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

314 Flight to Freedom
Figure 31. Zumbi of Palmares
by Manuel Victor
the forces of oppression, utterly rejected the
treaty. As it was, Ganga-Zumba was assassinated
two years after the treaty was signed,
and Zumbi, his successor, simply refused
to carry out its terms (Mattoso 1979,
139). As noted earlier, in a series of military
encounters in 1694–95 between the
two inveterate enemies, the brave warriors
of Palmares were overcome, their
cities sacked and their inhabitants dispersed.
In 1695 a former inhabitant of the
confederation betrayed Zumbi’s hideout,
leading to his capture and decapitation by the
authoritarian regime. It took two years for
Domingos Jorge Velho to engineer the ultimate
defeat of the confederation. In the final assault
on the capital, some four hundred people are said to have lost their lives, and
another five hundred were captured (Kent 1979, 186–87). It is clear that most
of the twenty to thirty thousand Palmarinos who constituted the confederation
were not killed or captured. Karasch (1987, 312n29) points out that the
Palmares mocambos still “preoccupied” the attention of slaveholders in
Pernambuco and Alagôas in the nineteenth century. This strongly suggests
that either all the mocambos that made up the confederation had not been
destroyed in the late seventeenth century or, perhaps more correctly, that
refugees from the confederation established new mocaombos or rebuilt the old
ones. Conrad (1983, 377) points out that folk festivals in various parts of
Alagôas kept the memory, and perhaps some of the spirit, of Palmares alive
into the twentieth century.
In 1655 a group of Maroons in the mountains of the Dominican Republic
refused to accept the government’s offer of formal recognition of their freedom
in return for assisting in the colony’s defence against a British force
under Oliver Cromwell. They took this decision to their ultimate detriment,
for a little over a decade later an expeditionary force wiped them out
(Larrazábal Blanco 1998, 148). In the 1730s negotiations between the
Colombian authorities and El Castigo palenque fell through because the
palenqueros refused to agree to stop accepting new runaways and to allow a
colonial magistrate to reside among them (McFarlane 1986, 135). According