Saafuten: the slave plantations of Dutch Guiana

Saafuten [Matawai language]: slavery.

Cautionary note: this chapter contains some graphic illustrations and descriptions of the realities of slavery in the times of colonial Suriname. Please proceed with discretion.

“One dikitor was sadistic and very fond of having slaves whipped, so the slaves decided to cure him of this. They made a certain 'medicine' and prepared a man with it. He then went and courted a whipping from the dikitor. The latter ordered his bassia to start the whipping. The victim urged the bassia to whip him harder because he couldn't feel a thing. Then the dikitor yelled, 'Stop, it's killing me! I feel the whip on my own back!' He later learned that his wife felt the same pain. Such was the magic of the ancestors.”

The history of the Matawai is deeply connected to that of Suriname as a plantation colony, and it's difficult to tell the story of the Matawai without first looking back to how they came to arrive in the Americas to begin with. To help set the stage, in this chapter we will focus on the history of this Dutch colony in Guiana, and the economic engine that powered its early success, namely slavery.

The first successful settlement on Surinamese soil was founded in 1650 by the Englishman Francis Willoughby, who took possession of the area in the name of the British crown. From the very beginning, plantations formed an integral part of the colonial economy as the settlers cultivated plots of land adjacent to the mouth of the rivers leading into the ocean. They initially planted sugarcane, followed later on by coffee, cotton, tobacco, and indigo.

As elsewhere in the Caribbean and South America, the European colonizers first tried to enslave the native indigenous people of Suriname to take on the heavy labor of cultivating agricultural lands in the tropics. However, the amount of available indigenous people was seen as scarce, and they were easily able to escape in the rainforest.

Consequently, they began tapping into the transatlantic Slave trade. When the Dutch started to colonize the coastlines of Brazil and the Guianas in the late 17th century in particular, an enormous amount of enslaved Africans were brought over under the administration of the Dutch West India Company.

Eventually, in 1667, the Dutch took over the Surinamese colony, and retained control from then onward until independence was declared in the 20th century, only briefly ceding sovereignty back to the British from 1799 to 1816 in the context of the Napoleonic wars.

As observed by Maroon scholar Richard Price, colonial Suriname was a plantation society par excellence. The colony was comprised of relatively large-scale estates, with roughly 80 percent of the population living on plantations until the end of the 18th century. At the height of Suriname's success in the 1700s, the plantation economy inspired "the envy of all the others in the Americas" and produced more total revenue than any other Caribbean colony.

Suriname's enormous profits came at the cost of an equally sizable force of enslaved people imported at a vertiginous rate from West Africa, however. According to Silvia de Groot, the total number of enslaved people brought to Suriname is estimated to have been between 300,000 and 350,000. One third are estimated to have been Loangas from the area between Cameroon and Angola, another third being from Ghana (known in Suriname as Kromanti), and the remainder were Mendé/Mandingo (from Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Ivory Coast), and Papa (Togo, Benin, western Nigeria).

During the sugarcane era, Suriname's plantations had a force of enslaved people that significantly outsized those of other major plantations such as in Jamaica, Virginia, and Maryland. And according to demographic statistics, the number of enslaved people in Suriname outnumbered whites no less than 25 to 1 in 1738.

To maintain control over this incredibly high number of enslaved Africans, the Dutch used a divide-and-rule strategy by ensuring that the Africans brought to Suriname were from different ethnicities, and upon arrival in the colony, would separate them as much as possible by selling the lot to a multiplicity of plantations. In spite of this, the sizable population of enslaved people caused an enormous amount of tension for the colonial society, and historians have observed that the white plantation owners in Suriname were among the most cruel and hostile in the Americas, in the context of an already harsh and exhausting plantation labor system, in order to retain control over the population of enslaved people.

The despondent conditions were infamously chronicled by the English soldier John Gabriel Stedman in his 1976 work The Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam. Stedman contrasted the natural beauty of the Surinamese landscape with the wretched conditions of the treatment of enslaved people, recounting a story where an enslaved mother was ordered by her mistress to hand over her crying baby. The mistress then threw the baby into the river, drowning it. The mother jumped into the river after her baby, whose body was recovered by fellow enslaved people. The mother later received 200 lashes for her defiant behavior. In another story, Stedman describes encountering

... a young female slave, whose only covering was a rag tied round her loins, which, like her skin, was lacerated in several places by the stroke of the whip. The crime which had been committed by this miserable victim of tyranny, was the nonperformance of a task which she was apparently unequal, for which she was sentenced to receive two hundred lashes, and to drag during some months, a chain several yards in length, one end of which was locked around her ancle, and the other was affixed a weight of at least a hundred pounds..."

The demographics of Suriname's population of enslaved people confirm these accounts, and cast an even darker shadow on the Dutch colonial history. Although some 300,000 - 350,000 enslaved people were brought to Suriname between 1668 and 1823, by the end of this period only 50,000 were remaining. By contrast, the United States is estimated to have imported roughly 427,000 enslaved people, yet in 1825 the black population was around 2 million (Price 1976). Outpacing also Jamaica and Saint-Domingue (in contemporary Haiti) in terms of wasting human life, Suriname under Dutch colonial rule holds the dubious distinction of being among the most extremely brutal and murderous plantation regimes in the Atlantic world.

As a result of the sheer amount of lives that were being consumed at the plantations of Suriname, the transatlantic trade continuously replenished the population. Throughout the first hundred years of the colony's history, more than 90 percent of the enslaved people were African born, and even in the mid-18th century, over half of the population consisted of Africans who arrived within the last ten years (Price 1976).

In 2018, the National Archives of Suriname, in partnership with the Anton de Kom University of Suriname and the Radboud University in the Netherlands, completed the digitization of 43 slave register books for the colony, with nearly 15,000 folios in total. These are now available online and fully indexed on the National Archives website  here .

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