Wild Coast

by John Gimlette

  (Illustration credit 7.2)

  That, broadly speaking, describes Paramaribo. So what went wrong? How did it get forgotten?

  I spent my first day falling in love with Paramaribo, and then the rest of my time wondering quite why. It wasn’t that I ever fell out of love, just that after a while things stopped making sense. Although the city was never conspiratorial like Georgetown, it could still be mind-bogglingly obscure. How had it ended up with square coins, for example, and a banknote for 2½ dollars? Why was the newspaper called the Times of Suriname and yet published in Dutch? And why were all the advertisements in ‘English’ English, a language only a few understood? The big poster at the time depicted a woman in a state of advanced ecstasy, under the banner ‘Did you already find spice?’ I simply couldn’t imagine what she wanted me to buy. Her tiny dress? Condoms? Delay spray? Or just marjoram and dill?

  Everything began well when I booked into a guesthouse called Albergo Alberga. It was a large Victorian building with a slave-house at the back. For the first few days, until he flew home, Toon had a room on the ground floor. My room was up in the eaves, and from it I could look all the way down Heerenstraat. This was a street of little wooden banks, and each night a small army of gunmen would appear and settle in the porches. We even had one on our porch, who took a shine to the pretty black actress in the room next to Toon’s. She was also from Holland and was here to discover her roots. It can’t have been an edifying experience, because after a week her hair began to straighten and her face broke out in spots.

  Other guests, however, were Surinamese, just visiting the city. One had a very young baby which she once left on reception. As the girl on the desk had never handled a baby before, she asked me for help. For a while we debated whether to give it a carton of milk, and then decided we should. The baby seemed to thrive on this and was slightly disappointed when, an hour later, her mother returned, covered in parcels and gratitude and a large statue of Ganesh. ‘This place gets worse and worse!’ she panted. ‘You can never get what you want!’

  When I told Toon about this, he merely smiled.

  ‘But isn’t that odd?’ I insisted. ‘Don’t you think that’s strange?’

  ‘Everything’s a bit crazy here. You should try the shopping.’

  I soon found out what he meant. Up behind Heerenstraat was a neighbourhood of shops. They all looked relatively normal at first, large clapboard buildings selling jeans and drums and camouflaged crossbows. But then I noticed that the largest shop sold only Christmas baubles, and that some places only opened at lunchtime or on Wednesdays or for a few hours at dawn. They never seemed to open together, and even when they did, that’s when the confusion began. Things often cost half as much as it said on the label, and occasionally double. Worse, some items, such as cloth, were still measured out in Rhenish els, or they’d slip you an extra three-eighths of an inch by trading in Dutch feet. I once tried to buy something and found myself sucked into a Soviet queuing system, joining a line to pay, a line to get a receipt and then finally – twenty minutes later – a line to pick up my biro. Far more straightforward was the witches’ market, where you could buy anything from a cure for husbands to a bundle of tampons grown in the forest.

  Turning right out of the guesthouse, the street led downhill towards the river. This was the Paramaribo I loved. The street opened up into a large grassy field known a little grandly as Independence Square. Around the edge were palm trees and mangos, the wedding cake palace and a splendidly crooked old courthouse, the Hof van Justitie, which looked like the backdrop to a Rembrandt.

  At first I was troubled by the thought that perhaps the only reason I liked all this was because it was familiar, and that I might simply be homesick. But then I noticed that everyone else loved it too, and that each afternoon people would appear with kites and easels, or would dance in the grass. It was hard to think of a city that looked so readily happy. Sometimes the army would appear, thrashing their drums and tootling pipes. Or it might be a troupe of kung fu fighters, or the Rastafarians, with their buckets of cold sweet mush, keenly known as schaafijs.

  Because I looked so foreign and unhurried, people often talked to me. I never knew what they really wanted, although their requests were intriguing. Usually they wanted to know whether I had a mobile, but once someone asked me if I’d come and change the oil in his car. Another time I was questioned about the snow in England, and whether we had wintis, or spirits. Occasionally I was approached by maroons, in their breeches and checked linen. Although they spoke only Talkie-talkie, they were enthusiastic salesmen. One tried to interest me in a live boa constrictor, and, when that failed, he started mimicking an ape. It was quite common to see monkeys chained up to trees, but he kept insisting, ‘Yapiyapi switi! Yapiyapi switi!’

  ‘No ferstan,’ I’d say. ‘No ferstan.’ I don’t understand.

  Eventually he gave up and moved off, still muttering ‘Yapiyapi.’

  That evening I asked the girl at the Alberga what he’d been saying.

  ‘Nothing really,’ she said sweetly, ‘just that monkey tastes delicious.’

  At the far end of the grassy square was the little purple fort. For some reason people didn’t like it down here, under the trees. There was something about it that seemed to repel them, and so I often had the riverbank all to myself. It became my favourite place in the city, with its abandoned cannon, its biscuity ramparts and a scattering of marble heads. It also happened to be the last remnant of Willoughbyland, the original Fort Willoughby, and the beginning of Dutch Guiana. On 27 February 1667 Abraham Crijnssen had scrambled over its shellstone walls and claimed the fort for Holland. After that, it would get a new name – Fort Zeelandia – and a new little town inside, like a miniature Amsterdam.

  It took me weeks to get inside. Although it was now a museum, its opening hours were – like the shops’ – impressively quixotic. All I could do was walk around the outside peering up at the walls. It was a pentagon, I noticed, with its two biggest bastions thrusting into the river. No one would tell me what it was about the fort that so appalled the city, or why everyone shrank away. Most people I met said they’d never been inside and probably never would. So, with little else to go on, I simply assumed that the wintis had been at work, and that the place was somehow cursed. A far less easy explanation would just have to wait.

  At night the city was like a theatre closing down, and then secretly reopening. First the actors stepped into the wings, then the audience left, and then out went all the lights. I’ve never known a place so dark. A few of the main streets were lit, although even then it was more like orange gas than light. Often the only way I could get around was by starlight or by the glint in the canals. But it was still a perfect city, or almost perfect. The air crackled with bats and nightjars, and the darkness smelt of earth. Eventually, even the distant traffic would die down, and so there’d be no sound but the hum of the forest.

  That’s when the new cast appeared. There weren’t many of them: scavengers and cleaners, the watchmen with their little fires, the maroons that lived in the palmentuin, the drunks, the lovers, the conscripts with nowhere to stay, and the wild girls who tottered out of the bushes, hissing in Sranan. Occasionally, I’d bump into someone who didn’t seem to belong in this scene at all, such as a pedlar selling hammocks, or a lone rackler, out with his songbird.

  What puzzled me was where everyone else was. Downtown, almost everything shut as soon as it got dark, including the restaurants. There were only a few places open. One was called Café ’t Vat, which was popular with the Dutch, who liked to huddle together, like a wagon train under the lights. Another was an old warehouse, with a vast pair of scales. According to Toon, a lot of people thought these were for weighing slaves, and so no one used to go there. That left only the old harbour wall, the ‘Red Steps’, down on the Waterkant.

  The Red Steps were like a stage within a stage. Odd characters were always pitching up here with things to sing or sell. One man had a trolley covered
in love-hearts, and another sold little stuffed alligators, wearing hats and bras, and with huge glass eyes. It was also the place to buy something to eat and a jugo, or bottle of beer. I always liked ordering food from these stalls because everything sounded like jazz. There was Olie Bollen, Pom, Bami Kip, and Pinda Soep with Tom Tom (or, more prosaically, oily bread, yam, chicken noodles and peanut soup with plantain). On Toon’s last night we went down there to find that we had ten food stalls all to ourselves.

  ‘Where is everyone?’ I gasped. ‘Don’t people ever eat?’

  ‘Not at night,’ said Toon, ‘they go to the casino.’

  ‘What? Everyone?’

  ‘Not quite. But the city’s pretty hooked.’

  ‘And who’s paying for it all?’

  ‘I don’t know. Holland, probably.’

  ‘Holland?’

  ‘Sure. We got an aid package worth over a billion dollars.’

  This has to be seen, I thought. A game of development poker.

  Toon refused to come with me. He said he hated the casinos and was too much of an old hippy. A few days later, however, I sought them out myself. They weren’t hard to find. In this star-sprinkled city they were their own galaxies, exploding with light. Or were they black holes? It seems that everyone had been sucked in: Indians, Creoles, Javanese, the old, the young, the witless, matrons, manikins, whole families of suits, wives like carthorses and mistresses like ponies, a priest, a man with no nose, a table of schoolgirls, an elderly Jewess trimmed in rabbit, and a pair of twins, both famine-thin and wearing matching bodices of rubber. I could also see waiters battling their way through this gaudy throng, with more trays of pom and bami kip and flutes of champagne. Then I spotted Mary, the Chinese girl I’d met on the Saramaka trip.

  ‘What a surprise,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she beamed, ‘except we’re here every night!’

  Behind her were her family, glittering with accessories and whisky.

  ‘Oh, is this your family’s business?’

  Mary laughed drily, ‘Don’t you know what this place is?’

  ‘A casino?’

  She leaned her face into mine, so close I felt her hair on my cheek.

  ‘A washing machine,’ she whispered. ‘Cleans up the drug money.’

  I didn’t know what to say, but Mary carried on.

  ‘It’s all imported,’ she said, glancing at the rubber twins, ‘even the girls.’

  After that I didn’t go back to the casinos, although this left me with a problem. With everyone squashed inside, how would I ever experience Paramaribo at night? I had only three contacts. One ran a tug-boat company, and the other two were revolutionaries, old comrades of Dr Roopnaraine in Georgetown. I tried one of the Marxists first. All I knew is that, after one of the military coups, he’d become some sort of minister. After that the trail went cold. They told me at the Alberga that he was dying of cancer. But then someone told me he’d been in court on a sex charge, perhaps involving children, and so I abandoned the search.

  Ah well, I thought, every Garden of Eden has to have its snakes.

  The excesses of today were nothing, I realised, compared with the decadence of 1769. Not even Demerara and the Berbice could compare, despite all that Malmsey and sausage. That was just hoggishness, over-sexed bumpkins and a surfeit of grog. Paramaribo was altogether different. It was like Rome at the moment it ruptured, except a fraction of the size and ten times as torrid. It even had Roman law, citadels, colonnaded courts and a society of slaves. There were few other places with such a concentration of wealth and such a dearth of restraint. Whenever the governor had a banquet, the gentlemen at his table would enjoy the best crystal and silver, and his most beautiful girls, perfumed and half-naked.

  Amid such bacchanalian splendour a wealthy man could want for nothing. He might live on Heerenstraat, or down on the Waterkant, which was paved in seashells and planted with tamarinds and lemons. His would be no ordinary house but a fine wooden mansion, furnished with gilt mirrors and chandeliers, and richly panelled in cedar. The master would sleep in a magnificent hammock, over which there’d be a fine awning to deter the insects, or a slave would appear and take off her blouse to swat away the gnats. It’s often mischievously thought that the great fires which so often swept the city were acts of retribution, directed by God. Today only a few of these great houses remain.

  But more remarkable than the great Paramaribo mansion was the appearance of the merchant himself. It wasn’t just the absence of vitality, or the excess of everything else. Visitors from Holland had never seen so much bling. As one put it: ‘Their carriages and dress are truly magnificent: silk embroidery, Genoa velvets, diamonds, gold and silver lace, being worn daily, and even the masters of the trading ships appear with buttons and buckles of solid gold …’ As though all this dressing up wasn’t enough, our baubled knight even had his own theatre, in which he could entertain his friends. In fact, his whole life was like a very short play, in which he’d make a dramatic entrance, debauch all the extras and then die in Act I.

  Naturally, while he was alive, he could have whatever he wanted, and very often did. Like today, everything was imported, from carriage clocks to women. If, for a moment, his needs weren’t met, he had only to blow his ivory whistle. Across the city there were some 75,000 slaves attending a mere 5,000 Europeans.

  In the stew of Paramaribo slavery was always the volatile component. As in Rome, all that sustained it was the idea of disproportionate dread. No transgression could ever be worth the penalty that inevitably followed. Here the colony surgeon was as busy as anywhere, lopping off limbs at £6 a go. But the merchants could not rely on amputation alone. That year, 1769, slaves would not only have spikes driven under their nails; they’d also be impaled on hooks and pulled apart by horses.

  It wasn’t just men doing this, but also Dutch women. Frustrated by their husbands’ Olympian feats of infidelity, the wives often took it out elsewhere. ‘They are also rigid disciplinarians,’ wrote a diarist of the day, ‘as the backs of their poor slaves, male and female, sufficiently testify.’ In one incident a pretty slave girl was given a hundred lashes for breaking a piece of china. It was quite common for slaves to kill themselves, usually by jumping out of a window. The Dutch women were never punished for their excesses. One used to get particular satisfaction from beating the breasts of her girls, while another once stabbed a ‘quadroon’ with a red-hot iron, killing her at once. It’s hard now to imagine how they worked up such hatred, and I’ve often wondered whether in the Sranan term ‘potato-women’ there isn’t a lingering hint of revenge.

  Slavery, however, wasn’t just killing slaves; it was also killing the slavers. The abundance of everything was suffocating. There was even talk of a ‘vortex of dissipation’. Men would do whatever they dreamed and then drown in their fantasies. Drink and the pox killed most, but some just faded away. Meanwhile the wives seemed to survive. Often they were widowed two or three times before they found another rake. It was almost as though the city was about some gruesome masque, dancing itself to death.

  Then, amid the fiddles, came the sound of Rome, catching fire. Maroons had surrounded the city, and were closing in for the kill.

  The arrival of maroons in the city still caused anxiety. I couldn’t always tell who was a maroon and who wasn’t. Some were easily recognisable by their togas and breeches, or by their bags of herbs and snakes. Or it might be the slightly superior strut, and the air of defiance. But even when maroons wore jeans and a smile, the Creoles still knew who they were. ‘They talk like animals,’ said a man I met on the foodstalls, ‘and they act like them too.’

  I said that didn’t sound like the Saramaccaners.

  ‘They’re not so bad,’ he said. ‘The N’Djukas are filthy.’

  Many maroons now lived in the city, although there were plenty just visiting. They called Paramaribo ‘Foto’, as though it was still just a fort. I often saw the new arrivals on Saramaccastraat, at the end of the Waterkant. This was the
drop-off point for the country buses, little wagis all crudely daubed in girls. Often the maroons just seemed to settle wherever they alighted, making their home on the street. Some sold back-scratchers or bushmeat, but others just issued their demands: cigarettes, drinks, attention, menaces or money. They were fascinated by the girls and were always panting and squeaking at them, even the children. But it was worse for shopkeepers. They’d now dreaded the maroons for over two centuries (ever since the first treaties, and the arrival of Saramaccaners – six at a time – swaggering around with their silver-topped canes). In 1960 V.S. Naipaul wrote that only violence would resolve the tension between the city and the country. They were prophetic words for a man only passing through.

  Although I couldn’t distinguish them, I probably saw maroons from almost all the different groups. The only tribe I wouldn’t have seen were the Bonis, or Alukus. They were different from the others. It was said that they even had their own impoverished language, Aluku-tonga, with no word, for example, for ‘yellow’ (they had to describe things as ‘bird fat’). By reputation, they were also shorter and less affable: bold soldiers but poor carriers. According to the Danish explorer Henry Larsen – writing in the ’50s – every Boni had a beautiful, tender childhood until the age of ten and was then jolted into adulthood. After that it was a life stripped of affection. Men were even despised by their women, for whom love was rare and infidelity began early. (‘It was the sensual experience that was valued,’ wrote Larsen, ‘and the identity of the male who provided it was a matter of minor importance’.) Perhaps that’s why the Boni version of the water monkey was female and sexually insatiable. It may also explain why the tribe were often thought of as a lost generation. They were maroons at their most extreme: quarrelsome, volatile and persistently vindictive.