After all, as my Grandma was fond of saying, “When the hunter writes the story, the lion is always dead.” Anglo-American textbooks were largely written by white folks and for the glorification of white folks. How they influenced geopolitics and the cultures of North, South, and Central America and the Caribbean Islands. Over in the Lesser Antilles, the Danish were sent scrambling from the islands they had captured.Ī fair amount of people still do harbor the view that black struggle for human rights and justice started with Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech so I am not surprised that people do not know of the Maroons and of their contribution to the rich tapestry of the Americas. In Haiti, they chased both the British and the French armies outta town. They fought two declared wars against the British and forced that great power to the bargaining table. They took on the mightiest armies of the time and beat them back time and time again. They put the fear of God in slaveowners and colonial administrators alike. The Maroons would return to engage the enemies time and time again. ![]() The Maroons of Jamaica, for example, didn’t just flee from slavery, that is but less than one third the story. Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines maroon as “a fugitive slave….” This dismissive, belittling definition fails to capture the essence of who those warriors really were. This group would become known as the mighty Maroons. From this hardy group - the fittest of the fit - a band of warriors would emerge, a people brutalized and dehumanized but who would nonetheless arrive in the West with their spirits unbroken, their resolve unshaken, their heads unbowed. Then they were the survivors: people who through sheer determination held on to their grip on life and on to their sanity as they made the voyage under the most barbaric conditions imaginable. Most were killed by their captors during transit - some before reaching the point of departure from their African holding ports and others during the journey aboard the slave ships - some succumbed to illnesses of the mind and body, and some made the conscious decision to choose death over subjugation. ![]() It is estimated that some 5 million kidnapped Africans died en route to slave plantations across the Atlantic ocean. The fiercest of them all: Queen Nanny of the Unconquerable Maroons
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