Gov’t conferred Order of National Hero on Nanny in 1976

NANNY AND Captain Quao had some major disagreements, especially when Quao allowed the British to enter their camp with peace overtures. She regarded the signing of the treaty as a manifestation of weakness, especially since it was based mainly on the terms of the British.

Yet one year later, Nanny and her people were granted 500 acres of land by the Government. The land patent, a copy of which is stored in the national archives at Spanish Town, St Catherine, is listed as “Land Patent to Nanny, 1740, Patent Vol. 22, Folio 15B.

The process to elevate her to the status of national heroine was initiated by the late senator and educator Maroon Colonel C. L. .G Harris of the Moore Town Maroons. Colonel Harris’ forceful presentations in the Senate in the 1970s led then Prime Minister Michael Manley to order cultural and historical research on Nanny of the Maroons, spearheaded by Professor Kamau Brathwaite, then a reader at The University of the West Indies, Mona.

Brathwaite’s findings were convincing, and in 1976, Grandy Nanny of the Windward Maroons became the seventh Jamaican to be conferred with the Order of National Hero.

In addressing the president of the Senate, Colonel Harris said, inter alia, “I specially would like, sir, and I think it is my duty, and a very pleasant one, to say a thank you, a very special thank you, to our prime minister for the fact that Nanny of the Maroons has been elevated to the Order of National Hero. The Maroons are truly pleased, and theirs is the desire not to be parsimonious in their expression of gratitude.”