His Excellency Emperor Horus LA Lewis El Bey — Chief High Priest, Paramount Chief — Nyan-Ko-Pong Sovereign Maroon Global Tribal Nation Territories

Every generation of colonized people produces those who decide the law of the mountain is more legitimate than the law of the ship. Cudjoe decided this in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica in the 1720s, when he led the Leeward Maroons into a decade of guerrilla warfare that the British Empire could not win. Nanny decided this before Cudjoe — in the same mountains, with the same clarity, with an additional dimension of spiritual power that the British colonial records describe with barely concealed terror. The Saramaka of Suriname decided this in 1762 when they signed a treaty with the Dutch that their descendants enforced in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2007, winning a landmark sovereignty ruling that is still binding today. In every case, the colonial powers, the governments, the media establishments of their time — dismissed these people. Called them bandits. Called them madmen. Called them criminals. Then signed treaties with them, or lost in court, or both.

We tell you this because you need to understand the frame through which Maroon Histories looks at Emperor Horus LA Lewis El Bey and the Nyan-Ko-Pong: Sovereign Maroon Global Tribal Nation Territories. We are not the Jamaica Gleaner running an entertainment feature. We are the publication that has spent months documenting three thousand years of legal architecture built to suppress exactly what Emperor Lewis is asserting. And from that position, we say clearly: what he is doing is not madness. It is Maroon tradition. It is legally grounded.

Who Is Horus LA Lewis El Bey? The Full Story, Not the Punchline

Before he was Emperor, Horace Lewis was a Jamaican DJ who spent years writing “LA Lewis is a big DJ” on walls across Kingston. The media made this a punchline for years. But look at it differently. A man with no institutional backing, no political party, no inherited wealth — claiming space, asserting presence, refusing to be invisible. That is not the behavior of a fool. That is the behavior of someone who understands that sovereignty begins with assertion.

The Emperor with members of the Nyan-Ko-Pong nation

Constitution signing ceremony — Nyan-Ko-Pong government assembly

Sixteen years ago, that same man began building the Nyan-Ko-Pong: Sovereign Maroon Global Tribal Nation Territories. Not announcing it. Building it. Writing a constitution — now in its third revision as of September 2025. Establishing government ministries. Creating official documentation for members: Nativity Papers, Identification Cards, Travel Permits. Surrounding himself not with yes-men but with legislators, lawyers, doctors and scholars.

The name itself is the first declaration. Nyan-Ko-Pong — Nyankopon — is the supreme deity of the Akan people of Ghana, the Ashanti. The Akan are the cultural, spiritual and genetic ancestors of the Maroon communities of Jamaica. Queen Nanny herself is understood within both oral tradition and scholarly research to have been an Akan woman, almost certainly Ashanti, who brought to the Blue Mountains of Jamaica a legal and governance tradition that predated British colonialism by centuries.

The Flag at National Heroes Park — February 2021

Emperor Horus Lewis El Bey at Flanker, Xaymaca — April 13, 2021 — Photo: Nyan-Ko-Pong Sovereign Maroon Government

In February 2021, Emperor Lewis raised the Nyan-Ko-Pong Maroon flag at National Heroes Park in Kingston — the same park where the statues of Marcus Garvey and Queen Nanny stand. That was not a stunt. That was a legal assertion of presence, made on sovereign ground, in front of the ancestors whose work he is continuing. The colonial government called it trespassing. The Maroon legal tradition calls it reclamation.

The Territorial Claim: Why It Is Legally Serious

The mainstream media has treated the Nyan-Ko-Pong territorial claim as absurd: a man claiming the entire island of Jamaica. We want to examine that claim through a different lens — the lens of three thousand years of legal history that this publication has spent months documenting.

The Nyan-Ko-Pong constitution claims “the entire land of Xaymaca as the inheritance of our ancestors — free people who travelled to the Atlantic Sea willingly as explorers both before and during the Mali Empire of Mansa Musa.” More immediately: the Nyan-Ko-Pong is making precisely the same argument that the Saramaka of Suriname made before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2007 — and won. The Court held that tribal peoples with this kind of relationship to their territory have collective land rights that supersede the property claims of the successor colonial state.

The Constitution — Third Revision, September 2025

Constitution launch at The Jamaica Pegasus, New Kingston — October 2025

Nyan-Ko-Pong government delegates — officials, legislators and community members

In October 2025, at the ballroom of The Jamaica Pegasus hotel in New Kingston, Emperor Lewis launched the third revision of the Nyan-Ko-Pong constitution. The media covered it as entertainment. We read it as a government document. It grounds the nation’s legal claims explicitly in UNDRIP — the international legal framework that the Saramaka used to win their 2007 case. And it is now in its third revision — not a theatrical gesture but an evolving legal instrument.

The Emperor and the Broader Maroon Community

Emperor Lewis with Jamaican reggae artist Tanya Stephens — Lost in Time event — Photo: Nyan-Ko-Pong Sovereign Maroon Government

Emperor Lewis has built a structure that reaches beyond the traditional treaty communities to claim all descendants of the Maroon tradition — the urban Jamaican, the diaspora, the African descendant whose connection to the mountains was severed by colonialism but whose ancestral rights were never erased. The 1739 treaty-based claims of Accompong. The 1740 treaty-based claims of Moore Town. The broader pre-colonial territorial claims of the Nyan-Ko-Pong. These are not contradictions. They are a coalition.

What the Government of Jamaica Is Required to Do

Jamaica signed the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007. That declaration requires, under Article 37, the recognition, observance and enforcement of treaties concluded with Indigenous peoples and their successors. A 2018 Jamaican court confirmed that the Accompong Treaty of 1739 is valid and currently binding. The government of Jamaica is legally obligated to honor these instruments.

We call on the Government of Jamaica to engage seriously and respectfully with Emperor Horus LA Lewis El Bey and the Nyan-Ko-Pong nation. To sit across the table, as the British sat across the table from Cudjoe in 1739, and acknowledge what the law already says.