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Return of the Maroni (Forest Secession)

West Indians are frightened and ashamed of the past. They know about Christophe and L'Ouverture in Haiti and the Maroons in Jamaica; but they believe that elsewhere slavery was a settled condition, passively accepted through more than two centuries. It is not widely known that in the eighteenth century slave revolts in the Caribbean were as frequent and violent as hurricanes, and that many were defeated only by the treachery of "faithful" slaves.1

It took almost a century of guerrilla warfare against the soldiers of the slave system for the N'djuka and Saramaka, groups of deported Africans, to definitively wrest their freedom from the plantation owners of Surinam, formerly Dutch Guiana. In fact, faced with the threat of a general conflagration in the colony in 1760, the Dutch were forced to sign peace treaties with the nègres marrons ("black maroons") who were fugitive slaves. These official accords confirmed the autonomy of the N'djuka and Saramaka territories - vast expanses of the Amazonian forest crisscrossed with rivers and creeks, interrupted by marshes and savannahs, and pierced deep by invisible bogs. Several years later, toward 1770, another group of nègres marrons, the rebels of the Cottica, launched a new war of liberation that was more radical than its predecessors: their leader, Boni, had decided not simply to seize independence but also to chase the "white master" from Surinam altogether. This time William of Orange, Stathouder of the United Provinces,2 put a significant army on the ground that carried the day thanks to its numerical superiority and weaponry and forced the Boni to retreat to the French banks of the Maroni, Sparouine, and Lawa rivers.

In 1772, a revolt more terrible than any before broke out on the shores of the Cottica. Its leader was a mulatto named Boni, born in the woods to a runaway slave mother. The colonial militias proved insufficient and the prince of Orange was asked for a corps of regular troops to fight back against the insurrection . [Colonel Fourgaud] stuck to his goal, requiring his troops to manoeuver in all weather and in all seasons, across creeks, bogs, savannahs, and wetlands. He paid the cries and protests of the officers and soldiers no heed, but neither did he give the enemy any chance for rest or mercy. The capture of the village of Gado-Saby, where Boni himself was found, dealt the final blow to the insurrection; but the winners paid dearly for their victory. Of 2,000 men sent from Holland, barely 100 returned to their country, sick and exhausted from the consequences of this disastrous affair . Wounded, pushed beyond the limits of endurance, chased successively from his torched villages, Boni led his soldiers' retreat; he crossed the Tapanoni and took refuge in the upper Maroni with the debris of his scattered nation."3

Ever since that moment, the destiny of the Boni - who took their name from their heroic ancestor - has been intimately linked to that of French Guiana, where other groups of marrons ("maroons") came to join them over the course of time. Today the Boni, the Paramaka, the N'djuka, and the Saramaka represent more than 20 percent of the Guianese population. However, very few works recounting their existence and their history exist in France. This is hardly surprising, given that the majority of books dealing with slavery present marronage as a secondary phenomenon, a simple systemic reaction. The myth of the docile slave remains difficult to uproot. Because this misrecognition of marronage struck me as a new injustice to the deported Africans and their descendants, I decided to spend some time in French Guiana, on the Maroni river, in the hope of learning from the "revolted Negroes" themselves a little more about their hidden history.4

Variations on marronage, slavery, and the memory of resistance movements

My stay in Guiana began in Montreuil, on the grounds of the Parole Errante,5 one spring evening when friends asked me to review the proofs of an interview that they had just completed with Daniel Maximin. In this interview, responding to questions from high-school students [lycéens], the Guadeloupean writer explained the different forms of resistance to slavery known throughout the Americas: sabotage, "suicide," poisonings, acts of arson, and revolts - as well as all the cultural practices, more or less secret, through which the slaves reinvented their humanity.6 When he got to marronage - the general phenomenon of enslaved persons' escape - he described its two major forms: small marronage and great marronage. The first designated limited flights of several hours or several days: slaves went missing to meet with a friend or family member on another plantation, to escape punishment, or to get a tyrannical overseer removed (in the slaveholding system, strikes took the form of a temporary collective flight). The second designated definitive escapes, whether individual or collective, that the slaves undertook by melting into the anonymity of towns or into the impenetrable tangles of nearby forests, hills, and tropical marshes. Sometimes, Maximin explained, this great marronage gave birth to veritable societies of fugitive slaves, maroon communities capable of introducing cracks into the colonial order itself. As Louis Sala-Molins emphasized, "it was by 'marooning' that the Blacks shook the bases of colonial society in the most efficient way and that they became aware of their capacity for systematic opposition and revolt."7 One might add that continual raids by bands of neg mawon against plantations, roads, and isolated villages caused the colonies to tremble in perpetual insecurity, prefiguring the future liberation movements of colonized peoples (for example in Haiti, Vietnam, or Algeria) as well as their guerilla tactics of immersion in the landscape. Let us recall, with Frantz Fanon, that "decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is clearly an agenda for total disorder."8

Certainly, I had already heard talk about nègres marrons, but had never pictured them to myself as anything but poor vagabonds forced to be brigands, living from one day to the next, and haunted by the threat of "Negro hunters."9 Never had I suspected that, in certain places and at certain times, they were able to form significant and lasting communities. My first research into this subject touched on the origin and the meaning of their name. In truth, marron has nothing to do with color;10 rather this noun comes from the Spanish cimarrón, a term from the Taïno (one of the peoples "discovered" and immediately subjected to "genocide".).11 The word was first used on the island of Hispaniola - the future Saint Domingue - to refer to domestic animals imported from Spain (such as pigs, cattle, or cats) who escaped, and in consequence returned to a wild state. Just as runaway bulls were called toros cimarrónes, so too the habit arose of calling blacks who escaped into the woods negros cimarrónes. It seemed quite natural to displace the meaning of animal stock onto human stock. Around 1540, the use of the noun marron spread throughout the slaveholding colonies of the Americas. In the eyes of planters, a black person who escaped slavery could only be an ungrateful and lazy animal, indeed one badly trained. Before it was revalorized by the writers and artists of the Caribbean (above all, after the abolition of slavery in 1848), the word mawon became synonymous in Creole with "vagabond," "delinquent," or "bandit." This reduction of meaning contributed to the redaction of Creole memory.

It is symptomatic that little by little the colonists and their authorities (assisted by the Church) were able to impose on their population the image of the nègre marron as an ordinary bandit or assassin, concerned only with avoiding work, to the point where he was made interchangeable in popular representation with the villainous bogeyman used to frighten children. . Even more telling is the observation that [in the Antilles] the nègre marron eventually became exactly what he was said to be, and that at a certain moment he began actually behaving like an ordinary bandit . an observation teaching us primarily that a community which is deprived of its "natural" popular heroes and which disowns them under the alienating pressure of colonial action has disowned itself.12

The use of the term cimarrón is revealing in more than one respect. First, it expresses the fact that all slavery, whether that of ancient civilizations, Viking conquerors, or Muslim sultans, happens through domestication - a process of training, and therefore an animalization of human beings. Slavery has always obeyed animalistic models: "From the very beginning there must have been two distinct types of slave: the single slave, linked to his master as a dog is, and numbers of slaves together, like cattle in a field."13 But with "modern" slavery this definition of roles began to follow a chromatic logic. Usually only the "lightest" colored slaves - particularly...