The man who was to become the first African-American maroon arrived within a decade of Columbus' landfall on the very first slave ship to reach the Americas. One of the last maroons to escape from slavery was still alive in Cuba only 15 years ago. The English word "maroon" (The authors have chosen to spell "maroon" in lower case when it is used to refer to individuals who escaped from slavery. It is capitalized only when used generically to refer to contemporary peoples or ethnic groups.) derives from Spanish cimarrón--itself based on an Arawakan (Taino) Indian root. Cimarrón originally referred to domestic cattle that had taken to the hills in Hispaniola, and soon after it was applied to American Indian slaves who had escaped from the…show more content… It presented military and economic threats that often strained the colonies to their very limits. In a remarkable number of cases throughout the Americas, whites were forced to appeal to their former slaves for a peace agreement. In their typical form, such treaties--which we know of from Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Hispaniola, Jamaica, Mexico and Suriname--offered maroon communities their freedom, recognized their territorial integrity, and made some provision for meeting their economic needs. In return, the treaties required maroons to end all hostilities toward the plantations, to return all future runaways, and, often, to aid the whites in hunting them down. Of course, many maroon societies never reached this negotiating stage, having been crushed by massive force of arms; and even when treaties were proposed they were sometimes refused or quickly violated. Nevertheless, new maroon communities seemed to appear almost as quickly as the old ones were exterminated, and they remained, from a colonial perspective, the "chronic plague" and "gangrene" of many plantation societies right up to final…show more content… But these are of the same type as those that can be found, albeit less frequently, in African-American communities throughout the hemisphere. And stressing these isolated African "retentions" may neglect cultural continuities of a far more significant kind. Roger Bastide divided African-American religions into those he considered "preserved" or "canned"--like Brazilian candomblé--and those that he considered "alive" or "living"--like Haitian vaudou. The former, he argued, represent a kind of "defense mechanism" or "cultural fossilization," a fear that any small change may bring on the end; the latter are more secure of their future and freer to adapt to the changing needs of their adherents. More generally, tenacious fidelity to "African" forms can be shown to be in many cases an indication of a culture that has finally lost touch with a meaningful part of its African past. Certainly, one of the most striking features of West and Central African cultural systems is their internal dynamism, their ability to grow and change. The cultural uniqueness of the more developed maroon societies (e.g., those in Suriname) rests firmly on their fidelity to "African" cultural principles at these deeper levels, whether aesthetic, political, or domestic, rather than on the frequency
