Dancing with the Saramacca in Suriname
21.07.2023 - 08:07
/ roughguides.com
Once a Dutch colony, Suriname sits on the northeast coast of South America and has a population of around a mere 550,000 people. Venturing deep into the jungle-clad interior, Rough Guides writer Anna Kaminski went to explore the ancestral territory of the Saramacca, descendants of seventeenth-century West African slaves.
Our little Cessna plane rumbles over the jungle; from above, southern Suriname is a dense carpet of greenery, punctuated by bright pink jakaranda trees and bisected by brown ribbons of rivers. The open wounds of the land – the gold mines – have been left far behind.
Finally, the Cessna dips down and lands on a cleared grass strip that constitutes the runway. The «airport» is a tiny wooden building where a little boy hangs out with a wheelbarrow, ready to cart our baggage down to dugout canoes moored by the riverbank.
Several Saramaccan passengers have arrived with us from Paramaribo, Suriname’s capital. The women have a graceful, straight-backed walk, balancing their suitcases on their heads. Flying is a much quicker way of getting to and from the capital; in the old days, the one-way journey by dugout canoe would take a month.
There are five of us here, deep in Saramaccan territory – two Dutch couples and myself. We are staying at Awarradam Lodge, a group of wooden cabins sat on an island in the middle of the Gran Rio river, just upriver from four Saramaccan villages.
Suriname’s Saramacca number around 55,000; they are the largest surviving group of Maroon people and have been living along the Upper Suriname River and its tributaries, the Gran Rio and the Piki Rio, for over three hundred years. Their ancestors, largely from West Africa, were sold as slaves to Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to work on sugar, coffee and timber plantations.
Fleeing the harsh conditions of slavery, many Saramacca escaped into Suriname’s impenetrable jungle. With the help of the local Amerindian tribes, they staged rebellions, sometimes carrying out armed raids on plantations.They became greatly feared by owners and, as a result, in 1762, a hundred years before Suriname’s slaves were emancipated, the Saramacca signed a treaty with the Dutch. This agreement gave them a degree of freedom and the rights to their land in exchange for returning further runaway slaves to their owners.
We meet some Saramaccans at the lodge. Their language – a mix of English, Portuguese, Dutch and the Niger-Congo languages of West Africa – is very musical to the ear and their greeting has a call-and-response element to it. This is one of the few parts of the world where Christian missionaries have failed to make great inroads; one of the villages is Christian, but the others hold on to the spiritual