Nanny of the Maroons
"A girdle around her waist with nine or ten knives hanging in it, many of which no doubt have been plunged into human flesh and blood." -Cpt. Philip Thicknesse, British officer
The Nanny of the Maroons was a semi-mythological guerilla warrior grandma and Obeah mystic priestess who led an armed revolt against the British Empire that raged through the mountains and jungles of Jamaica for nearly two decades. She set up an intricate intelligence, espionage, and communications network that infiltrated the entirety of British operations on the island, liberated more than a thousand slaves from sugarcane plantations across the colony, established heavily-fortified defenses around several impenetrable settlements, and served as leader to a self-sustaining settlement that produced music, art, and preserved the traditions of her people.
And, perhaps most improbably for those of you who have read about guerilla warriors on this site before, her story doesn't end with her head impaled on a pike outside the British governor's office.
It ends with her negotiating a peace treaty to end the war, being allowed to continue her way of live on a 500-acre parcel of land, and then fading off into history to live to old age. Nowadays she's the only woman to be declared a National Hero of Jamaica, her face is on the country’s $500 bill, and the land she fought to defend is still in the hands of those who battled so hard for their freedom.
Which even more awesome when you consider that most of her life was spent commanding an army of badass warriors who charged through the jungles with their bodies and faces camouflaged by mud and brush, cut their enemies' hearts out with big-ass sugarcane-chopping machetes, and unwaveringly believed that she was a powerful witch who could deflect bullets using dark magic and reflect them back at anyone she thought deserved a musketball to the nutsack.
As tends to be the case with many mysterious badasses, not much is known about the woman known as "Granny Nanny" – both where she came from, and what she looked like. One British prisoner lucky enough to survive his encounter with her described the leader of the Maroons as being small, muscular, and strong, with intense eyes, and wearing a girdle that was bristling with somewhere between eight and ten different sharp bladed combat knives, each one presumably for carving up a different part of the human body. Many historians believe she probably came from Ghana originally, maybe part of the ultra-badass Ashanti warrior tribe, and that she was enslaved at some point but escaped her captors and fled into the jungles of Jamaica -- although at least one folk tale claims that she was born on the island, and was never enslaved, so maybe many historians don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. We do know that she practiced Obeah, which is the Jamaican version of African mysticism that stems from a similar source as practices such as Voodoo, Santeria, and Macumba, and that she was revered among her people not only as a warrior, but also as a healer, a noble leader, and a holy defender of their way of life.
While we don't know much about Nanny herself, we do have plenty of information about that "of the Maroons" part of her name. Jamaica was by far the largest island of the British Empire's Caribbean holdings, and, over the years they'd been there, many plantations had popped up to harvest the various crops the island was capable of growing – particularly sugarcane, a critical ingredient not only to create sugar, but also molasses and, most importantly, rum. It's one of the points on that "Triangle Trade" thing you always hear about, where colonial merchants would trade booze and cotton for human beings who were legally required to work themselves to death or be executed by hanging.
Well that whole last part didn't go over so well with many of the people enslaved on Jamaica, as you might imagine, and over the years many men and women were able to escape to the jungles or mountains and form small communities of free folk. These people were known as Maroons (I don't know where that word comes from and I have a sinking feeling that I don't wanna know), and, at some point during the 1710s, many of the groups on the eastern part of Jamaica became unified under the leadership of one person -- the mysterious old woman we know as Nanny.
And she organized them into a cohesive force capable of self-sustainability – and self-defense.
Nanny Town was a thriving village high in the Blue Mountains, on the Eastern side of Jamaica. Situated in a large clearing atop a 900-foot tall ridge, this settlement raised livestock, grew crops, and had a vibrant culture of music, art, and folklore, and – perhaps most importantly – the only way to get up there was a single six-mile road, just wide enough for two people to walk side-by-side, that started in a super-exposed valley and then winded up the side of a mountain past dozens of ambush sites manned by sentries with guns, signal horns, and giant-ass boulders they could roll down to smite the hell out of anyone who didn't have an engraved invitation to visit Nanny Town.
Well, you know how these things go, and naturally in 1720 the British colonial government on Jamaica declared war on Nanny Town, beginning the First Maroon War.
The war started with a few unsuccessful attempts by British militias to attack Nanny Town, burn it to the ground, and either execute or enslave all of its people, but a mix of fire attacks, gigantic-ass boulders, and gunfire from concealed positions in the jungle repeatedly drove any advances backwards. The British soldiers describe the Maroons fighting by charging from heavily-concealed positions, their bodies painted dark colors and camouflaged with brush, mud, and sticks, and that when they'd launch a charge they'd all start blowing signal horns or conch shells to make this huge terrifying noise that would make all the redcoats shit a brick. Later stories, during a different war called Tacky's Revolution, describes Maroon troops killing Tacky, cutting off his head, parading it around, and then eating his heart, so you can kind of imagine that this wasn't that much fun to fight in a rainy jungle in the middle of the night.
The Blue Mountains of Jamaica. One officer wrote that this campaign wasn’t like fighting in France — because, as he put it, “here the problem isn’t defeating the enemy… it’s finding him.”
Nanny's troops responded by making hardcore incursions onto the plantations of Jamaica — assaulting the heart of the colonial economy, raiding, and plundering these sugarcane plantations for goods and materials, then burning them to the ground and freeing all the enslaved people to come back to Nanny Town and join the Maroons. They also cleverly sent emissaries to the British military, and, as a result, many of the (largely-enslaved) porters, wagon drivers, logistics teams, and auxiliaries working for the British military in Jamaica actually deserted their posts and joined up with the Maroons, because being a badass guerilla warrior was a hell of a lot better for them than getting hit with a cane for forgetting to polish a silver teapot or whatever.
And perhaps this intelligence network is one of the most impressive aspects of the Nanny of the Maroons' intricate campaign of guerilla warfare. From their village at the top of the Blue Mountains, she and her men could easily traverse the ridgelines that ran throughout the center of the island, and were able to infiltrate spies into nearly every aspect of the British colonial establishment. She had informants inside the plantations feeding her info on troop movements and equipment setups, she had spies in the jungle reporting enemy attacks days before they departed, and she'd even have agents that would disguise themselves as slaves, go to the Port Royal Sunday Market, and then just buy a shitload of guns and bullets and bring them back to Nanny Town. Meanwhile, the British troops who hunted her down were faced with brutal conditions, slogged through mud and torrential rain, and were getting annihilated by everything from malaria and yellow fever to gunshot wounds and machete blows to the esophagus.
Tge Nanny of the Maroons also ran a great psychological warfare campaign as well – convincing both her followers and her enemies that she was a magical force of nature who could reflect bullets back at shooters and make her followers immune to pain. In fact, she was so good at that propaganda thing, that we aren't entirely convinced there weren't multiple Nannies. Like, we have three accounts of people who "killed" her – one Captain Cuffee claims he shot her in battle, a slave named Kofi claimed he stabbed her to death in her tent, and a third officer named Stoddard said he shot her with a cannon. So, either Nanny of the Maroons was one tough old cookie, those guys were all lying to try and cash in the bounty on her head, or there were multiple hardcore old Jamaican ladies running badass guerilla war operations in Jamaica in the early 18th-century.
These options all seem equally plausible.
Well, in 1734, after 14 years of open war, the British finally managed to break through the defenses of Nanny Town. It took British Army Captain Stoddard five days to fight his way up the side of the mountain, a feat that was only possible after he dragged a few cannons up to support his attack, and the battle cost him over 80 casualties, as the Maroons fought desperately to defend every inch of their home. But, after tough bayonet-to-machete combat, Stoddard and the redcoats broke through, capturede Nanny Town, killed many of its defenders, and set the place on fire.
Except Nanny wasn't dead.
She'd escaped, with around 300 followers, and led them through the jungle to the other side of the island to reestablish a new settlement. They formed New Nanny Town a few months later, and went right back to doing what they do best: Wolverines-ing the British.
This went on for another five years before the British finally decided they'd had enough. So in 1739 a truce was declared between the colonial government and the Maroons that basically let Nanny keep 500 acres of territory as long as she stopped burning plantations to the ground and dropping huge rocks on the heads of British officers.
And that's the last we hear of the Nanny of the Maroons. After fighting the British from 1720 to 1739 – nearly two decades of war – she signs this treaty, lives to old age, and fades into history forever. She is one of the great guerilla warriors of history, and one of the few military leaders to successfully resist the colonial powers – a task she was so successful at that we don't actually even know anything about her today. Nowadays she's been officially declared a National Hero of Jamaica (currently the only woman to hold that honor), and her face appears on the five hundred dollar bill there.
But, as far as I'm concerned, the most important lasting legacy of Nanny of the Maroons is this – to this day, 300 years later her war began, the site of New Nanny Town is known as the city of Moore Town, Jamaica – an township recognized by the Jamaican government and the United Nations as being an autonomous region under the self-government of the Maroon People.
She and her people remain unconquered.
Links:
Books:
Chidi, Sylvia Lovina. The Greatest Black Achievers in History. N.p.: Lulu.com, 2014.
Craton, Michael. Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies. United Kingdom: Cornell University Press, 2009.
Dadzie, Stella Abasa. A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery and Resistance. United States: Verso Books, 2020.
