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

324 Flight to Freedom
lence always leave deep scars on the body politic. But sometimes there is
no route to freedom for oppressed peoples except through the portals of
violence.
The uplifting aspect of the Maroons’ story is that it describes a group of
people who determined not to be killed off completely as a people and
adopted numerous aggressive and defensive strategies, first to survive and
then to improve the quality of their lives. Over time they created a culture of
their own that, while bearing resemblances to those of Europe and Africa,
was distinctly Maroon in its combination of features, including the triumphs,
tragedies and mythologies that inform human societies.
The significance of marronage transcended the numerical size of the
Maroon community as a whole, for Maroon activities had an impact on all
groups and all aspects of life, especially in the slave plantation societies. It
created more than a headache (Flores Galindo 1984, 117–18) for these societies.
It was the prime instrument that moved the state authorities, on the
one hand, to pass the most draconian pieces of legislation in the history of
the Americas, and, on the other, to recognize Blacks (at least, some of them)
as persons entitled to their freedom, not simply recipients of freedom through
the largesse of the state or the slaveholder.
Maroons were thinking, planning people. They showed considerable ingenuity
in the organization of their communities, which included defensive
structures, agricultural plots, and political, judicial and social systems. They
showed that enslaved people were not the inanimate, robotic creatures that
Charlevoix tried to make them out to be: “[T]hey are robots, whose springs it
is necessary to rewind each time that one wants them to move” (Fouchard
1972, 35). Certainly they needed no rewinding of their springs when it came
to marronage. They won sneaking admiration from many a military leader
who went up against them, not the least of whom was John Stedman.
A few writers have raised the question of whether the Maroons should be
classified as “social bandits” – in the same way, for instance, that many have
regarded the more mythical Robin Hood and Zorro, or the more flesh-andblood
“bandits” that operated in Cuba and other Latin American countries
from the late nineteenth century. 1 Schwartz (1979, 212) apparently accepts
that this view has some merit. He asserts that “in a slave society the ideological
basis of social banditry varied from its classic form of archaic peasant
protest” but “the reactions of Brazilian slaves and Brazilian peasants against
oppressive social and economic order were strikingly similar”. He also opines