Maroon Communities

Description

Joris Leverink:

"Along with the introduction of chattel slavery to the Western hemisphere by European colonists, a new phenomenon was born: Maroon communities. After escaping from the plantations, many former African slaves started organizing themselves in autonomous communities in the inaccessible interior of Caribbean islands and coastal colonies.

Their political organization was often modeled on traditional African societies, with land held in common by kinship groups and communal meetings functioning as popular assemblies. An entirely new culture of resistance, formed out of the eclectic mix of the different ethnic and religious backgrounds of its individual members, developed as part of the collective struggle for freedom.

To this day, many Maroon communities—like the ones in Jamaica and Suriname—remain to a large decree autonomous from the centralized governments of the contemporary states of which they have since become a part, and they carry on the traditions of self-governance their ancestors have fought for for hundreds of years." (https://roarmag.org/magazine/pirates-peasants-and-proletarians/)