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2 Flight to Freedom
a boost in 1992, in the quincentennial year of Columbus’s arrival in the
Americas, when the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, sponsored
two important events: an assembly of people, including the descendants of
several Maroon communities, at a Festival of American Folklife, and an exhibition
under the theme Creativity and Resistance: Maroon Cultures in the
Americas.
There are many reasons for the growing fascination with Maroon history,
but one of the most important is the struggle of African peoples in the
Americas to achieve human dignity in the face of great adversity. An outstanding
feature of Maroon communities is that many of them survived for
several decades – and some for over a century – without capitulating to the
military expeditions sent against them. Among the most durable were
Palmares (literally “palm groves”; also known as Angola Janga or Little
Angola) in Brazil; Saramaka and Ndjuka in Suriname; San Basilio in
Colombia; Esmeraldas in Ecuador; Le Maniel (present-day San José de
Ocoa) on the Haitian–Dominican Republic border; and the Leewards and
Windwards in Jamaica. 1 The struggle for freedom was a hard one; most
enslaved persons sought it in one form or another, but relatively few attained
it until the authoritarian state decreed general abolition. It was this circumstance
that caused Fuentes (1979, 11) to write about the “phantasm of freedom”
that many runaways sought. Once attained, that freedom was
constantly in jeopardy from the former slaveholders; thus Jesús (Chucho)
García (1996, 63) writes about “the danger of freedom” that was integral to
the dialectics of marronage. While most Maroon communities knew only an
ephemeral existence, the longevity of marronage itself constituted a significant
aspect of the Blacks’ struggles for freedom. García (1989, 62) extols marronage
as a saga of the redemptive love of freedom and a quest to recapture
the beauty of the human form, which had been reduced to a work machine
through slavery that created a disjunction between the enslaved person’s inner
self (soul, spirit) and outer self (body).
The Maroon heritage exists almost everywhere in the Americas – especially
in the large plantation societies – in extant contemporary literature,
artefacts, place names, icons, and myths and legends. Richard Price (1979,
105) states that the Maroon heritage is deeply intertwined in the history of
the French Antilles, that out-of-the-way rural settlements that relate to the
Maroon past are not uncommon, and that in Haiti present-day historians
glorify the Maroons’ role in the revolution that overthrew slavery and colo-