Nanny of the Maroons

Nanny of the Maroons, also known as Queen Nanny, who lived from around 1686 to around 1760, was a Jamaican revolutionary and leader of the Windward Maroons, a community of formerly enslaved people, most of West African descent, who had escaped bondage in the British colony of Jamaica. According to Maroon oral tradition, on which much of what is known about her rests since little textual evidence survives, Nanny was born in 1686 as an Asante from Asanteman before being taken into slavery by the British. At the start of the eighteenth century she led the Windward Maroons in a guerrilla war against British colonial authorities known as the First Maroon War; Maroon tradition attributed their success to Nanny's use of supernatural powers, while historians credit the Maroons' mastery of guerrilla tactics and knowledge of the terrain. Unable to defeat the Maroons on the battlefield, the British sued for peace and signed a treaty with them on 20 April 1740 that ended hostilities, granted the Maroons state sanctioned freedom, and gave five hundred acres of land to Nanny and her followers, on which the village of Moore Town, also called New Nanny Town, still stands. In 1975 the government of Jamaica declared Nanny the country's only female national hero, and her image appears on the Jamaican five hundred dollar note.