When Lemba was a young man he was captured and taken to companies in France and Spain around the year 1525, and was eventually transferred to the island of Hispaniola.
After their uprising, they escaped to the island's rugged, mountainous interior and began a war against the Spanish authorities with the ultimate goal of freeing Hispaniola from the clutches of slavery.
Lemba and his comrades raided Spanish settlements, freeing other enslaved Africans, stealing food and supplies, and sabotaging the colonial economy.
The revolt resulted in significant losses for the Spanish and attracted the attention of neighboring maroon communities, who saw it as a potential model for their own resistance against colonial rule.
But by this time, Taíno slavery had been outlawed, due to the intervention of Dominican friar, Bartolomé de Las Casas, who instead suggested to the Spanish crown to import enslaved Africans for the labor.
Lemba' s work consisted looking for gold, and move sugar mills to grine the cane and extract the guarapo for sweetning.
His army moved at night, devastating the properties of Higüey, San Juan de la Maguana and Azua.
In this last town, under the cover of night, they attacked the Cepicepi Mill, owned by Diego Caballero, while the nine Spaniards who were there slept peacefully in some huts.
Captain Tristán de Leguizamón was finally able to enter the maniel - or house or community of the maroon - of Lemba in Baoruco Viejo.
When Leguizamón retired to Azua, Lemba entered San Juan and plundered it, taking all the iron from the sugar mills to make weapons.
The circumstances, place and precise date of his death are unclear, however, some sources point to a time period somewhere between 1547 and 1548, in San Juan de la Maguana or elsewhere in the South of the country.
But it is also said that he died in Santo Domingo, where he was captured and taken after he was killed in one of the city gates between Fort San Pedro and the Puerta del Conde.
He was one of the first to free, organize, and begin an unequal armed rebellion against the imposition of the Spanish Empire through its governorship in the New World conquered by the Imperial Force on the island of Santo Domingo.
His warlike affront, his raids, and burning of plantations and sugar fields, in addition to the liberation of the slaves found wherever he was constituted the manor focus of resistance faced by the settlers on the island during the colonial period.
"Lemba' s sacrifice for the life and liberty of others served as an example and inspiration for the freedom of blacks and native slaves in Santo Domingo.
He led a rebellion in unequal conditions against slavery and forced labor without pay, to which the Spanish settlers had subjected his entire race and Taíno Indians who inhabited the island of Santo Domingo.
With his unshakeable fights for freedom of his kind, Lemba was a true precursor of anti-slavery and liberation in Santo Domingo, and the American continent in the era in which he lived.
[6] A fundamental part of Lemba's legacy is constituted also by the spirit of rebellion against abuse, shame, and oppression of Dominicans by foreign rule.
His actions were a spark of inspiration for hundreds of thousands of slaves in Santo Domingo, who like Lemba, rebelled against the mistreatment and abuse of the Spanish colonists over the next 3 centuries.
The Africans brought as slaves to the island of Santo Domingo during the colonial period left a profound influence on Dominican society.