Suriname folk-lore

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Part I Notes on the culture of the Paramaribo Negroes

1. General Considerations

The Negroes of the city of Paramaribo, the capital of the Dutch Colony of Suriname, in South America, make these distinctions in the population of which they form a part; they differentiate the urban group, foto suma, which includes the people of the principal cities of the colony - Albina, near the border of French Guiana, Nickerie, near British Guiana, and Paramaribo itself; those who live on plantations and in the ‘small bush’ of the coastal fringe of the colony, and are called pranasi suma, - ‘plantation people’; and, finally, those who are loosely characterised as ‘Djukas’. This last group comprises three principal tribes of Bush-Negroes who inhabit the ‘big bush’ of the deep interior.¹

The classifications made are not alone geographical, but racial as well, though the lines of racial demarcation do not follow closely those of the groupings we have just described. Thus, in this coastal area, there are Negroes, Whites, American Indians, Hindus, Javanese, Chinese. In the deep bush, with the exception of a few Carib and Arawak Indian bands, there are only the ‘Djukas.’

Still finer classifications are made, - classifications that are mirrored sharply in the attitudes held toward those placed in the various divisions. For example, all Whites are Bakra, but there are important White people, bɩgi Bakra, and there are those who are merely Bakra; Chinese, Javanese, Hindu are all Kuli (coolie), though here, too, distinctions are made, so that the Hindu is often referred to as Madrasi, and the Chinese as Sinese. Indians are Ɩ̨ŋgi, except in definite ritual possession by an Indian spirit, when reference is made to Arawaki Ɩ̨ŋgi or Krebisi Ɩ̨ŋgi, Arawak or Carib Indian. All Negroes are Nɛŋgere; but here there occurs grouping within grouping, - of color, of status, of place of habitation; and terms overlap, as for example when Negroes speak of a man as a ‘Djuka,’ meaning not a member of a Bush-Negro tribe at all, but someone, not an inhabitant of one of the three urban centers, who is skilled in the control of the supernatural.

1 In reality, ‘Djuka’ is the name of only one of these tribes, the other two being the Saramacca and the Boni. The Encyclopaedia van Nederlandsch West-Indië, (hereafter referred to as ‘Encyc.’) states, ‘Die naam Djoeka wordt te Paramaribo ten onrechte soms gebruikt voor Boschnegers in het algemeen.’

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Since the days of slavery, there has been no vast amount of crossing between the racial groups of the colony, and basically each lives its inner life without too much intimacy with, or interference from the others. In earlier times, the usual crosses between master and slaves were common, so that there is a considerable mulatto population in the coastal area. Today, with the ratio of Oriental men exceeding that of Oriental women, crosses do occur between them and women of the Negro group, but these are isolated instances, rather than the rule, and this is also true of Negro-Indian crosses. Those that occur most commonly are between Indian men and Negro women. Negroes have their names for all crosses, and, in the traditions of the colony, children born of such racial mixture enter into the Negro group.¹ A cross between a Negro and a Hindu is called kabugru, between a Negro and an American Indian, basera Ɩ̨ŋgi.² A Negro-White cross, as elsewhere, is called a mulatto, and the gradations of color follow in terminology those used in the Caribbean Islands, but if the features of a child born of a Negro-White cross are distinctly Negroid, he is called Nɛŋgere. Crossing is not looked upon by the Negroes with much favor at the present time. The attitude toward it is reflected in such a town Negro proverb as, ‘Greed makes her marry a mulatto,’ and the satirizing which accompanies racial crossing when it does occur.

The life which we describe is centered largely in the southern portion of the city of Paramaribo, where the Negro population is concentrated. This does not mean that there are no Negroes living in other parts of the city, for there is no segregation of population groups. Indeed, we must make clear at the outset that in the general idiom of the colony, the term Negro - Nɛŋgere - relates to those who are either actually of full African descent, or who in appearance give the impression of being of full African descent, and to those, who, though showing some racial mixture, choose to be identified with this Negro group by adhering to the practices which distinguish the Negro population as such from the rest of the inhabitants of the city. All reference to the beliefs of the town Negro population must, therefore, be held as excluding those mulattoes and others, who, representing varying degrees of crossing with non-Negroid stocks, participate in the culture of the Europeans of the colony in dress, manner of living, and worship. Nor must it be assumed that there are no Negroes, in the Suriname sense of the word, who do not also live according to these patterns of

1 Thus, the grandchild of one of our acquaintances, herself a Negro, was the result of a Chinese-Negro cross, but was regarded as a member of his mother's group, the Negroes. This child is the one shown, with his grandmother, in Pl. II.

2 Encyc., however, p. 400, gives the name ‘Karboeger’ to a mulatto-Negro cross: ‘De karboeger heeft dus drie vierden negerbloed.’ ‘Indiaansche karboegers’ are also mentioned, the term being used as applicable to ‘kruisingen van een indiaan en een negerin’, or vice versa.

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European life, nor that there is no marginal group of persons who, following the European form of life in externals, continue certain religious practices peculiar to the Negro group.

Again, it is to be emphasized that in singling out for description here those practices which individualize the Negro group from the rest of the population, it is not suggested that these urban Negroes have not incorporated numberless European and Indian traits into their patterns of life. For, in fact, all of the more generalized aspects of that life will tend, certainly in externals, to emphasize its European character. Where such acculturative elements impinge upon the customs described, mention is made of them.

There is yet another observation, which though implicit to the scientifically trained, would seem, nevertheless, to require explicit stating. For inferences have too frequently been drawn from descriptions of African and African-like customs of a fear ridden, superstition obsessed people who lead paranoiac lives because of the structure of their supernatural world. That such deductions are less than half truths is evident to those who study ritual not as material for cataloguing, but as something which illuminates the life and the values in life of the people investigated. The customs herein set forth fall into a rhythm of life that shows no greater pathological stresses than life lived in any Western World community. It cannot be pointed too sharply that the existence of ambitions, enmities and jealousies, and the range of antisocial expressions they seek, are not exotic facts; that the problems the Suriname Negro faces in pacifying his soul and his gods have been secularized by modern idiom into such rubrics as personality problems and the like; while it is also evident that the Western World does not wholly shun non-scientific remedies to cure diseases.