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

16 Flight to Freedom
eleven insurgents making their way via the Rio Hondo to the Spanish post of
Bacalar in Yucatán (Bolland 2002, 55).
Marronage offered enslaved persons the best hope of recapturing their
freedom. What Conrad (1983, 360) observes of Brazil is equally appropriate
for a number of other jurisdictions, including Suriname, Jamaica, Venezuela,
Cuba, Haiti and the United States: “Thousands of offers to reward the capture
and return of runaway slaves which appeared in hundreds of newspapers
over seven or eight decades are convincing proof that flight was a common
solution to the slave’s predicament.” The durability of Maroon settlements
collectively, and the aggressive stance that some of them adopted towards the
enslavers, made them the most widespread expression of the enslaved persons’
hatred of the slavery system. As Carlos Esteban Deive (1989, 8)
observes, marronage constituted the most aggressive response of enslaved persons
to the servitude and oppression to which they were subjected for centuries
by the slaveholding regimes in the Americas.
The vast majority of enslaved persons neither became Maroons in the true
sense of the term nor absconded. Fouchard (1972, 153–54) contends that some
enslaved persons had no desire to revolt or were incapable of doing so for a
variety of reasons, including timidity, submissiveness, resignation, apathy,
moral and physical weakness, the holding of certain privileges within the
slavery system, brainwashing by the enslavers, and so on. He is quite harsh
on those who, he asserts, were incapable of considering the slightest desire to
flee yet were prisoners of a savage and unrelenting system. In his view, their
failure to flee was no tribute to the humanity of the enslavers, but rather to
their own subjective or objective circumstances that prevented them from
doing so.
Fouchard is perhaps too harsh on those who remained in bondage. The
fact is that no matter how draconian the system of oppression, in societies
with a large population rarely do the vast majority of people show open
resistance. Large-scale resistance almost invariably has to be carefully
planned if there is to be any chance of success, and slave society rarely allowed
for such a circumstance to happen. Notable exceptions are the servile revolts
in Berbice in 1763 and Haiti in 1791. However, most scholars would probably
accept that the vast majority of enslaved persons carried out resistance at a
lower level – which Orlando Patterson (1967) dubs passive resistance, and
Monica Schuler (1973) and Raymond Bauer and Alice Bauer (1971) call dayto-day
resistance – at some point during their enslavement. Others reacted