• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The story is not exceptional. Although governments throughout the Americas wiped out many maroon groups, others won their freedom—along with the later anonymity that was its concomitant. A few examples are worth listing, if only because slaves’ prospects for autonomy are all too often portrayed as completely dependent on the goodwill of their masters.

Mexico

Even as Spain was giving in to Africans who menaced the silver road in Panamá, it was facing Africans who menaced the silver road in Mexico. Sporadic, small-scale violence in the sugarlands of Veracruz flared into full-scale revolt after about 1570, with the escape of Gaspar Yanga or Nyanga, said to be a prince and general in what is now Ghana. Like Aqualtune in Palmares, he may actually have been one. Yanga, by all accounts a compelling, canny figure, united hundreds of Africans into a confederation in the mountains outside Veracruz. Driven by a kind of serene fury toward the people who had taken him in chains across the ocean, he led countless raids of sugar plantations, gleefully snatching slaves and provisions. Most important to New Spain, the maroons attacked convoys carrying silk and silver on the Veracruz–Mexico City road. Horrified colonists spread rumors that the maroons killed anyone who saw their faces and drank their victims’ blood in Satanic ceremonies.

The colonial government, confounded by the rugged terrain, did little about the assaults until Yanga’s forces committed the unforgivable sin of destroying a shipment of the most recent fashions from Europe. A military expedition of a hundred soldiers, an equal number of Indians, and two hundred colonists and their slaves charged into the mountains in January 1609. Six weeks later they occupied Yanga’s base—and accomplished nothing, because the maroons had evacuated to a second, more remote base. Yanga dispatched a Spanish prisoner with eleven nonnegotiable demands, chief among them “that all those who escaped before last September will be free.” The discouraged colonists accepted all eleven. Like the maroons of Bayano and Portobelo, Yanga’s people were presented with their own domain: San Lorenzo de los Negros. Later renamed Yanga, honoring its founder, it was the Americas’ first sunset town: Europeans were legally prohibited from staying the night there. Yanga and his descendants prospered so much that local Spaniards eventually paid them the ultimate compliment and moved in, ignoring the ban on whites. As a result, the town of Yanga is now almost completely “Mexican.”

Two other, legally free African towns are known in Mexico proper, one in the mountains west of Veracruz and one on Mexico’s west coast. But the maroons’ greatest success may have occurred in the eighteenth century, on the Pacific coast of Guatemala. A hotbed of maroon activity, it was assaulted by Spain until its militia ran out of soldiers—a problem the government solved by replacing the militia with the Afro-Indian groups they were attacking. Once they controlled the army, the maroons used subtle threats to persuade officials to remove the last vestiges of slavery.

Nicaragua

English Pilgrims launched two colonies: the famous Plimoth, the first successful colony in New England, in 1620; and a short-lived effort in Providence Island, 140 miles off the coast of Nicaragua, in 1631. Unlike their brethren in non-malarial New England, the Providence Pilgrims imported African slaves in numbers and with enthusiasm. As many as six hundred escaped when Spain drove out the Pilgrims in 1641. Landing in what is now Nicaragua by either shipwreck or design, they ended up mixing with Miskitu-speaking Indians and a small number of Europeans. More African and Indian refugees kept trickling in, swelling the ranks of the Miskitu, as these hybrid people came to be called. Viewing Spain as the biggest potential threat, they allied with the English who had previously enslaved some of their number. Riding with English buccaneers, armed with English swords and English guns, they raided Spanish plantations from Costa Rica to Panama,