GENERAL KNOWLEDGE

Detailed explanation-1: -Formerly enslaved Africans who fled to remote mountainous areas were called marron (French) or mawon (Haitian Creole), meaning ‘escaped slave’. The maroons formed close-knit communities that practised small-scale agriculture and hunting. They were known to return to plantations to free family members and friends.

Detailed explanation-2: -The institution of slavery was threatened when large groups of Africans escaped to geographically secluded regions to form runaway slave communities, often referred to as maroon communities. Such communities were established throughout the Americas, particularly in the Caribbean and Brazil.

Detailed explanation-3: -From the 1830s on some Maroons (or their descendants) returned to Jamaica to work as free labourers, and many of them settled in the village of Flagstaff, near the old site of Trelawny Town (although some of these returnees resettled in Sierra Leone) (see Jamaican Maroons in Sierra Leone).

Detailed explanation-4: -The Maroons were escaped slaves. They ran away from their Spanish-owned plantations when the British took the Caribbean island of Jamaica from Spain in 1655. The word maroon comes from the Spanish word ‘cimarrones’, which meant ‘mountaineers’.