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Maroon Government
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eral states, was so powerful that he lived apart from the others, and was so
renowned for his courage and bearing that many of his enemies feared him
greatly. His mocambo was well fortified and contained more than a thousand
houses (Conrad 1983, 369, 373). The last thing that the king would have
wanted was civil unrest, which would surely have arisen if he had alienated
such powerful rulers by flouting the rules of political and civil conduct.
Maroon communities were much more likely to be torn apart from without
by military expeditions against them than from within by fissiparous tendencies.
It is instructive that while contemporary writers focused on many
aspects of Maroon life, rarely did they mention large-scale conflicts within
Maroon polities.
Perhaps because absolute authority did not reside in a single individual in
this monarchical federal system, it is often referred to in the literature as a
republic, 7 suggesting that the focus of government was not on the monarchy
per se but on the wider council of powerful lords, which included judges and
chief military officers. Notably, the highest military office did not reside in
the king.
In spite of this system of government, Freyre (1963) dubbed Palmares “a
‘republic’ under a dictator”. Carneiro (1946, 11) quotes Sebastián da Rocha
Pitta who, in his work entitled História da América Portuguesa (1730), referred
to the constitutional form of the confederation as “a central despotic government,
similar to those of its African contemporaries, which could only be
considered elective in the sense that it was always based on proofs of great
valour or sagacity”. At one point Carneiro (1946, 50) seems to be more perceptive,
noting that King Ganga-Zumba availed himself of a council of chiefs
for the most important deliberations concerning war and peace, and that the
president of the council was Gana-Zona, his brother. However, he is really
hardly more discriminating than Freyre or da Rocha Pitta when he declares
that the most important decisions rested with the king, before whom all the
guerrillas knelt, clapping their hands and bowing their heads in a gesture of
vassalage similar to what was common in Africa (ibid., 41). He might have
extended the comparison between the Palmarino and African practice of
government to point out that African rulers sought consensus among members
of their councils and that, while they generally had the last word on a
matter, their decision was expected to reflect that consensus.
The elective principle was common in Maroon polities from the earliest
period, as was the case around the mid-sixteenth century when the Maroons