We Slaves of Suriname

Anton de Kom, David McKay

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781509549030
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

Anton de Kom's We Slaves of Suriname is a literary masterpiece as well as a fierce indictment of racism and colonialism. In this classic book, published here in English for the first time, the Surinamese writer and resistance leader recounts the history of his homeland, from the first settlements by Europeans in search of gold through the era of the slave trade and the period of Dutch colonial rule, when the old slave mentality persisted, long after slavery had been formally abolished.

159 years after the abolition of slavery in Suriname and 88 years after its initial publication, We Slaves of Suriname has lost none of its brilliance and power.

The Era of Slavery

The Arrival of the Whites

The ancient people who, to their own ruin, showed hospitality to the wealth-crazed crew of a Spanish caravel and to a man named “bearer of Christ.” A people hounded …

Albert Helman¹

In the words of a French author, “Fortunate the nation that knows no history.”

The history of Suriname dates back to the discovery of the Wild Coast (the Guianas) by the whites in 1499.

We know from Hartsinck how the Wild Coast looked in those days.² It was home to an Indian people who were lord and master of their realm. “Being hospitable,” Wolbers writes in his history of Suriname, “they often received visits from other members of their tribe, during which the conversation tended to revolve around the cherished topics of hunting and fishing. They possessed a certain inborn honesty and righteousness that shone through all their actions; they even displayed a courtesy and friendliness that one would not expect of uncivilized peoples. When they conversed with each other, their tone was always calm and gentle; they never spoke scornful words to one another. They also had some understanding of the motion of the stars, which was very useful to them for finding their way in the wilderness.”³

This description remains consistent with what explorers tell us today about the character of their descendants, the Trios and the Wayanas. They too are calm and gentle people, among whom intense emotional outpourings and uproarious laughter are rarely observed; they too are renowned for their warm generosity, their courage, and their enterprising spirit; they too are excellent boat pilots with expert knowledge of the rainforest. And yet they are nothing but vestiges, stunted in their natural development, of what was once an independent and happy people.

What drove the whites to these “wild” coasts? What sense of mission possessed them? What tidings, what happiness, what civilization did they have to offer this free and happy people? Did they, the first Spaniards who visited our shores, come to bring Guyana the blessings of the auto-da-fé and the Inquisition? Did they bring the same toleration, in the name of Christ, that Spain was then showing to Jews and Moors, or the white civilization of the breaking wheel, death by burning, and other tortures? Was that the legal basis for their invasion? Or was their sole reason for coming, with their red and yellow flags flying, to bring the message that gold is always bought with blood?

We will allow the facts to answer.

In 1492, Columbus discovered America, and soon the exaggerated accounts of the new land and its riches exerted an irresistible pull on Europeans of every class and rank.

Professor Werner Sombart has written about them in Der Bourgeois:⁴

One species of the business [of sea-robbery] was the voyages of discovery which had become so numerous since the fifteenth century. It is true that in the majority of cases all sorts of non-material motives were responsible for the enterprises – science, religion, glory, or pure adventure; yet the strongest, and often enough the only moving influence was the desire for gain. In reality these voyages were nothing more than well-organized raiding expeditions to plunder lands beyond the sea; more especially after the reports of Columbus, that on his voyages of discovery he had come across veritable gold-dust.⁵ El Dorado henceforth became the avowed or implied goal of all the expeditions. Digging for treasure and gold-making, these superstitions were now united to a third – the search for a new land where gold could be gathered by the spadeful.

What manner of men led these expeditions? They were strong, healthy adventurers, sure of victory, brutal and greedy, conquering all before them. Common as they were in those days, they have more and more ceased to exist in our own. These attractive, ruthless sea-dogs, who abounded more especially in England in the sixteenth century, were made of the same stuff as the leaders of hired bands in Italy of the type of Francesco Sforza and Caesar Borgia, only they were more intent on the acquisition of gold and goods. They were thus more akin to the capitalist undertaker than their Italian predecessors.

[…]

It may be asked, what is my reason for bringing these conquerors and robbers into connection with capitalism? The answer is simple enough. Not so much because they themselves were a sort of capitalist undertaker, but principally because the spirit within them was identical with that in all trade and colony planting right down to the middle of the eighteenth century. The two were equally expeditions of adventure and conquest. Adventurer, Sea-robber, and Merchant are but three imperceptible stages in development.

El Dorado

El Dorado.

The Land of Gold.

Even now, the name has lost none of its wondrous power.

Even now, on the big passenger ship, a young doctor steps out into the night, his eyes dazzled by the lights of the ballroom, his thoughts swaying to the tipsy rhythms of the jazz band, and it seems to him that he is the only living person to escape a frenzied gathering of display-window dummies.

He leans out over the rail and lets the night wind cool his temples. The inconstant glow from a porthole projects weird streaks of light on the dark waves.

Veins of gold in granite.

El Dorado.

In the sound of the waves, the young doctor hears the distant song of the buccaneers, blowing in on the night wind from bygone ages.

He passes his days in his cabin, writing on the ship’s immaculate stationery: prescriptions for American ladies suffering from seasickness and for elderly gentlemen with liver trouble.

At night, when the jazz band falls silent, when the sea wind can be heard again, and when only the hoarse shouts of a few drunken planters emerge from the smoking lounge, his heart comes alive with the madness of El Dorado.

In the night his good shirt, his tuxedo, his social position are all forgotten.

He feels a kinship with his ancestors, the savage raiders who hoarded gold in the holds of their ships, a kinship with the adventurers, the destroyers, the slave hunters.

Under the gray ashes of the daily grind, that same madness glows in the heart of every young white man: the feverish desire for El Dorado.

In 1499, Alonso de Ojeda and Juan de la Cosa reached the coast of the Guianas. Around the same time, Vicente Yáñez Pinzón discovered the mouth of the Amazon and the eastern Guianas. A rumor spread that far inland, a country had been discovered with immeasurable troves of gold and precious stones, and that the sandy shores of one infinitely large lake, named Parima, consisted entirely of gold dust.

Tempted by these rumors, Domingo de Vera undertook a voyage to the Guianas in 1593, claiming the territory for Spain with great ceremony on April 23, 1594. Commanders and soldiers knelt before a cross and offered up their thanks to heaven. “Then Domingo de Vera took a cup of water and drank from it; he took a second cup and poured it out, scattering the liquid as far as he could, drew his sword, and cut the grass around him, as well as a few branches from the trees, saying, ‘In the name of God, I take possession of this country for His Majesty Don Philip, our lawful overlord!’”⁶

This is also the earliest example of the misuse of God’s name in the colonial tragedy. It was often said later, in Christian books, that the Negro is not human, because humans are made in God’s image and, after all, those Bible scholars added, God is not black …

So let us, here, as Negroes, offer this assurance: we agree we were not created in the image of the God whose blessing was always invoked by those early white colonists, whenever they seized the land, bodies, and belongings of people of other colors.

The high expectations of the Spanish gold-seekers never became a reality. As no gold was found in the coastal areas, it was assumed that the natives were hiding it in the hinterlands. With their weapons in hand, they forced their way into the hinterland, and wherever opposition was found, the whites used bloodhounds, whose names have gone down in history.

Yet El Dorado was never found.

And the embittered adventurers vented their wrath on the natives, depriving them of their freedom, binding them in chains, forcing them to labor, flogging them, and abusing them.

And when that race proved too weak to bring forth the treasures that the whites, in their frenzy, had believed would be theirs for the taking – when, beaten and abused, they died by the thousands – the Spanish in Suriname recalled the advice of Las Casas to import a stronger race than the Indians from Africa.⁷

It was then that the slave trade began.

It was in those days that the first of our ancestors were brought to Suriname.

From that time onward, slavery in Suriname took shape. Each new ruler drove out the last, yet each one, after taking violent possession of the settlements of other Europeans, would begin by making the solemn declaration that under the new regime the right of property – which is to say, the right to use and abuse one’s living chattels, to buy and sell our fathers and mothers – would still be held sacred and enforced.

The First Settlements

Despite the ceremonious occupation of Suriname by the Spaniards, their power was hardly in evidence. They were soon driven out of the Guianas by the constant attacks of wrathful Indians. By this time, the French, as well as the Hollanders and Zeelanders, had begun to ply the coast of the Guianas more regularly. A Dutch General Charter of 1614 awarded anyone who discovered any new harbor, passage, or site the right to use it exclusively for four years.

Yet still there were no long-term settlements. The Europeans first gained a foothold in the Guianas in the mid seventeenth century. Captain Maréchal, accompanied by sixty English settlers, established a colony along the river dubbed the “Suriname,” but no other historical facts about this settlement have come to light. In 1643, a company was founded in Rouen for the colonization of Suriname. A man named Charles Poncet de Brétigny led a b...