Talk:Jamaican Maroons

Way of Life

The entire section was deleted without explanation, so I restored it. I checked the discussion page, and there was no note of explanation. However, in looking back over the history, it seems that a concern has come up about the section duplicating a previous section. If the removal was intentional, and if this was the reason, by all means, reinstate your edit -- with explanation so it does not appear to be vandalism, as this page was recently vandalized in a similar manner.Djneufville (talk) 23:55, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your well-meaning attempt to revert my edit, but this section was in the article twice for no good reason. Look back at the "history" tab, and you'll see that I simply removed a subheading that was duplicated. Josh a brewer (talk) 05:09, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks -- the diff and history showed about 200-300 characters disappearing with your edit without comment. Hist will show the other recent blanking of the page, which was reverted. The other cleanup done looks good.Djneufville (talk) 00:45, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

I see what happened. The "bot" messed up. In the "history" tab, click on "last" next to 23:49, 29 January 2008 ClueBot. The bot correctly restored the page after the vandalism, yet somehow it also duplicated the "Way of life" section. That's why I removed the extra one, leaving only one "Way of life" section. Josh a brewer (talk) 04:39, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Jamacian material removed 26 Januray 2007

The following material was added by an IP editor (IP 172.188.176.124) under Usage and other terms by someone who apparently did not read the whole article. Much of it is already in the section on Jamaica. The Jamaican section could do with a good rewrite. Removed materail:

Following the seizure of the Spanish colony of Jamaica by a British force sent to the region by Oliver Cromwell, the local Maroons fought a prolonged insurgency campaign against the new occupier. Amongst their leaders was a female chief known as 'Nanny', now an official national hero in independent Jamaica. Local legend maintains that Nanny was able to catch British musket balls with her teeth and throw them back at the advancing redcoats.

Fighting from their mountain hideouts and protected by thick vegetation and the tropical climate, the Maroons prevailed and were eventually able to negotiate a peace treaty with the British. This treaty awarded them local self rule within two parts of the Jamaican hinterland, and they remain there today, governed independently by their 'Colonel of Maroons', a little known remnant of the original slave population brought from Africa by the Spanish in the 1500s.

The Maroons have their own language which is largely based on West African languages and when a Nigerian film crew visited them in the early 1980s, they were able to converse without recourse to English.

• Verification and citation is needed for some of this. --Bejnar 03:09, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

Disjointed

This article still remains disjointed with the information not particularly well connected. I hope that someone will continue to work on this article with a couple of the history books at their elbow. --Bejnar 02:14, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Questionable source

I have to call into question the page that much of this article relies upon: The Jamaican Ministry of Education, Youth & Culture's "National Heroes" website. This source seems to cite no reliable secondary sources, and it is written like a legend rather than scholarship or history: "Nanny prayed night and day. She asked for guidance and strength. Nanny soon had a vision. She was told never to give up the fight for freedom." None of this is cited. It tells a good story, but it simply makes up parts of it. We need facts that are verifiable. I propose that someone should revise this article so that it removes much of the myth and leaves the truth. Folk tales are important, but this is an encyclopedia. We need facts. The history of the Maroons is too important to leave to the children's story hour. There are plenty of scholarly secondary sources for us to use to help us write a verifiable, NPOV, sourced article, but we should be skeptical of sources that sound like they were written to entertain kids. Incidentally, I don't question the Ministry of Education's motives in telling the tale this way. It just isn't all true. Josh a brewer (talk) 04:33, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Edith Blake - 1898 essay on the Maroons

Edith Blake wrote an article about the Maroons for The North American Review that was published in 1898. Its in the public domain and may be read or downloaded here:

http://archive.org/details/jstor-25119093

Though written in the "academic style" (more the magazine's claim and probably should be described as popular) of its day it does have some information regarding the Maroons.

Please note that with any text over a hundred years old you are dealing with a historical document with the views, opinions and prejudices of that period.

There are much better books and sources available but this is a 15 minute "free" read and may offer an introduction (albeit a very old one) to anyone new to the subject.

Sluffs (talk) 12:40, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

Update 2015

I'm currently giving this page an overhaul based on information in Michael Craton's Testing the Chains, which should take a couple of days.

As part of this, I recommend deleting the section on Akan day names at the bottom of this page. It's true that these need a note as they can cause confusion, but I would prefer to flag that inline and link to the page on Akan day names rather than reproduce the information.

I also recommend summarizing the section on Jamaican Maroons in Sierra Leone quite a bit and transferring much of the information here to appropriate main pages for the Second Maroon War and/or Sierra Leone Maroons.

Does anyone have any comments or shall I go ahead?Pen Lewins (talk) 15:17, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

I made the changes. Pen Lewins (talk) 14:25, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

I have also made a few improvements to this article, from a historical point of view. By the way, before 1707, Jamaica was an English colony, and after 1707 it was a British colony.Mikesiva (talk) 11:45, 24 December 2020 (UTC)

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Capitalization

"Maroon" by itself isn't capitalized; it's a condition, not an identity. It is capitalized in Leeward Maroons, Jamaican Maroons (specific groups). deisenbe (talk) 17:46, 16 December 2019 (UTC)

That's not the way Jamaicans see it. As you can see in this article, the word "Maroon" is capitalised throughout the story. http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/art-leisure/20160103/excitement-scotts-hall-maroon-village-st-mary However, we can see if we can arrive at an agreement on standardisation, since it is common for the word "Maroon" to be capitalised or written with a common "m".Mikesiva (talk) 14:16, 24 June 2020 (UTC)

After discussions with MassiveEartha I have realised that Cassidy's dictionary of Jamaican English and Jamaican patois capitalises the word "Maroon" in documents that discuss the Maroons who came to terms with the treaties of 1739 and 1740. I will use the common "m" to discuss those maroon communities that formed afterwards, and independently of the official Maroon towns. That's the distinction I used in my PhD dissertation on the Maroons of Jamaica, which was supported by the University of Southampton. I borrowed that classification from renowned slavery historian David Geggus, who defines the Maroons, with a capital ‘M’, as the communities of runaway slaves who chose to come to terms with the colonial Jamaican authorities in the mid-eighteenth century, while he classifies Cuffee (Jamaica)’s 1798 runaways as ‘maroons’ with a small ‘m’. I will be capitalising the official Maroons in this article now, while I will be using the common "m" for Jamaican communities of runaway slaves, such as Cuffee.Mikesiva (talk) 10:48, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

Thanks Mikesiva, a quick note to add my voice to the discussion on the capitalisation of Maroon in articles about Maroons in Jamaica in general and this article in particular. As Mikesiva points out in Jamaican English Maroon, when referring to communities and individuals associated with the colonial treaties, is capitalised and this article is should use Jamaican English, as indicated by the {{Use Jamaican English}} tag.
I suggest we expand on term like "fugitive", "self-liberation" and "maroonage" when referring to other communities of free black in colonial Jamaican and perhapes include a section about settlements of free (masterless) black people in the Colony of Jamaica who were not treaty Maroons. MassiveEartha (talk) 17:11, 5 February 2021 (UTC)#

That's a great idea, MassiveEartha, as usual. I will see if I can work on producing such an article about free black people of the Colony of Jamaica next week.Mikesiva (talk) 14:07, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

Moved from article

Recording

• Bilby, Kenneth, ed. (1992). Drums of defiance : maroon music from the earliest free black communities of Jamaica. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. OCLC 491579581.

Film

• 1984 – Caribbean Crucible. From Repercussions: A Celebration of African-American Music TV series, programme 6. Directed by Dennis Marks and Geoffrey Haydon.