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244 Flight to Freedom
cassava, and also with respect to knowledge of local soil types, especially in
the early years of African settlement in the Americas. It was the indigenous
peoples who pioneered the diversification of crops in the Americas. 4
Arguably, among the Maroons provision of food was secondary in importance
to that of defence or physical security. In societies that enjoy a high
level of physical security and freedom from warfare, food security is (or ought
to be) of primary importance. Such societies, while adopting measures to
maintain physical security, do not usually make it as much a conscious daily
concern as societies under military arms. But Maroon societies rarely enjoyed
such physical security and therefore had to spend a lot of time guarding the
lives of their inhabitants and also their agricultural fields.
Since the Maroons’ choice of land was constrained by the need for safety
and security, they did not always cultivate the best lands available. However,
in the larger jurisdictions they often had access to virgin soil, sometimes
among the best in the country. In Jamaica, for instance, large stretches of
excellent farming land remained unoccupied by Whites because of their fear
of the Maroons, and, in fact, settlers abandoned several plots that they had
brought under cultivation (Campbell 1990, 142, 145). 5 As did agrarian communities
in pre-colonial Africa, Maroons collectively cleared the bush, cut
down the trees and tamed the land. Sometimes they planted small plots that
were allocated to single families, but they also planted some fields collectively.
6 The André and Matudere Maroons, in French Guiana and Colombia
respectively, generally cultivated separate plots but divided the catch from
collective hunting and fishing (Louis 1979, 315; Borrego Plá 1973, 83). Freyre
(1963, 39–40) writes about “the near-socialist form of life and work which the
settlement of Negroes in Palmares assumed” and its “parasocialist type of culture”.
He also pays tribute to that state, whose agrarian economy was “a forerunner
of the diversification of crops in contrast to the predominant
monoculture of the white planters”.
African Maroons, of course, were not the first regional peasant communities;
that distinction belongs to the Indians. However, many Maroon communities
did establish autonomous and viable peasant communities. Sidney
Mintz (1974, 152–53) refers to them as “runaway peasantries” but suggests that
they were not “typologically” peasant societies, because their “economic integration
with the outside world” was “impaired” by the military threats and
operations of the slaveholding states, so that some of them were “compelled
to maintain complete isolation”. 7 The fact is that the large Maroon societies