Maroons

British planters, merchants and other non-landholding persons from Barbados owned and transported enslaved persons to the South Carolina colonial settlement as early as 1670. However, there is minimal specific information about Africans or Barbadian Creoles selected for these voyages. To date, no empirical research has examined any data on African or African descended artisans (enslaved or free) who accompanied their owners or authorized travelers to the New World. Such historical lack provides negligible if any recognition of the skillsets rendered by specific artisans that significantly enhanced the economic development of both Barbados initially, and later during the early development of Charleston. There is also little information known as to why Black artisans were specifically chosen or able to travel to and from the new Atlantic World. This lack of knowledge directly opposes the analyses of the numerous studies done on the importation of West Africans brought to Carolina for their expertise in rice technology and indigo processing which notably benefitted colonial capitalism during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.

Research generally seeks to gain better understandings of ways in which inhabitants of African-Caribbean heritage created a life for themselves by the manifestation and transformation of their culture through adaptive strategies, coping mechanisms, and creative resistance. The architectural, industrial and socio-cultural details of sugar and rice plantations have been documented to interpret ways in which local patterns of life emerged and evolved in Caribbean and Carolina settings. Yet little of these studies provide voice, face, and evidence of the co-existence amongst Bajans and Gullahs working in rural and ‘urban’ settings such as Bridgetown and Charleston.

A multitude of African and Creole artisans and skilled tradespersons played important roles during the colonial period, thus this research investigates the associated cultural heritage of craftsmanship and the built environment. The study examines artisans working within utilitarian and decorative arts with data mined from critical archives, history, genealogy, and archaeology resources associated with Black artisans originating in Barbados and their trajectories to later connections with Gullahs of Charleston, South Carolina.

La Roche, R. A.(2017). “Bajan To Gullah” Cultural Capital: Wood, Stone, Iron, and Clay 1670 To 1770. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/4454

Situado no Golfo da Guine, com 190.000 habitantes em 1.001 quilômetros quadrados, São Tome e Príncipe é o segundo menor país da África. A população é constituída por três grupos, nomeadamente os crioulos nativos, conhecidos por forros, os tongas, descendentes de trabalhadores contratados, e os angolares. A maioria dos historiadores não duvida que a ilha São Tome fosse desabitada quando os primeiros portugueses lá chegaram em 1470. Contudo, esta suposição tem sido questionada no contexto do debate sobre a origem dos angolares. Geralmente aceita-se que os angolares constituem em termos sócio-culturais e lingüísticos, um grupo distinto de cerca de 10.000 pessoas.  Relativamente à sua origem existem pelo menos três hipóteses diferentes.
A mais antiga diz que os angolares são descendentes dos sobreviventes
de um navio de escravos vindo de Angola, naufragado na costa sudeste da ilha em meados do século XVI. Esta história foi publicada pela primeira vez por um autor português nos meados do século XIX e desde então tem sido repetida por inúmeros autores. Provavelmente continua ser a tese mais divulgada e aceite.
A segunda hipótese afirma que os angolares são os habitantes autóctones de São Tome que já estavam presentes na ilha quando os portugueses chegaram. Não admira que nos anos 1970 nacionalistas são-tomenses rápido abraçaram esta explicação.
A terceira e mais recente hipótese defende que os antepassados dos
angolares eram cimarrones, escravos fugidos dos séculos XVI e XVII. É notável que em São Tome e Príncipe as primeiras duas hipóteses sempre fossem muito populares, enquanto a terceira explicação foi largamente ignorada e rejeitada dentro do país. Este artigo esboça a história da emergência das três hipóteses, analisa os respectivos argumentos, pretendo colocá-los num contexto histórico e político mais amplo.

Report for Reflections of Manatee, Inc. on file with the Florida Master Site Files delineating historical archaeological and public outreach in the research on an early 19th-century maroon community on the Manatee River, Florida, known as Angola. The report focuses on 2004 to 2014 and makes the argument for material traces of Angola by the Manatee Mineral Spring. An update on the successful research is available as Uzi Baram 2021 "Recovering History by the Manatee Mineral Spring, Bradenton, Florida: Excavations and Laboratory Analysis" Report Prepared for Reflections of Manatee, Inc. - available at the Florida Master Site Files and https://ncf.academia.edu/UziBaram

Errancy is a mental state, a journey made introspectively, a search for the truth or a rejection of society. Errancy as a notion has always perplexed and disquieted people […] Our interest in this article revolves around the way in which Mariama Barry presents the subject in her novel One does not bend the heart as one does the knee […] This theme appears to be very important to Mariama Barry, so much so that she hints at it in her dedication to the novel: One does not bend the heart as one does the knee. Also, the book is dedicated to “children of today and those of yester years, separated from their parents.” […] The theme of errancy is by its very nature interdisciplinary.

Keywords : Errancy, maroons, incessant movement, separation, alienation, psychological torments, indeterminacy, evolution, incompleteness, inaccessibility, vagabondage, abandoned child, tossed to and fro, navétane, social disintegration

The Great Dismal Swamp straddles the North Carolina and Virginia state lines. From the seventeenth century until the Civil War this remote landscape became home to thousands of Maroons. These Maroon communities were comprised of runaway slaves, Native Americans and disenfranchised Europeans. The swamp was not only part of the passage for the Underground Rail Road (UGRR) but it was also a destination for individuals who lived on high ground and islands throughout the swamp. These self emancipated individuals developed complex modes of communitization. This dissertation uses a variety of theoretical perspectives, including agency theory, diaspora, and marronage to aluminate and understand the conditions and cultural transformations that took place over the course of several centuries and generations. The examination of these different communal groups will show that each community possessed and left behind different archaeological assemblages. Towards the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the outside world began to view the swamp as an exploitable resource and commodity. This led to increased forays by the outside world into the swamp and increased the possibility of contact with remote communities living on mesic islands deep in the swamp’s interior. As the outside world penetrated the interior of the Great Dismal Swamp it required the communities to adapt and transform. This dissertation will examine the cultural and communal transformations of a community that resisted contact with the outside world in response to loggers and canal laborers arriving in the deep interior of the swamp. The Great Dismal Swamp Landscape Study excavated the Crest of the nameless site during the 2009-2013 field seasons. These excavations ran in conjunction with American University’s Archaeological Field School. The excavations revealed a new architectural feature and artifact assemblage that represent a cultural transformation and the emergence of a new mode of communitization. These features and artifacts will be examined using a lens of agentive action to shed new insights into the Maroons who occupied a mesic island deep in the Great Dismal Swamp.

This article explores the historical framework of the bullerengue, a musical Afro-descendant tradition of maroon communities in the Colombian Caribbean, from the career of Petrona Martinez (b. 1939). The genre remained invisible and marginalized to Colombia's cultural and political consciousness during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, Petrona Martinez managed to preserve and take it to the World Music stage. Consequently, she helped to turn it into a cultural entity in Colombia. Currently, Petrona and bullerengue are part of the multiethnic and multicultural political agenda promoted by the state and the media.

The intricate histories of Maroon ecology contain complex, layered histories of agency that shaped and redefined Maroon experiences. Rather than relying on one-sided colonial narratives of Maroon spatiality and ecological praxis that confine these experiences to the institution of slavery and defence against enslavement, this research goes deeper to explore agency through the ecological relations in the Maroon sites of Jamaica and Brazil from 1630 to 1780. By examining existing literature on Maroon experiences, this work seeks to re-imagine these relations by recognising Maroon ecology both in context and as a legitimate part of history. It also seeks to develop a framework that offers deeper insight into Maroon ecology, mainly through understanding the inextricable link between the environment and Maroon experiences.

The aim of the present work is to present how have Dutch curators dealt with the representation of Suriname’s multiplicity in the ethnological museums of the Netherlands.Through museums’ modes of representation, particular constructions are created of image making and concepts developing. Ethnological museums are imagined as spaces that represent the life of groups of people inhabiting specific areas. The history of Suriname and the cultures of its people are a fixture in Dutch museums of ethnology, due to the historical colonial link between the two countries of Suriname and the Netherlands. How do Dutch museums of ethnology represent the ‘otherness‘ of Suriname and Surinamese people? In order to answer this question, two major museums of ethnology in the Netherlands, the Volkenkunde and Tropen museums, are investigated as case studies of how Suriname’s history, culture and various ethnic groups are today represented in the museological institutions of Suriname’s former colonizer.
In the analysis of these exhibitions I will concentrate on matters regarding the authority of the museum, the presentation of decolonization, the vocalization of the narratives, the concept of exclusion, and the involvement of source communities in curatorial processes. Through this analysis, this paper seeks to determine what types of narratives dominate the representation of Suriname in Dutch museums and the vision of Suriname and Surinamers offered to the public in these exhibitions. In addition, the case studies presented will investigate which histories are unspeakable and which are not, how museums suggest their authority on the subjects they present, and the extent to which the intellectual framework to which a museum is bonded influences its displays, and which is the period we are going through nowadays and how have the museums been adjusted accordingly. In discussing these aspects of museological representation, this research hopes to add to the discussion of how museums can best produce ethical representations.

Contemporary actors and, later, historians and critics have long compared the Haitian Revolution to a tragic play. But the model of tragedy they invoke has changed over time. Today the best-known example comes from The Black Jacobins (1963), in which C. L. R. James narrates the events of the Revolution through the lens of a Hegelian definition of tragedy. David Scott has championed James’s “tragic mode of history” for political reasons, arguing that it is better suited to address the challenges of the postcolonial present. But a tragic mode of history can be of use for the postcolonial present only if it is firmly grounded in the world-changing events that it is supposed to illuminate. It should build on what tragedy was in the milieu of Toussaint Louverture and the slave rebels. To lay the groundwork for this critical shift, this essay traces how tragic performances and history intersected during the Revolution and shows how radicalized versions of Voltaire’s Roman-themed tragedies and Afro-Caribbean mythology and rituals played a prominent part in the fight for equality.

In the 1780s the numerous Maniel maroons (runaway slaves) of the mountainous borderlands dividing Spanish Santo Domingo and French Saint-Domingue on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola began peace negotiations that ultimately both flummoxed colonial officials and extracted favourable terms. On the surface the maroons’ eventual acceptance of Spanish rule and Catholic tutelage to avoid re-enslavement seemed to reintegrate them structurally and curtail their liberties. However, this deal expediently provided the maroons a guise of compliant conversion and protected subjecthood that allowed them to pursue material well-being, mediated mobility, and socio-political openings. By the 1790s the Haitian Revolution rocked the island and challenged slave-holding paradigms of the Americas as the intertwined French Revolution presented alternatives ideas of citizenship and equality. This, combined with Spanish reaction, offered these pragmatic maroons new leverage to elude state power rather than approach it, just as maroons across the Americas did to pursue their own non-state guarantees of freedom. By the early 1800s the maroons had largely regained their non-state space to much imperial distress. These suspicions of state power even compelled them to avoid later affiliation with Haiti, the world’s first black republic. Their savvy navigations of the transformative schisms between royalism and republicanism, religiosity and secularism, and slavery and freedom demonstrate an evasive strategy common to maroons across the Americas. From social and imperial margins these maroons confounded European constraints and geopolitics, illuminating alternative paths of polity and autonomy that influenced historical trajectories in the Caribbean.

It might be argued that the 1739 treaty between the Jamaican Maroons and the British prevented the colony from being overtaken by the maroons and their enslaved collaborators, thereby precluding it from becoming the first free black nation in the Americas – a distinction that Haiti (Saint Domingue) famously holds. Conversely, despite its singularity as the only rebellion that resulted in the abolition of slavery and independence from colonialism, the Haitian Revolution lacks preceding large-scale revolts or maroon wars that were more common in Jamaica. This paper analyzes early eighteenth-century colonial repression of marronnage by co-opting intermediary groups whose freedom for even themselves was precarious – the Jamaican maroons and the freemen of color-dominated maréchaussée of Saint Domingue. The emergence of these two groups in the early eighteenth century had lasting implications for future rebellions in both colonies, and shape national and racial identity discourses in the post-emancipation era.

The Haitian Revolution was the modern era’s most successful slave rebellion. Grand marronnage, long-term or permanent escape from enslavement, was part of the pre-revolution repertoire of contention. This paper uses content analysis of digitally archived runaway advertisements to examine relationships between birth origin and interactional patterns that facilitated long-term escape and reflected shared responses to repression and other environmental factors over time. Marronnage by a group of two or more people was a significant portion of the sample, demonstrating the importance of small-scale group interactions while escaping rather than attempting the dangerous act of fleeing alone. Africa-born and creole African-descendant runaways responded to repression using group escape and other types of social network ties in distinctive ways. There was a closely associated relationship between the use of social network ties and durations of escape that were relatively successful, which I define as lasting for six months or more. Moreover, rates of successful marronnage gradually increased in the years before the Haitian Revolution, which perhaps helped to facilitate the diffusion of a growing shared consciousness. These findings indicate a need for further research on micro-level activity prior to world-historical events such as the Haitian Revolution.

The internal dynamics of American piracy, of Caribbean and Pacific Indian native group, of black slaves and maroons, and of the Spanish authorities exercising control in the then Province of Tierra Firme, which for more than two centuries crisscrossed three types of alliances: military, commercial and configured by the search for survival. These alliances resulted in intercultural encounters in which each group was adapted, appropriated and reproduced elements of knowledge of others, local and foreign, who made the subsistence and achievement of the internal interests of each. The Isthmus of Darien was the scene in which both encounters and misunderstandings that have led to a series of problems for the Spanish Crown, which for more than two centuries had to respond in several ways to keep its colonizer domain in one of its frontiers. Such domain was being seriously threatened by the presence of European foreign and its strong influence on the Indians and maroons, who as subjects subordinates of the Colony, were positioned in their social context as a real risk and potential for the Spanish Empire as main dominator of the American territory, and more specifically the isthmus of Darien. It is necessary to establish that the frontier in the colonial context is essential to highlight the conditions that made possible such meetings and alliances between actors who are usually staged as natural enemies from a European perspective. The frontier, beyond the geographical boundary between two or more spaces, is understood as the symbolic place where subaltern elements, differences, exchanges, barbarism and risks are include, to name a few.

Las dinámicas internas de la piratería americana, de los indios nativos del Caribe y del Pacífico, de los negros esclavos y cimarrones, y de las autoridades españolas que ejercían su control en el entonces Reino de Tierra Firme, que durante más de dos siglos se entrecruzaron en tres tipos de alianzas: la militar, la comercial y la configurada por la búsqueda de supervivencia, derivaron en encuentros interculturales en los que cada grupo se adaptó, apropió y reprodujo elementos de saberes de los otros, locales y foráneos, que hicieron posible la subsistencia y el logro de los intereses internos de cada uno. El Istmo del Darién fue el escenario en el que se dieron tanto los encuentros como los desencuentros que desencadenaron en una serie de problemáticas para la Corona española, que por más de dos siglos tuvo que responder en varios aspectos para mantener su dominio colonizador en una de sus fronteras. Tal dominio se estaba viendo seriamente amenazado por la presencia de extranjeros europeos y por su fuerte influencia en los indios y negros cimarrones, que como sujetos subalternos de la Colonia, se posicionaron en su contexto social como un riesgo real y potencial para el Imperio español como principal dominador del territorio americano, y más específicamente del istmo de Panamá y el Darién. Es necesario dejar establecido que la frontera en el contexto colonial es fundamental para resaltar las condiciones que hicieron posible este tipo de encuentros y alianzas entre actores que normalmente son puestos en escena como enemigos naturales desde un punto de vista europeo. La frontera, más allá del límite geográfico entre dos o más espacios, se entiende entonces como el lugar simbólico en el que se comprenden elementos de subalternidad, diferencias, intercambios, barbarie y riesgos, por nombrar algunos

Na última década do século XVIII, o então governador do Grão-Pará, Francisco Coutinho, envia militares portugueses para missões de reconhecimento nas províncias do Grão-Pará e do Rio Negro, e nos territórios vizinhos pertencentes a outras nações europeias: as Guianas Holandesa, Inglesa e Francesa. A partir destas missões, foram elaborados documentos oficiais, descrições da região. Duas delas são particularmente ricas em informações sobre as colônias vizinhas: um diário de Francisco José Rodrigues Barata sobre uma viagem de Belém a Paramaribo passando pelo Rio Negro, Branco, Essequibo, Demerara e Berbice; e um conjunto de descrições da Guiana Francesa e das terras do Cabo Norte feitas por José Lopes dos Santos Valadim. O atual trabalho é uma apreciação geral destes dois documentos, indicando as contribuições que eles podem fornecer, enquanto fontes, para a historiografia do norte amazônico, sobretudo no que diz respeito às populações negras, indígenas e os litígios acerca das fronteiras coloniais.

Palavras-chave:
Amazônia
Guianas
Francisco José Rodrigues Barata
José Lopes dos Santos Valadim

Ensaio realizado enquanto pesquisador-doutorando no Programa Nacional de Apoio à Pesquisa - PNAP - Biblioteca Nacional, 2014.

The present thesis is an ethnography of the Saamaka maroons, descendants of runaway slaves established in Upper Suriname in the 18th century. In particular, it is about Botopási, a Christian village, affiliated with the Moravian Church ever since its foundation 120 years ago. Local funerary practices are analysed at the core of the work: ceremonial exchanges, rituals that strive to please the dead and safeguard the living, means of controlling the distance and the agency of the spirits, and efforts that bring back joy to those who lost a loved one. Throughout the chapters, the thesis addresses several modi operandi of the dead, which may appear as ghosts, avenging spirits, ancestors, supernatural genitors. Both Saamaka political forms and the changes brought about by Christianity help us to reflect on variations in practices and beliefs surrounding death and other subjects. We may then be able to understand how people in Botopási face different types of transformations in their relationships dispersed through space-time: those brought about by an event of death as well as those brought about by conversion or other engagements with the living, the dead, spirits, gods, Saamakas, and outsiders.

This article develops a framework for reading the maroon in literature, drawing on the maroon's historical and contemporary significance in the Caribbean, as well as its continuing resonance for writers and thinkers. The maroon's separateness or withdrawal, I argue, is characterized by a spatial distance that also engenders a challenge to the authority and temporality of the colonial regime or the apartheid state. I turn to Alejo Carpentier and J.M. Coetzee to offer readings of their novels through the lens of marronage, analyzing their protagonists' flight, labor, and " idleness " as newly legible dimensions of resistive waiting. The strategies of marronage encourage new readings of the formulations of freedom and unfreedom, resistance and refusal in the literary texts, and create a " line of flight " between the Caribbean and South Africa.

This article examines the practices of captivity among the Maroons of Jamaica during the early colonial period.  In this paper, I argue that the practice of holding people in bondage in Maroon communities, which was strongly influenced by the West African customs of their ancestors, had much in common with the southern Native American nations in the United States before the mid-1800s.  Through a comparative analysis, I draw conclusions about the nature of captivity among the Jamaican Maroons almost a century before the first slave was documented in the Maroon census records. I conclude that captives in Maroon villages experienced a range of rights and obligations and even those held in chattel-like servitude had mechanisms for social inclusion.

Key words: Jamaica, Maroon, bondage, captivity, Akan, Native American

When Johan Maurits of Nassau, Governor-General of Dutch Brazil (1630-54), sent out expeditions against the maroons of Palmares, he was informed by his intelligence officers that the inhabitants followed the “Portuguese religion,” that they had erected a church in the capital, that there were chapels with images of saints and the Virgin Mary and that Zumbi, the king of Palmares, did not allow the presence of “fetishists.” Portuguese sources confirm that Palmares had a priest who baptized children and married couples and that its inhabitants followed Catholic rite, although according to Governor Francisco de Brito, they did so “in a stupid fashion.” Many more examples of the existence of Afro-Catholic elements in maroon communities in Latin America can be found. They question the widespread assumption that Catholicism had been forced upon all African slaves and that, even among those who seemingly embraced the colonizer’s faith, it functioned merely as a veneer underneath which their truly African, indigenous beliefs remained hidden. As the case of Palmares indicates, slaves did not necessarily wish to liberate themselves from all “Catholic ballast” once they ran away but sometimes remained strongly attached to it. 
This conclusion corresponds to the assumption by the Brazilian historian Marina de Mello e Souza that upon arrival in the Americas, many slaves did not perceive Catholic elements as something foreign since “Catholicism represented a link to their native Africa.” Souza is but one of several scholars who in recent years contributed to a shift in the study of black performance culture in the New World. The new paradigm essentially consists in the acknowledgment that our understanding of black performance culture can be bettered if we take into consideration that many Africans had already adopted certain European—predominantly Portuguese—cultural and religious elements before they were shipped as slaves to the Americas.
In the context of this shift, there has been an increased interest in Afro-Iberian brotherhoods (irmandades/hermandades) and confraternities (confrarias/cofradías). While it was long assumed that these so-called “black brotherhoods” were associated with slave culture on the Iberian Peninsula and in Latin America only, it can now be confirmed that Afro-Catholic fraternities also flourished in parts of Africa during the Atlantic slave trade era. As Linda Heywood has argued, “many Kongos and not a few Angolans had been Christians before their enslavement in Brazil. Thus they would have been familiar with the brotherhoods in Luanda, Soyo, and Kongo, and the central role they played in the creole society of Kongo, Angola and São Tomé.” Nicole von Germeten’s research on black brotherhoods in Mexico also concluded that “some Central Africans probably took part in social and religious brotherhoods and sisterhoods before crossing the Atlantic.” 
Ira Berlin also observed that black brotherhoods played a crucial role in the intercontinental networks that developed in the context of the transatlantic slavery. However, like most scholars, Berlin perceives brotherhoods as an essentially Iberian phenomenon that was crucial to the development of black identity the Iberian World, differing from North America, where “numerous informal connections between black people” developed, but not brotherhoods. Although Berlin confirms that slaves “created an intercontinental web of cofradias … so that, by the seventeenth century, the network of black religious brotherhoods stretched from Lisbon to São Tomé, Angola, and Brazil,” he believes that those slaves who ended up in Dutch, French or English colonies refrained from developing brotherhoods since there were no “comparable institutional linkages” that allowed them to do so. Berlin’s assumption thus presupposes that brotherhoods could only be established with institutional support and excludes the possibility that slaves themselves may have taken the initiative to create such organizations.
This article questions this conclusion and explores the possibility that slave organizations modeled upon Iberian brotherhoods have existed in North America. In doing so, it follows a reasoning by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Matt Childs and James Sidbury, editors of The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade (2013), according to whom “approved institutional structures authorized by the Catholic Church were not always necessary for Africans and their descendants to build fraternal structures.”  A first section provides an overview of the characteristics of Afro-Iberian slave brotherhoods. The following section presents a comparative analysis between king celebrations in Afro-Iberian brotherhoods and those at African-American Election Day and Pinkster festivals in New England and New York. The article ends with a reflection on the origins of Afro-Iberian cultural and religious elements among slave communities outside of the Iberian realm in the American diaspora.

"The study of death, the afterlife, and related phenomena has long been of interest to anthropologists and religious studies scholars. Although such matters are of central human and cultural concern, Western academic approaches often rely on the juxtaposition between “our” rational and “their” irrational belief systems, and attempt to “explain away” or ignore emic interpretations with a subsequent loss of semantic density. A methodology for studying the afterlife and related phenomena based on cognitive, empathetic engagement involves adopting an emic interpretive lens in order to arrive at a “thick description” that does not shy away from aspects of experience outside the ethnographer's Weltanschauung. A discussion of the implications of adopting a dialogical, participative, open-minded approach to these aspects of human belief and practice are discussed in the context of case studies of spirit possession and reincarnation.

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