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

Military Expeditions and Judicial Terror
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as dark cells and went on to boast about the salutary influence of such confinement
(Thompson 2002a, 213). From around the last quarter of the eighteenth
century they were constructed on all plantations in the French
Caribbean that had more than 150 enslaved persons (Debien 1979, 119).
As noted above, even the dead (or rather their bodies) were often subject
to exemplary “punishments” by displaying them in public places. In 1695 the
colonial authorities in Pernambuco cut off the head of Zumbi, the last ruler
of Palmares, and stuck it on a pole in the busiest part of Recife, in order to
intimidate would-be deserters. It was perhaps also a symbolic representation
by the authorities that this widely acclaimed god of war was, in fact, a mortal
being whom they could dispatch to eternity (Carneiro 1946, 53; see chapters 4
and 10). In 1533 Governor Manuel de Rojas of Cuba, having killed four runaways
in the mines of Jobabo, took their bodies to Bayamo, where he had
them cut in pieces and the heads stuck on poles (Ortiz 1975, 369). In 1612 the
Audiencia in Mexico City decreed that twenty-nine males and four females
should be hanged, and their heads removed and placed on poles until total
decomposition had taken place (Naveda Chávez-Hita 1987, 127). In 1771
Guillermo Rivas’s head and an arm were cut off and placed at the entrance
and exit of Panaquire (García 1996, 77, 79). In the early seventeenth century
Fernando Montero (Montoro) was executed, and his hands and head were
cut off, taken to Santo Domingo and placed on poles at the entrance to the
public square. The rest of the body was cut into pieces and placed along the
highways (Larrazábal Blanco 1998, 146).
A more well-known example of brutality and vulgarity by the judicial
authorities appears in the extant records concerning Lemba, a much feared
Dominican Republic Maroon leader in the mid-sixteenth century, who was
killed in one of his many encounters with the colonial troops. The colonial
government directed that his head should be placed on an iron hook and displayed
on one of the gates that opened out into the King’s Savannah. For a
long time that gate was remembered as “Lemba’s Gate” (Esteban Deive 1989,
50; Larrazábal Blanco, 1998, 143). 23
Certain judicial sentences are chilling simply to read about them.
Consider the following sentences passed on two Maroons that the French
colonial government apprehended in 1752.
Copena, charged with and convicted of marronage; of bearing firearms; of invading
and pillaging, along with other maroons, the house and plantation of Berniac
from which they stole furnishing, silver and a musket, and carried off many of