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

Negotiations and Treaties
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they forcefully repulsed the attackers (Hoogbergen 1993, 174–75). Thus, plantation
hands did not universally love Maroons, which must be why some of
them took the field with the Whites against the fugitives. Still, the vast
majority of enslaved persons must have given either passive or active support
to the Maroon cause since, as indicated earlier, they developed a symbiotic
relationship and enslaved persons frequently took to the woods and mountains
to join Maroon groups. As for the relatively few enslaved persons who
were allies of the slaveholders, though they might receive some rewards and
sometimes their freedom for participating in such expeditions, the reward
may not always have been their chief motive.
One of the main reasons that Black persons betrayed their colleagues was
to avoid being imprisoned or executed as conspirators. This happened with a
group of Maroons in Peru, in the late sixteenth century, who were threatened
with execution for highway robbery unless they acted as spies and scouts for
the slaveholders. As a result, the latter were able to capture a group of
between thirty and forty Maroons, some of whom they executed and others
they castrated (Bowser 1974, 201). It is always difficult to make a choice when
one’s life – and sometimes the lives of close relatives – is at stake. Some
apprehended Maroons, of course, refused to yield up any information concerning
their colleagues, even when they were subjected to extreme torture.
These exceptionally brave men, however, probably did not represent the
majority of captured Maroons who were placed under similar duress. 5 We
know that the captors depended upon captives to supply them with vital
information concerning the sanctuaries in which they had lived.
Not all individuals who supplied this kind of information or otherwise
betrayed their colleagues were caught in a life-and-death dilemma; some –
arguably the majority – did so to obtain personal freedom. One of the most
notorious cases was that of Graman Quacy (Greatman Kwasi) of Suriname.
He was proud that the imperial authorities had manumitted him and given
him a lovely coat, a gold medal and a golden breastplate with the inscription
Quassie, faithful to the Whites for service to the colony. 6 He served as a healer
and diviner among the enslaved people and also, according to Stedman (1988,
582), on behalf of their overlords, for whom he did such an effective job that
the latter were often able to exercise considerable control over their servile
charges. For more than forty years he was the main intermediary between the
colonial authorities and the Maroons. He served first as a scout and then a
negotiator. He even lived among the Saramakas as a spy in the mid-1750s,