The “discovery” of America by Christopher Columbus in 1492 is still considered a great civilizational achievement in the western world. At least the day of his arrival is still celebrated as a public holiday, for example in the USA or Spain. Columbus' voyage did change the world forever - but for the vast majority, not for the better. In addition to the brutal murder of the natives, the mass transport of African slaves to the "new world" began just a few years after the alleged discovery. Over the next few centuries, over 12 million people were abducted this way. However, one facet of this development is often overlooked. The history of those slaves who resisted, fled and founded their own societies far from the European plantations is almost as old as that of the plantations themselves. They are called the Maroons and it is their extraordinary history that we shall be talking about today.
The Maroons:Attempting a Definition
As soon as the first Africans were brought to the Caribbean as slaves, the first of them fled and founded their own communities in the hinterland of the plantations. Because even if the Europeans wanted to convince themselves that nobody liked being a slave. Such "maroons" have been documented in the sources at least since 1512 - only twenty years after the arrival of the Europeans in America. These escaped slaves were also given their names at this time by their former Spanish masters. They were called Cimarrónes, which means "wild runaways". From the French "Marron" it finally became the English word Maroon, which to this day also describes these groups in German.
It wasn't long before such maroon communities existed throughout the Caribbean. The story was similar everywhere. The Spanish colonizers spread island after island and operated plantations there, mostly for sugar cultivation, operated by African slaves. Escaped slaves then retreated to the non-Spanish-controlled interior of the islands. There, some of them managed to found independent communities, far from the control of the colonizers and partly in mingling with the Caribbean natives. Of course, it was not an easy or even pleasant life. The interior of islands like Hispaniola, Puerto Rico or Jamaica was and is not a welcoming place. These are mostly mountainous forest landscapes. Farming was difficult and, on top of that, the Maroons had to constantly defend themselves against attacks from the Spaniards. But life in slavery was even worse, so there was a steady influx from the plantations.
It would be another two centuries before colonial rulers extended their control from the coasts to the interior of the Caribbean islands and reached the Maroons. After several centuries, these groups slowly but surely disappeared on the smaller islands in the 18th century. On the big islands, however, things looked very different and especially on Jamaica and Hispaniola the Maroons would soon take on a truly historic role.
Jamaica and the Maroon Wars
Jamaica is a prime example of this. There, as elsewhere in the Caribbean, there have been groups of Maroons hiding in the mountains from the Spanish colonizers since the 16th century. England took control of Jamaica in the mid-17th century, but as before, that meant only the coast. It was not until a good hundred years later that the British occupying power made serious attempts to bring the interior of the country under their control for the first time. The Maroons living there didn't just let that happen to them. They banded together and militarily opposed British troops from the 1730s:The First Maroon War. With guerrilla tactics and clearly superior knowledge of the country, the Maroons made life difficult for the British for ten years until they were ready for a peace treaty. The victorious Maroons were granted extensive autonomy. This was the first time in history that a group of ex-slaves could achieve independence from a European colonial power - 100 years before the British Empire abolished the slave trade!
In the period that followed, there were repeated conflicts and also a second war against the British administration. The Maroons of Jamaica never lost their autonomy again. They still live in the interior of Jamaica, far away from the majority population of the coastal regions. It is estimated that there are still several thousand Maroons in Jamaica.
The Maroons in the Haitian Revolution
The Maroon communities soon took on a historically even more important role on Hispaniola and what would become Haiti. The French colony of Saint Domingue there was probably the most productive in the world at the time. No other estate produced as much revenue for its colonial power as Saint Domingue did for France. The events that were to take place there at the end of the 18th century are all the more important - and the Maroons were right in the middle.
The colony had been a deeply divided society for centuries at the time. Saint Domingue was ruled by a vanishingly small white upper class. There was also a white underclass, free blacks, “mixed” people and an overwhelming majority of African slaves who were constantly being brought in from Africa due to the enormous mortality rate and who probably made up 90 percent of the population. In addition, of course, Maroons lived here since the early 16th century, and they received a steady flow of runaway slaves to their villages in the interior of the country. They posed a constant threat to plantation owners.
The 1750s saw the first major Maroon uprising in Haiti. Led by their leader François Mackandal, they raided plantations for nearly a decade and fomented slave uprisings there. The colonial power looks on helplessly for a long time. Eventually Mackandal was caught and executed, but his example had already made waves. Barely forty years later, Saint Domingue saw the largest slave rebellion the Caribbean had ever seen. From 1791 to 1804 the country was in open civil war. Slaves, Maroons, free blacks, French, Spaniards, Britons and whoever else found the time faced each other in changing coalitions. Tens of thousands died in the fighting and (especially among Europeans) from yellow fever. In the end, however, Haiti was the first and only free "slave republic" in the world.
A heavy legacy
The colonization of the "new world" by the Europeans was an inhumane and mostly one-sided undertaking. The profit of the white Europeans was on the one hand, the suffering of the natives and African slaves on the other. It is all the more important to remember that these were not just victims. At any point in time there were independent Maroon communities that opposed enslavement. And last but not least in Haiti they showed what they thought of the European presence. In Spain, the USA but - let's be honest - the whole western world, this realization is still not fully understood.