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

Forms of Marronage
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refer to the large groups as “tribes”, suggesting that they had acquired the
profile of distinct ethnic groups. The large and powerful entities sometimes
vied with each other and the slaveholding states for physical space and material
resources, and occasionally fought to the death to eliminate each other.
One of the most notorious examples was the part that the Ndjuka (Auka)
Maroons played in destroying the Aluku (Boni) Maroon settlements in
Suriname in 1793 (Hoogbergen 1990). By that time the Ndjukas had undergone
over thirty years of “pacification” following their treaty with the colonial
authorities in 1760, and were being used, not for the first time, by the Whites
to eliminate the much more militant Alukus, who were a thorn in the side of
the plantocracy. But the Ndjukas had their own grievances with the Alukus,
who apparently posed a threat to their spatial integrity. For the same reason
the Ndjukas attacked a number of groups that had begun to establish themselves
along the Cottica River and Sara and Surnau creeks in the post-treaty
era (Thoden van Velzen 1995, 128–29).
Other groups had various conflicts. In the unsettled circumstances of the
late seventeenth century, several groups that had fled during the British invasion
of Jamaica distrusted each other, and this distrust persisted for many
years after the British had firmly established themselves as the new colonial
authority. Patterson (1979, 258) views this circumstance as partly accounting
for the return of several runaways to their overlords. However, by the early
eighteenth century many groups were forging alliances with each other, based
both on their material needs and on acceptance of the stubborn reality that it
was only through such alliances (and sometimes even political integration)
that they would be able to resist the increasingly large military forces being
sent against them. Still, tensions and sometimes clashes occurred between
different groups, the result of territorial notions and of treaty arrangements
with the authoritarian state.
Suspicion of treachery between Maroon groups was not without some
foundation. This was the cause of the clash between the Juan de Bolas
Maroons, who had accepted a treaty with the British that required them
to apprehend runaways, and the Karmahaly (Carmahaly, Vermejales,
Vermaholis, Vermahalles) Maroons under Juan de Serras, in the late seventeenth
century. The same reason prevailed when the Windward Maroons
assaulted the small group, led by Three-Fingered Jack, that was troubling the
Jamaican planters. The Leeward Maroons also considerably harassed a small
group under Captain Gummor (Goomer) in the 1730s, apparently because