Jean Besson, Transformations of Freedom in the Land of the Maroons: Creolization in the Cockpits Jamaica

Jean Besson’s latest work is an ethnographic portrayal of the effects of creolization, globalization, and land ownership in northwest Jamaica that are often referred to as the Cockpits. Her work examines three communities, the Accompong Maroons, Aberdeen, and Maroon Town/Trelawny. This particular region is renowned as one of the sites of Jamaica’s eighteenth-century Maroon Wars. Yet, the Maroons were not the sole population who lived in the area, and nearby communities, both those connected with the Maroons and others who bore different marks of the transatlantic slave trade, built their communities in the cockpits after the end of slavery. These communities, over time, saw their relationship with ancestral lands and labour impacted by creolization and globalization.

Besson argues that creolization, from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first century, incorporated the process of place making, adaptation, and cultural re-creation so that people could root their identities, families, and communities in land. Further, non-Maroon communities developed novel systems of land transmission that rejected British primogeniture and allowed both sexes to inherit and pass on land to future generations. Besson suggests that creolization is also impacted by economic globalization, and thereby incorporates both cultural continuities and transformations.

One challenge related to Jamaican Maroon scholarship is the distinction between the oral historical narratives of the Maroon Wars that define Maroon communities and their very different lived experience from the late nineteenth century to the present. A particular focus on the Maroon Wars neglects how the Accompong managed their communally held land with consistent and persistent challenges from Jamaica’s colonial government. Besson’s ethnographic and historical research reflects the ways Maroons grappled with these challenges. One example of adaptation and cultural re-creation is evident when the Accompong bury their dead. First-time Maroons were buried in Old Town and general community members were buried in separate ethnic burial grounds to repair their initial disjuncture with Africa. In the late nineteenth century, the post-treaty Maroon community, upon invitation by the Accompong, buried their dead in the Presbyterian church yards. Additionally, Besson’s most recent work reveals that parallel with the neighbouring non-Maroon communities, the Accompong began the practice of yard burials signifying familial land control without the limitations of sex.

Burial traditions are not the only way in which the Accompong undergo the process of creolization. The community also changed sacred sites and continued the practices of Myalism along with a limited incorporation of Rastafarianism. Additionally, Accompong has become a tourist site that draws domestic and international audiences. The Jamaican Ministry of Tourism and other vendors have taken advantage of this opportunity and incorporate Accompong as part of Jamaican history. Non-Maroon audiences consume Maroon cultural staples such as the Myal play.

Aberdeen borders Accompong and is closely linked to it. Aberdonians descended from slaves, planters, and Maroons. Eventually, some Accompong bought land in Aberdeen and some Aberdonians married into Accompong families. Their connections not only blur land boundaries, but also those of conjugality and affinity. In Upper Aberdeen, residents, based on genealogical descent, participate in Accompong society including their right to reside in Accompong and to vote in elections for the Colonel. Both Maroons and Aberdonians believe that the government stole Maroon land and pass this narrative on to subsequent generations thereby mending the disjuncture of diminished Accompong lands for both communities and, again, reflecting the process of creolization.

Maroon Town has its own particular history in the Cockpits as the site of the former Trelawny Maroon community. The Jamaican government deported the Trelawny Maroons at the end of the Second Maroon Wars to Nova Scotia, Canada, and then Sierra Leone, ending their lives in the Cockpits. Creolization was inescapable because this town was transformed from a Maroon community, with land held in common among African descendants, to new Afro-Scottish residents who had historical ties both to banana plantations and to the peasantry who also cultivated bananas. The community sold bananas globally and migrated both within and outside Jamaica so that global forces operated upon Maroon Town. Further, Maroon Town has now become a site of tourism and is part of Jamaica’s annual Emancipation Day celebrations. The narratives Maroon Town residents share about their community conflate the events of the First and Second Maroon Wars so that the Maroon community emerges as victors against their British foes. Both these narratives and subsequent land use patterns serve to repair the disjuncture created by the Second Maroon Wars. Ultimately, Maroon Town reflects changes in land use and familial land owning patterns that reflect the ongoing process of creolization within globalization because of tourism, the banana industry, and migration.

Besson ensures that Maroons are not frozen in time; they experience the inescapable process of creolization. She allows her respondents to speak because she integrates their narratives in Jamaican patois without ‘translating’ it for her audience. She also contributes to broadening perceptions of the relationship between descendants of the formerly enslaved and Maroons by portraying relationships that are not necessarily fraught; through the 1738/9 treaty the colonial state pitted them against each other. Forces of globalization and creolization allowed them to live and build communities in close proximity that impacted and supported each other. Finally, Besson’s work integrates Jamaica’s challenges at the time she completed her fieldwork. Tourism is still often one of the only products Jamaica produces for international markets and it changes how these communities present themselves to the outside world. It also changes what it means to be Jamaican and Maroon when the Jamaican Ministry of Tourism is a broker of these very identities.

Besson responds to longstanding debates about the rate of creolization amongst Maroon populations. Anthropologist Werner Zips argues that the Accompong demonstrate slow rates of creolization as evidenced in their patterns of land ownership and governance that bear the marks of their Ghanaian predecessors. Besson explicitly rejects this thesis and aligns herself with Richard Price, arguing that the process of creolization occurred more swiftly. Accompong burial rituals, as an example, repaired disjunctures with the African continent thus taking the old world and applying it to the exigencies of the new, a convincing and impressive contribution to this debate.

Further, Besson updates Sidney Mintz’s thesis concerning the reconstituted peasantry as they continued to resist Jamaica’s labour regimes by taking wealth accumulated abroad and investing it in Jamaican land holdings to provide security for themselves and future generations. Mintz’s reconstituted peasantry was not the final phase of creolization. As such, Transformations is a logical extension of her last book, Martha Brae’s Two Histories: European Expansion and Caribbean Culture-Building in Jamaica. She expands the themes of land tenure after slavery as a means of resisting colonial paradigms of landholding as its own process of creolization. Transformations extends the question of land tenure beyond Martha Brae.

Besson’s work is difficult reading if you are not an anthropologist. Both the necessarily extensive visual and verbal genealogies combined with blocks of narratives from her participants could benefit from more succinct integration with her larger narrative, and less jargon. Her book is intended for anthropologists focused on Jamaica, generally, and the Cockpit region, in particular, and might be inaccessible to people outside her discipline and students who are not engaged in doctoral-level work. This is regrettable as her findings are intriguing.