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An American educational curse overturned traditional wisdom about enslaved Africans in the New World by demonstrating that the first successful slave uprising in the Americas occurred in Panama, Haiti, as many have long believed.
Robert Schwaller, a historian at the University of Kansas, discovered new main points about the Panama Uprising in the Archivo General de Indias, a repository in Seville, Spain, committed to the Spanish Empire in the Americas and Asia. The documents, adding letters, royal edicts and court documents, threw new sympathy on several teams of enslaved Africans in and around what is now the Panamanian province of Colón.
Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa first transported captured Africans to Panama in 1513. About a decade later, the enslaved population began fleeing captivity, first individually and then in groups. As the ranks of the self-emancipated grew, they stormed Spanish villages and roads, to enrich themselves and liberate their fellow Africans.
These maroons, an English term used to refer to former slaves who had freed themselves, engaged Spanish forces in costly guerrilla warfare for decades, forcing a negotiated peace. In 1579, the Superior Court of Panama granted permanent freedom to the leader of the Maçanbique resistance. and its network of maroons in all Spanish territories of the Americas. The decree, long ignored by historians, marks the good fortune of this series of uprisings, which took place more than two centuries before Toussaint Louverture helped lead the Haitian revolution. The good fortune of Panama’s Maroons set a precedent to ensure the freedom and autonomy that other African Maroons would repeat in the centuries to come in Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, and Jamaica,” says Schwaller, who highlights his studies in a 2021 book, African Maroons in 16th Century Panama: A History in Documents.
This article is a variety of Smithsonian magazine’s January/February 2023 factor
Sixteenth-century African freedom fighters formed autonomous colonies in the spaces around the Spanish fort of Portobelo. More than 4 centuries later, the Portobelo network endures. other people who came here from Congo and Angola, many of whom were brown,” Schwaller says. “They know its history, although few foreigners know it. “
Meanwhile, other researchers celebrated Schwaller’s findings. Ben Vinson III, a historian and executive vice president of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, states that “Schwaller’s remarkable work . . . He devised new tactics to teach rebellion, as well as to perceive how peace was negotiated. “and how other imperial goals created a space for African Resistance.