Jamaican Maroons

Proven Free

The early Maroon communities of Jamaica…though hugely outnumbered and poorly equipped, launched a highly effective armed resistance and nearly managed to bring economic development in parts of the island to a standstill. 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. 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. 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.

*Source: https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/maroon-autonomy-jamaica

What are the beliefs and practices of my people regarding how a human being is meant to exist in relationship with a living earth?

Explore questions for each quote below by clicking the image.

Peoples Blog

“If you chop that branch, it’s filled with water that the Maroons would drink…This is why, when we cut a tree, we plant another one to replace it.”

Lloyd Wilks (loyd wilks), Jamaica's consul general at Toronto

Read More →

“We make drums the same way our ancestors did 200-300 years ago. We play the same rhythms, the same songs that record the history of our ancestors.”

Wallace Sterling (wahl-lass stir-ling), Colonel Maroon Council

Read More →

“Fight in the morning, fight in the day and fight in the night. There ain’t no giving in. In true maroon determination, doggedness and defiance, we will win.”

Nichole McIntosh (neh-kole mak-in-tosh), nurse, poet, blogger

Read More →

“Africans who refused to be enslaved said, "Oh no. We insist to have the right to practice our African centered way of life as we see fit and we do not need a slave master over us.”

Nana Farika Berhane (fah-rick-ah beh-hahn), author and poet

Read More →

Proven Resistant

The greatest challenge to Maroon autonomy…came with Jamaica's political independence in 1962. The country's new constitution did not address the question of the political and legal status of the Maroon communities in post-independence Jamaica…. The Maroons continued to insist on the validity of their treaties, which they regarded as sacred charters, and they pointed out that these had been made with the British crown, and not with the ancestors of those who constituted the new government. During the 1960s and 70s, successive governments attempted to further the integration of the Maroons into the larger population by demanding that persons living on Maroon lands pay taxes on the individual plots they occupied. Maroons in the two major communities of Moore Town and Accompong, however, resisted all efforts to divide and tax their communally held "treaty lands." The Maroons of these two communities still pay no taxes on their communal lands.

*Source: https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/maroon-autonomy-jamaica