True-Born Maroons

Constructed from the oral histories of one of the most secretive groups in the Caribbean, the Maroons of Jamaica, this book provides a unique view of a culture that has been nurtured by enslaved Africans and their descendants to survive against tremendous odds for nearly 350 years.

Constructed from the oral histories of one of the most secretive groups in the Caribbean, the Maroons of Jamaica, this book provides a unique view of a culture that has been nurtured by enslaved Africans and their descendants to survive against tremendous odds for nearly 350 years. The descendants of African slaves who escaped from the Spanish and British plantations in Jamaica during the 17th and early 18th centuries, the Maroons battled for and maintained their autonomy during 70 years of guerrilla warfare with the British army that ended in a truce in 1739. The British colonial government in Jamaica violated the truce and began a deportation campaign to eradicate the Maroons in 1795. Nearly 600 were captured and sent to Nova Scotia, where many died of exposure. Remarkably, this and later efforts to destroy the group failed, and today the Maroon settlements on Jamaica still consider themselves an independent nation governed by the terms granted in the 1739 truce.

In numerous visits to the island over 25 years, Kenneth Bilby gained the confidence of the Maroon elders, who revealed to him secret details of their ancestral heritage—including history, music, Kromanti religion, language, and culture—for publication. Whereas almost all previous studies of the Jamaican Maroons have focused on the distant past, this one is as much about present-day Maroons as about their ancestors. For the first time, the story of what it means to be a Maroon is conveyed through the words of the Maroons themselves. Gathering together dozens of oral-history narratives, sacred songs, and other forms of esoteric knowledge, the book is a study of cultural memory challenging the common assumption that contemporary Maroons have little or no knowledge of their own ancestral past, as well as the related idea that they have "all but disappeared" from Jamaica. Equally important is the story of the complex local and global politics into which the contemporary Maroons are increasingly drawn and the problematic ways in which the Maroons’ highly valued history has been appropriated, theorized, and commodified in postcolonial Jamaica and beyond, threatening to sever the Maroons from their own past.

The first study of Jamaican Maroons to place living voices at the center of analysis, True-Born Maroons sheds much new light on both the past and present situation of Jamaica's hidden Others, once described as "some of the world's most famous but least-known people.