She Caused a Riot by Hannah Jewell

Author:Hannah Jewell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2017-11-27T05:00:00+00:00

Queen Nanny of the Maroons

Sometimes it’s difficult to find out very much about a woman’s life from hundreds of years ago, particularly when the historical references we have about her were written by racist men whose asses she roundly kicked. So it is with Queen Nanny of the Windward Maroons. Most written references to this incredible Jamaican leader’s life were recorded by the British colonial soldiers whom she fought in the early eighteenth century. There is, however, enough oral history to add to dodgy British records, so that we can learn more about the excellent Queen Nanny.

Jamaica was settled by the Spanish in 1509, soon after its “discovery” in 1494 by one of the absolute shittiest men of history, Christopher Columbus. In the 150 years following his arrival, the native Arawak people were nearly completely wiped out by the colonizers, who meanwhile began to bring slaves from West Africa to the island. When the British invaded Jamaica to take it from the Spanish in 1655, most Spaniards left to Cuba and elsewhere, disappointed that the island didn’t have gold anyway. In the struggle between the two colonial powers, the Spanish settlers’ slaves escaped to their freedom in the mountains and forests of Jamaica. A “Maroon” is a word first used by the British in the 1730s to describe these communities of free and escaped slaves.

The free Maroons survived by living off the land as well as raiding the plantations run by the British, who’d come to Jamaica for a pleasant colonial experience of slavery and exploitation only to have their weapons, food, and livestock disappear in the night. The presence of the Maroons inspired and assisted uprisings and desertions of slaves from these huge, brutal sugar plantations—and nothing inspired a slave revolt like the example of successful revolts at the plantations next door. The escaped slaves went to join the free Maroons, so the community grew.

British officials had to keep writing back to England that things weren’t going very well and that the Maroons “are like to prove as thorns and pricks in our sides.” One British governor, D’Oyley, who was oily, tried to get the Maroons to stop their raids by offering them twenty acres a person (of the land that they already lived on) as well as their freedom (which they had already claimed for themselves). Some white settlers just gave up and left the island altogether, though most stayed, bringing hundreds of thousands more slaves to Jamaica for more than a century longer. The community of Windward Maroons who lived on the eastern side of the island, however, successfully kept their freedom and fought off the British—but at the time the most powerful empire in the world—for eighty-three years. Queen Nanny was one of their most important military and political leaders.

Nanny was born in the 1680s in the Asante Empire, present-day Ghana, and was likely transported to Jamaica as a free person or became free soon after arriving. One British soldier who may have encountered her, Captain

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