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Forms of Marronage
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context of desertion, but perhaps this activity had much more significance
than scholars have attributed to it in terms of the ideology of freedom. García
(1989, 85) argues that marronage in itself was an act of valour, hardship and
risk taking, all in the quest to regain one’s dignity as a human being.
At the same time we accept, even at the risk of being contradictory, that
the freedom enjoyed by Maroons living a solitary life was very limited. Most
of them could not establish a permanent presence anywhere but lived largely
as wanderers, without family, kin or friends. They must have lived mainly by
foraging rather than cultivating the land. Thus it is tempting to view them as
trees without roots. It is true that individual marronage cost the enslavers
money, especially if the deserter was a highly valued worker. It also increased
the fear in the White community because it helped to swell the ranks of the
permanent deserters who became potential, and sometimes actual, members
of Maroon settlements. But in reality, the Maroon dwelling alone did not
usually pose a serious threat to the plantocracy, since his chances of longterm
survival as a free person would have diminished considerably had he
attempted to carry out assaults on the White community. Maroon life was
hard physically and psychologically, and became much more so when individuals
chose or were forced to live alone for long periods. Because of one
Suriname Maroon’s troubles with both his overseer and his Maroon leader,
he chose to live alone in the forest for two years and endured, according to
his own testimony, great mental hardships and anxieties (Stedman 1988, 482).
The biography of the Cuban deserter Esteban Montejo, one of the bestknown
stories of individual marronage, may – curiously enough – both challenge
and reinforce such views of the solitary Maroon. In his middle or late
teens when he absconded the second time, Montejo believed that he was
compelled to do so because he had the spirit of a runaway guarding him,
which never left him. He was constantly thinking about deserting; the
thought pervaded – at times tormented – his mind and would not leave him
alone (Barnet 1996, 37). 1 He declared that this urge was fed by the fact that he
had no freedom and had to do everything that his overlord or overseer commanded
him to do. He described slavery as a plague that he could not endure
indefinitely. His overseer was both strong and cruel, and all the Blacks
respected him because he could flay the skin off a person’s back with one
stroke of his whip (ibid.). Montejo hated this man intensely; simply looking
at him filled him with rage. On making his flight to freedom, he wandered
listlessly for several days up and down the hilly forest terrain, until he hit on