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Werner Zips Nanny's Asafo Warriors: The Jamaican Maroons' African Experience. Kingston: Ian Randle, 2011. xlvi + 262 pp. (Paper US$35.00)
This interesting book was first published in German in 2003 under the title Das Stachelschwein erinnert sich: Ethnohistorie als praxeologische Strukturgeschichte (The porcupine remembers: Ethnohistory as praxeological structural history). It was later updated and translated into English by Francesca Deakin. Werner Zips has written several books and articles on the black experience in Africa and the Americas during and after the colonial era (see the bibliography in the work under review). Historians dealing with the Maroons will no doubt be aware of his seminal work entitled Black Rebels: African Caribbean Freedom Fighters in Jamaica (1999). He has spent over twenty years doing ethnographic and other research among the Jamaican Maroons, and has also spent a great deal of time conducting related research in West Africa on the slave trade and the African diasporic experience. He is therefore well qualified to write on these subjects.
Nanny's Asafo Warriors deals mainly with a comparison of the political and religious systems in Ghana and the Accompong Maroon community in Jamaica. A preface and a fairly long introduction entitled "Encounters with History-History of Encounters" are followed by six chapters: "Ethnohistorical Appraisal of the 'Historical Present'," "The Logic of Maroon Praxis: Some Theoretical and Methodical Notes," "Roots from the Roots-Africa in Jamaica," "A Comparative Dimension of West Africa and the Caribbean: On the Structural History of Chieftaincy among the Maroons," "Engendering History: Comparative Reconstruction of Female...