Wild Coast

by John Gimlette

  On my last morning Archie disappeared for hours, and so Shafiqah took over. She drove me out to her father’s farm in a kampong on the padi. It was like life on an island, lapped by green. The family had only one modern possession, and that was a tiny car that gleamed like a jewel. Shafiqah’s mother fried up some peanuts and liver, and then her sisters appeared, and giggled very neatly. I suddenly felt rather big and ungainly, as though I’d taken ‘EAT ME’ pills and ended up in Wonderland, among rabbits dressed in klimbis. We saw their father only once, way off in the rice. On his back he had a large tank of pesticide. ‘Salaam alay-kum!’ he squeaked, and then faded away, beneath a billowing incubus of spray.

  Shafiqah said it was time to go and look for Archie.

  ‘Tomorrow, you’ll see more rice,’ she said, ‘so much it makes you mad.’

  It was indeed a lot of rice, but no worse than open sea.

  I spent most of the next day sailing east in a minibus called Destiny. The driver was a friend of Archie’s, known as ‘Garage Ivan’. He was also Javanese, and had two pigtails and a tiny beard, no bigger than a coin. I think he liked the idea of a foreigner aboard and was always stopping for photographs and plunging off the road. The other two passengers, however, seemed to disgust him. One was an ancient Indian lady who was very publicly dying and had already turned pale green. The other was a prostitute returning to Brazil. She’d somehow managed to scoop herself into a bodice of crimson spandex and was now trying to explode her way out of it, on a diet of Coke and crisps. I often caught Ivan studying her in his mirror, as though she were some rare creature that had wriggled from the swamp.

  For hours the view didn’t change. Just occasionally we’d spot factories, like great silvery cathedrals, thrusting out of the rice. At some point we reached Wageningen, which was once – I’d read – the biggest fully mechanised rice farm in the world. We were still skimming over its land an hour later, and for an hour after that. Then, slowly, things began to change; lilies reappeared, followed by shrubs, bushes, scrub, trees, woods, cattle and then great, red patches of scorching savannah. By now the huge parallels of rice had fallen apart, and nature had reasserted its control. Ahead lay the other 90 per cent of Suriname, richly smothered in forest.

  Soon there were signs of human life again. It wasn’t much at first: a hut like a bonnet, or a child selling fish. But then, we were among winkels and drempels, or corner shops and speed bumps. The people here were different, I noticed: no longer Asian, but African or Creole. It was beginning to feel like another country, severed by the rice. I also noticed fishing boats, sailing through the trees, and a wooden church with a dainty little spire. A thought suddenly occurred to me. I’d once read of an improbable Utopia, known simply as ‘Seacoast’. Perhaps this was it, or at least the start?

  Garage Ivan said he’d never heard of Seacoast.

  ‘Sorry, baas. You wanna stop?’

  From the back rows there were sounds of pouting and pain.

  ‘No, it’s OK. But what are these villages called? This one, for instance?’

  ‘This one?’ said Ivan. ‘This little place called Oxford.’

  The tale of Seacoast is like that of Willoughbyland, except a century later, and without a New York.

  It all begins with a beautiful idea. Britain will quietly expand into Dutch Guiana, to keep Napoleon out. At the same time honest crofters will be persuaded to leave their shabby, overcrowded islands and come to Guiana. Here they’ll settle in lavish, scarlet soil and soon be lairds themselves. Their slaves will drain the land and carve out estates as big as any at home. It will be a beautiful Presbyterian land, rich in sugar and cotton.

  By 1816 the plan is well under way. The Nickerie coast is now covered in polders with magnificent names like Waterloo, Hazard and Botany Bay (which will puzzle people for centuries to come). There is also a new Scotland in Coronie, beginning in Oxford and spreading out east. Here the Scots’ slaves have been hard at work planting Scottish sugar. Among the cane there are now Scottish villages, each with a little spire: Burnside, Totness, Clyde, Inverness, Hamilton, Moy and Perseverance. The crofters are happy to be alone again, and accessible only by sea. They call their colony Seacoast because that is all it is.

  But, the same year, the Dutch recover the land, under the Treaty of Paris. Most of the Scots, however, decide to stay. They have no Manhattan to swap, the profits are good, and the cotton grows high. All that troubles them is the malaria, which – would they only knew it – is now the most deadly on the continent. So it is that they live well here – and die rich, if long before their time. But, it won’t last for ever, and the end comes when the price of cotton crashes. By then there are so few crofters left that they merge with the slaves. Eventually, all that will be left of them is a string of Scottish spires, and some curious African tribes, such as the MacDonalds and the McLeods.

  But England – and its neighbours – have left Suriname with more than just a litany of names. Englishness haunts every aspect of this country’s life. It’s in the newspapers and on the radio; it percolates politics and contracts; it’s at the heart of every love affair and the root of every murder; it’s blown up on billboards and sprayed over walls. Often, it’s all you’ll hear from Coronie eastwards, and for 300 miles inland.

  At first, it doesn’t sound like English, but a simple babble of home-made slang. Then you realise it’s both. Amid the syntactical chaos and the warm, round vowels of Africa something familiar emerges. A door’s a doro, a boat’s a boto, tomorrow’s tamara, and enough’s onofo. In English, the Surinamese will declare both their love for their country (Mi Kondre Tru) and their love for each other (Mi lobi yu). In English, too, they’ll say they don’t understand (Me no ferstan) or that you need to hurry (Mekie hesie!) or that everything’s fallen apart (alasani fuk-up). Although Dutch may be the language of officialdom, Talkie-talkie, as it’s called, remains the language of the hearth.

  All this ought to make life easy for the Anglophone, and yet it doesn’t. The chatter still sounds bewilderingly African, with its drumbeat accent and echoing words. Without an ancient vocabulary, things that are fugufugu and kruwakruwa become simply mysterious, instead of ‘hairy’ and ‘half-done’. But it’s not just African. Talkie-talkie is also riddled with Hebrew, French, Portuguese and Spanyoro. Rabbits, money and children (Konkonis, plaka and pikins) all owe something to the Spanish, and so does being thin, or mangrimangri. There’s no real pattern to it; a hill may be Dutch (bergi) while the river is English (liba). Different languages seem to erupt everywhere. The Surinamese will greet the day in Dutch (Morgu!), meet their friends in Portuguese (Odio!), say goodbye in Spanish (Adyosi!), and then go to bed in English (Ku’neti!). Sometimes they’ll hitch languages together to create highfalutin words such as Grantangi, the expression of great thanks.

  But, at its core, Talkie-talkie is English. Often it’s simplified English, with the words pared and rounded, or given an African echo. ‘Noise’, for example, becomes bawli-bawli, and ‘knife’ becomes a neefi. Sometimes this can give the language a nursery feel, as when things happened a long time ago (langa langa) or a very long time ago (langa langa langa). But it can also be both touchingly poetic (‘good friends’ are skin-skin) and brutally blunt. Requesting a drink, for example, may involve the phrase ‘Watra osu killame’ (literally, ‘Water or kill me’). This is clearly no ordinary English. It’s the sort that’s either spoon-fed to children or beaten into adults.

  And that’s the clue as to how it came about. It would be nice to think – as some do – that Talkie-talkie is merely a relic of Willoughbyland or Seacoast. But the English were never here long enough to leave their language behind. Instead, it’s an idiom created not in Guiana or Africa but somewhere in between. It’s the language of what was once the world’s greatest industry, slavery – a matter in which England excelled. Simplified and abbreviated, it became the language of command. You can still hear the sound of the seventeenth century in the words that remain. A garden gate is a nengre-doro (n
egro door), the police are still ‘scouts’ (skowtu) and a young woman is a wenke.

  That this slave argot survived is perhaps surprising. The Dutch, however, did little to discourage it and merely called it Negerengels, or Negro English. Then, for a while, it became a mark of ignorance, and children would have to wash their mouth out for speaking Talkie-talkie. But now, since independence, it’s become a source of pride and is known as Sranan Tongo (or ‘the tongue of Suriname’). It’s even started growing again, to meet the demands of the modern world – although its neologisms still sound bosky and antique. A machine gun is a dagadaga, a plane is an ‘iron bird’ (or isrifowru) and all vehicles have become ‘wagons’ (or wagis). You know it’s all over when the hearse turns up, otherwise known as the dedewagi.

  Paramaribo slaves, circa 1830. In Suriname, slavery only ended in 1870, just short of the Age of the Car. (Illustration credit 6.3)

  It’s surprising, too, how difficult, in its simplicity, this English has become. I realised from the start that I’d never really understand it. It was almost easier to admit defeat in Dutch: ‘Het spijt me, Mijnheer, Ik spreek geen Talkie-talkie.’

  As Destiny rattled its way east, I moved up front and sat with Garage Ivan. I think he liked this arrangement. It was an opportunity for him to vent his full range of likes and dislikes in language that no one else would understand. As we sped along, through the enormous stands of coconut palms and the wreckage of old plantations, I was treated to his full spectrum of prejudice and preference. On the plus side, he liked Arsenal, Toyotas, his mother’s cooking, all Javaans (except the songs recorded in Holland), dogs, Pringles and Mariah Carey. He wasn’t sure about President Obama and detested Michael Jackson. In fact, Africans were top of his other list, along with bicycles, spiders, the president, Ruud Gullit and all the Dutch. Everyone despised Holland, he said, and in Sranan it was known as Patata Kondre, or ‘Potato-land’. They had no nice girls, just Patata-umas, or ‘Spud-women’. ‘And you know what? Holland has the best bridge-builders in the world, and they never built us one!’

  At that moment a vast bridge appeared, across the Coppename.

  ‘Then who built this one?’

  Garage Ivan shrugged sulkily. ‘Dunno. Maybe Cuba.’

  Soon he was back on safer territory, railing at the Creoles. He said that all Africans ever thought about were drink, sex and coconuts. ‘They just buy a couple of trees and some rum, and then settle down with a girl.’ This rather pleasant-sounding idyll irritated Garage Ivan so much that he couldn’t even bring himself to smile when people waved from the roadside. After a while I began to suspect that news of his hostility had travelled ahead of us up the coast, and so – by the time we got to the great Saramacca River – there was no one waving at all. The countryside had emptied once again. Those who’d once worked this land had now become city-dwellers, or Stadsnegers (as the Dutch called them) – or had long since fled, deep inland.

  Since the collapse of Willoughbyland, the slaves who’d escaped had been quietly flourishing.

  No one seemed to care that there was a little Africa re-forming, with its own languages and tribes. Over the next twenty-six years – to 1700 – they’d be joined by another 5,000 runaways. Some had come alone, some had fled after a revolt in 1690, and others had escaped from a powerful Jewish owner called Machado and called themselves ‘The Matjau’. Another wave came after the French pirate Cassard sacked the coast in 1712. Soon there were so many of them that they became like tiny, truant nations, with their own kings and captains, and fancy names. Here, on this river, they were the Saramaka, or Saramaccaners.

  It wasn’t long before the fugitives were forming little armies and plundering the farms. In time they’d have their own firelocks and lances, and could raid the coast at will. By 1726 the rebels were, as our old friend Bolingbroke noted, so numerous ‘by accession of fresh runaways and by the natural fertility of their women, that they rendered the prosperity of the whites very insecure’. To Englishmen like him the runaways were also known as ‘maroons’, from the Spanish word cimarrón, meaning ‘wild or untamed cattle’. But to the Dutch the loss of slaves had a more permanent feel – like a change to the landscape – and so they became known as the ‘Bush Negroes’, or Bosnegers.

  So began what is known as the Age of Heroes. As with all heroic ages, there was plenty of random bloodshed. Outnumbered twenty to one by their slaves, the Dutch were forced to rule by fear. They were always lopping off tongues and testicles, but in 1730 they held a spectacle of horror: two girls were decapitated, six women were broken on the rack, two men were roasted alive, and another had an iron hook stuck through his ribs and was hung from a gibbet. Across the colony the slaves were outraged, and the maroons sought revenge. As Bolingbroke put it, ‘white planters were in their turns hooked on trees or roasted alive’.

  What followed was merely an age of mutilation. Suriname became a byword for brutality in the name of profit. In Candide, published in 1758, Voltaire’s hero arrives here to be robbed by judges and sea captains, and to meet a slave who’s been shorn of his limbs. (‘That,’ he says, ‘is the price of your sugar in Europe’.) It’s a moment of utter despair, the literary obverse of the road to Damascus. Candide finally renounces his faith in Providence and decides to head for home.

  The Dutch, meanwhile, had no intention of giving up their sugar, although they would find an alternative to war. They suddenly realised the maroons could be bought – or ‘pacified’ – and that vast tracts of the jungle could be harmlessly signed away. It was gruesome diplomacy. The runaways now had leaders with names such as Zam-Zam and Captain Boston, who’d lived in the forest for much of their lives. At first, in 1757, the Dutch tried to fob them off with trinkets and baubles. The response of the fugitives was stark. ‘Do Europeans imagine that Negroes can survive on combs and looking glasses?’ replied Captain Boston, and the war began again. News of the Dutch weakness, meanwhile, filtered west, prompting – eventually – the revolt in Berbice.

  It was another five years before the Saramaccaners signed a treaty. This time the Dutch provided proper gifts (muskets, ammunition, checked linen, canvas, beef spirits, saws, salt and hatchets), and the parties had to swear oaths and drink each other’s blood. The formalities done, the Europeans were then treated to the best of the warrior women.

  Under the treaty the Saramaka acquired a kingdom within a colony. The interior and the upper reaches of the river would devolve to the Saramaccaners, and each year the Dutch would recognise their sovereignty with not only gifts but also the flummery of office; for the captains there’d be uniforms and black canes with silver tops, and, for the granman a breastplate and a kingly tricorne hat. In return, the Saramaccaners would be faithful allies, they’d return all deserters and would never enter the whites’ city, Paramaribo, in groups of more than six. Apart from two European emissaries who lived among them, the Saramaccaners had little contact with the outside world. Soon people could forget all about them, as though they’d never existed.

  As we drove along the river, I asked Garage Ivan what had become of them.

  ‘Go see for yourself,’ he said. ‘It’s like Africa in there.’

  Two weeks later I took this advice and flew up the river.

  I’d managed to join a small group heading for a tributary of the Saramacca, known as Gran Rio. It was 170 miles inland, and as I rode along I realised how much the Saramaka had craved their solitude. Below, the trees looked like clubs of broccoli, packed tight from horizon to horizon. I could see the river, now thready and deranged, and tiny pocks of orange, gouged from the forest. These were gold mines, I realised, scraped away by miners, or garimpeiros (‘One Brazilian and two girls’, as people used to say). But then the broccoli would close in again, sucking out the light. Over the last year, I read, twelve previously unknown species had emerged from this vegetable wilderness, including a brand new frog that glows fluorescent purple.

  Among our group there were several Dutch tourists, a Chinese girl called Mary (w
ho worked for the government) and a photographer called Toon Fey. No name better describes this man. He was like a brilliantly animated shambles: Pooh with more punch, or Popeye without the spinach. Everywhere he went, he left a trail of passports, pens, memory sticks, anti-malarials and lenses. To some extent he’d dealt with this by covering himself with pockets. But, coupled with the fact that he was completely bald, this only made him look stranger still, like some sort of military egg. Despite all this – or perhaps because of it – I took to Toon, and he and I have been friends ever since.

  It also turned out that he’d been married to a maroon for almost thirty years. Although nowadays she seldom left Holland, Toon was always popping over, to gather up the story. He’d now written three books about the maroons, and taken thousands of pictures. Few people had such a window on their remarkable world. Toon said there were over 50,000 maroons still living in the interior, making them easily the largest-ever group of runaway slaves. Although the Saramaccaners accounted for almost half of them, there were five other tribes: the Kwintis, N’Djukas, Bonis, Paramaccaners and Matawais. Until modern times they’d had nothing to do with each other and had never inter-married, and trespass had been a sure-fire cause for war. As for their relations with the coast, the anxiety has never really ebbed. The Creoles have spent over two centuries trying to pretend the maroons aren’t there and only gave them the vote in 1963.

  ‘Should we be anxious?’ I asked Toon.

  He smiled. ‘Just careful. The Saramaccaners are good people. Maroons for beginners.’

  No sooner had we landed than an eerie society seemed to fold in around us. Most of the men on that savannah wore short togas and carried rifles. For a while they closed in to watch us. They had hard, glossy limbs, and their hair was woven into thick braids like ship’s rope. Some carried heavy loads on their heads – like chainsaws – and the braids acted as cushions, protecting the scalp. As for the togas, or banjakoosus, they were startlingly bright, and embroidered with bursts of colourful geometry.