Page 7 - The Maroon- Patricia Reid

These Maroons also agreed with the colonial authorities to assist in crushing all slave rebellions and

defend the country from any invasion. In return for these acts, the Maroons would be financially

compensated by the ruling planter class — the slave owners.

This I find disturbing. But even more is the conspiracy by the Colonial Board of Education after 1845, and

archivist Clinton V Black (not his real name) in the second half of the following century mislead the rest

of the black population through the education system that the Maroons are our heroes when, to the

contrary, they were our vicious oppressors and unmerciful murderers and capturers.

I frown against the lies and, even more, the disrespect that suggests strongly a belief that the children of

“Quarshie Fool” would have no way of finding out the truth. In being lied to, not only about the Maroons

but also a greater part of our history, the use of literary devices to glamorise and romanticise the pain and

cruelity meted out to the rest of the negro population by the official agents of the salve masters — the

Jamaican Maroons — were also brought heavily into play.

It has been a disgrace and I am fighting down those lies not the Maroons…) although they too have very

little to be commended for or to be proud about as part of the Jamaican history. They have, and by the time

readers come to the end of this article they will discover that the Maroons have reaped more than what

they have sown, and like Clinton Black, the few Maroon apologists must know that the unfolding truths

about our history, inclusive of the Maroons, in this the technological and information age cannot anymore

be sequestered into the hands of a select few and be tucked away under a bushel safely hidden.