Archaeology Conference

Last week I was honored to deliver a paper on the Accompong Maroons and the use of site in history at an archaeology conference. I do want to make a few comments about the conference. First, I have to say that I did not think that working on Maroons would be controversial. Participants asked me questions that were not related to what I spoke on, but included topics such as what do the Accompong think about the Trelawney Maroons and how to they account for their failure to back the Trelawney Maroons during the Second Maroon Wars. Generally, antipathy about the Maroons centers on their squelching of the Morant Bay Rebellion. This is certainly a different line of critique and it makes me wonder what else will happen if I publish my dissertation.

The other set of comments concerned an audience member's thoughts on Jamaica's National Heroes. She was a White Jamaican and argued that she could not figure out the criteria for vetting the country's national heroes. The heroes are Grandy Nanny of the Maroons, Samuel Sharpe who led the Christmas Rebellion in 1832, Paul Bogle who led the Morant Bay Rebellion, Marcus Garvey ('nuff said), Norman Manley, and perhaps Bob Marley. She was concerned that the heroes selected were violent and that school children could not state why they were heroes. Besides, she quipped, none of them are women.

I think there is one issue that needs to be addressed, that heroes are often unseen and unsung. So, what's interesting about the Morant Bay Rebellion, for example, is that women were very prominent in planning and executing it, but we don't know their names and their roles. They are hard to make heroes under those circumstances. Paul Bogle gets much of the credit, but he has many heroes amongst him. However, ain't Grandy Nanny a woman? She was the amazing military leader of the Maroons who won their freedom from slavery in 1738 and 1739. This might not have been doable without her!

Also, I would like to speak to the issue of violence associated with these heroes. Each one of them took violent action in the face of oppression none of us can imagine in this day or age. They resisted enslavement, they resisted their lack of input and political and economic participation in the period immediately following slavery, they started a new nation. We must contextualize the violence, not denounce it out of hand. Slavery was a violent institution which begot violence. The period in post-emancipation Jamaica also enjoyed its share of violence which also begot violence in response. To denounce the national heroes for violence does not make sense in this context.

But I am not a White Jamaican. However, she lives in a society amongst Black Jamaicans that are beneficiaries from the fights taken on by Nanny, Bogle, Sharpe, etc.