Under construction

The term “maroons” refers to people who escaped slavery to create independent groups and communities on the outskirts of slave societies. Scholars generally distinguish two kinds of marronage, though there is overlap between them. “Petit marronage,” or running away, refers to a strategy of resistance in which individuals or small groups, for a variety of reasons, escaped their plantations for a short period of days or weeks and then returned. “Grand marronage,” much less prevalent, refers to people who removed themselves from their plantations permanently. Grand marronage could be carried out by individuals or small groups.¹

Historians have had a long debate on differences between a runaway and a maroon. The enslaved would not have cared or made such a distinction therefore I do not find it necessary to do so here. As Karen Cook Bell puts it, fugitivity is a revolutionary act of resistance thus engaging in any type of fugigivity was something to be lauded. Fugitivity is understudied in The Bahamas. Lack of study on marronage in The Bahamas has led me to look at similar locales and situations for definitions that could fit such a unique place. Slyviane A. Diouf’s paradigm shift beyond petit and grand marronage to hinterland and borderland marronage fits with the scope of this study. Shifting the focus from the duration of an escape to geographical location allows for maroons’ voices to speak in a new way. Borderland, as defined by Diouf, means wild land that bordered farms, plantations, cities, and towns. Hinterland refers to communities far away from settled areas that were hard to reach, usually due to difficult terrain. Runaways were creating what historian Stephanie Camp calls a ‘rival geography’ for themselves with their fugitivity. Bahamian maroons could be labeled as engaging in petit, grand, and borderland marronage.²

The enslaved in The Bahamas engaged in over-land and maritime marronage. The spaces of 18th century Nassau allowed for social connections to take place which in turn gave runaway slaves the ability to gain freedom. Sailors, Black Loyalists, and liberated Africans were transient and masterless people. Enslaved people who engaged with these groups heard transnational news, learned new avenues of maritime marronage, gained and maintained African culture in the colony, and had ideas of freedom and revolution transmitted to them unfiltered by White colonial authorities. Places in the French and Spanish speaking Caribbean were avenues for marronage outside of the Bahamian colony.

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Notes