In the Forests of Freedom: The Fighting Maroons of Dominica

by Lennox Honychurch

Overview

In this detailed, brilliantly researched book, historian Lennox Honychurch tells the enthralling and previously untold story of how the Maroons of Dominica challenged the colonial powers in a heroic struggle to create a free and self-sufficient society.

The Maroons, runaways who escaped slavery, formed their own community on the Caribbean island. Much has been written about the Maroons of Jamaica, little about the Maroons of Dominica. This book redresses this gap.

Honychurch takes the reader deep into the forested hinterland of Dominica to explore the political, social, and economic impact of the Maroons and details their struggles and victories.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781496823755
Publisher:	University Press of Mississippi
Publication date:	08/01/2019
Series:	Caribbean Studies Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	226
File size:	16 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Born and raised in Dominica, Lennox Honychurch is one of the island’s most noted historians. A graduate of University of Oxford, he has published numerous books and academic papers on the history of Dominica and the wider Caribbean. He is well known for writing The Dominica Story: A History of the Island, the first published history of the island. He also published the textbook series The Caribbean People and the travel book Dominica: Isle of Adventure.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

A lasting memorial: the leaders of liberty

A speech for the unveiling of the 'Neg Mawon' emancipation statue delivered by the author at Peebles Park, Roseau, Dominica, 1 August 2013

Your Excellency the President and Mrs Williams; Acting Prime Minister Hon Ambrose George; Minister of Culture, Youth and Sports Hon Justina Charles, other members of Cabinet and the House of Assembly; Mayor of Roseau Cecil Joseph; distinguished guests; brothers and sisters all of this Commonwealth of Dominica.

In a socio-historical study of Dominica carried out in 1984 the Haitian historian Jean Casimir noted that Dominica shows the effects not so much of a plantation society but of a Maroon society. He argued that a late and weak plantation system in Dominica had resulted in a less colonised and thus less regimented and more open modern society. Briefly, Dominica was the last island in the Caribbean to be colonised. Its rugged mountainous nature enabled it to be one of the last places of refuge for the the region's indigenous people, the Kalinago. When the British took over the island in 1763 there were already more than 300 Maroons living in small settlements in the interior. As British and French planters opened up more land for sugar and coffee and imported more enslaved labour so did the Maroon numbers increase. Plantations and villages clung to the coast while inland a vast jumble of forested ravines, cliffs and river valleys combined to create a complex natural maze which confounded the British forces who attempted to reduce the Maroons by any means possible.

The call of the conch shell, the kon lambi, echoed across the valleys sending messages and warnings from camp to camp, from one 'Neg Mawon' leader to the other. The name 'Maroon' had come from the Spanish word cimarrón meaning 'fugitive, runaway, living on mountaintops' (from the Spanish cima meaning 'top, summit'). It was adopted by the English and anglicised into 'Maroon'. For the French Creoles it became 'Neg Mawon'; in those days the French word negre did not merely mean black man or Negro, it also referred to a slave.

This memorial that we are about to unveil recalls the 'Neg Mawon' chiefs such as Balla, Congo Ray, Gorre Greg, Jacko, Cicero, Pharcel, Zombie, Jupiter, Juba, Mabouya, Sandy, Quashie, Nicko, Hall and many others. There were also women among them: Charlotte, Calypso, Angelique, Marie-Rose, Tranquille, Rosay, Victorie and Rachel, and hundreds of others with unrecorded names who, from the 1760s through to the first stage of emancipation in 1834, held out against the plantation forces that were pitted against them.

It is significant that most of the senior chiefs had been born in Africa for unlike the Creole, Dominican-born slaves these Africans had once lived in and experienced a society other than the plantation society. They knew that an alternative system existed and they had no difficulty imagining that it could be recreated here on the other side of the Atlantic.

In one way I had hoped that this statue would have been erected in a prominent place in the mountainous heartland of our island home. For in those hills the statue would overlook the mighty green citadel of jagged peaks that was the place of liberty and freedom. It was a sanctuary for those who escaped the system and fought to overturn the institution of enslavement that had been imposed upon them. For, up there, among those forested mountains, was truly their land of Zion.

Instead, this symbolic representation of Maroon heritage has been placed here on this hill in the centre of the nation's capital. Within a few hundred yards in every direction there are places that were, for many of the Maroons, familiar: the site of arrival, the site of sale, the place of punishment and the point of death. For this area was indeed their Babylon. Just down the hill in the harbour below us anchored the slave ships that had completed the treacherous Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean from the coast of west Africa. There, on that coast, renegade chiefs, not unlike the drug lords and cocaine dealers of today, had connived with European traders to engage in human trafficking in return for the equivalent of bling and ill-gotten gain.

Along the Bay Front stood the warehouses and open yards, the taverns and main marketplace where the sales of the newly arrived slaves were transacted. The last of these buildings to survive is the barracoon building near the end of Dame Eugenia Charles Boulevard on the junction with Hillsborough Street.

Besides being a place of sale, the Old Market was the scene of horrific public punishments and executions. After the great Maroon conflict of 1814, the cobblestones are said to have run with blood, so much so that the populace refused to continue to draw water from the public well and it had to be filled in and covered over.

Right next to us at Fort Young, the Maroon chief Balla was brought in half dead from the heights of Layou in 1786. According to the British Governor, John Orde, 'Balla refused answering almost any questions that were put to him ... he called upon his captors repeatedly to cut off his head, telling them that they might do so, but that Balla would not die – his Obi or charm and his child were the only things that he expressed much anxiety about. The former he wished to bury, the latter, a boy of about five years old he bid to remember [that] the Beckeys or White Man had killed his father.' Balla was taken to the marketplace to be displayed in a narrow iron cage called a gibbet and took a week to die. The people sang a refrain 'Balla mort, Bwa gattay Oh.' ('Balla is dead, the woods are spoilt.') And, as for his son, Governor Orde took the little boy to England where he was sent to school and where he disappeared into the social whirl of Regency London.

But perhaps the greatest tragedy of the whole Maroon campaign was that many of the 'Neg Mawon' lost their lives at the hands of their own people, the so-called 'trusted Negroes' who joined their masters' Ranger Corps. You can go to the National Archives on Kennedy Avenue in Roseau and see the receipts for rewards and bills of freedom paid to Rangers in return for killing the aged and respected chief Jacko, on 12 July 1814, and other chiefs.

A couple of hundred yards to the south of us is the House of Assembly, which in those days also served as the Court House. There, and at Fort Young and also at the Market House, which still stands overlooking the present Old Market, is where the 'kangaroo court' trials of the Maroons took place. The planters produced and quoted legal and religious books to justify the power that they had seized in this colonial society. For we must be frank about this: the Judaic Christian Bible was just as much a tool of colonisation and control as were the draconian laws, the land titles and the maps of appropriation and possession.

That House of Assembly echoed with Biblical quotations plucked from the Old and New Testaments to justify the institution of enslavement. Among the most favoured passages used by the planter-legislators was Leviticus 25:44-46: 'Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves ... and they will become your property. You can will them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life ...'

In exhorting their human property to accept their state in life, they turned to passages such as Peter 2:18: 'Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect, not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh.' And when they were debating the Amelioration Acts in the 1820s, aimed at reducing some of the greatest abuses of the system, they turned, in their defence, to Exodus 21:20-21: 'If a man beats his male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies as a direct result, he must be punished, but he is not to be punished if the slave gets up after a day or two, since the slave is his property.' It is fitting to note that as the tide against slavery began to swell, other verses from that same Bible were used by the Anti-Slavery Movement, Methodists and Moravians prominent among them, to ask, 'Am I not a man and a brother?' It is truly a religious text for all seasons.

When full emancipation was granted on 1 August 1838, exactly 175 years ago today, it was far from the end of the struggle. The Emancipation Act granted compensation not to the former slaves but to their masters for the loss of their property. The slave holders of Dominica received £275,547 from the British government while the 14,175 former slaves were left with absolutely nothing to start out their lives as free people. This must be taken into account when considering Dominican society today for, when seen in that light, it is remarkable what has been achieved in areas such as education, home and land ownership and self-government, given that the majority of our ancestors started off with nothing.

In the decades following emancipation, a raft of laws, such as the wide-ranging vagrancy acts, were passed to keep control of the masses. The aim was to deprive them of land so as to tie them to reliance on the estates, to limit the right to vote and to determine everything in their lives from the rates of their labour to the nature of their sexual activity. The so-called obeah laws were a front for a government policy of de-Africanisation of the population. Carve a mask or a statue out of wood and you could be charged with the possession of an instrument of obeah.

Many of these post-emancipation laws of control still litter our legislation. On independence, we maybe should have done as Nelson Mandela did in South Africa: sweep everything away and start afresh to meet the needs of a modern nation state. But we were too timid, maybe we are still too timid, and that unlike what the Haitian historian Jean Casimir said of Dominican society, we have been too well and thoroughly colonised to 'free our minds of mental slavery'.

However, it must be said that we were bold enough to go directly into independence as a republic, the only Commonwealth Caribbean country to do so (Trinidad and Guyana became republics some years after their independence). Even today, we are the only member of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) where our head of state, elected by our own representatives, sits among us, as he does today, and participates in the life and aspirations of our people rather than being a governor-general representing a distant figure 5,000 miles away.

So the message of this statue does not end with the end of slavery. It does not even end with political independence. Its message carries on, to look back and remember, but also to look forward to influence our present ideals and those in the years ahead. Together with the nearby cenotaph commemorating Dominicans who died in the two world wars, this statue represents a spirit of determination against all odds, a spirit of togetherness in the koudmen tradition of the 'Neg Mawon', a spirit of self-reliance and a respect for the forested citadel of this island that has given its natural resources for our survival and for the continued protection of our people.

CHAPTER 2

An island citadel: understanding the Maroon landscape

Climbing along a sharp-edged ridge above the rain forest in the centre of Dominica adventurous hikers push aside the branches of the thick smooth leaves of the kaklin and the stiff fronds of the mountain palm (palmiste) to look out towards Morne Diablotin, the island's tallest peak. There is nothing to indicate that they are on an island. No blue triangle of sea breaks the waves of green ridges that encircle them. Every ridge is a different shade of green and within each wave rise trees that spread contrasting tones into dark ravines or against the skyline. Shadows and sunny highlights shift as the breeze ripples across the canopy. They see no one else although someone could always be there. They could walk for days and meet no one, although someone may have seen them pass.

* * *

It is in this landscape that the story of the 'Neg Mawon' of Dominica unfolded as a displaced and enslaved people fought upon this forested island to create a free and self-sufficient society during an intense 70-year-long struggle (17641834). Those seven decades of internal conflict began in earnest the year after the British took possession of the island following the Treaty of Paris in 1763. From 1778, when the French recaptured Dominica, Maroon activity intensified, overflowing into the period of British repossession. The momentum was briefly broken by an unsettled lull between 1787 and 1791 while the Maroons regrouped. Against the backdrop of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars, spanning the decade of the 1790s and climaxing in 1814, the Maroons shook the British hold on Dominica to its foundations. It forced the colonial power into a 20-year period of amelioration of slave laws that led to the first stage of emancipation in 1834.

From the very beginning, the Maroons' long-term objective was to overturn a system that kept their people in bondage. But defeating slavery was not the end. In the years after emancipation the des-cendants of Maroons pieced together what cultural elements they could to mould a new more equitable community out of the shattered remains of their ancestral experience. Even the much later achievements of self-government and political independence do not close the story begun centuries before by men and women struggling to be free.

The island upon which all this took place provides a spectacular stage for the human drama in which three ethnic groups, Kalinago, African and European, converged to engage with each other to manipulate possession and control of this rugged space. To fully comprehend the powerful hold that the Maroons of Dominica had upon this plantation colony during the last half of the 18th and the early 19th century one must understand the nature of the island and particularly its volcanic origins. Aerial and satellite photographs of the central mountains show the complex formations that aided the escaped slaves for the terrain of deep valleys and ridges was an excellent hideout for any force. The Kalinago people had used it to their advantage for some 200 years throughout the 16th and 17th centuries during the long offensive to hold on to their island delaying attempts by Spanish, French and British settlers to colonise it. Once again, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the luxuriant forests would offer protection.

Approaching the island from the sea in 1887, the British historian James Anthony Froude contemplated the land mass that rose before him: 'Grenada, St Vincent, St Lucia, Martinique are all volcanic, with lofty peaks and ridges; but Dominica was at the centre of the force which lifted the Antilles out of the ocean, and the features which are common to all are there in a magnified form. The mountains being the tallest in all the group, the rains are also the most violent, and the ravines torn out by the torrents are the wildest and the most magnificent. The volcanic forces are still active here. There are sulphur springs and boiling water fountains, and in a central crater there is a boiling lake.'

Froude's observations came many decades before geologists had fully accepted the theory that the earth's surface is composed of independent, slowly shifting tectonic plates, which move against each other creating uplifted mountain ranges and arcs of volcanic activity. Froude rightly suggested that Dominica was at the bow of the Caribbean tectonic plate 'at the centre of the force' thrusting up and outwards into the Atlantic Ocean. As a result, it is the most mountainous in the Caribbean chain and has the highest concentration of live volcanoes on earth. Nowhere else will you find an area of less than 300 square miles with nine live volcanic centres crowded together. A base of molten magma lies beneath the main volcanic domes that make up the backbone of the island with the northernmost, Morne Aux Diables, having a separate magma chamber.

Dominica rises sharply out of the sea. The east coast is hammered by the powerful ocean swells of the Atlantic. Here, constant erosion has carved out precipices interspersed with occasional coves and long beaches of black volcanic sand. These gaps between the towering walls of rock are swept by high waves and dangerous undercurrents that make the landing of boats well-nigh impossible. During the colonial period, the plantations on this windward coast were isolated and lacked proper communications by land or sea. Only here and there did the planters use shelves of rock as at Glacee near Boetica, or walls and a crane as at Rosalie, or the shelter of islets such as at Castle Bruce, to load and ship supplies and produce. Elsewhere, the boatmen counted the waves and then rowed their canoes frantically through the lowest swells to drive themselves up onto a beach, jumping out to secure their boats before the next wave came crashing behind them. Such were the landing places at Bout Sable and Plaisance Bay, La Plaine, or at Pointe Mulatre, Delices. As a result, east coast plantations were most prone to attacks by Maroons who descended in armed parties from their camps in the hills cornering the isolated settlements between an inhospitable ocean on one hand and impenetrable terrain on the other.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "In the Forests of Freedom"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Lennox Honychurch.
Excerpted by permission of Papillote Press.
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Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

1. A lasting memorial: the leaders of liberty,
2. An island citadel: understanding the Maroon landscape,
3. The first Maroons: the Kalinago foundation,
4. The neutral island: creating a Maroon base,
5. The first plantations: Jeannot Rolle at Grand Bay,
6. The British take over: Maroons consolidate,
7. The French return: Maroons gain strength,
8. The First Maroon War: the Balla uprising,
9. A new challenge: the French ascendancy,
10. The New Year's Day Revolt: Maroons and 'The Rights of Man',
11. An unstable decade: Maroons manipulate colonial conflict,
12. The West Indies regiments: a challenge to Maroons,
13. The prelude to mayhem: Maroons destabilise the system,
14. The Second Maroon War: an eradication policy,
15. The road to emancipation: halfway to freedom,
16. The aftermath: Zion, Babylon and the globalised colony,
Endnotes,
Bibliography,
Picture credits,
Acknowledgements,
Index,

Editorial Reviews

"The brave people who held out in Dominica's mountain wilderness for generations against the military forces of two colonial empires have had their story well told at last. Their spirits can now be at rest." — Adam Hochschild, author of "Bury the Chains"

"This book will long stand as the definitive account of these Maroons whom the British considered, after those in Jamaica, the major menace to their plantation system. Dominica's Maroons have finally found their chronicler." — Richard Price, author of "Maroon Societies"

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