True-Born Maroons (New World Diasporas)

“An impressive ethnography of identity and cultural memory among the little-known Windward Maroons of eastern Jamaice, descended from escaped slaves who established free communities in the mountains of this New World colony a century before the abolition of slaveryThis book is an essential and rewarding read for all those interested in resistance to slavery in the Americas and its legacy today.”Jean Besson, Reader in Anthropology, University of London

“A fine and long-overdue introduction to Jamaican Maroons, based on oral narratives collected in the field. . . . Learning that Maroons have valuable knowledge and insight into their own history and persuading them to reveal some of their ‘intimate and hidden culture of remembrance’ and to exercise their right to speak for themselves and their past, Bilby has provided an important work of reclamation and rehabilitation of Maroon identity over three centuries of history.”–Monica Schuler, professor emerita, Wayne State University

“In this work [Bilby] specializes in the African voices of freedom in Jamaica, demonstrating how the Kromanti spirits of Africa worked with the living people of Moore Town and other communities to forge independent Maroon territory and territoriality in the past, bring[ing] this past constantly into the present. The key anthropological and historical issues of memory, text, play, story, and communication flow beautifully through the author’s text and through the texts of the real Maroon people themselves. The author also learned to commune with the African spirits through Maroon people, and he shares these experiences with the reader so that we may vicariously commune as well. But there’s no contrivance here; anthropological rigor emerges in all places to create a convincing and nearly unique document that will serve anthropology, history, and students of vernacular speech and wide-flung cosmology for a long, long time to come. . . . An anthropologist’s dream of elegance, accuracy, poignancy, and communicability to others.”–Norman E. Whitten, director, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, University of Illinois


“Reflects the author’s quarter of a century of intensive research into the history, storytelling, drama, music, and spirituality of Jamaican Maroons, and immediately establishes a claim as the most comprehensive text ever written about the Jamaican Maroons, making it essential reading for anyone concerned with Jamaican cultures  . . . there is nothing simple in the history of the Jamaican Maroons, and Bilby deserves enormous credit for creating a book faithful to the actual voices of a community more readily exploited by the modern world than understood in their own terms . . . short of going to Jamaica and talking with Maroon leaders, if you’re able to gain their consider, this book is the best way to enter their world.”–Norman Weinstein, author of “A Night in Tunisia: Imaginings of Africa in Jazz”

Constructed from the oral histories of one of the secretive groups in the Caribbean, the Maroons of Jamaica, this book provides a unique view of a culture that has been nurtured by enslaved Africans and their descendants to live on against tremendous odds for nearly 350 years. The descendants of African slaves who escaped from the Spanish and British plantations in Jamaica during the 17th and early 18th centuries, the Maroons battled for and maintained their autonomy during 70 years of guerrilla warfare with the British army that ended in a truce in 1739. The British colonial government in Jamaica violated the truce and began a deportation campaign to eradicate the Maroons in 1795. Nearly 600 were captured and sent to Nova Scotia, where many died of exposure. Remarkably, this and later efforts to destroy the group failed, and today the Maroon settlements on Jamaica still believe themselves an independent nation governed by the terms granted in the 1739 truce.

In a large number of visits to the island over 25 years, Kenneth Bilby gained the confidence of the Maroon elders, who revealed to him secret details of their ancestral heritage–including history, music, Kromanti religion, language, and culture–for publication. Whereas almost all previous studies of the Jamaican Maroons have focused on the distant past, this one is as much about present-day Maroons as about their ancestors. For the first time, the story of what it means to be a Maroon is conveyed through the words of the Maroons themselves. Gathering together dozens of oral-history narratives, sacred songs, and other forms of esoteric knowledge, the book is a study of cultural memory challenging the common assumption that contemporary Maroons have little or no knowledge of their own ancestral past, as well as the related idea that they have got “all but disappeared” from Jamaica. Equally important is the story of the complex local and global politics into which the contemporary Maroons are increasingly drawn and the problematic ways in which the Maroons’ highly valued history has been appropriated, theorized, and commodified in postcolonial Jamaica and beyond, threatening to sever the Maroons from their own past.

The first study of Jamaican Maroons to place living voices at the center of analysis, True-Born Maroons sheds much new light on both the past and present situation of Jamaica’s hidden Others, once described as “one of the world’s most famous but least-known people.”