* * *
Slavery was abolished in Surinam in 1863; so someone might still be alive who was born a slave. It was hard not to think of slavery, and not only because of the reminders on every side of big house and slave quarters. So many things in these West Indian territories, I now began to see, speak of slavery. There is slavery in the vegetation. In the sugarcane, brought by Columbus on that second voyage when, to Queen Isabella’s fury, he proposed the enslavement of the Amerindians. In the breadfruit, cheap slave food, three hundred trees of which were taken to St Vincent by Captain Bligh in 1793 and sold for a thousand pounds, four years after a similar venture had been frustrated by the Bounty mutiny. And just as in the barren British Guiana savannah lands a clump of cashew trees marks the site of an Amerindian village, so in Jamaica a clump of star-apple trees marks the site of a slave provision ground. (Trinidad, with only forty years of slavery, has proportionately far fewer star-apple trees than Jamaica.) There is slavery in the food, in the saltfish still beloved by the islanders. Slavery in the absence of family life, in the laughter in the cinema at films of German concentration camps, in the fondness for terms of racial abuse, in the physical brutality of strong to weak: nowhere in the world are children beaten as savagely as in the West Indies.
West Indians are frightened and ashamed of the past. They know about Christophe and L’Ouverture in Haiti and the Maroons in Jamaica; but they believe that elsewhere slavery was a settled condition, passively accepted through more than two centuries. It is not widely known that in the eighteenth century slave revolts in the Caribbean were as frequent and violent as hurricanes, and that many were defeated only by the treachery of ‘faithful’ slaves. In Trinidad almost nothing is known of the bush-Negroes of Surinam, though their story might promote a recovery of racial pride.
Negro slaves had always been escaping into the bush in Surinam—in the smaller islands there was no such possibility – but the movement did not become general until 1667, in the interval between the British withdrawal and the Dutch occupation. The movement continued throughout the next hundred years, brutality leading to escape, massacres, reprisals, increased brutality. ‘It is felt as a terror’, an English traveller wrote as late as 1807, ‘to menace a Negro with selling him to a Dutchman’, and Stedman’s Narrative shows why. ‘The colony of Surinam’, Stedman wrote, ‘is reeking and dyed with the blood of African negroes’, and this was no figure of speech. The first object Stedman saw on landing (and sketched for his book) ‘damped’ his pleasure at being in the tropics. It was:
… a young female slave whose only covering was a rag tied round her loins, which, like her skin, was lacerated in several places by the stroke of the whip. The crime which had been committed by this miserable victim of tyranny, was the nonperformance of a task to which she was apparently unequal, for which she was sentenced to receive 200 lashes, and to drag, during some months, a chain several yards in length, one end of which was locked round her ankle, and to the other was affixed a weight of at least 100 pounds … I took a draft of the unhappy sufferer.
The lacerated slave with the chain, the artist with his pad: it is a curious scene. One wonders whether there was any local comment. Stedman reports none, and perhaps there was only that amused surprise which the native feels at the exclamations of the tourist. Torture was a commonplace in Surinam and never concealed. Stedman later spoke and gave a few coins to a slave who was chained for life in a furnace room; he sketched a slave who was hung alive by the ribs from an iron hook and left to die.
In the early nineteenth century the book of ‘dear old Stedman’ – the phrase is Kingsley’s – was popular in England for its natural history and for the story of Stedman’s romance with the mulatto slave-girl Joanna, which Kingsley thought ‘one of the sweetest idylls in the English tongue’. And this popularity, this talk of idylls, is a puzzle; not only because eighteenth-century refinement falls flat today, particularly in someone like Stedman, to whom it does not come easily; but because Stedman’s story is terrifying and in its nauseous catalogue of atrocities resembles accounts of German concentration camps during the last war. Stedman was no abolitionist – he went out to Surinam to help put down the slave rebellion of 1773 – and his work cannot be dismissed as propaganda. He tried hard to display the fine sensibility which was admired at the time – he apologizes, for instance, to his ‘delicate readers’ for speaking of lice – and he cannot be accused of sensationalism. Yet one needs a strong stomach to read Stedman today. The Surinam he describes is like one vast concentration camp, with the difference that visitors were welcome to look round and make notes and sketches. The slave-owner had less on his conscience than the conentration camp commandant: the world was divided into black and white, Christian and heathen. White might conceivably be expected to show some scruples in his relations with black; but the Christian had no such inhibition in his relations with the heathen. In fairness to the Dutch, however, the earlier quotation should be given whole: ‘It is felt as a terror to menace a Negro with selling him to a Dutchman. The Dutchman, however, has a like terror in reserve, and threatens to sell his slave to a free negro.’
The runaway slaves fought with a spirit which could not be matched by the Dutch mercenaries or the ‘faithful’ slaves (in Stedman’s regiment there were the Negroes Okera and Gowsary, who ten years before had betrayed Atta, the leader of the Berbice slave rebellion) and they were never defeated. Towards the end of the eighteenth century hostilities ceased, and the independence of the bush-Negroes was tacitly recognized. In the forest the bush-Negro reorganized his life on the African pattern; tribes were formed, tribal territories demarcated. The bush-Negro never married outside his tribe or race and was proud of his pure African descent: it marked him as a descendant of free men. Settled along the rivers, he developed his outstanding river skills. Isolated from the world, he remembered his African skills of carving, song and dance; he remembered his African religions. He developed his language; in the far interior it became Africanized. And fifty years ago he developed a script.
In 1916 Dr C. Bonne, a physician at the Government Hospital at Paramaribo, saw one of his patients, a Bush Negro by the name of Abena, of the Aucaner or Djuka tribe, writing strange characters. Abena was quite willing to explain their significance and said that they were originated by another member of his tribe, called Afaka. Bonne came to know this Afaka, who repeatedly explained to him and to Father Morssink (a Catholic missionary) how at the time of Halley’s Comet he had a dream in which a Person appeared with a sheet of paper in his hand, ordering him to devise a script for his people. The first should bring the second, the second the third; and so on. Following this vision, he devised a sign every two or three days until in the end he had about 56 characters by which he could write down his thoughts. In 1917 Bonne made a trip to the Djuka country, and by means of the new script could send messages, which were understood and acted upon.*
Though Afaka was disowned by the Granman (the etymology is obvious) of his tribe for daring to produce a script without permission, and damned as ‘na wissi-wassi man’ – that wishy-washy man – his script survived; in 1958 Mr Gonggrijp sent and received messages in it. Afaka Atumisi died in July 1918. On his grave was found a cross with an epitaph in his script: ‘Masa Atumisi fu da Santa Katoliki Kerki’, Atumisi was one of the Holy Catholic Church. This was not strictly true; but it was his Christian leanings which had made him suspect to the bush-Negro chiefs. Now here is the mystery: thirty-four of Afaka’s signs are found in the script of the Vai tribe of Liberia. Is this an example of racial memory? Or did Afaka have a touch of the Moses of Thomas Mann’s mischievous tale, The Tables of the Law?
An invitation to coffee. I telephoned Corly and invited him to have coffee with me at my pension. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I will come to have some coffee with you. I will come at 7.30. We shall drink coffee until eight. But what shall we talk about after eight? The minister? Did you like your talk with the minister? Was it intellectually profitable? No? That is not the w
ay I like it. We must fill our evening substantially. Let me see. Yes. Bruma. We shall talk about Bruma.’ But at this stage I thought it better to withdraw the invitation.
I could not leave Surinam without going to the district of Coronie, whose inhabitants had endeared themselves to me by their reputation as the idlest people in Surinam and their universal description as de luie neger van Coronie, the lazy Negroes of Coronie.* When slavery was abolished the coconut-planters abandoned their plantations to their former slaves, who settled down to an idyllic, isolated existence (communication between Coronie and Paramaribo was by sea), chasing out all newcomers of other races, including one hundred Indians, whose energy threatened to disturb Coronie calm: to this day the Negroes of Coronie will not sell land except to Negroes, and Negroes like themselves. From time to time they need money; then they gather some coconuts and sell them to the oil factory. The factory is regarded only as a convenience and its full capacity is seldom engaged. The planners despair, but the Negroes of Coronie, who are now in possession of the vote and know their own power, refuse to be rushed. They permit Chinese to do the shopkeeping for the district; and for some reason they have allowed one Indian farming family to settle.
This at any rate is the legend in Paramaribo. Johnny, the barman at the Palace Hotel, who knew Coronie and knew its one Indian family, offered to come with me; and early one morning we started on the hundred-mile ride. Outside the town the road was unsurfaced and worn into corrugations such as might have been caused by the passage of a tank. Cyclists were masked against the dust and many of the innumerable roadmenders wore goggles.
The land was flat, always flat. The forest lay immediately behind the huts that were strung along the road. Surinam is an underpopulated country. Here it felt neglected and abandoned and, oddly, related to nothing else, with the inhabitants, mainly Javanese, lost in an unfamiliar landscape, whose monotony invited no exploration. But each hut had its provision garden; here were not the helots of the British Guiana coastland.
Cool coconut groves, spotted with soft white blurs of sunshine, announced Coronie. We stopped under the eaves of a Chinese shop and I looked for de luie neger. Three old men were gossiping across the road in the scant shade of a tree. Surreptitously, because of the reported hostility to foreigners, I made ready to photograph them. I caught them posing, with fixed smiles. One man was filling a water-barrel on an ox-cart; he too posed and made his son smile. Another man was wheeling a bag of coconuts on the handlebar of a bicycle, doubtless on the way to that celebrated oil factory. No one else was around. I put away my camera. I suppose I had expected something more Arcadian, something less familiar than a run-down West Indian village with its concrete government buildings and wood-and-corrugated-iron food-shops.
Below a high hot sky the flat fields spread north to the sea, intersected by long straight canals in which one or two Van Goghlike masted boats rested askew in the mud. We walked to the coconut fields, where the grass was thick, the ditches choked, and the mosquitoes large and vicious, injecting their stings through my khaki trousers and terylene socks. Small grey-black wooden houses on low stilts were set in clean dirt yards baked by the sun; and in these yards pomegranate trees grew, three or four to a house. Each yard had a small heap of coconuts, and in each yard there was a little wooden stand with a modest display of fruit: two or three oranges, a melon perhaps, two or three pomegranates, nothing more: stall facing petty stall across the grassy footpath and the deep ditches. Dangerously narrow lengths of board, and sometimes only a trimmed coconut tree trunk, bridged the ditches.
Johnny the barman had seven children and wanted to take back some fruit to Paramaribo. He crossed a ditch into a yard, climbed up the front steps of the house and knocked on the closed door, the lintel of which was marked in blue paint: God is boven alles. A window was opened; Johnny explained. Presently the door was opened and a Negro, adjusting his clothes, came down barefooted into the yard, picked some pomegranates from the low trees, tiptoeing once or twice, gave the fruit to Johnny, received some coins, politely bade us good day, went up the steps and closed the door once more.
We had some trouble locating the Indian family: the paths and ditches and houses and fields looked so alike. The house stood on a rectangular plot of land, and, with ditches on all sides, appeared moated. Rusting junk in a rusting corrugated-iron shed; a bicycle wheel against a pillar; chickens in the dust and drying mud below the two or three dwarf coconut trees; a bad-tempered barking mongrel; and the mosquitoes thick in the damp heat. A young spastic Indian woman in a slack cotton dress held the dog. We crossed the moat and made our way to the back of the house where, unprotected from the sun, a very old man with white hair and a bristle of white beard sat on the ground rubbing oil on himself. The mosquitoes left him alone; they left Johnny alone. But they fastened on to me, to my hair, my shirt, my trousers, and even the eyelets of my shoes. Movement didn’t disturb them; they had to be brushed off.*
The old man was pleased to have visitors. He had just had a nasty accident: he had fallen from the top window of his house to the ground. ‘It cost him thirty guilders,’ Johnny said. But the old man told the story as though it were the purest comedy. He was amused at his own decrepitude – it was, after all, so very absurd – and he invited us to share the joke. His face, though shrunken, was still handsome; his eyes were the liveliest part of him. He was born in India and had come out to British Guiana as an indentured labourer. He had served his indenture and gone back to India; then he had indentured himself again. He spoke English of a sort and Hindi, no Dutch. How did he come to Surinam? That was the sweetest part of the whole joke. He had married in British Guiana and then – he had run away from his wife! He said this more than once. That act of roguishness of forty or fifty years ago was the biggest thing in his life and had never ceased to amuse him. He had run away from his first wife!
While he spoke the woman sat with the angry dog in the shade some distance away and looked at us, playing with her loose dental plate.
And what about me, the old man wanted to know. I had been abroad? What was it like? Did people have to work? What sort of work did they do abroad? What did abroad look like? He wanted me to give him concrete details. I tried. And so I really knew this abroad? He was amused and incredulous but reverential: he called me babu. He could scarcely conceive a world outside British Guiana and Coronie – even India had faded, except for a memory of a certain railway station – but he felt that the outside world was the true, magical one, without mud, mosquitoes, dust and heat. He was going to die soon, on that moated plot in Coronie; and he spoke of death as a chore. In the meantime he spent his days sitting in the sun, sometimes lying down in what looked like a fowlcoop; it was only at night that he went indoors. But he was forgetting: we were visitors: would we take something? A coconut?
He rose, the woman rose, the dog growled. He took a cutlass from the dust below the house and cut a few coconuts for us.
My back itched. It was bumpy with mosquito bites. So was my scalp. Neither Italian cotton nor thick hair was protection against the mosquitoes of Coronie.
A derelict man in a derelict land; a man discovering himself, with surprise and resignation, lost in a landscape which had never ceased to be unreal because the scene of an enforced and always temporary residence; the slaves kidnapped from one continent and abandoned on the unprofitable plantations of another, from which there could never more be escape: I was glad to leave Coronie, for, more than lazy Negroes, it held the full desolation that came to those who made the middle passage.
* Bush Negro Art: an African Art in the Americas by Philip J. C. Dark (London, 1954).
* J.W. Gonggrijp: ‘The Evolution of a Djuka Script in Surinam’: Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, 1960, p. 40.
* From the article on Surinam in the 1958 Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses:
‘In spite of rough travelling conditions, crossing two rivers by ferry and finally loading all the brothers into trucks for the last stretch, 175 tired but happy witne
sses reached the assembly destination, a coconut plantation called Coronie. One of the highlights of the assembly was the unexpected attendance of 408 at the public talk given across the street from the Protestant church. The sight of some 300 persons watching the baptism of twelve new brothers in a nearby canal made one think of how it must have been in the days of the apostles.
‘We are proud of one of our isolated brothers, who, besides his daily fishing work on the rivers, also takes time to fish for men of good will. Although being the only witness there, he never becomes discouraged, but is known for his preaching activity.’
* Stedman once killed thirty-two mosquitoes at a single stroke.
5. MARTINIQUE
I HAVE NEVER cared for dressing up or ‘jumping up’ in the streets, and Carnival in Trinidad has always depressed me. This year, too, the ‘military’ bands were not so funny: they vividly recalled the photographs of the tragic absurdities in the Congo. With this Carnival depression I flew north over the Caribbean. The sea was turquoise, with blurred white banks and blue deeps; out of it rose brown islets frilled with white.
In the society page of the Trinidad Guardian I read that yet another American had bought a piece of the island of Tobago, following those who had bought pieces of Barbados, Antigua, Dominica, Montserrat (the Montserrat Government had been running a campaign to attract American buyers). These islands were small, poor and overpopulated. Once, because of their wealth, a people had been enslaved; now, because of their beauty, a people were being dispossessed. Land values had risen steeply; in some islands peasant farmers could no longer afford to buy land; and emigration to the unwelcoming slums of London, Birmingham and half a dozen other English cities was increasing. Every poor country accepts tourism as an unavoidable degradation. None has gone as far as some of these West Indian islands, which, in the name of tourism, are selling themselves into a new slavery. The élite of the islands, whose pleasures, revealingly, are tourist’s pleasures, ask no more than to be permitted to mix with the white tourists, and the governments make feeble stipulations about the colour bar.
The Middle Passage Page 21