Nanny’s importance as a fighter and leader raises some intriguing questions about the status of Maroon women. They are typically described as slaves or drudges, the hapless victims of plunder by marauding males whose very survival depended on seizing women from local plantations. As always, this view was based on accounts by European men who tended to believe their own hype. Their preconceived notions of Africans and the ‘dark continent’ tainted whatever they saw. Characterising African women as brutalised and debauched amounted to an act of self-exoneration, for it allowed them to present their own much greater crime against Africans as a necessary ‘civilising’ intervention.10

Stella Dadzie, A Kick in the Belly- Women,…, loc. 397