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

Introduction
13
what they perceive as a continuum between such actions and the wider struggle
for national independence in Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, Brazil and elsewhere,
in which enslaved persons and Maroons played major roles.
Marronage was political action on the part of enslaved persons and frequently
a challenge to the status quo that the enslavers had established
(Landers 1998, 358). Incontestably, Maroon settlements constituted the first
independent polities from European colonial rule, even if the authoritarian
states did not recognize them as such at the time. They had their own independent
political, economic and social structures, and occupied definitive
land spaces that they often contested with the colonial powers and won.
Though “Maroon treaties” compromised the political sovereignty of some of
these polities, others retained a good deal of autonomy, and some Maroon
leaders absolutely refused to make any arrangement with the colonial state
short of a full declaration of their independence.
It is important to recognize that while the vast majority of enslavers in the
Americas were Europeans, some Africans (Blacks), Indians and Creoles
(Coloureds or Mestizos) were also enslavers. However, there was a great gulf
between the Europeans and the other categories of enslavers in terms of
access to political, social and other privileges. They only closed ranks, and
even so not completely, in cases of heightened slave unrest and pressing
Maroon activities. This study focuses largely on the Whites because they
exercised extreme dominance within the slavery system, they were by far the
most numerous victims of Maroon depredations, and they organized the
main military expeditions against Maroons.
Maroon communities included Indians, Africans, Europeans and Creoles;
young, middle-aged and elderly people; enslaved and free people; field workers,
domestics, drivers, artisans, messengers and soldiers; adherents to African
traditional religions, Christianity and Islam. The enslaved people fled from
all jurisdictions, regardless of the economic or social circumstances. They fled
from the highly developed plantation societies of Brazil, Jamaica, Suriname,
Haiti, the United States and Mexico, and from less developed plantation or
trading economies such as Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, the Bahamas, St
Eustatius and Bermuda. Lauren Derby (2003, 11) argues that the Caribbean
plantation system spawned
a frontier society of runaways, vagrants and half-castes who did not live within
colonial society but rather in opposition to it in the refuge of the mountains, the