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

14 Flight to Freedom
depopulated coasts and the sea. And it was here that a truly Creole society was
founded in the sense of a novel social identity and culture that saw itself as
autonomous from the metropole.
Slavery was a pathologically wrong socio-economic system, and it negatively
affected all people living in the slaveholding states, including those
who were not enslavers and did not use the services of enslaved persons.
Slavery was a total institution in more than one sense, but particularly in that
it defined the relationships between all classes and groups in the society.
Thus, in order to defeat or undermine it, the opposition had to be committed
to a total struggle against it. The level of commitment of various groups to
such a struggle is one of the many moot points to which this discourse will
pay some attention. Still, it is important to note Werner Zips’s (1999, 12)
views here that Blacks had to fight a “physical and psychic battle . . . against
the attempted destruction of their religious, social, cultural, political, judicial,
and philosophical values and forms of expression by whites”.
The existence of Maroon communities also underlined the draconian
nature of New World slavery, and the difficulties of escaping totally from it,
short of a general abolition of that nefarious institution. Maroons were fugitives,
not from justice but from injustice that relentlessly pursued them up to
the very gates of their new habitats. But they retaliated fiercely and often
effectively. Both the contemporary and modern literature places considerable
attention on the depredations that the Maroons wrought on European plantations
and urban communities, sometimes bringing the inhabitants to their
knees and forcing them to sue for peace. While the literature also refers fairly
often to the numbers of Maroons slain in battle, it does not provide us with
any coherent data on that subject or on the numbers slain on both sides of
the divide. The data suggest that far more Maroons than their pursuers died
in such struggles, because of the massive advantage that the latter possessed
in terms of weaponry and the size of their military and paramilitary forces.
Nevertheless, as far as we know, while many settlements were razed to the
ground, the entire population of no large palenque was ever completely wiped
out, and the human residue often reconstituted itself within a short time by
new recruits.
There was always a nexus – perhaps a better word is symbiosis – between
the slaveholding and Maroon areas. The latter depended heavily on the former
for the majority of their population; sometimes for food, arms and vari-