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Maroon Economy
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Agriculture
The varied Maroon economic activities give the lie to the pervasive stereotype
of “the lazy Negro”. At least one European official report (from Vines,
British Consul in Belem, Brazil, in 1854) mentions that the inhabitants of the
mocambos in the Amazon Valley were “industrious” in looking after their
material needs (Conrad 1983, 390). The more established Maroon communities
could not have been more unlike the wandering, straggling groups of
runaways that could have been regarded as Maroon communities only in the
most superficial sense of the term. The large Maroon communities did not
usually suffer from a shortage of food. They grew large quantities of wholesome
food, and their cupboards were never bare, except when military expeditions
destroyed their supplies. In fact, it appears that they commonly
overflowed, in striking contrast to what obtained among enslaved persons on
the plantations (see below). 3 The extent to which abundant food supplies was
an attraction to would-be Maroons remains uncertain, but it must have influenced
some of them to flee to greener pastures.
African-born Maroons, in particular, brought with them to the Americas
extensive knowledge of tropical soil conditions. They came from basically
agrarian communities. Oluwasanmi’s (1966, 53) observation that around the
time of Nigerian independence some 75 per cent of the people engaged in
farming as their main economic activity is perhaps apposite to West Africa as
a whole. The Maroons had earlier practised in Africa a wide variety of farming
techniques and three main fallow systems: shifting cultivation, rotational
bush fallow and rotational planted fallow. They also knew how to engage in
crop mixtures and to stagger crop production during various seasons, planting
different crops at different times so as to make the best use of the climate.
They engaged in crop rotation during a sequence of years that allowed
the land to recover from exhaustion caused by certain crops. They practised
bush farming, hillside farming, swamp farming (for example, for rice), and so
on. The Wolof of Senegal distinguished five different kinds of flood land,
based on soil types and preferred crops (Morgan and Pugh 1969, 72, 104–5,
125–27). While the Maroons had to translate and modify this knowledge to
suit the particulars of their new environments, the change would not have
required drastic modifications of the techniques learned in Africa. At the
same time, it seems clear that Maroons borrowed heavily from the Indians
with respect to the cultivation of certain indigenous crops, such as maize and