Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Maroon Communities

Maroons are groups of formerly enslaved Africans and their descendants who gained their freedom by fleeing chattel enslavement and running to the safety and cover of the remote mountains or the dense overgrown tropical terrains near the plantations. Many of the groups are found in the Caribbean and, in general, throughout the Americas—Central, South, and North. In Brazil, Jamaica, Haiti, Suriname (the former Dutch Guiana), Cuba, Puerto Rico, St. Vincent, Guyana, Dominica, Panama, Colombia, and Mexico, and from the Amazon River Basin to the southern United States, primarily Florida and the Carolinas, there are well-known domiciles of the Maroons.

The word Maroon, first recorded in English in 1666, is by varying accounts taken from the French word marron, which translates to “runaway Black slave,” or the American/Spanish cimarrón, which means “wild runaway slave,” “the beast who cannot be tamed,” or “living on mountaintops.” The Spanish used the word in reference to their stray cattle, with cattle being the root of the word chattel, which is of course the descriptor of the “peculiar institution” called slavery in the Americas. It is further believed that the word cimarrón is from cima or “summit.”

It is important to note that most Africans did not refer to themselves as Maroons. They usually opted for liberatory, powerful names such as “Nyankipong Pickibu,” which means “Children of the Almighty” in Twi, a language widely spoken in Ghana, West Africa. The Jamaican Maroons tend to prefer the monikers “Koromanti,” “Kromanti,” or “Yungkungkung” to denote their culture and history. This entry looks at the origins of Maroon communities in Africa, their history of struggle and revolt in the New World, and their contemporary representation.

African Origins

According to legend, the Koromanti name continues to ring in the Maroon communities for one of two traditional reasons. The first is that it memorializes and pays tribute to one of their last visions of home, the West African coast of the same name that was traversed by the newly enslaved Africans en route to the ship that would transport them to the West. The alternative explanation is that the appellation represents the memory of the Koromanti clan, a subgroup of the Asante people of Ghana. (These two groups, along with the Congo, are the three African ethnic groups that comprise the Jamaican Maroons.)

In 1717, the Koromanti are said to have famously rebelled against Asante paramountcy and killed their hallowed King, Osei Tutu I, whose body is said to have fallen into the river, never to be seen again. This inspired the Asante people to take a sacred oath that empowered them to rise up and put down the Koromanti uprising. Legend has it that the thwarted Kormantis were exiled and sold into slavery for their abomination. It is said that only their memory resides in Ghana. To this day, the Koromanti designation is commonly used by the Maroons to describe their rituals, languages, dances, and songs, which are sung to bury the dead and accompany healing rituals.

There are divergent accounts as to the earliest Maroons, with some even indicating that the first Maroon was a solitary African who escaped from the first slave ship to dock in the Americas in 1502, just 10 years after Columbus's arrival. He is said to have escaped to the jungle-like interior of Hispaniola, or “Little Spain” in Spanish (present-day Haiti), blazing a trail that many of his African brethren and sisters would follow. Most reports, however, start the timeline at 1512, when a steady stream of enslaved Africans began escaping from Spanish and Portuguese slavers and “disappearing” into the hinterlands.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution