Kojo’s Dis/Ability: The Interpretation of Spinal Pathology in the Context of an Eighteenth-Century Jamaican Maroon Community

Abstract

More than three centuries ago, a man named Kojo became the leader of a group of self-emancipated African Jamaicans , referred to as Maroons . Although Kojo is one of the most famous African Jamaicans of his time, little is known about his physical appearance. Based on equivocal historical sources, nineteeth- and twentieth-century writers generally accepted that Kojo was “hunchbacked”. More recent scholarship has challenged this interpretation, claiming that Kojo’s condition was rhetorical and not corporeal—nothing more than a posthumous colonial effort to disfigure an otherwise indomitable adversary. However, viewed through the lens of social disability theory, there is little compelling ethnohistoric evidence to substantiate the assumption that, if Kojo did indeed have a visible body difference or spinal pathology, like kyphosis, such a condition would have necessarily disqualified him from holding the chief Maroon leadership position. To the contrary, special marked status might have actually helped to enable Kojo to assume power. It is argued that if scholars do not carefully contextualize paleopathological data and allow for the role of cultural creativity, then they run the risk of perpetuating disability stigma. This is particularly important because bioarchaeologists, unlike many other history scholars, have the advantage of being able to marshal physical evidence about specific people that can be used to critically read disability history.