60199616-flight-to-freedom-african-runaways-and-maroons-in-the-americas

The Imperative of Freedom
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ing their attacks on White settlements in 1814 (Reis 1993, 47). One of the
most well-known cases of mass suicide occurred in St John, Virgin Islands, in
1733, when more than thirty insurgents threw themselves off the top of a hill
rather than allowing themselves to be captured (Dookhan 1995, 169). In
Jamaica, it is alleged that in the 1730s many of the Maroons of Nanny Town
did the same thing (Harris 1994, 47). 3 In 1760, following Tackey’s revolt in
that same country, many of the insurgents committed suicide rather than suffer
capture and brutal execution (Campbell 1990, 155–56). Several instances of
mass suicide were also noted among enslaved persons in Cuba in the 1840s
after aborted revolts; on one occasion in 1843, as many as forty hanged themselves
(Hall 1971, 56–60). 4
In an attempt to prevent future suicides, enslavers often severed the body
parts of those who died by their own hand, to impress upon the living that if
the dead made it back to their homeland it would be in mutilated form. The
fact that their actions had little impact on the incidence of suicide should
have taught them that they had only a vague understanding of the African
world view. While some Africans undoubtedly viewed self-inflicted death as
facilitating the return of the body to its homeland, most of them believed the
passage involved primarily the soul or spirit. Oldendorp (1987, 199), a
Moravian missionary in the Danish West Indies, was one of the few White
people who understood this:
This belief in the migration of souls has a very harmful effect on some Negroes.
Thus, when slavery in the West Indies becomes too hard for them, they take
their own life in the hope that their soul will wander back to their homeland and
be reincarnated there in a newborn child.
A number of enslaved persons saw marronage as the winning ticket in the
lottery of life characteristic of slave society in the Americas (Hoogbergen
1993, 165). Enslaved persons could and did revolt, but this often happened
within the framework of the plantation – that is, they took over the plantation
as their military base. While some of these revolts were successful in the
short term, such as those in Jamaica in 1760 and Berbice in 1763, only in
St Domingue (modern Haiti) between 1791 and 1804 did the insurgents manage
to overthrow the slavery system (and colonialism at the same time).
Enslaved persons found it very difficult to sustain and sometimes even to
stage armed insurrection because of geographical, military, demographic and
other factors. Indeed, in some territories, such as Puerto Rico (Soler 1970,