History books about the slavery past in Suriname usually deal with the plantations. Historian Karwan Fatah-Black, on the other hand, examined the city of Paramaribo. It is relatively unknown that an ever-growing community of free Afro-Surinamese arose here, long before the abolition of slavery in 1863.
It is only logical that the plantations play a major role in Surinamese history. For centuries, the entire economy revolved around plantation production. And the enslaved Africans kept this economy going. They made up the majority of the population but were not seen as such:slaves were not legal entities but property. You cannot kill or rape property; you can do whatever you want with it.
Occasionally slaves were set free, but there were also other paths to freedom. These free Afro-Surinamese settled on pieces of land on the outskirts of Paramaribo, between the plantations and the city. The book Property Struggle is about them and how they managed to build a life of their own within colonial society.
Historian Karwan Fatah-Black (Leiden University) shows how this small community grew into a bastion of free Afro-Surinamese:around 1800, so well before the abolition of slavery in 1863, half of the free population in Suriname was black. These people and their paths to freedom have never received much attention from history writers, until now.
Roman law
The book is not about life on the plantations, but it does start here. The author explains how plantation directors got the enslaved to resign themselves to their fate. Day in, day out, and through violence, intimidation, and belittling, they made it clear to their slaves that they were inferior and disenfranchised. But to ensure that slaves had hope and something to lose, owners offered freedom in obedience and loyalty.
The laws in Suriname governing this release were based on the legislation of ancient Rome, as contemporary Dutch law prohibited slavery. The release of a slave was called manumissie, from the Latin words manu (hand) and mission (sending). Ultimately, only a few would be freed from their white owner in this way:in the 1760s, after a hundred years of slavery, the free non-white population in Suriname consisted of no more than three hundred people, compared to fifty thousand slaves and two thousand white owners.
One hundred years later, the free Afro-Surinamese community had grown to 15,000 people (to which a further 34,000 would be added after the abolition of slavery). A lot had happened in that century and this had nothing to do with plantation directors who put their hand over their hearts, on the contrary. The author shows on the basis of the sources that it was the enslaved themselves who found other ways to freedom and then did everything they could to buy their family and friends into slavery free.
Fatah-Black treats each chapter a different way to freedom than release. He does this on the basis of quotes from original sources, such as letters, court files and other archival documents. This is not easy as the freed slaves almost never left their own writings. Fatah-Black only found fragments of their lives through the rare occurrences of a written archive. Moreover, those fragments were usually recorded by the clerks of the colonial elite and not by the people themselves.
Traitors
Freedom had to be earned or enforced with enormous risks. Male enslaved in particular sometimes fled from the plantations, but they were hunted fanatically. They settled in the jungle when they managed to stay out of the hands of the slave hunters. Their next of kin are still called Maroons and form their own communities. Especially in the eighteenth century, the Maroons regularly carried out armed robberies on plantations to liberate others and to steal things.
The men found another way to freedom in the harbor of Paramaribo. Here, the judiciary often came out on top:the author found in the sources that unfree people could hide here for months before they were discovered. Smuggling pubs functioned as hiding places for fugitives and black and white, free and unfree sat here drinking their beer. Mooring captains often needed new working hands to replace those of deceased sailors. They didn't care if the men on board were runaway slaves. It also regularly happened that a fugitive hid on deck and once at sea appeared, according to ship's logs.
Military service was also a path to freedom. The Redi Musu, or red caps, were slaves who fought for the colonial government. They therefore also fought against slaves who had rebelled or fled and because of this they are still seen as traitors to the land. Unjustly according to Fatah-Black and he shows that these soldiers were part of the basis of the free Afro-Surinamese community. After their years of service, they not only got their freedom but also owned a piece of land. For example, more and more land came into Afro-Surinamese hands.
Free children
The most important and neglected role in the early free society was played by enslaved women. For them, concubinage was a common way of gaining freedom:for their children and sometimes for themselves. The author immediately adds that this was anything but a pleasant option:'By living as concubines with owners, they could be severely damaged mentally and physically. But the sacrifices they made ensured that their children had a chance at a free life'.
For a long time, the released concubines made up the majority of all freedmen, and when the plantation directors recognized their children, they rose up the social ladder. This usually did not apply to the women themselves and the concubinage also drove a wedge between her and the rest of the enslaved.
To invest in their future, free women bought land, something that was relatively easy. The protection of property rights ensured that freemen could settle, despite all other forms of exclusion and discrimination by the white Surinamese. This created a free group of blacks and their descendants who, from 1750, acquired more and more land on the edge of the center of Paramaribo. In this way, women in particular formed the solid foundation of the free Afro-Surinamese community in Paramaribo.
Random family
With the abolition of slavery, you as a reader think that most people were released in 1863, but nothing could be further from the truth, Fatah-Black shows. In the last decades before its abolition, slavery continued to erode itself as the number of freemen grew faster and faster. Freedmen helped family and friends who were still in slavery to become free, for example by buying them. Non-white owners began to displace white owners as important freers of slaves.
In 1846 the free black population of Paramaribo consisted of 5665 persons. There were still 5,326 enslaved in the city and an additional 1,966 registered whites. Most of the free non-white population lived in a neighborhood together. Poverty was a growing problem in the city here because the economy was based on plantation production. There was little work for the free blacks. After the abolition of slavery, it became even more difficult to build a meaningful life, according to Fatah-Black, because of the economic slump and the more difficult to access land market. "It was not only, not even primarily, the legacy of slavery, but the loss of what had already been built up during the period of slavery that hurt."
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The author also uses archival examples to explain how this ever-growing free community lived before the abolition of slavery. The enslaved developed their own culture in Suriname from the beginning, which was separate from that of the free, white colonial elite. The plantation directors were against Christianization and did not impose their language and religion on their slaves, but distinguished themselves with this. However, religious education was compulsory in the case of manumission, although plantation directors did not take any notice of this until after 1830.
In the city there was more room to join the church independently. Here Christian and Jewish faith communities played an important role in the liberated community. Poor relief also played a role in this, since freedmen received no support from urban poor relief. But slaves in the city also joined the church:in 1830 90 percent of the converted slaves were residents of Paramaribo. These children of God were not seen as equals, about which Fatah-Black gives a poignant example from the court files:
"After Isabella's owner died, other plantation owners wanted to force her to live in fornication," she said. When she refused, they called her a black beast. The planters denied having insisted on the concubinage or sex with Isabella. However, they did not deny the continuation of the story. They had indeed banned her from the church. The fact that Isabella had been baptized would not help, according to the co-religionists, heaven was not made for a black person, they were all of the devil, who had to work and be a pleasure to their planters.'
Acquisition
The history of Dutch slavery is still colored by research into plantation slavery, following the American example. The existence of a free Afro-Surinamese community in Paramaribo at the time of slavery was unknown to me, and probably to many other readers. It now appears that this community was formed precisely in the city because it bought land and built houses for herself and her descendants, long before the official abolition of slavery.
An easily readable book about the history of slavery in Suriname and Paramaribo in particular is therefore an asset and very enlightening. Sometimes the book is a bit cumbersome, because the author discusses several legacies in succession and uses them as examples to make his point. However, the author turns most of the sources, such as statements to the court, into beautiful stories with which the book is strung together.