#maroonage

[belovedbluv]

Maroons in Suriname and Guiana by Nicola Lo Calzo

[daygloayhole]

[thetendertongue]

maroonage — the act/process of escaped, formerly enslaved Africans forming their own independent communities, often in hard-to-reach places; embodied resistance, autonomy, and ancestral continuity; a literal and metaphorical act of running toward freedom

[protoslacker]

Most of the time when people ask, “What should I do?” they’re really asking “What organization should I join? What leader do I follow?” So, we must always try to debunk that. We should say that if you find yourself in a movement that has formed around an obviously dominant leader, you might as well go the hell home. That movement is a dead end. But if you have people who are organized around an issue or idea and they are able to sit down and listen to one another and develop a strategy, then you’re on the right track. I can’t find those people for you. You have to learn to look for them, because those are the people who are making history.

Modibo M. Kadalie in conversation with Andrew Zonneveld in Roar Magazine. ​Re-learning the past to re-imagine the future

In his new book, Modibo Kadalie examines the convergence of maroon and Indigenous cultures in the US and rediscovers a lost history of intimate direct democracy.

Intimate Direct Democracy: Fort Mose, the Great Dismal Swamp, and the Human Quest for Freedom by Modibo Kadalie

[blackfilm]

Watch For Humanity: Culture, Community and Maroonage Online | Vimeo On Demand

“Maroons” are people of African descent who were able to escape from enslavement during the transatlantic slave trade. The Maroons created free societies…

“”Maroons” are people of African descent who were able to escape from enslavement during the transatlantic slave trade. The Maroons created free societies (villages), hidden in thick densely forested regions that they protected with their lives in order to ensure that they would never be caught and forced to return to the plantations from which they escaped. While most people have no idea that such places ever existed, even fewer people realize that some of the villages still exist to this day. The village of Palenque San Basilio in Colombia, South America (Palenque), the first of such places in the world, was established in 1603 when Benkos Bioho, who was transported to Colombia as part of the South American Slave trade, rebelled and obtained his freedom and the freedom of over thirty other enslaved people. This documentary focuses on Palenquero identity, relationships, music, culture, and what this group may be able to contribute toward making humanity better. The film also highlights some of the challenges that Palenqueros are experiencing as villagers begin to rely more on the nearest metropolitan city (Cartagena) for jobs and resources.” via Vimeo page.   

[africandiasporaphd]

VIDEO/FILM: Landscape and Power: Freedom and Slavery in the Great Dismal Swamp

VIDEO/FILM: Landscape and Power: Freedom and Slavery in the Great Dismal Swamp

Dan Sayers, Carolyn Finney, and more describe maroonage in the Dismal Swamp in this documentary: (more…)

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[canebrake--blog]

To believe, as I do, that the enslaved are our contemporaries is to understand that we share their aspirations and defeats, which isn’t to say that we are owed what they were due but rather to acknowledge that they accompany every effort to fight against domination, to abolish the color line and to imagine a free territory, a new commons. It is to take to heart their knowledge of freedom. The enslaved knew that freedom had to be taken; it was not the kind of thing that could ever be given to you. The kind of thing that could be given to you could just as easily be taken back. Freedom is the kind of thing that required you to leave your bones on the hills at Brimsbay, or to burn the cane fields, or to live in a garret for seven years, or to stage a general strike, or to create a new republic. It is won and lost, again and again. It is a glimpse of possibility, an opening, a solicitation without any guarantee of duration before it flickers and then is extinguished. The demands of the slave on the present have everything to do with making good on the promise of abolition, and this entails much more than the end of property in slaves. It requires the reconstruction of society, which is the only way to honor our debt to the dead. This is the intimacy of our age with theirs – an unfinished struggle. To what end does one conjure the ghost of slavery, if not to incite the hopes of transforming the present?

Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000), p. 169-170

[belovedbluv]

Cicatrization is a scar formation at the site of a healing wound. Scarification, a form of cicatrization, is a permanent form of body modification that affects the texture of the skin by cutting through layers to purposefully create a scar. This process can include a number of techniques, including cutting, scratching, or burning. This was practiced at large globally in pre colonial societies/civilizations and still is in small communities today. 600,000 Africans during slavery, were sent to Guinae(Bissau) down to Angola between 1600 and 1830. During this time period on plantations some Africans would escape in the Amazonian rainforest, where they would be known as maroons and live amongst each other called marronage. The tradition of scarification continued to be practiced in marronage. We can see this amongst the maroons of Suriname and French Guiana, specifically in the Saamaka and Ndyuka tribes.

1 - Maroon woman from Langatabiki, Suriname by Willem van de Poll, 1947

2 - Maroon man from the Cottica region, Suriname by Eugen Klein, 1910

3 - Maroon Fashion History By Sally Price

4 - Maroon woman in Suriname from Ndyuka tribe with ritual scarification (1952), photographer unknown.

5 - Maroons from Suriname by Augusta Curiel, 1911

6 - Aukan woman in Suriname by Augusta Curiel, 1915

7 - Ndyuka artifacts are on permanent display at MPM.

8 - Ndyuka artifacts are on permanent display at MPM.