With the general emancipation of slaves in 1834, things changed drastically for the Maroons. The deep divisions and resentments caused by the post-treaty Maroons' willingness to cooperate with the British in this way continue to haunt much of the thinking, both official and popular, about Maroons today.
The treaties of 1739 reinforced and institutionalized preexisting cultural differences between the Maroons and the coastal slave population by legally sanctioning the Maroons' existence as semi-autonomous free peoples within a slave colony, and by providing them with bounded territories that came to symbolize their corporate identities as communities of common landowners.Īfter 1739, the British colonial government helped to further entrench the distinctions between Maroons and other Jamaicans by employing the former as a sort of internal police force whose responsibility it was to track down and capture future runaways and to aid in the suppression of slave insurrections. Over several decades, while building new societies in the island's interior, both groups had developed distinctive Afro-creole cultures to which new recruits from the plantations adapted and contributed. Two major groups were covered by the treaties: those under the leadership of Cudjoe (Kojo) in the Cockpit Country in the western part of the island, known as the Leeward Maroons and those affiliated with Quao (Kwau), Nanny, and a variety of other leaders in the Blue Mountains in the east, known as the Windward Maroons. The two treaties signed by the Maroons and their British antagonists in 1739 gave legal recognition to de facto ethnic groups that already differed culturally (despite significant areas of overlap) from the rest of the Jamaican population. Their continued existence as distinct communities is far from assured. Many reggae fans from other countries have attended the annual celebration of Maroon heritage that takes place in Accompong on January sixth.ĭespite their relative fame and the widespread acknowledgment, both locally and internationally, of their ancestors' accomplishments, the Maroons occupy an ambiguous social space in contemporary Jamaica. And most devotees of Jamaican popular music are aware of the continuing existence of Maroon communities on the island. The Maroon resistance of past centuries continues to serve as an important point of reference in the discourse of black struggle associated with the Rastafari movement and its music. The politically charged brand of "roots" reggae championed by Bob Marley and dozens of other Rastafarian artists during the 1970s remains popular internationally. (Jamaicans call it "nanny.") The global circulation of Jamaican popular music has also helped to spread awareness of the Jamaican Maroons to other parts of the world. An imaginary portrait of her now adorns the ubiquitous Jamaican $500 bill. The 18(th)-century Maroon ancestress Nanny was officially named a national hero. During the turbulent 1970s, their historical epic's significance for the ongoing struggle against neo-imperialism and the construction of a post-independence national identity was much discussed and debated in Jamaica. More recent trends have once again placed the Jamaican Maroons in the spotlight. Since the 1930s and 40s, when prominent figures such as Zora Neale Hurston and Katherine Dunham published accounts of their visits to the Jamaican Maroons, these semi-independent enclaves have held a certain fascination for North American readers. Today they remain, after the Maroons of Suriname and French Guiana, the most culturally and politically distinctive of all surviving Maroon communities of the Americas. The fact that they were never defeated or assimilated into the larger population set them apart from most of the other Maroon groups spread across plantation America. Unconquered, they persisted as free peoples in the heart of Britain's most important and notorious slave colony until long after the abolition of slavery in 1834. Though hugely outnumbered and poorly equipped, they launched a highly effective armed resistance and nearly managed to bring economic development in parts of the island to a standstill. But those that made treaties with the British crown in Jamaica in 1739 were destined for special fame (or infamy, depending on the perspective). In hemispheric context, the early Maroon communities of Jamaica - those formed in the 17(th) century, during the late Spanish and early British periods - were hardly unique.