.Maroons were self-emancipated Africans and Afro-descendants who resisted slavery and colonialism by escaping plantations and urban areas to remote areas protected by nature. Some escaped alone or in small groups, and others created larger communities and freedom towns. This permitted the fusion and preservation of indigenous and African people’s knowledge, and cultures.
.Maroon freedom towns have different names. Some were called quilombos, palenques, or mocambos. These settlements were spaces where maroons and indigenous people could devise innovative multi-ethnic linguistic, religious, military, and communal practices based on multiple traditions from Africa, aboriginal, and colonial Americas.
.Maroons and their descendants were and still are essential for decolonial struggles throughout the hemisphere and the archipelagos. From guerilla warfare to sustainable farming techniques to embodied archives of African knowledge and languages, marronage (the acts and ways of being of maroons) has represented a still active form of protecting the legacy of these communities driven by freedom, resistance, and preservation.
In the words of Richard Price, “maroons and their communities can be seen to hold a special significance for the study of slave [and self-liberated] societies. For while they were, from one perspective, the antithesis of all that slavery stood for, they were at the same time everywhere an embarrassingly visible part of these systems. Just as the very nature of plantation slavery implied violence and resistance, the wilderness setting of early New World plantations made marronage and the existence of organized maroon communities a ubiquitous reality. Throughout Afro-America, such communities stood out as a heroic challenge to white authority and as living proof of the existence of a slave consciousness that refused to be limited by the whites’ conception or manipulation of it.” (2)
Let’s unpack this quote. What is Richard Price trying to convey here?
Presentation(s)
Discussion Questions
.What was the difference between marronage on a small and large scale, and how colonial authorities reacted to these different formations? (3-4)
.What role did location play in the lives and survival of maroons? (5-7)
.Describe some of the guerilla warfare skills developed by maroons. (7-9)
.Elaborate on the “economic adaptations” and subsistence methods of maroons (10-12)
.Price states that maroon communities also needed to keep contact and exchange with plantations. Discuss these tensions. (12-13)