from plantations, were crucial for the rise of Afro-American identities, cultures and politics. These historical spaces - which some scholars call 'maroon societies', derived from the Spanish word cimarrón, which was originally used to stigmatize those who ran away from slavery - proliferated and constituted a threat to the stability of slave regimes. Palenques became beacons of hope for the achievement of freedom, as well as ideological inspiration for identification with Africanity and blackness. This memory is still alive, as exemplified in our current identification with leaders such as Benkos Biohó, head of an early seventeenth-century maroon society, the territory of which is now a Colombian town named San Basilio de Palenque. In Colombia, Benkos is often invoked as the founding figure of Afro-Colombian history. ${ }^{18}$  
Concerning the political-epistemic implications of maroonage, the noun cimarrón and the verb cimarronear are now often used to signify everyday practices of resistance and self-affirmation of people of African descent. They became political-epistemic categories for the types of Africana critical theory that constructs knowledge from within the race and against the tools of the master. ${ }^{19}$ In 1998, a march celebrating the 100 years since the abolition of slavery in Brazil was named after Zumbí. He was the last leader of the quilombo of Palmares, a kingdom of maroons in north-eastern Brazil that existed for almost a century, from 1605 to 1694, when the Portuguese finally dismantled the settlement, but not its legacy.