For Women’s History Month, as we watch the Caribbean country of Jamaica moving closer toward becoming a republic and removing the British Crown as their titular head of state, I thought it appropriate to dive into Jamaican history and introduce you to the legendary Queen Nanny of the Maroons, who is a revered figure on the island representing freedom from enslavement, and not British colonial domination.
Though in the U.S. we have powerful Black female figures that rose up out of bondage, like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, we have no real equivalent to Queen Nanny.
RELATED STORY: Caribbean Matters: Dumping the queen and the British colonial legacy
Caribbean Matters is a weekly series from Daily Kos. If you are unfamiliar with the region, check out Caribbean Matters: Getting to know the countries of the Caribbean.
David Reid (dopper0189), managing editor of Daily Kos community group Black Kos, first learned about Queen Nanny from his Jamaican elders. He wrote a detailed history in October. Dopper, who has Maroon blood from his mom, “grew up knowing all the stories of her heroics by heart.”
The island of Jamaica was under Spanish rule for nearly two hundred years, from Christopher Columbus’ arrival in 1494 until 1655 when the British captured it. During their rule, the Spanish first enslaved the native Arawaks (Taino) Indians, but they quickly succumbed to diseases introduced by the Spanish conquerors. The Spanish then turned to the importation of African slaves, a practice that was replicated throughout the Spanish territories in the Caribbean and the Americas.
By 1530, slave revolts broke out in Mexico, Hispaniola and Panama with many fleeing to create independent colonies. The Spanish called these free slaves "Maroons," a word derived from "Cimarron," which means "fierce" or "unruly". Ironically the name is also a description of people marooned on lands far from home with no way to return home.
The British conquered Jamaica in 1655, forcing the Spanish colonists to flee Jamaica. Many Spanish slaves took the opportunity to join the Maroons who had previously run away from the Spanish and set up home bases in the interior mountains.
Nanny and her four brothers (all of whom became Maroon leaders) were sold into slavery and later escaped from their plantations into the mountains and jungles that still make up a large proportion of Jamaica. Nanny and one of her brothers, Quao, founded a village in the Blue Mountains, on the Eastern (or Windward) side of Jamaica, which became known as Nanny Town. Nanny has been described as a practitioner of Obeah, a term used in the Caribbean to describe folk magic and religion based on West African influences.
The Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation at enslaved.org also details her history :
Nanny of the Maroons was the first and foremost leader of the Windward Maroons of Jamaica, an autonomous community of self-emancipated formerly enslaved people in eastern Jamaica. Her historicity and legendary status blended into one another, but she was most likely born into an Akan community in present-day Ghana around 1680. Dispossessed of her homeland sometime around the turn of the eighteenth century, she survived the Middle Passage across the Atlantic.
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Nanny’s Maroon Town grew in the first half of the eighteenth century, following the social organization of matrifocal Akan society, and swelling to the size of between eight hundred and a thousand people. Protecting Nanny Town from invasion and administering spiritual and physical sustenance though natural and supernatural means marked the parameters of Nanny’s responsibilities. While the colonists referred sparingly and negatively to the Maroons in their records, enforcing a kind of discursive invisibility on them and rendering them without history, the Maroons themselves made judicious use of the tactics of invisibility in guerilla warfare to obstruct the colonists’ desire to find, overtake, and enslave them. Nanny strategically positioned her community along a 900-foot precipice that overlooked the Stony River. From this position and from others nearby, she advised her Maroon warriors on the techniques of concealment, misdirection, and ambush. She covered them in branches and leaves, cloaking them from soldiers’ sight, and used an abeng, a cow’s horn also used among Akan tribes, to signal the moment of surprise attack.
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The government of prime minister Michael Manley declared Nanny of the Maroons as a Jamaican National Hero in 1975. She is the only woman and the only Maroon in the national pantheon. Since 1994 she has been featured in the $500 Jamaican dollar note.
The popular $500 bills on the island, which are worth about $3.25 USD, are often referred to as “Nannys.”
Jamaica’s Maroons were not the only group of Caribbeans to escape from enslavement. In 2018, Black Kos Editor JoanMar pointed to the existence of other Maroon groups in the New World—both here in the U.S and throughout the Caribbean. Nanny, however, is the only female Maroon leader to have achieved governmental legendary status.
In 2012, filmmaker Roy T. Anderson produced a one-hour documentary, Queen Nanny: Legendary Maroon Chieftainess, which premiered at the United Nations in October 2015.
The trailer:
From the film’s synopsis:
Nanny symbolizes the pride of today’s Caribbean women. In fact, Jamaica’s first female and former Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller, paid homage to Queen Nanny in her January 2012 inauguration speech, and continues to do so at every opportunity. And although Maroons, who all proudly proclaim to be Grandy Nanny’s ‘pickibo’ (children), are appreciative that she was named National Hero in 1976, to them her historical importance is such that she is seen as a powerful, living, breathing presence for almost three centuries.
Shot in Jamaica, Ghana, Canada, and the United States over the course of two years, the film features interviews and conversations with world-renowned scholars and present-day Maroons. We also engage a select group of women, to explore Queen Nanny’s impact on their lives, and how she has influenced them in their own pioneering work.
One of the highlights of the film is a historic 35-person expedition to the rugged hills of Old Nanny Town in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica. Legend has it that only the bravest Maroons or those “free of bad deeds” can safely venture up to this sacred spot where Nanny’s powerful spirit still inhabits. As we seek to uncover the history and legacy of Queen Nanny, her intriguing story is also told through songs, performances, poetry, narration, and a series of re-enactments.
From the “Filmmaker’s Statement” in the discussion guide:
Queen Nanny is a natural outgrowth of my first film Akwantu: the Journey, which looks at the general history of my ancestors, the Maroons of Jamaica. The genesis of that project was really an attempt by me to search out my roots. What started out as an innate sense of curiosity grew into a newfound sense of pride as I began to learn more and more about a people generally referred to as the New World’s first successful freedom-fighters.
“Most Maroons and their descendants have lacked the agency to represent their own history and culture, at all levels of academia, both in scholarly writing, as well as on film,” says History Professor Harcourt T. Fuller, a key producing partner on Queen Nanny: Legendary Maroon Chieftainess. He continues; “the production of knowledge about the Maroons has historically been the domain of European colonial officials, journalists, researchers and scholars in a variety of disciplines, who have had the requisite training, preparation, and funding to carry out such research. In a sense Maroons have largely been written out of and marginalized by history, because others have spoken on their behalf.”
Queen Nanny signals a decisive break from this trend as it expands on the story of the forging of a Maroon nation in Jamaica by shedding light onto one of its leading figures – Queen Nanny. It is my hope that by collaborating with Dr. Fuller, a scholar also of Maroon descent, we can make a significant contribution to our understanding of the dynamic history and culture of the Maroons and their contemporary descendants in Jamaican and the diaspora, and the role of Queen Nanny in this history and culture. “The Maroon nation of Jamaica was born out of a struggle for freedom in the crucible of slavery, rebellion and political reconciliation,” Dr. Fuller points out for emphasis. Poorly armed and outgunned, the Maroons faced down the mighty British Empire for more than 80 years, led by such brave warriors as Queen Nanny and Captain Kojo. Hostilities between the British forces and the Maroons ended in 1738/39, resulting in the signing of two peace treaties that established Maroon self-government on the Leeward and Windward parts of the island, led by Captain Kojo and Queen Nanny, respectively.
Nowhere else in the New World had Africans attained such a degree of autonomy, coming almost 60 years before the Haitian Revolution (1791), having occurred before the American, and French revolutions, and almost 100 years before the abolition of the slave trade (1834) in the former British colonies.
Queen Nanny is now being both revisited and reimagined. In November 2022, E. Hartman Reckord wrote “Nanny Reimagined as Protector of the Natural Environment” for the Jamaica Information Service.
A collection of five art pieces under the theme ‘Reimagining Nanny’ was unveiled on Sunday (November 27) during a ceremony and exhibition at the Institute of Jamaica (IOJ) in Kingston.
The works are ‘Moonlight Meditations of Mama Nanny’ by Richard Natto, who is the 2020 Prime Minister Youth Award recipient in the category of Arts and Culture; ‘Queen Nannies’ by Leigh Goffe; ‘We Are Still Here & We Remember’ by Ibaya Art; ‘Warrior Shield VI: Queen of the Blue Mountains’ by Lisa Callender; and ‘Queen Mother Arms of Liberation’ by Nigerian painter Segun Bamidele Aiyesan.
The collection of works was commissioned in 2022 to reimagine National Heroine and outstanding military leader, the Right Excellent Nanny of the Maroons, as Chiefess of Blue Mountain’s biodiversity forests and waters, and a protector of the natural environment.
The project was organised by the Natural History Division of the IOJ, in collaboration with the Jamaica Conservation and Development Trust (JCDT) and the Liberal Studies, Faculty of Arts and Science and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies of New York University (NYU), New York in the United States.
Reimagining Queen Nanny of the Maroons is a short documentary premiering this month. Here’s the trailer:
Repeating Islands recently announced an upcoming screening at New York University. It’s open to the public via Zoom. Register for it here.
In celebration of Women’s History Month and its theme of “Women Who Tell Our Stories,” NYU Liberal Studies invites you to join Dr. Leo Douglas at a screening and panel discussion for the launch of his documentary short Reimagining Queen Nanny of the Maroons. This event features LS professor Jacqueline Bishop, Dr. Marcia Douglas, Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe, and Dr. Thera Edwards.
The documentary celebrates the self-determination and Afro-Indigenous retentions of the formerly enslaved peoples of Jamaica and the diaspora. This Zoom Webinar will be on Thursday, March 23 at 12:30-1:45pm. This event is open to NYU and the public community.
Here’s a short interview with the filmmaker and the overarching “Reimagining Nanny” project curator, Dr. Leo R. Douglas.
From the YouTube notes:
Dr. Leo R. Douglas sits down with Professor Jacqueline Bishop (New York University - NYU) and responds to the question, "Does Queen Nanny of Jamaica's Windward Maroons belong to only Jamaicans? Who does this iconic woman leader belong to?
Project Title: Reimagining Nanny - Chieftess of Blue Mountain’s Biodiversity, Forests & Waters Project Overview: Drawing on African spiritualism in which nature itself is sacred, and West African cultures where women are traditional leaders and the female-form is commonly ecologically deified (examples: the goddess of fresh water, the goddess of rain and storms, and the goddess of land and fertility), the “Reimagining Nanny: Her Sword – A Seed” 2022 Project seeks a retelling of the story of Nanny, national heroine of Jamaica, in keeping with her broader significant real and symbolic roles as a shaman of the forests, healer, priestess and protector of the springs and watersheds, and commander of energies of the earth, creatures, mountains and valleys of the Blue and John Crow Mountains of Jamaica.
This project thus embodies a broadening of the public’s knowledge of our iconic national heroine beyond the revered warrior that currently forms the essence of public education about her lived experiences and legacy. This project centers the untold herstories of Queen Nanny as a fundamental means of deepening public appreciation of Jamaica’s globally important native biodiversity, ecosystems and the island itself. The project illuminates significant African retentions/continuations that are largely unrecognized or undiscussed by positioning Queen Nanny as one of the island’s first naturalists. By so doing, the project challenges narratives around Afro-Caribbean ancestry within the context of biodiversity protection, and describes a historical imaginary of the indelible cultural and spiritual values of the flora and fauna of the island of Jamaica. The project further uses this retelling as an opportunity to situate Jamaican Maroon heritage, and more broadly, the knowledge of our Afro-indigenous ancestors as crucial to sense of place and an ecological identity, given the growing concerns and interests in climate resilience, environmental protection, and building health-supporting bio-cultural practices.
I’ll close with a musical tribute to Queen Nanny from British jazz group Sons of Kemet: 2018’s “My Queen Is Nanny of the Maroons.”
Queen Nanny is my queen, too!
Join me in the comments for more on Queen Nanny, and for the weekly Caribbean News Roundup.