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

Maroon Government
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395) advances the view that “To ‘capture’ when used in regard to Negroes, was
a frequently employed euphemism for inducing, persuading, or assisting
them to run away.”
Hoogbergen (1993, 175) recognizes the problem for the modern historian
in simply accepting contemporary White opinion about Maroon abduction
of large numbers of enslaved persons. According to him, the only meaningful
way to deal with it is to assume that whenever all enslaved persons disappeared
with the Maroons after an attack, we should view what happened as
collaboration, even if the contemporary records employ the terms “carried
off ” or “abducted”. In his classification, it was an act of rebellion on the part
of the enslaved persons. However, if the Maroons carried off only women
and children, we should conclude that it did not amount to rebellion by the
missing – and presumably abducted – people. Even if we accept his approach,
there is still a wide grey area encompassing the many small groups who disappeared
after Maroon raids.
A related problem is how to differentiate the various systems of servility
within Maroon polities. Most writers have assumed a linear relationship
between the Maroon and American plantation patterns, and no relationship
to what obtained in Africa. Until we can be more discerning on these issues,
we have to make tentative observations and conclusions. To the extent that
Maroon societies held people in systems of unfreedom, this was a contradiction
within the body politic and indicates the imperfect nature of Maroon
societies and the pervasive nature of the slavery system in the Americas.
At the same time, we know that in many instances such unfreedom was not
permanent.
Maroon societies had to guard themselves against the ever-present danger
of betrayal by those who had ostensibly embraced their cause. Thus, runaways
taken into Maroon societies were received with extreme caution,
because those individuals might turn out to be spies for the White authorities
or social misfits. Those who were judged to be spies, refused to engage in
battle or betrayed the cause in any way were likely to be executed immediately
(Pérez de la Riva 1979, 52; Zips 1999, 65), while others deemed social
misfits might suffer a like fate or be cast out physically (though this was dangerous,
since they might later guide Maroon-hunting expeditions). A less
severe treatment might be to put them to a regimen of hard work. Palmares,
in fact, often meted out this treatment to all would-be members of its various
settlements.