Maroon Community

maroon community, a group of formerly enslaved Africans and their descendants who gained their freedom by fleeing chattel enslavement and running to the safety and cover of the remote mountains or the dense overgrown tropical terrains near the plantations. Many of the groups are found in the Caribbean and, in general, throughout the Americas. In Brazil, Jamaica, Haiti, Suriname (the former Dutch Guiana), Cuba, Puerto Rico, St. Vincent, Guyana, Dominica, Panama, Colombia, and Mexico and from the Amazon River Basin to the southern United States, primarily Florida and the Carolinas, there are well-known domiciles of the maroons.

The word maroon, first recorded in English in 1666, is by varying accounts taken from the French word marron, which translates to “runaway black slave,” or the American/Spanish cimarrón, which means “wild runaway slave,” “the beast who cannot be tamed,” or “living on mountaintops.” The Spanish originally used the word in reference to their stray cattle. It is further believed that the word cimarrón is from cima or “summit.”

It is important to note that most Africans did not refer to themselves as “maroons.” They usually opted for liberatory, powerful names such as “Nyankipong Pickibu,” which means “Children of the Almighty” in Twi, a language widely spoken in Ghana, West Africa. The Jamaican maroons tend to prefer the monikers “Koromanti,” “Kromanti,” or “Yungkungkung” to denote their culture and history. This entry looks at the origins of maroon communities in Africa, their history of struggle and revolt in the New World, and their contemporary representation.