to thrive by growing crops and hunting. Here, they grew in number as more slaves escaped from plantations and joined their bands. Seeking to separate themselves from colonisers, the Maroons gained in power amid increasing hostilities. They raided and pillaged plantations and harassed planters until the planters began to fear a massive revolt of the black slaves.

By 1700, many early Maroon communities had disappeared or were displaced from the smaller islands. Survival was always difficult, as the Maroons had to fight off attackers as well as grow food.

Relationship to colonial authorities

''Marronage'' () was a constant threat to New World slavocracies. Punishments for recaptured Maroons were severe, like removing the Achilles tendon, amputating a leg, castration, and being roasted to death. Maroon communities had to be inaccessible and located in inhospitable environments to be sustainable. For example, Maroon communities were established in remote swamps in the southern United States; in deep canyons with sinkholes but little water or fertile soil in Jamaica; and in the deep jungles of the Guianas. Maroon communities turned the severity of their environments to their advantage to hide and defend their communities. Disguised pathways, false trails, booby traps, underwater paths, quagmires and quicksand, and natural features were all used to conceal Maroon villages.Maroons utilised exemplary guerrilla warfare skills to fight their European enemies. Nanny, the famous Jamaican Maroon, used guerrilla warfare tactics that are also used today by many militaries around the world. European troops used strict and established strategies while Maroons attacked and retracted quickly, used ambush tactics, and fought when and where they wanted to. Even though colonial governments were in a perpetual state of conflict with the Maroon communities, individuals in the colonial system traded goods and services with them. Maroons also traded with isolated white settlers and Native American communities. Maroon communities played interest groups off of one another. At the same time, Maroon communities were also used as pawns when colonial powers clashed.

Absolute secrecy and loyalty of members were crucial to the survival of Maroon communities. To ensure this loyalty, Maroon communities used severe methods to protect against desertion and spies. New members were brought to communities by way of detours so they could not find their way back and served probationary periods, often as slaves. Crimes such as desertion and adultery were punishable by death.

The Maroon Wars

Maroon communities emerged in many places in the Caribbean ( St Vincent and Dominica, for example), but none were seen as such a great threat to the British as the Jamaican Maroons. Beginning in the late 17th century, Jamaican Maroons consistently fought British colonists, leading to the First Maroon War (1728–1740). In 1739 and 1740, the British governor of the Colony of Jamaica, Edward Trelawny, signed treaties promising the Jamaican Maroons in two locations, at Cudjoe's Town (Trelawny Town) in western Jamaica and Crawford's Town in eastern Jamaica, to bring an end to the warfare between the communities. In exchange, they were to agree to capture other escaped slaves. They were initially paid a bounty of two dollars for each African returned. The treaties effectively freed the Maroons a century before the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, which came into effect in 1838.

The Second Maroon War of 1795–1796 was an eight-month conflict between the Maroons of Cudjoe's Town (Trelawny Town), a Maroon settlement later renamed after Governor Edward Trelawny at the end of First Maroon War, located near Trelawny Parish, Jamaica in the St James Parish, and the British colonials who controlled the island. The Windward communities of Jamaican Maroons remained neutral during this rebellion and their treaty with the British still remains in force. Accompong Town, however, sided with the colonial militias, and fought against Trelawny Town.

Modern era

Remnants of Maroon communities in the former Spanish Caribbean remain as of 2006, for example in Viñales, Cuba. To this day, the Jamaican Maroons are to a significant extent autonomous and separate from Jamaican society. The physical isolation used to their advantage by their ancestors has today led to their communities remaining among the most inaccessible on the island. In their largest town, Accompong, in the parish of St Elizabeth, the Leeward Maroons still possess a vibrant community of about 600. Tours of the village are offered to foreigners and a large festival is put on every 6 January to commemorate the signing of the peace treaty with the British after the First Maroon War..

The Ndyuka treaty remains important to relations between the Ndyuka and the modern Surinamese government, as it defines the territorial rights of the Maroons in the gold-rich inlands of Suriname.

Culture

There is much variety among Maroon cultural groups because of differences in history, geography, African nationality, and the culture of Indigenous people throughout the Western Hemisphere. Outside of the plantation system, Maroons were also freer to share, retain and adapt various African, European and Indigenous traditions and cultures, resulting in diverse Maroon identities. The Jamaican Maroons, for example, have been recorded using the Coromantee language for ceremonial purpose, and retain certain herbal medicine practices similar to West African traditions.

The jungles around the Caribbean Sea offered food, shelter, and isolation for the escaped slaves. Maroons sustained themselves by growing vegetables and hunting. Their survival depended upon their cultures, and their military abilities, using guerrilla tactics and heavily fortified dwellings involving traps and diversions. Some defined leaving the community as desertion and therefore punishable by death. They also originally raided plantations. During these attacks, the Maroons would burn crops, steal livestock and tools, kill slavemasters, and invite other slaves to join their communities. Individual groups of Maroons often allied themselves with the local Indigenous tribes and occasionally assimilated into these populations. Maroons played an important role in the histories of Brazil, Suriname, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Jamaica.

Maroon settlements often possessed a clannish, outsider identity. They sometimes developed Creole languages by mixing European tongues with their original African languages. One such Maroon creole language, in Suriname, is Saramaccan. At other times, the Maroons would adopt variations of a local European language (creolization) as a common tongue, for members of the community frequently spoke a variety of mother tongues.

The Maroons created their own independent communities, which in some cases have survived for centuries, and until recently remained separate from mainstream society. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Maroon communities began to disappear as forests were razed, although some countries, such as Guyana and Suriname, still have large Maroon populations living in the forests. Recently, many of them moved to cities and towns as the process of urbanization accelerates.

Geographical distribution

Africa

Mauritius

Under governor Adriaan van der Stel in 1642, the early Dutch settlers of the Dutch East India Company brought 105 slaves from Madagascar and parts of Asia to work for them in Dutch Mauritius. However, 50 of these first slaves, including women, escaped in the wilderness of Dutch Mauritius. Only 18 of these escapees were caught. On 18 June 1695, a gang of Maroons of Indonesian and Chinese origins, including Aaron d'Amboine, Antoni (Bamboes) and Paul de Batavia, as well as female escapees Anna du Bengale and Espérance, set fire to the Dutch settlers' Fort Frederick Hendryk ( Vieux Grand Port) in an attempt to take over control of the island. They were all caught and decapitated. In February 1706 another revolt was organised by the remaining Maroons as well as disgruntled slaves. When the Dutch abandoned Dutch Mauritius in 1710 the Maroons stayed behind.

When representatives of the French East India Company landed on the island in 1715 they also had to face attacks by the Mauritian Maroons. Significant events were the 1724 assault on a military outpost in Savannah district, as well as the attack on a military barrack in 1732 at Poste de Flacq. Several deaths resulted from such attacks. Soon after his arrival in 1735, Mahé de La Bourdonnais assembled and equipped French militia groups made of both civilians and soldiers to fight against the Maroons. In 1739, Maroon leader Sans Souci was captured near Flacq and was burnt alive by the French settlers. A few years later, a group of French settlers gave chase to Barbe Blanche, another Maroon leader, but lost track of him at Le Morne. Other Maroons included Diamamouve and Madame Françoise.

Réunion

The most important Maroons on Réunion were Cimendef, Cotte, Dimitile and Maffate. In the 18th century, Dimitile rebelled and found asylum in the region of the island to which he gave his name. In 1743, Dimitile and his companions are said to have freed Jeanneton, a slave from Mozambique, from the hands of her owner Pierre Hibon.

Sierra Leone

A group of just under 600 Jamaican Maroons from Cudjoe's Town, the largest of the five Jamaican maroon towns, were deported by the British authorities in Jamaica following the Second Maroon War in 1796, first to Nova Scotia. Four years later in 1800, they were transported to Sierra Leone.

The Sierra Leone Company had established the settlement of Freetown and the Colony of Sierra Leone in 1792 for the resettlement of the African Americans who arrived via Nova Scotia after they had been evacuated as freedmen from the United States after the American Revolutionary War. Some Jamaican Maroons eventually returned to Jamaica, but most became part of the larger Sierra Leone Creole people and culture made up of freemen and liberated slaves who joined them in the first half-century of the colony.

North America

Canada

= Nova Scotia

=

In the 1790s, about 600 Jamaican Maroons were deported to British settlements in Nova Scotia, where American slaves who had escaped from the United States were also resettled. Being unhappy with conditions, in 1800, a majority emigrated to Freetown, West Africa where they identified as the Sierra Leone Creoles.

Caribbean

= Cuba

=

In Cuba, there were Maroon communities in the mountains, where African refugees had escaped the brutality of slavery and joined Taínos. In 1538, runaways helped the French to sack the city of Havana

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