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

10 Flight to Freedom
341–42; Freehling 2002, 8–9). Also, Maroons on the whole were waging a
counter-offensive against slavery. The real aggressors were the enslavers who
had held them in bondage, sought to return them to bondage and continued
to keep their families and friends in lifelong bondage.
I used the term “former enslaved persons” earlier because, functionally,
Maroons were no longer enslaved persons. Patterson (1979, 278) states that
arguably Maroons were not “slaves”. Jean Fouchard (1972, 339) insists that
they were de facto free persons, but different from other free persons because
they had freed themselves against the express wishes of their overlords. Jesús
(Chucho) García (1989, 53, 61) speaks about marronage as the Africans’
“reconquest of their freedom”, and “the reconquest of the human condition of
the African and his descendants”. Brito Figueroa (1985, 206–7) views it as an
attempt by enslaved persons to “take back the freedom that the Spanish had
so tyrannically usurped”. 3 Occasionally, the colonial authorities spoke about
pre-treaty Maroons as free people – for instance, in an official document of
the Royal Audiencia in Caracas (Brito Figueroa 1985, 238).
We should also bear in mind that many people were born in Maroon communities
and were never enslaved. This was true especially of the large and
long-standing communities such as Palmares in Brazil, the Windwards and
Leewards in Jamaica, the Saramakas and Ndjukas (Djukas, Ndyukas, Aukas)
in Suriname, and Le Maniel (Spanish: Maniel de Neiba) on the border
between Haiti 4 and the Dominican Republic. Nevertheless, the slaveholders
commonly referred to the progeny of deserters as “slaves”. One example
comes from the court records of Maroons captured in Brazil in 1877.
Although certain women testified that they had been born in the Curuá
mocambo and that they had children but had never had masters, the records
still referred to them as “slave women” (Conrad 1983, 393). Similarly, although
the vast majority of Maroons and other groups of African descent in the
Miskito population of Nicaragua lived as free persons, working for themselves
as traders, woodcutters, fishermen and peasant farmers, in 1766 the
writer Robert Hodgson still listed them as “slaves” (Gordon 1998, 35).
Patrick Carroll (1977, 499) refers to Maroons who had signed treaties with
the authoritarian states that recognized their freedom as “former maroons”.
The use of such a term and the larger argument that I have put forward are
in a sense semantic, but the objective is to probe more deeply the psyches of
both the plantocracy and the escapees in dealing with the issue of bondage
and freedom. Part of the process of rethinking marronage is to try to view the