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

Conclusion
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that Maroon depredations in that country “foreshadowed” the social banditry
of the post-colonial period. Aguirre (1993, 264–65) accepts that Maroon
attacks on members of the wealthy class resulted in the acquisition of jewellery,
other valuable objects, money and a great deal of unwrought gold, and
that these were instances of the poor robbing the rich, leading to somewhat
less inequitable social distribution of material resources. However, he does
not view Maroons as a group as social bandits. The fact is that many of them
also divested poor Whites, Blacks, Indians and other oppressed groups of
their resources, and they did not generally share their booty with enslaved
persons, or only did so in exchange for other items. At the juridical level, the
situation is less clear, since a number of Maroon leaders – most notably
Guillermo Rivas of Venezuela – punished slaveholders for their treatment of
their enslaved charges. In this sense they may be said to have been meting
out a measure of social justice (“popular justice”) that was largely absent from
slave societies. 2
Though he does not accept Schwartz’s view, Flory (1979, 127) puts forward
the equally interesting suggestion that, while the authoritarian states
regarded Maroons as outlaws, various groups, depending upon their vested
interests, might have considered them otherwise. He writes:
It remains true that all quilombos existed outside the law and were potentially
vulnerable to its sanctions. But in the Latin American context this need not have
placed the “outlaw” in categorical conflict with the postulates of society. To be an
outlaw in this sense simply meant that one was a prospective victim of arbitrary
and selective enforcement determined by the class needs of those who controlled
the legal system. The runaway slave community shared this vulnerability with
drifters, squatters, and all the free poor who existed at the sufferance of their
social superiors. With these obscure and ill-defined social types, it appears, the
runaways also shared markets, news, ambitions and rivalries. 3
Whether Maroons were outlaws or not, their activities had a major impact
on the financial life of the slaveholding states and on individual slaveholders.
As Freehling (2002, 7) observes, in a curious sense Maroons were runaway
investments. Especially in the large states, the governments and planters
repeatedly cried out against the cost entailed in catching or eliminating these
runaways: the need to bivouac mercenary or specially posted government
troops from Europe to give defensive and offensive support to the state; military
installations that often included forts in strategic places; bounties that