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

216 Flight to Freedom
followers. In most instances, his violence seems to have been neither necessary
nor structured. In the context of the time, however, many of these acts
were common, even quotidian, experiences in slave societies, carried out by
individual planters, managers and judicial officers. Did the brutalities that
Boni and other oppressed people either experienced themselves or saw
inflicted on their significant others, both on the plantations and during military
expeditions against the Maroons, lead to their own wanton disregard for
human life Were they suffering from some form of paranoia or schizophrenia
We may never know the answers to these questions, but we must at least
ask them. In the case of Boni, who was a Mulatto born in the forest, some
authorities feel that the circumstances of his birth might explain his intense
hatred for Whites (Stedman 1988, 655n457): his father may well have raped
his mother. 5
We must also bear in mind, when assessing Maroon governments, that
the vast majority of them could not have equalled those of the plantocracy
and the authoritarian state in cruelty and the denial of basic human rights, at
least against enslaved persons. Zips (1999, 27) rightly classifies the government
of the oppressors as a “shocking dictatorship”, while Patterson (1967, 9)
views slave society as a whole as “a monstrous distortion of human society”.
The only part that enslaved persons played in such government was as victims.
They suffered a daily round of contempt, abuse and wrong at the hands
of their overlords, including being barring from access to the law courts to
requite those wrongs, and general denial of personhood except when the
oppressors considered them to be felons. This is why, in fact, despite the
many state offers of amnesty to runaways if they returned to their overlords,
relatively few did so, viewing the Maroon communities as offering greater
freedom, mobility and justice than the White settlements.
Perhaps it is apposite to point out here that part of the mythology about
Maroons generally is that they were exceptionally cruel, much more so than
their former overlords. An American officer, writing in the 1830s about the
Seminole Maroons, declared that they were “blood-thirsty and cruel” (Porter
1932, 337). Dallas (1803, 1:45–46) said of the Jamaican Maroons:
In their inroads they exercised the most horrid barbarities. The weak and
defenceless, whenever surprised by them, fell victims to their thirst of [sic] blood;
and, though some were more humane than others, all paid implicit obedience to
the command of a leader, when that was given to imbrue their hands in blood: