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248 Flight to Freedom
Figure 26. Leonard Parkinson, Jamaican Maroon captain. 10 Courtesy Bristol City
Council.
keeping with pre-colonial practices in Africa, where some granaries held food
for up to three years in case of emergencies (Suret-Canale 1971, 235).
Rice was one of the primary staples. It could be stored for long periods,
the ecological conditions allowed for its cultivation on a large scale, and it
was grown commonly in certain parts of West Africa, especially modern
Sierra Leone, Gambia and Guinea (Bigman 1993, 34; Lewicki 1974, 33–37).
Yam was another important staple amenable to long-term storage. This crop
was widely planted in West Africa and was the most important food item of
the forest peoples (Morgan and Pugh 1969, 85). Richard Price (1991), who
consulted the extant work of Schumann, the late-eighteenth-century
Moravian missionary among the Saramaka, and supplemented his understanding
with fieldwork and oral information gathered from among presentday
Maroons, has produced perhaps the best statement regarding the
diversity of the Maroon economy in Suriname. Apart from mentioning the
wide range of crops that they produced (see above), he notes that they cultivated
numerous varieties of rice (Richard and Sally Price counted seventy