Excavating at Angola

Nearly erased from the pages of history, Angola is now celebrated annually through a Back to Angola Festival as descendants from Red Bay, Andros, The Bahamians return to the land where their ancestors created a haven of freedom, today a small urban park on the south side of the Manatee River. Excavations in 2008-2020 established the park as part of the early 19th century maroon community. The evidence is curated by a small museum near the park; the larger area of the maroon community (1770s-1821) has not been archaeologically investigated and most material evidence under the streets of the City of Bradenton.


Angola, as the freedom-seeking community became known, had more than seven hundred people at its height. Destroyed in an 1821 slave raid, some survivors escaped to the interior where they and their descendants became known as Black Seminoles and others reached the British Bahamas and freedom. Their descendants on Andros actively remember the community and its heritage. The oral histories and archaeological research gave the Angola Maroon Community recognition by National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. Studies have been published in the scientific literature and presented in several documentaries and exhibits but still the marronage is barely known outside of a small group of scholars, local residents, and the descendants. The heritage is at risk from rising sea levels, with the park closed for months in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton in 2024.