Maroon communities prefigured the Haitian revolution as a living challenge to colonial ideology

Evidence

“Wild” outlawry was the most respect that scholars in the tradition joined by Stoddard could accord to the maroons. Despite repeated efforts to destroy the communities, they persisted, however, “devastating the countryside and inspiring fear in the Saint-Domingue settlers at the end of the eighteenth century.” Others, like the famed Le Maniel, made their peace with the colonial authorities only on the very eve of the revolution that would eventually make them redundant. Yet their importance, the significance they bore for the ideologists of the colonial regime, went far beyond their objective achievement. Like the revolution their existence foretold, they were demeaned and devalued by those who saw in them a contradiction to the myths of European superiority. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 732

Categorization

• XREF: Marronage as proto-resistance links forward to the Black radical tradition’s origin claims; parallels Robinson’s earlier treatment of maroons escaping slavery.