Cudjoe

Cudjoe, also spelled Cudjo and Codjoe, corresponds to the Akan day name Kojo or Kwadwo, a name for a boy born on a Monday. He was the leader of the Leeward Maroons, a community of self-liberated Africans in western Jamaica who lived in the hills around the settlement known as Cudjoe's Town, later Trelawny Town. The date of his birth is uncertain, with some accounts placing it around 1690, and Accompong Town oral history holds that he was the free-born son of Naquan, the leader of Africans who had fled from a plantation.

The Maroons had been fighting for their freedom since the English seized Jamaica in 1655. In 1728 the conflict flared into the First Maroon War, which lasted off and on until 1740. The Leeward Maroons under Cudjoe, and the Windward Maroons led by Queen Nanny and Quao, used guerrilla tactics to inflict heavy losses on colonial militias, which proved unable to win any significant victories. In 1735 over a hundred of Cudjoe's warriors captured a military barracks in the west of the island.

By 1738 and 1739 the British authorities realised they could not defeat the Maroons. Governor Edward Trelawny offered Cudjoe a peace treaty, and the planter and militia officer Colonel John Guthrie signed it with him. An engraving shows the two exchanging hats as a sign of friendship. The treaty recognised the Leeward Maroons as a semi-autonomous people, guaranteed their freedom from slavery, gave them land and self-government, and made the settlement the town later called Trelawny Town in the governor's honour.

The treaty came with a painful price. In return the Maroons agreed to stop sheltering new runaways and to help the colonial authorities to capture others who escaped from the plantations. In the 1740s some Leeward Maroons who opposed the treaty rose in revolt, and Cudjoe put the rebellions down. The treaty named Accompong, who is described in some sources as his brother, as his successor.

Cudjoe died in 1764. His agreement made the Maroon communities permanently free about six decades before the Haitian Revolution, and more than a century before emancipation. The Trelawny Town Maroons later fought the Second Maroon War of 1795 to 1796, after which most were deported to Nova Scotia and then to Sierra Leone, while the Accompong Maroons kept their treaty and their community, which still exists today.