From Coromantee to Maroon: Grandy NANNY and the Making of Modern Jamaican Identity

Recognized today as part of a pantheon of freedom fighters and national heroes in the Anglophone Caribbean, Jamaica’s Queen Nanny has been an imposing figure in diasporic imaginary since the nineteenth century. As leader of an enclave of rebel slaves in eighteenth-century Jamaica, Nanny exists in a fragmented archive of just three extant written sources. Memories and folkloric traditions of her have filled the void with colorful accounts of her ritual and political prowess. Among their many oral traditions, Jamaican maroons developed an origins story in which Nanny is the literal mother of all maroons. From her ability to catch bullets with her buttocks to her use of a magical pot to rain boiling water on the heads of enemy soldiers, the folkloric traditions associated with Nanny emphasize her role as progenitor and protector of the maroons—reflecting the roles played by women like her in a range of maroon and plantation societies.

As a national hero memorialized at monuments and murals, on currency, and in reggae anthems, Nanny spurred the rise of a new national identity. In the midst of their independence struggle, Jamaicans consciously replaced British “founding fathers” with a new set of national champions that epitomized their struggle against white hegemonic and patriarchal rule in slavery. In the process of forging post-colonial national identities, Nanny became a metaphor for perseverance and triumph. This paper seeks to decode the allegories associated with Nanny as a means of understanding the role memories of her played in forging modern Jamaican identity.