NANNY OF THE MAROONS Nanny, leader of the Windward Maroons is something of a mysterious figure in Jamaican historiography. Situated somewhere between mystic and martyr, rebel and myth, the former slave and military leader nevertheless occupies a place of great importance and reverence in Jamaica. The current and continuous debates concern not the existence of Nanny, but her level of participation in Maroon battles and the range and extent of her leadership. Priestess, warrior, spirit figure, Queen Mother was she all of these things? Was she any? After Jamaica gained its independence from Britain in 1962, a national emphasis on the history of resistance from slavery, colonization, and economic oppression was the collective desire. Along with other inductees into national hero status, Nanny of the Maroons was included with slave rebel Samuel Sharpe in 1975. Nanny, is mentioned only four times in written historical texts.The most important is a 1740 land patent offering five hundred acres of land to Nanny and the people residing with her. We know that Nanny was most likely an Akan/Asante woman sold into slavery in the early eighteenth century. Along with other slaves, most of them African-born, Nanny escaped into the mountainous landscape of Jamaica and helped to form a community of free women, men and children-the Maroons. Maroon populations, especially those located in Jamaica and Suriname were a particular problem for colonists. From the time the British seized Jamaica from the Spanish in the middle of the seventeenth century, wars were fought over the capture and control of Maroons. Using the dense backlands and high, hilly terrain, from 1655 until the land grant in 1739/40, ex-slaves and their would-be enslavers battled over the stolen cargo that the fleeing bodies of the Maroons represented. Its a Steady arguement that the ultimate success of the Maroon population in Jamaica was a combination of wit, military expertise and the West African influenced matrifocal system of cooperative power. The core of Maroon settlement was the valuation of women and their contribution to maroon survival. Since women played such an integral part of Maroon development in strategic battle defenses, it is no surprise that one of the most famous leaders to emerge out of Maroon oral history is a woman
Posted on: Thu, 03 Jul 2014 18:01:36 +0000