‘mountainous heartland … mighty green citadel of jagged peaks’ 

‘a country difficult beyond description’ 

The marrons, "Maroons", are the fugitive slaves, and marronage, originally the political act of these slaves who escaped into the forested hills …now designates a form of cultural opposition to European-American culture. 

The hills rising abruptly behind the Caribbean beaches … Deeply forested in places still, they are the savage and life-preserving land in which the Maroons took refuge.

The mountainous island of Dominica (Eastern Caribbean) has a quite unique history of enslavement and maronnage. The last island in the Caribbean to be colonised by European powers and too steep for vast sugar plantations, it remained until the mid-18th century, a refuge for both indigenous people and self-emancipated Africans fleeing European domination and plantation expansion along the archipelago. Thus, before it would become a plantation colony of Britain (in 1763) – who fought several wars with France for control of the island and attempted a sugar revolution there - it was largely a masterless place, inhabited by indigenous Kalinago people, by self-emancipated African settlers/maroons from neighbouring islands (e.g. Guadeloupe to the north, Martinique to the south), as well as French missionaries, woodcutters and petit blancs (‘poor whites’) smallholders with small numbers of enslaved workers. Throughout the first half of the 18th century, the number of French smallholders and enslaved people would grow. Despite an Anglo-French treaty in 1748 declaring Dominica a neutral Kalinago island, the French de facto colonial presence increased, and Britain eventually fought them for formal control. Yet, despite Britain’s eventual colonial domination, the 250 years of interaction between Kalinago, Europeans and Africans were largely defined by ways of living outside of and in the shadows of a plantation order, in autonomous settlements dotted across its rugged geography; across enclaves that lined its deep river valleys and high ridges. So, perhaps, as scholars of Dominica have argued, the modern foundations of Dominican society are more a reflection of a maroon society than a plantation order. 

Between 1763 when Britain gained control of the island and the maroons’ eventual defeat by 1814, the island would witness two ‘maroon wars’/genocidal campaigns by the colonial state (1785-6 & 1812-14), a failed maroon-‘mulatto’ revolutionary plot to overthrow the white supremacist order in 1791 (just months before Haitian revolution began), several large scale slave walkouts, in addition to countless escapes (temporary and long term) and acts of maroon insurgency and clandestine siphoning from the plantations. Despite British colonial attempts to survey, lot and auction off the entire island for sugar estates, the island’s vast heartland of virgin rainforest, great mornes that rise into cloud-covered pitons (peaks), its high plateaus, long ridges and precipices that drop into deep valleys, this interior fastness became a space of well defended maroon camps, of spiritual practices, provision grounds, and African relations to this new earth, sea and sky. As Dominican historian Lennox Honychurch argues: 

This harsh terrain ensured that ‘plantation Dominica’ extended little more than two miles from the coast. This left thousands of acres in the interior, amounting to nearly two-thirds of the island, as untouched as it had been from before the time of Christopher Columbus. This was Maroon Country. 

Dominica’s neg mawon built a world and way of being that enabled their self-possession, autonomy and humanity beyond the debasements of plantation life. This ‘maroon impulse’, which predates plantation life in Dominica, has endured the latter’s rise and decline. Almost every scholar to study the neg mawon, has observed a maroon spirit and legacies that have persisted beyond Ainslie’s genocide (1813-14), beyond Emancipation (1834-88), and beyond independence (in 1978). 

(L) Maroon Country and Plantation Dominica (Honychurch, 2017: 14); (C) Morne Trois Pitons National Park, Gaffey, 2019; (R) ‘Known Maroon camps and chiefs. 1763-1834’ (Honychurch, 2017: 14). 

Therefore, the Dominica team on Slavery and Its Legacies is interested in how enslavement is remembered as a system of domination, but even more so interested in how maroon memory lives on in the island. We are interested in key sites of memory from the Old Market and Roseau Museum, where captured maroons where tried in sham courts and violently executed, heads placed on stakes to terrify the enslaved populace; to Jacko flats, site of a famous maroon camp, named for the chief Jacko; Hillsborough plantation, site of a famous walkout by 20 enslaved people, in protest at the killing of their coworker by a violent manager; and the various pieces of land and landmarks still named ‘Neg Mawon’ or after specific chiefs in the mountainous interior. We are interested in how these places and those maroon figures whose names can still be recalled – Mabouya, Bala, Jacko, Elephant, Pharcel, Jean Zonbi and many more – are remembered, and how this remembrance differs between different constituents and across class, colour, gender and geography. Silences – who or what is not remembered – will also be questioned.

 

Jacko Flats

Belles, Dominica, 2026.

Photo by Adom Philogene Heron

LennoxHonychurch, citing Haitian historian Jean Casimir’s social history of Dominica from 1984, noted: ‘that Dominica shows the effects not so much of a plantation society but of a Maroon society’; whilst Bernard Wiltshire has argued that, yes, the ‘Maroons were defeated but their years in the forest were not without gain … they left a legacy with which we have yet to come to terms’. Schuyler Esprit adds that ‘the ethics of resistance by which they lived have had lasting impacts on the island’. We too are interested in whether/how Dominicans see or experience those lasting impacts persisting into the present. The following questions animate our work: 

How might this maroon spirit manifest itself in contemporary Dominican life? 

Who, since the maroons, may have taken inspiration from their ethics of autonomy, collective living, naturalist survival and will to freedom? 

If these legacies lie dormant or have died, what may have precipitated their suppression/death? 

How might collaborative film and curatorial practices conjure or invoke a reencounter with mawon lifeways, ethics and politics? 

What might such a reencounter reveal in in terms of how maronnage and enslavement are remembered (perhaps in diverging ways)? 

And how may this remembering form part of a process of repair in enslavement’s wake? 

To confront these questions, local partners OneOff Productions – led by filmmaker Michael Lees – will workshop, co-devise and shoot a series of short films with local actors that feature visitations from maroon figures of the past, intervening in the lives of contemporary Dominicans. The quasi-scripted films will feature key sites of memory, key figures from the archives – with references to historic events and people – as these ancestral beings (neg mawon) contact, inspire, perhaps haunt contemporary Dominicans; inviting a reckoning with the past. In collaboration with members of the Waitikubuli Artists Association, curatorial activities centring on the material culture of maroons – likely including cutlass, wah wah (wild yam), spiritual objects, Carib baskets, conch shells, wild game – will also form part of this work.

The outcomes of these activities, along with the screening of the films will inform a public event - a small Maroon Festival - to inform attendees of this rich and complex history, provoke conversation, inspire reflection and open-up dialogue on how maronnage inhabits the present and might be remembered in contemporary Dominica. 

The Old Market Roseau, c.1900. 

The site of Maroon executions less than a century earlier. 

Photo held by Roseau Museum

Unidentified man with conch shell

© Alan Lomax La Plaine, Dominica, 1962.

https://archive.culturalequity.org/field-work/caribbean-1962/la-plaine-i-662/unidentified-man-conch-shell