#MappingFreedom - creating a digital database and interactive GIS & Wiki-enabled map of all of the #FreedomColonies on the planet, to create an international UNESCO World Heritage Trail of each community, modeled after Colonial Williamsburg.
Freedom colonies are the communities of targeted people that formed immediately as a response to Western settler-colonialism.
From the palenques, quilombos, and maroon colonies in Colombia, Brazil, and Jamaica and the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean including Haiti, to the “black/brown “freedmen” settlements" in North America, Australia, Africa and Asia - wherever Western cultures invaded during its colonial era - the targeted peoples (of genocide, racialized “one-drop” chattel slavery, racism, White Supremacy) defended themselves by creating “colonies of freedom.”
As soon as Western settler-colonialism set out to disenfranchise, #TheResistance was instant: enslaved Africans jumped ship and with indigenous groups who had survived the genocides, created the original “safe spaces,” colonies of freedom-communities fiercely devoted to protecting their freedoms. The very first ones were founded in the late 1400s and early 1500s. Africans who had been enslaved by European colonists escaped the slave ships as they docked in ports in what is now Brazil and Colombia, and ran for the hills.
Western settler-colonial cultures created constructs of “race” to separate and divide people into, in order to carry out race/ism (take away freedom from, and disenfranchise people based on Europe’s Dark Age medieval feudalistic terrorism, and the color hierarchy of white supremacy). Freedom colonies offered an alternative way of being for the targeted peoples in the colonized world, a chance to escape persecution, and to live free.
Colombia’s San Basilio de Palenque was one of such early communities. Created in the early 1500s by escaped Africans who jumped ships as they docked into the port of Cartagena, and headed to the hills to form their own fortified colonies of freedom, the community fended off invaders since inception. By 1605, the colonial Governor of Cartagena, Gerónimo de Suazo y Casasola, unable to defeat the “Village of the Maroons” as it was then known, offered a peace treaty, but broke it in 1619 to capture and execute one of its founders, former Mande/Kabuu Mandinka royal, Benko Biohó (originally captured from what is now the islands off of the coast of Guinea-Bissau).
A veritable T’Challa, this prince was certainly the Black Panther of this Wakanda, dedicating his life to the rescue, livelihood and protection of the palenque. This betrayal by the Spanish colonial government has contributed to the history of distrust of Columbia’s government ever since. In 1691, the Spanish crown officially recognized San Basilio de Palenque by Royal Decree, thus guaranteeing its freedom. In 2005, UNESCO declared it a heritage site.
There are many, many others. 5,000 have been identified in the US (and 557+ in Texas alone), with the first one being founded in 1738, Ft. Mose, in what is now Florida. An untold amount of others exist along every pathway of the Western colonial circuit. We endeavor to find and account for every single one, and create a digital database and interactive map to share with the world.
