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

The Imperative of Freedom
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Some of the Maroons were said to have become bold enough to appropriate
land that was marked out for the White settlers there, and to be indulging in
other “insolences”. The authorities tried to capture them, but most of them
escaped to other areas in the country (Martin 1957, 123).
In 1648 in the Chocó, Colombia – which was to become a principal haunt
of both Indian and African Maroons in the province of Cartagena (Borrego
Plá 1973, 6) – the fight was carried to the Spanish by over a thousand Indians,
joined by a dozen or so African Maroons (Sharp 1976, 158). The Indians kept
up their struggle for a long time, until their numbers were devastated by
White military expeditions and new diseases brought by the invaders. In
Cuba in 1802 two Indians were creating problems for the Whites in Filipinas,
west of Havana. The colonial authorities set a much higher reward than
usual, of 400 pesos, for each of their heads. However, up to 1804 one of them
still remained at large, leading a small group that included Indians from
Mexico and eight Blacks. In that year the colonial authorities placed 2,250
pesos on his head. The records uncovered to date are silent on what eventually
transpired (La Rosa Corzo 2003, 88–89).
Even when Indian and African Maroons did not forge a unity, Whites
feared that they would do so. In Belize in 1817 a magistrate expressed the view
that enslaved persons would join the Mayas in the interior and that they
would soon overpower and destroy all the British subjects (Bolland 2002, 55).
Indian–African Maroon activities were widespread throughout the
Americas. This reality reinforces the point, made in chapter 2, that while
some ethnic consciousness existed among Maroons, it was not the main factor
in their relations with each other; what mattered most was their common
struggle against their oppressors. Realizing this, in the latter half of the sixteenth
century the Spanish imperial government repeated its decree, published
earlier in Venezuela, Mexico and other Spanish domains, that no
Blacks, Mulattos or Mestizos should be allowed to live among the Indians
(Veracoechea 1987, 81; Dusenberry 1948, 291).
African Marronage
The story of African marronage is writ much larger than that of their Indian
counterparts. Large-scale African enslavement in the Americas was associated
almost everywhere with the establishment and development of the plan-