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

Establishment of Maroon Communities
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Maroons the Whites thought there were ten thousand (Manigat 1977, 498).
Likewise, La Rosa Corzo (2003, 73) argues, in the case of Cuba, that fear led
the Whites to exaggerate the Maroon threat. Their fears were engendered by
the physical destruction that was occurring around them, the failure of regular
troops to deter Maroon assaults, and the complete uncertainty about
where the Maroons would strike next. The enslavers’ fear was the obverse of
their policy of oppression, creating in them a form of psychological bondage
or enslavement. This was seen clearly in relation to the so-called slave laws.
As Jordan (1968, 108) rightly observes:
While the colonial slave codes seem at first sight to have been intended to discipline
Negroes, to deny them freedoms available to other Americans, a very slight
shift in perspective shows the codes in a different light: they aimed, paradoxically,
at disciplining white men. Principally, the law told the white man, not the
Negro, what he must do; the codes were for the eyes and ears of slaveowners. . . .
It was the white man who was required to punish his runaways, prevent assemblages
of slaves, enforce the curfews, sit on the special courts, and ride the
patrols. Members of the assemblies, most of whom owned slaves, were attempting
to enforce slave-discipline by the only means available, by forcing owners,
individually and collectively, to exercise it.
The panicky response of the Jamaican government in 1670 to the attacks
of the Karmahaly Maroons was seen not only in the placing of the island on
a war footing for the second time but also in the passage of certain legal provisions
that considerably restricted the movements of the free White population.
It became an offence for any military or civilian person to venture out
alone two miles or more without being armed. An alarm was to be sounded
at any hour when Maroons were sighted, and all the inhabitants were compelled
to repair to a specified place on such occasions to await further orders.
Any person sighting Maroons and failing to sound an alarm was to be tried
under the Articles of War, published in 1665 when the island was first readied
for war. These orders were to be published throughout the island every time
any company of the militia or soldiers met for exercise.
The colonists’ fear of Ventura Sánchez (Coba, Cobas), leader of the
Bumba Maroons in Cuba, was so great that the Spanish authorities broached
peace terms with him, though they eventually slew him through treachery
(see chapter 9). It was said that he had organized a large-scale operation
involving hundreds of runaways (Franco 1979, 42–43). There was also