Jamaican Maroon Establishments - Maroon Town, Sierra Leone, Accompong, Nanny Town, Cotterwood, Cattawood Springs, St. John's Maroon Church (Paperback)

Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Accompong is a historical maroon village, located in the hills of St. Elizabeth Parish in Jamaica, consolidated by a treaty in 1739. It is located in one of the two areas where runaway slaves settled, originally with the Tainos, isolated enough to be safe first from the Spanish and then later from the British. The town of Accompong was named after the Maroon leader Accompong, who was the brother of a number of other Maroon leaders: Quao, Cuffy, Cudjoe, and Nanny, from an Ashanti family. In Accompong Town, rebel slaves and their descendants wrested land from the colonial plantation-military regime and transformed a marginal mountainous reservation, imposed by a colonial legal treaty, into a sacred landscape rooted in common land. Cudjoe (also Kojo), a leader of the Maroons, is said to have united the Maroons in their fight for autonomy under the Kindah Tree - a huge, ancient mango tree that is still standing (2009). Accompong was founded in 1739 after the Maroons signed a peace treaty with the British at nearby "Peace Cave". The treaty granted the Maroons their long sought autonomy. However a second Maroon war broke out in 1795. The Accompong Maroons remained neutral and the British left them alone. At the end of the war all the other Maroon settlements in Jamaica were destroyed, Accompong alone remained. The Kindah Tree (Mango Tree) of Accompong near where the Maroons signed their treaty with the British in 1739 (Pic 1993)The fruitful Kindah Tree itself, with its sign proclaiming We are Family, symbolizes the common kinship of the corporate creole community on its common land. In the 1990s the Myal Dance became a tourist attraction and a symbol of Jamaican nationhood, forged through a history of conflict and alliance. The inhabitants of Acc... More: http://booksllc.net/?id=1079263