Maroons

ma·roon¹  [muh-roon] 

adjective

1.dark brownish-red.

2.Chiefly British.

  a.  a loudly exploding firework consisting of a cardboard container filled with gunpowder.

  b.  a similar firework used as a danger or warning signal, as by railway brakemen or mariners.

Origin: 1585–95;  < French marron  literally, chestnut, Middle French  < Upper Italian  (Tuscan marrone ), perhaps ultimately derivative of pre-Latin *marr-  stone

ma·roon²   [muh-roon]

verb (used with object)

1. to put ashore and abandon on a desolate island or coast by way of punishment or the like, as was done by buccaneers.

2. to place in an isolated and often dangerous position: The rising floodwaters marooned us on top of the house.

3. to abandon and leave without aid or resources: Having lost all his money, he was marooned in the strange city.
 

noun

4. ( often initial capital letter ) any of a group of blacks, descended from fugitive slaves of the 17th and 18th centuries, living in the West Indies and Guiana, especially in mountainous areas.

5. a person who is marooned: Robinson Crusoe lived for years as a maroon.

Origin: 1660–70;  < French mar(r)on,  apparently < American Spanish cimarrón, wild; first used in reference to domestic animals that escaped into the woods, later to fugitive slaves

The prospects for an escaped slave in the Spanish West Indies were not promising unless he could find fellow fugitives with whom to associate, and from the mid seventeenth century such people, often in the company of indigenous people who had fled Spanish oppression, formed villages in marginal areas of the Caribbean islands. These were the maroons. Generally, only in the rugged interiors of the larger islands was it possible to sustain such communities. Their relations with settlers became increasingly violent, and in Jamaica and Haiti the maroon communities, outside the control of the colonial authorities, developed into focii for slave revolt (they might also, as Francis Drake discovered in Panama, assist the enemies of the colonial power).

In Jamaica, now under British rule, the maroons raided plantations and blocked exploitation of the interior; conflict erupted in the First (1731) and Second (1795) Maroon Wars. In the aftermath of the latter, most of the maroons were shipped off to Canada and then Sierra Leone, leaving only the more tractable village of Accompong. Having remained neutral in the Second Maroon War, this town retains certain privileges even within independent Jamaica.

In Saint Domingue (Haiti), where the local creole term for them is Mawon, the maroon communities, sometimes in association with the indigenous Taino people, formed a powerful force in the hill country. Their relationship with the French colonial authorities was not always adversarial - they sometimes helped hunt escaped slaves for bounty - but mawons such as Mackandal were also implicated in slave revolts. The Haitian Revolution in 1791, which would become mostly associated with Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, grew out of the actions of a mawon called Dutty Boukman.

 

 Dutty Boukman initiates the 1791 Haitian slave revolt.

Boukman was a voodoo houngan, though there have been odd suggestions that he was also a Muslim ("book man"). On 14 August 1791, Boukman and the priestess Cecile Fatiman carried out animal sacrifice at Bois Caiman and instructed his audience to seek vengeance upon the French. Plantations were attacked and, as the violence escalated, slaves seized control of increasing areas of the colony. The revolt subsequently became complicated by the involvement of France's colonial rivals, by which time Boukman himself had been captured and killed by the French. In January 1804, Dessalines declared Haiti a free republic (though he later that year declare himself Emperor Jacques I and subsequently be assassinated).

The voodoo ceremony which sparked the uprising, however, has provoked some to claim that the foundation of Haiti had resulted from a pact with the devil. Remarkably, this assertion is still current. In 2010, in the wake of the Haitian earthquake, the fundamentalist American preacher and all-round fuck-knuckle Pat Robertson (1) repeated it as part of a contention that Haiti was "cursed".

Perhaps he could profitably be marooned... in Scotland (2).

(1) A typical quotation: "You say you're supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don't have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist." Friend of war criminal ex-Liberian president Charles Taylor and Zairean shitbag dictator Mobuto Sese Seko, he regards liberal university professors as "racists, murderers, sexual deviants and supporters of Al-Qaeda."

(2) Robertson apparently also believes, or did in 1999, that Scotland was a dark land overrun with homosexuals.

EDIT: Music link removed 2/1/2013