1 Going “Home”

After our first overnight in Adi’s house (with its solar panels, glass windows, bathrooms, and a kitchen with gas stove, fridge, and freezer), all surrounded by heavy iron grillwork, we were eager to visit Dangogo. Adi dragged his 10-foot aluminum boat and 15 hp outboard into the water, and we set out for the 20-minute ride up the Piki Lio. As we passed by the villages of Asaubasu, Bendekonde, Palubasu, Asindoopo, and Akisiamau, with Adi expertly negotiating the rapids, we marveled that Rich had often paddled this route in our 10-foot dugout in the 1960s—not something he was about to try now.

Stepping onto the sandy landing place of Dangogo, where Sally had spent so many hours with village women, washing pots, dishes, and clothes and filling buckets of water to carry up the hill to our house, and where Rich had so often fished for piranhas, we barely recognized it. The familiar earthen stairway, more than 30 steep steps that the village captain had worked valiantly to keep free of vegetation, simply wasn’t there. Instead, Adi led us off to the side and up a gentler incline covered with grass—almost a lawn—with a couple of houses near the top. (In the other villages we visited as well, we often saw grassy areas, trimmed with gasoline-powered weed-whackers. In the 1960s–70s areas around houses were bare-packed earth, which women kept immaculate by sweeping them each morning with brooms made from twigs.) As we walked around, trying to get our bearings, we saw many houses built in an unfamiliar style from clapboard or wooden planks, with a shuttered window or two and galvanized roofing. We recognized a few “traditional” houses, though rusty galvanized metal had replaced the once ubiquitous palm-leaf roofs. Those old, abandoned structures now stood on a terrace of earth a foot or two above current village level, a witness to erosion from four decades of rain. And most of the delicately carved doorframes that had graced those houses were gone—we were told that a villager had ripped them off and sold them to tourists. We passed several recently built but unlived-in modern concrete houses constructed by men off working in (greater) Paramaribo or Guyane (French Guiana).

Soon we arrived at the neighborhood of the people we’d been closest to. Most of the houses were abandoned and collapsing, and we were told that their owners were now either dead or, in one case, living in poverty in a city slum. Eventually, we found our way to the house we had slept in while our own was being built in 1966; it was covered by rusty galvanize and abandoned, with Parbo beer crates stacked on its doorstep.

Suddenly Poi ran up. In the 1960s we had known her as a lively toddler who liked to visit us and often brought mud concoctions to her play husband, Lisati, balancing them on her head. (The frontispiece of Sally’s book about Saamaka women’s lives [S. Price 1984] shows her at 4, at 11, and then at 14, holding her first baby.) Poi ushered us into her house, its front room with gleaming pots and pans and enamel and plastic dishware, as well as a traditional basketry cassava sifter, on the walls, very much in the old style. She served us a meal of acai palm juice and cassava and filled us in on her life. She’d had six children, though several were deceased. Poi is unusual for having lived the bulk of her life in her natal village, spending little time in the city or Guyane. She used to garden far upstream at Kpokasa (a large forest camp where we’d often gone with her mother and aunts in the 1960s), and said she would return there if she had enough money to buy a paddle canoe. But since she doesn’t, she’s made her gardens nearer the village, accessible by paths through the forest. Lacking a husband, she depends on a son to clear the forest and undergrowth for her. Gifts were exchanged—Sally gave Poi a necklace she was wearing, and Poi gave Sally an embroidered skirt. They exchanged cellphone numbers and promised to stay in touch. We felt as though we’d had a touching encounter with the Saamaka life we’d once known.

(Another such reunion took place a few days later in Bofokule, just downriver from Soolan. Ozili had come frequently to Dangogo, where she had a husband, and we’d published a photo of her with her children, Akinesi and Konfa, aged two and five [S. Price & R. Price 1980:50]. The day we walked to Bofokule, there they were, all three of them. Akinesi, who told us she was born in 1964, later paid us a warm visit in Soolan, with her daughter and several grandchildren. And Konfa, now a village captain, stopped by at Adi’s to say hello almost every day.)

As we continued through the village, we came to the ritual area where we’d spent countless hours participating in divination sessions with the carry-oracle Gaantata. Gaantata’s house, though now roofed with galvanize, looked weathered but otherwise the same. In contrast, Dangogo’s main ancestor shrine, Bongootupau (established in the 1880s by the founder of the village), boasted a new concrete foundation and tiled floor. The house for the rivergod Tone looked unchanged, though the one for Vodu (snakegod) rituals that once stood beside it had disappeared after the death of its most important medium some years earlier.

Making our way down a path to our old neighborhood, we saw that our house had been replaced by another, now abandoned. Jungle foliage had taken over the house in front of it, where the gaama’s nonagenarian sister, Nai, had served as a daily source of village news and advice. During our years in Dangogo, she’d gradually shifted from suspicion of these White newcomers to becoming a friend, as close to us as anyone in the village. The whole area where we’d lived looked empty and desolate.

Directly across the river in Nyukonde (considered part of Dangogo—the two share kinship ties and ritual involvements), we were greeted by a rainbow-colored welcome sign announcing the village name. Soon we met two old friends, men now about 90—one had been Gaama Agbago’s favorite player of the apintii (“talking”) drum. Excited to see us, but frail and a bit discouraged, they told us that the priests of Dangogo’s three main ritual powers—Gaantata, Mamagadu, and Dungulali Obia—had all moved to Paramaribo or Guyane, leaving the village without spiritual guidance on either side of the river. They complained that, in any case, young people pay no attention to them anymore, that the great authority elders once had is simply gone. Before we left, an older woman we didn’t recognize rushed up to us excitedly, identifying herself as Dyam. As an 8- or 9-year-old she’d spent a lot of time with us across the river where her father lived, and served as a babysitter for Poi and her little brother when their mother was working in the Kpokasa garden camp.

At the downstream edge of the sparsely inhabited settlement (which featured several concrete city-style houses, all apparently unlived-in), Adi took us to see the large modern home belonging to a wife of a man whom we’d known as a teenager. He’d since become one of Saamaka’s most successful city entrepreneurs, establishing the first modern hotel in Paramaribo where rooms could be rented by the hour. He lives in the city but occasionally visits upriver, where his wife showed us her impressive variety of plants—almost a mini-botanical garden.

Overall, we felt disoriented by the sparsity of people on both sides of Dangogo, the disappearance of lived-in houses, the depopulation of what had once been a flourishing, active community. This had been the natal village of the last six gaamas, stretching back into the nineteenth century. Almost all middle-aged men were now either absent in Guyane or the city, though some kept their houses for occasional visits. There are few, if any, senior men to teach youths traditional skills such as building houses or canoes or to pass on knowledge of history or ritual. The central lines of cultural transmission have clearly been fractured. Our overpowering emotions on returning to “our village,” rather like Rip Van Winkle’s, were a mix of shock, nostalgia, and, above all, sadness.

Instead of reporting further on our visit day-by-day, we’ll try to summarize the main changes we saw in Saamaka, keeping in mind that long-term fieldwork would be necessary to challenge and expand these impressions. And although we did our best to absorb, sometimes with dismay, the new realities, the unexpected availability of the internet and the briefness of our stay kept us psychologically tuned in at the same time to the outside world—we stayed up one night to watch the disastrous July U.S. presidential debate on our iPhone, where we also caught some of the Euro soccer matches.

2 Transportation

Forty-five years ago, every man and every woman had a dugout canoe, about 10 feet long with extensive decorative carving, which they paddled to their gardens and to visit other villages. Paddle canoes were as ubiquitous on the river as cars are on an American highway. Today, paddle canoes are rare and usually undecorated; most of the travel (between villages and to/from the coastal region) is in larger “taxi” canoes run by men for a fee.

In the 1960s, when we went upriver in the gaama’s canoe (the fastest on the river, sporting a 35 hp outboard), the trip took three days. (Forty years earlier, by paddle canoe, it took two weeks.) Our 2024 trip from Paramaribo far upriver to Soolan took a scant six hours, three on land in a Saamaka-driven minivan on the Chinese-built road to the port of Atyoni (passing several heavy trucks that carried Chinese-cut logs toward the city, and taking detours around two of the bridges that had been broken by such trucks), then another three in a 45-foot-long canoe powered by a 150 hp outboard. The 40 or so villages (and dozens of tourist resorts) seemed to flash by as we swept up through the many rapids. Some two dozen such taxis, with boatmen who know the location of every submerged boulder along the way, make the early morning trip from the upriver villages to Atyoni every day, carrying people and goods on their way to the city; in the afternoon they carry others upstream, charging about US$ 17 per trip. (The minivans that run between Atyoni and Paramaribo charge a similar amount.) Most Saamakas, except those who live permanently on the coast, travel between the city and upriver villages frequently—both women and men. (We were told that the Atyoni road had recently been extended past the port for several kilometers to the village of Abenasitonu. How long before it extends all the way upriver?)

Each morning, motor canoes paid for by the government bring children to schools, making the return trip to their home villages in the afternoon. Some villages have a few mopeds and quads, and we saw a couple of rusting tractors and pickup trucks (brought upriver on two large canoes lashed together), though no streets or roads.

Airstrips, which were first carved out of the forest in the 1960s to ferry medical supplies and the occasional patient between the two missionary-run clinics in Saamaka territory and the city hospital, now mainly serve Dutch visitors flying in to resorts for jungle tours and vacations. These resorts, some owned by Saamakas, provide occasional employment as cooks, chambermaids, and boatmen to Saamakas who also “perform their culture,” including song and dance, in exchange for cash—see sites such as TripAdvisor. Easy access has meant that many outsiders have moved into Saamaka territory, though most have not stayed long—Chinese storekeepers, Brazilian garimpeiros, Creole and Dutch tour operators, Cuban doctors, schoolteachers of various ethnicities, and several generations of U.S. Peace Corps volunteers, as well as various Evangelical and other missionaries.

3 Communication

One of the most striking changes is the use of cellphones. The tall towers of Digicel and Telesur loom over each village complex, offering connectivity in all villages. Cellphone usage rivals that in the United States, though actual voice calls, often on WhatsApp, seem more important than social media. People are on their phones constantly, calling relatives near and far. While in the past, women would paddle for hours to visit a relative, now a quick phone call does the trick. Men working in Paramaribo or Guyane used to communicate with their wives in Saamaka by sending a tape cassette with someone who was returning to their village; now they simply make a phone call. Lovers in different villages, too, can flirt and set up rendezvous by phone. The two of us (neither one much of a social media user) now have more than 1000 Saamaka Facebook “friends” (many of whom live in Guyane or Paramaribo). We saw Saamaka women enjoying Nollywood films, dubbed into Saamakatongo or Ndyuka, on their phones, and men watching sports and music videos.

Electric power is scarce upriver, varying from village to village. At best, some have central power for a few hours in the evening. But in many villages, lack of fuel, supplied by the government, means people go months without power. A very few houses have a small solar panel, often supplying just enough power to charge a phone. During our stay, the search for a charge seemed to be a daily preoccupation for many villagers. (Those few who had a generator, and fuel, offered cellphone charging to neighbors for the equivalent of US$ 0.50.) Because Adi’s house had solar panels and batteries that provided full-time electricity (and because he offered it for free), there was a constant stream of people, mostly women, coming to charge their phones. They also charge the headlamps and LED light bars that have completely replaced the tin kerosene lamps formerly used by women and the lanterns used by men. The small Saamaka-run store in Soolan and another in Godo sell the phonecards that people buy frequently to add minutes to their accounts.

4 Depopulation, Migration, Dual Residence

Several years ago, on the basis of census records, colleagues’ data, and our own recent work in Guyane, we estimated that the world population of Saamakas was 115,500—35,000 still living in upriver river villages, 35,000 in Paramaribo and environs, 35,500 in coastal Guyane, and 10,000 in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere (R. Price 2018). We now realize that many of those whom we said were based upriver in fact spend significant time in the city, just as some of the city dwellers routinely visit their upriver villages, particularly for funerals. Many Saamakas (especially those who live in Suriname) now divide their residence, both in any given year and over several years, between city and village. But the choice of the city seems to be gaining, with those villages on the upper river emptying out faster than those in the middle and lower river. While in 1960, almost all Saamakas were based in villages along the river, today only about 30 percent still are. The others (in Guyane, Paramaribo, and elsewhere) are losing the old ways of thinking and doing, even faster than those we encountered upriver (R. Price & S. Price 2022).

Women with elementary school-age children tend to make their gardens within walking distance of the village so they can return home when they come back from school. But when their children want to continue to high school, they often move the family to the city, adapt to a life of crowded poverty (renting rooms, finding jobs, if they can, for example as cleaning women), and never move back permanently. And as older people, particularly women, become ill or frail, their daughters in the city often encourage them to move in with them, for better medical care and support. (There has been no resident doctor at the Dyuumu hospital since the civil war [1986–1992]—in the 1970s, almost all women gave birth at Dyuumu but now they are sent to the city when they’re about six months into their pregnancy.) We met few women past childbearing age who still had husbands, and government old-age pensions are minimal and being sapped by inflation.

As there is little paid work in the villages (and even captains and assistant captains get paid poorly), the pull of the city, even into the bottom of the labor market where most Saamakas find themselves, often trumps being moneyless in a village where everything is commoditized (including fish, game, and even garden produce, as well as carved items from combs to stools). And in contrast to 45 years ago, women travel almost as frequently as men to the capital and to neighboring Guyane; we met several who regularly spend a couple of months upriver and then a couple in Guyane, alternating according to family needs and crop seasons.

5 Village Layout and Architecture

Villages—once architecturally uniform, shaded by fruit trees, and dubbed “picturesque” by outsiders—have turned into a crowded jumble of diverse structures, many uninhabited and others under construction. Almost every village now greets visitors with a large welcome sign, many in English—our favorite is the 3- to 4-foot-high multicolored array of letters in front of the most populous of Saamaka villages, declaring “I ♥ G O E J A B A.” Each village now has at least one concrete landing place—a series of broad steps, some 10–12 feet wide descending into the river; and most have additional landing places of broad wooden stairs. Paths leading from the river into the village still have a palm-leaf ritual gate through which everyone (except menstruating women) must pass.

Although every village still has a few old-style Saamaka houses (the only kind that existed during our fieldwork), almost all are abandoned and deteriorating. Most homes are now built of unpainted planks, with a shuttered window or two, and many have a PVC above-ground cistern to catch rainwater off the galvanized roofs that have replaced the palm-leaf roofs of old—river water has become too polluted to drink. Galvanized roofing has three advantages: longevity, ability to catch rainwater, and “modernity,” but it turns once-cool interiors into virtual ovens. As in the past, many homes also have an open-sided shed next door, where women cook over a wood fire. Women use river landing places for washing laundry, pots, and dishware and for bathing, returning home with their burdens balanced on their heads (cushioned by a rolled-up cloth); as in the past, landings are a lively site of camaraderie, childcare, and village gossip. A minority of homes have a stove powered by gas cannisters brought from the city. And we saw a few houses with an old TV, used exclusively to play DVD s (often pornographic) when there are a rare few hours of power. We saw calabash trees in every village, though the fruits are less frequently carved as household bowls than in the past.

Each village also has a smattering (and growing number) of concrete, modern-style houses, many with iron grillwork on windows and doors. Built by men who are working in Paramaribo or Guyane, almost all are unlived in. Some have tiled outer walls, others pretentiously decorated concrete columns. Our friend Vinije Haabo once reported that his grandmother, from Piki Seei, used to say, “Building a city house in the forest is asking for trouble. Before you know, it will be a favourite spot for all the local fungi, cockroaches, bats, rats, wasps, woodlice, and other vermin that you can’t get rid of without using expensive stuff from the city” (Haabo in Meijer 2010:74). From what we saw, she doesn’t appear to have been wrong.

There are wooden outhouses with pit latrines (many unfunctional) scattered about each village. Many villagers still use chamber pots and the edge of the forest or the river for their sanitary needs.

The principle of menstrual seclusion, designed to protect local ritual powers from pollution, has been kept very much alive, though observing it has been made more comfortable. The inhospitable palm-leaf menstrual huts that once stood at the edge of the forest have been replaced by concrete buildings with at least two or three apartments boasting full-size doors and glass windows. (We were told that in each village the women’s husbands, fathers, and brothers raised the money and did the construction.) In fact, these new buildings don’t look very different from the housing built by the government for its elementary schoolteachers.

The village of Soolan (as well, surely, as others) has a large concrete-block manufacturing shed, where sand (pumped from the river floor) and gravel (from another village that pumps it from deposits on its riverfront) mixes with sacks of cement brought from the city. Concrete blocks and sand are piled around every village, wherever men intend to replace wooden houses. Village paths (like the river during the dry season) are littered with bits of crushed plastic bottles, plastic bags, beer cans, and broken glass. Fortunately, village residents, who used to go barefoot everywhere (in the village, gardens, and even hunting in the forest) have adopted the wearing of flipflops or sandals.

Many villages have a small Saamaka-run store or two. (Most of the Chinese stores that were established following the civil war closed when access to the Chinese supermarkets at Atyoni became easy and relatively inexpensive.) Selling everything from toilet paper, toothpaste, lollipops, and cookies to canned sardines, cooking oil, and cassoulet, their main sales are beer (US$ 6/liter) and cheap liquor (US$ 8 a bottle). Alcoholism, virtually unknown in Saamaka 45 years ago, has become frequent, costing the lives of several of the men who were close friends of ours. Drugs, including ecstasy and some crack cocaine, and pervasive marijuana, are found in every village we visited.

Household furnishings, such as the once handsomely carved stools that men made for their wives and carried around the village for themselves (S. Price & R. Price 2005), have given way to a much smaller number of often-uncarved or barely carved stools and, in almost every house, cheap, monobloc polypropylene chairs (the most common chairs in the world today). Similarly, calabashes, artistically carved by women and once used at every men’s meal for handwashing and drinking (and sometimes for display on the walls of women’s houses), have become much rarer, though the dozen or so we were given as gifts during our visit included some that were quite nicely carved. Today, almost all Saamakas sleep in beds rather than hammocks. (Beds would not have fit in the small, rear sleeping room of traditional Saamaka houses—there wasn’t a single one on the upper river in the 1960s.)

Men’s woodcarving, once the most celebrated feature of Saamaka culture, has largely been abandoned except for specialists—men who produce carvings for sale to tourists in Guyane where they reside for much of the year, and others who sell their wares to tourists through the museum shop at the Saamaka Museum in Piki Seei, including a group of Rasta sculptors, inspired by their natural environment, who create in a style quite distinct from traditional Saamaka carvings. The museum—a project these sculptors initiated a decade ago with considerable financial and technical support from Europe—is designed to showcase Saamaka handiwork of the sort we knew from the 1960s, presenting a collection of artifacts, model houses, historical information, and photos aimed at both tourists (whose numbers have declined since COVID) and Saamaka schoolchildren.

6 Ritual and Religion

Although we had heard that Evangelical churches, as well as Jehovah’s Witnesses and even Baha’i, had swept through the upper river villages in the late 1990s, we saw little evidence of their presence in 2024. Some converts had moved permanently to the coast. In the large complex of villages where we were based—Kampu, Soolan, Bofokule, Akwaukonde, and Gaan Seei—the single Jehovah’s Witness church (in Bofokule) now stands abandoned. And there is only one Evangelical church (in Godo); its mother church is in Paramaribo and its sister church in the long-time Christian village of Futunaakaba. Maximum attendance on Sundays is about 50, the pastor told us, but at least half are elementary school teachers and their children, none of whom are locals. There are no churches on the Piki Lio. So, the upriver villages we visited remained, from a religious perspective, largely as they’d been 45 years earlier—a couple of Roman Catholic schools and churches that had been long established (for example, in Golio and Semoisi), a long-standing Moravian church in Botopasi, and the Evangelical church in Futunaakaba. Most villages continue their traditional “animistic” practices, including ancestor worship, spirit possession, many sorts of divination and healing practices, and funeral rites that stretch over a year or more.

Rich attended the third and final day of a wata tuwe (water libation) in the village of Kampu that lasted four hours, involved about 60 people (half of them men, half women, including a dozen or so captains and assistant captains) and two ancestor shrines (one of which was in its own concrete house with tiled floor and tiled benches, with a galvanized roof). There were not only prayers and libations while pouring water; libations of rum and soft drinks were also poured. The somewhat formulaic prayers, addressed to each of the gaama of the twentieth century as well as many people whom we had known in the 1960s and 1970s, asked for success in hunting, gardening, and procreation. There was a 15-minute apintii drum recital, and finally, greasy (but tasty) chicken pieces were offered, first to the ancestors with cassava on a bed of leaves and then divided among the participants. Gaama Albert had ordered the rite after being consulted by the village captains about a 10-year-long dispute of some sort among inhabitants. At the ceremony’s end, participants crowded into the ancestor shrine, holding hands, as each captain in turn prayed for peace and prosperity in the village. Rich saw nothing that couldn’t have happened 45 years ago. (People even turned off their cellphones throughout the rites.)

There were two ongoing funerals during our stay, one in Dangogo, the other in Godo. They included most of the elements from our original visits, including singing, dance, and drumming (see R. Price & S. Price 2017:155–72), though often in truncated fashion, despite the influx of kinsmen from the city for the occasion. The joyful, communal folktale-telling sessions that were once a highlight of every funeral (R. Price & S. Price 1991) seem well on the road to disappearance—only sometimes (and in some villages) are they still told at all.

7 Education

When we arrived in Saamaka in 1965, there was a one-room Moravian elementary school at Dyuumu Mission, taught by a young university-educated Dutchman, and attended only by boys. All were promptly baptized and given Christian names, and a few learned rudimentary Dutch. There was no other school on the Piki Lio or in the large village complex from Kampu to Gaan Seei.

During our first few days in Soolan, the ten or so local schoolteachers at the government school, all young women, walked by Adi’s house twice a day, always saying “goede morgen” or “goede middag” as they passed. Most, it turned out, were Cottica Ndyuka Maroons, but one was from the Tapanahoni, and another from Coronie (western Suriname); there were also a couple of Saamakas. When we invited them over for an evening drink, they complained that because their pupils don’t want to speak Dutch, they learn very little. The teachers, who spoke basic Saamakatongo mixed with Sranantongo (the city creole), insisted that the children don’t want to learn, and that parents don’t understand education and don’t provide support. The children don’t do their homework, they said, even when it’s only ten minutes a night. They often stay up late at ceremonies or just playing, and then fall asleep in class.

Teaching upriver is clearly a hardship assignment but most of these teachers are simply not qualified to teach in the city. Several have one or two small children (some with a Saamaka father) who live with them and accompany them to their classrooms. Most live in small concrete houses near the school, others rent unused houses in the village. Their pay, even for the four MULO (junior high school) teachers, is less than US$ 3,000 a year.

We pressed the junior high school history teacher and that school’s principal about their knowledge of Saamaka history and culture. Neither was aware that there were relevant books available (in English, Dutch, and Saamakatongo). They spoke little Saamaka (communicating with us mainly in Sranantongo) and had never heard of the 2007 Saamaka case adjudicated by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. They were simply following lesson plans given to them in the city.

Because local schools are so inferior to those in the city, when mothers move to the coast with their children for further education, most Saamaka highschoolers find themselves markedly behind their peers. We were told that many girls quickly become pregnant and drop out, while many boys simply become truants and turn to petty crime and drugs or, lacking employment, find their way to the gold camps around Brownsweg.

8 Fashion and Dress

In the 1960s and 1970s, all Saamaka men wore a breechcloth and shoulder cape, sewn from city-bought trade cotton by wives or lovers. Women, who cicatrized their bodies lavishly, wore a double wrap skirt with a plain white kerchief around their waist, and went bare-breasted. On more formal occasions, men might add a neckerchief and/or calfbands. Women—especially when they were in their husband’s village—wore a small shoulder cape as well; sometimes they donned calfbands and/or stacks of aluminum ankle bands. Adolescent girls wore a koyo (pubic apron) folded over their waist tie, while children of both sexes wore only a braided string around their waist.

During our visit, we saw that men’s dress had radically changed. They all wore city-bought tee-shirts or work shirts on top of shorts or jeans, though for rituals and other formal occasions they tended to put a shoulder cape over the shirt. We saw no one wearing calfbands—they’re apparently reserved for particular rituals, as are the once-ubiquitous men’s breechcloths.

Women’s clothes show more continuity. Daily wear is still wrapskirts, always in two layers, but now they’re often made from synthetic material, sometimes in almost psychedelic colors and patterns. These are topped by waistcloths that, in contrast to the past, are made of synthetic fabrics such as rayon, brightly colored, and heavily embroidered. Because they’re much larger (3 feet square) than in the past, they’re folded over twice at the waist, making them bulky (and hot, Sally complained). These new-style waistcloths sport slogans, displayed in the center, such as “Hooi tanga/andi jaabi” (hold on strong to what you’ve got), “Na hii mati/da mati” (not every friend is a friend), “Gadu sabi/faandi mbei” (God knows why)—for a photo, see S. Price (2020:27). These skirts and waist-ties, rather than being sewn in the villages, are bought on the street in Paramaribo or Guyane, where Saamaka women specialists use sophisticated computerized Japanese machines—the Janome 500E Memory Craft Embroidery Machine, costing something over US$ 2,000, is the preferred model—to do both edge seams and the decorative sewing, largely replacing the hand sewing of the past. Some skirts also have colorful cloth decals affixed to their lower edge. (During our visit, cloth, either sewn or raw, was a common gift to us from women—we came home with an embroidered tablecloth, two women’s waist-ties, about a dozen skirts, and three men’s capes.)

Women’s aluminum ankle bands have disappeared. And young adolescent girls no longer wear koyos, instead sporting a single very short wrapskirt. The once-pervasive practice of women’s cicatrization has vanished. So, too, the multistranded beaded belts that women donned for lovemaking (and which were placed in their coffin after death). Though middle-aged and older women often go bare-breasted or simply wrap a cloth around their chest in the villages, younger ones more often wear tank tops. Women’s hairdos have become more varied than in the past, often incorporating beads in complex patterns of braids, influenced by what they see in the city and on their cellphones.

At river landing places, women taking care of household chores are still bare-breasted and the children and teenagers (both boys and girls) playing in the water mostly naked. Young children walking around the village are now often naked as well, not even sporting the once-necessary waist-ties. School kids, both boys and girls, wear jeans, shirts, and sandals or flipflops.

9 Agriculture and Other Labor

Women garden much as before, though they tend to stay closer to their village in order to take care of schoolchildren. Men use gasoline-powered chainsaws instead of axes to clear the forest for their wives; unmarried women often have to pay a man, sometimes a relative, to clear a new stretch of forest for them. Women still plant a remarkable range of crops, including many varieties of rice. But the processing of rice and cassava (and even maipa—palm nut—fat) has been mechanized. Every village has at least one gasoline- or diesel-powered rice-hulling machine, which has supplanted the large mortars and pestles of the past (except for occasional use in far-off gardens and in rituals). Women, who load their unhulled rice grains into the machine, pay the man who owns it the equivalent of US$ 30 to produce each 20-kilo bag. And there’s a similar machine for cassava: manioc roots are dumped into a funnel and the machine produces a pulp that the woman pours into a metal cylinder outfitted with a cover and a tire jack to expel the poisonous prussic acid. This replaces the old process of grating the roots and expelling the juice in a basketry squeezer, before drying and sifting the result in a basketry sieve. A basketry (or sometimes store-bought) sieve is still used before baking the cassava on a griddle over a wood fire. The process of making the much-appreciated maripa-palm cooking oil has similarly been transformed: after a woman unhusks the kernel in a small mortar and pestle, she takes it to the machine that extracts the oil, again for a price. One woman in Soolan bakes soft rolls in an outdoor oven which she sells for US$ 0.50—a couple of years ago there were six women who did this but the rising price of flour and transport has caused five to quit.

Men’s money-earning work remains mainly on the coast, in Guyane, or in the city. But backbreaking, dangerous (and not very lucrative) artisanal goldmining in small mines run by Saamakas (sometimes with migrant Brazilians) has now become the money-earning work of choice for younger men, particularly from the middle and lower river regions and the villages just below the dam, replacing the coastal wage labor of previous generations. Prostitution, previously unheard of in Saamaka, has become a feature of the goldmining regions, where criminal violence, including heavily armed Brazilian gangs, is rampant. Just outside Brownsweg is the “White House,” originally a gas station and store near the entrance to the Brownsberg Nature Park, but now a lively bar and whorehouse (replete with Dominicanas) frequented by gold diggers who work in the area.

Upriver men still hunt for (diminishing stocks of) game. One morning in Soolan, we were awakened by gunshots as a herd of wild hogs burst through the village. Within hours the meat was being offered for sale from wheelbarrows. During our earlier fieldwork, fishing with nylon nets had been banned by the gaama in order to preserve the stock, but now it’s done routinely. Larger fish that are sold by Saamakas at Atyoni for people traveling to and from the city are caught with nets in the Afobaka reservoir, which means that they contain considerable traces of mercury (from artisanal goldmining) and cyanide (from commercial mining).

10 Weakening Patriarchy

The strong patriarchy of the past, the control that men had over women’s lives, has weakened. While women were not allowed to venture beyond Saamaka territory in the 1960s, they now travel freely and often to both Paramaribo and Guyane. Men used to be the only ones who dealt with money (earning wages and buying goods in the city to bring back to their wives), but now women buy and sell goods and services on their own. And women no longer have to sew clothes for their husbands as they once did. In general, women are no longer wards of the men of their matrilineage and have become freer to make their own decisions. For some decades, women have been appointed as village captains and assistant captains. Yet men’s ritual powers continue to require the segregation of menstruating women (though now in more comfortable quarters). And men’s sexual activity remains focused on young women, leaving middle-aged and older women without husbands, and often in economic distress. Likewise, men’s strongly sexist attitudes continue (see R. Price & S. Price 2017:51–54). Despite women’s advances over the past several decades, the gap in wealth and earning power between men and women continues to be significant.

11 Government Encroachment, Deforestation, and Saamaka Resistance

The government’s first illegal incursion into Saamaka territory came when Suriname was still a colony—the construction in the 1960s of the Afobaka Dam, which flooded out 43 villages and forcibly displaced 6,000 Saamakas (R. Price 2025). And, for almost all of its postcolonial history, Suriname—the most forested country in the world (allegedly 93 percent)—has been dominated by corrupt governments that have prioritized logging, goldmining, and drug-smuggling (R. Price 2023).

In 1992, at the conclusion of the civil war, the government expanded efforts to exert control over Saamakas, building schools and minor infrastructure projects (such as creating local generator-powered electricity grids). One example underway during our visit was a project to set up eight drinking-water standpipes in Soolan and neighboring Godo to help the many villagers who do not have rainwater cisterns, which in any case are ineffective during the dry season. A Belgian multinational had been given the contract and was building a windowless concrete house outfitted with complex circuit boards, micro-filters, chemical tanks, and pumps, powered by more than a dozen solar panels. The idea is that this state-of-the-art system, designed to filter from the polluted river water everything from fecal matter to the tiniest bacteria and viruses, will be monitored 24/7 by internet linkup with sanitary engineers in Belgium. Given the physical and social environment in Soolan, we are skeptical it will survive for long. We asked the head technician if she had thought to discuss the installation with the Saamaka gaama, just across the river. “Never heard of him,” she offered, adding, “our company works for the government ministry in the city.”

Suriname’s constitution, adopted in 1987, specifies that all land that is officially untitled—and all the resources on and under it—belongs to the state, essentially making Saamakas mere guests on government lands. And in the treaty that ended the civil war, this status was reiterated when Saamakas were forced into signing a document relinquishing rights to land, minerals, and other natural resources—all of which are now claimed by the state. Soon after, the government began granting logging and mining concessions to foreign multinationals, and Saamakas found their territory invaded by Chinese, Canadian, and other multinationals for timber and gold extraction.

In 2000, in direct response to these incursions, Saamakas formed the Association of Saamaka Traditional Authorities (now known as the Stichting VSG), which quickly organized their more than 60 villages, held a series of over 120 community meetings, and petitioned the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in a case against the Republic of Suriname.

By the start of the new millennium, the government had either granted or was entertaining requests for logging concessions for almost the whole of Saamaka territory. Goldmining also contributes to rampant deforestation. The World Bank reports that mining now accounts for nearly half of the country’s public-sector revenue, and gold represents more than 80 percent of its total exports.³ For example, the massive Rosebel mine in Saamaka territory began functioning in 2004 without any consultation or consent of Saamakas—until 2022, it was owned by the Canadian multinational Iamgold, who then sold it to the Zijin Mining Group of China. At the same time, many Saamaka (and other Maroon) men scratch out a living from small-scale, illegal mining. While the industrial mines apply cyanide solution to leach gold from its ore, small-scale miners instead use mercury. Both toxins pollute waterways and cause serious health problems.

In 2007, in a climactic two-day hearing in Costa Rica before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the Saamaka People, led by the VSG, achieved a signal victory (R. Price 2011). The Court’s extensive judgment in Saramaka People v. Suriname ordered Suriname to rewrite its laws, including the constitution, both to recognize Maroon and Indigenous groups as legal personalities and to permit them to own and control property communally. The Court ordered the state to grant the Saamaka People collective title to their traditional lands as well as considerable sovereignty over that territory and its resources—a legal precedent that the Court ruled would henceforth apply to all Maroons and Indigenous peoples in the Americas. That judgment also recognized the Saamakas and other Maroons of Suriname as “tribal peoples” as defined in the International Labour Organization’s Convention 169, known as the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention. This rendered Maroons equivalent to Indigenous peoples in the international legal system, including the rights guaranteed by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. And the Court ordered Suriname to establish a US$ 675,000 community development fund for the benefit of the Saamaka People.

Now, nearly two decades later, other than setting up a modest community development fund, the government has still not taken steps to implement a single one of the orders in the Saramaka People decision. Just before the 2023 New Year celebrations in the village of Piki Seei, Headcaptain Wazen Eduards, who has led the struggle of the Saamaka Maroons since the beginning, summed up the current situation: “There is no momentum in this matter. The Saamaka people don’t understand why the central government is taking so long. Logging concessions are still being handed out in Saamaka territory.”⁴

Indeed, in 2025, Suriname still retains the shameful distinction of being, as the Forest Peoples Programme put it in 1998, “the only state in the western hemisphere in which Indigenous Peoples and Maroons live that does not in some way legally recognize their rights to own their ancestral territories.”⁵ The state continues to prioritize what the government calls the interests of the total development of the country—which increasingly means the private interests of government officials and their cronies.

So, what did we learn on our 2024 visit that adds to this discouraging history?

First, we had two audiences with Gaama Albert Aboikoni, whom we had known for many years under his Saamaka name of Adelimo. After the death of Gaama Agbago Aboikoni in 1989, two other matrilineal kinsmen held the office of gaama, most recently Albert’s older brother Belifon. Albert differs from his predecessors in being well schooled, speaking Dutch, and having served in the National Assembly. But as with his predecessor Belifon, his right to hold the office has been continuously contested, both by many of his own close kinsmen in Dangogo and by supporters of a claimant from the Nasi clan in the Middle River region. Both of these threats to his power had, in the months just prior to our visit, diminished somewhat—in the Dangogo case because his rival and many of his allies remain in Guyane, and in the Nasi case because a recent attempt by a large group of supporters to persuade the city government to recognize their man failed. Weaker in his authority than his predecessors, Albert nonetheless tries to fulfill his role as paramount chief today. We paid him a courtesy visit the morning after our arrival; several days later, at his request, we spent four hours with him in private conversation.

After incidents of violence in the nearby Saamaka capital of Asindoopo, Albert had built his house at Dyuumu Mission, near the hospital, where a (now abandoned) government police post had been established, and that’s where we visited him. He told us that he visits his office in Asindoopo on weekends to meet with captains and assistant captains from along the river and to conduct rituals. (During an earlier visit to Asindoopo, we had peeked into his empty office. Instead of the stately wicker armchairs that had graced the raised area where Gaama Agbago held court in the 1960s, there were stacks of cheap plastic chairs, and the photos of the Dutch royal family had been replaced by several of Suriname’s ministers and presidents. What had once been the lively and populous capital village of Saamaka seemed largely abandoned.)

Albert, 62 at the time of our visit, has little of the dignity of earlier gaamas. After recounting his life history at length and telling us the highly charged First-Time story of the avenging spirit that helped his brother Belifon become gaama, he shared his current dream—a vague and impractical plan to unite the leaders of Maroon and Indigenous communities, along with those in former plantation areas, as a sort of “Black Man’s Coalition,” in response to the recent “apology” (and possibility of reparations) announced by the Dutch king for the nation’s sin of slavery. We discussed the legally questionable Volkstribunaal (people’s court) that he established in 2022 to sort out internal problems, from land rights to crimes. And when we pressed him, he defended his 2023 decision to formally disallow the VSG from speaking on behalf of the Saamaka People, asserting that only he, as gaama, has that right.

Albert ended our visit complaining about the way he was treated as gaama. Traditional rules prevented him from hunting, fishing, or clearing gardens for his wives, since his subjects were supposed to share with him fish and game from any major catch or kill, and to clear gardens on his behalf. But in fact they never did. So he was left to buy whatever fish and game he could and was in no position to hand out gifts to others, as previous gaamas had.

Our more useful political encounter took place later, when we spent a couple of days with the leaders of the VSG, who are actively working to protect Saamaka territory from government and multinational incursions. They had invited us to a tourist resort in Tutubuka, where they were holding a training session for members. Their practice is largely to ignore Gaama Albert and to continue their struggle on behalf of the Saamaka People quite publicly.

We learned that Palmera Hout and its sister company Palmera Wood—subsidiaries of the Saragreen Group (registered in Singapore but apparently owned by Malaysians)—are now the primary concession holders in Saamaka territory, still in the process of extending their active logging road across from Atyoni toward Ndyuka territory, bringing an average of eight heavy logging trucks a day across the river on a Saamaka-owned ferry, and having already constructed a logging road deep into Matawai Maroon territory. (Aerial photos of the illegal road toward Ndyuka show massive piles of logs next to the road and the devastation left by illegal gold miners who have been working all along the road as well.) Palmera’s websites report that 90 percent of their exports go to China and India and detail their various concessions, their newly integrated timber operation (sawmills, kiln drying, moulding, warehousing, logistics, downstreaming, sales, and marketing) located at Marshall Kreek (Matyaukiiki) in Saamaka territory, their Suriname staff of some 450 employees, and their new large break-bulk export ship and smaller vessels for ship-to-ship operations.⁶

As of 2024, the Suriname government has granted a total of 1.1 million acres of concessions on Saamaka land—fully 32 percent of Saamaka territory—according to the International Land Coalition (Radwin 2024). During our visit, Hugo Jabini, the Saamaka attorney who, with Headcaptain Wazen of Piki Seei, had organized the struggle that culminated in the VSG’s victory before the Inter-American Court in 2007, seemed particularly exercised about recent concessions granted to Palmera, to Western Paragon (a company registered in Hong Kong), and to multinationals Fuerte Juntos and Nuestra Tierra, all in Saamaka territory (Ramirez Gomez & Bourgoin 2024:17, 23).⁷

We learned that the government is also routinely granting forest concessions to individual Saamaka villages, intended for local use, but that some village captains (severely underpaid by the government) have permitted foreign companies to harvest their logs in exchange for bribes. (The number of village captains has significantly increased during the past 45 years and appointments are now often decided by political parties in the city—Piki Seei, for example, already has ten captains, many currently living and working on the coast.)

One document posted on the Web by the government details the remarkable number of concessions it had granted to various companies and individuals in Saamaka territory as of 2020.⁸ An article on environmental crime in Suriname claimed that Suriname’s illegal timber exports in 2017 totaled more than US$ 12 million (Laan 2021). It seems clear to us that government corruption and haphazard monitoring and record-keeping render any estimate of the amounts of deforestation caused by multinational timber companies—and also by illegal, artisanal goldmining, which is also significant—speculative at most.

Hugo, our host in Tutubuka, filled us in on the most recent activities of the VSG. Articles about their struggle had been published that very week in De Ware Tijd, Suriname’s main newspaper,⁹ and also by Reuters (which appeared in many countries) and others (Kuipers 2024; Radwin 2024). On July 3, the VSG had presented a petition to the government, signed by 4,500 people, regarding the destruction of their forested territory. An excellent booklet had recently been published giving details and maps about current destruction by multinationals and the VSG’s work of resistance (Ramirez Gomez & Bourgoin 2024). And the evening before our arrival in Tutubuka, the VSG had staged a loud and successful protest rally, led by Saamaka women, that blocked the Atyoni Road to publicize their fight against Palmera Hout—Hugo played us a YouTube video of the event. He also showed us aerial photos of roads under construction illegally, running from behind the village of Semoisi to Dangogo on the east side of the river and from behind Daume to Kampu on the west. It does look like these roads are designed to hook up, one day, with those closer to the city, making the farthest upriver villages only a day’s drive away. With a laugh, he showed us on an aerial photo that the recently built road, that leads from the Atyoni Road all the way to the Matawai Maroon villages on the Saramacca River, zigzags back and forth through the forest rather than running straight. The Chinese roadbuilders, he explained, scouted out the most desired stands of trees before bringing in the bulldozers, because the standard deal is for the road builders to be allowed to harvest all trees within one kilometer on either side of any road they build.

Hugo also shared a photocopy of a particularly damning six-page Memorandum of Understanding, signed in October 2022 by Gaama Albert and the director of Palmera Hout, granting the timber company broad rights to conduct forestry operations and road building on Saamaka lands. We were assured, but of course could not confirm, that the gaama had US$ 100,000—some said twice that amount—deposited in his personal bank account in return for this agreement.

Accompanied by Captain Stiefen Petrusi, now chairman of the VSG, as well as three university-educated Saamaka assistants (one of whom is Hugo’s daughter), Hugo explained their immediate legal strategy. They are currently bringing three cases before domestic courts in Suriname. All involve details of the legality of the concessions that the government has granted in Saamaka territory. But even more important, last fall the VSG petitioned the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to give them a hearing about suspending the concessions that have been granted illegally since 2007, asking the Court to give Suriname six months either to comply or risk a fine of US$ 1 million per day, and either to clean up the damage they have effected or pay an additional fine of US$ 10 million. In addition, Hugo continues to build international relations for the VSG and now has partnerships with a number of institutions, including the World Resources Institute, the International Land Coalition, Tropenbos, the Rights and Resources Initiative, and many others, including its old partner, the Forest Peoples Programme. Between September and November 2024, he attended Climate Week NYC, the FLARE conference in Rome, COP16 (the United Nations Biodiversity conference) in Cali, Colombia, and the IPBES conference in Montreal.

The training sessions for VSG members were run by four or five city women from a consultancy firm who organized role-playing games and other activities to teach such concepts as Ubuntu, objectivity, and leadership. Although we found some of it silly, the sessions seemed to help build a sense of solidarity among the 35–40 enthusiastic participants, including captains and assistant captains from villages up and down the river, some of whom were carrying copies of Fesiten (R. Price 2013).

12 Half-Full or Half-Empty?

The one thing that most impressed us about the persistence of the Saamaka life we had once known involved language and sociability. We found the ubiquitous verbal exchanges that so indelibly marked traditional Saamaka life—the love of words, of banter and chatting—to be as alive as ever. And we could hardly believe how little the language itself had changed. Linguistically (vocabulary, grammar, turns of phrase), it was almost as if we had stepped right into an upriver village of the 1960s and 1970s. Of course, Saamaka minivan drivers and other Saamakas who live in the city exhibit more influence from Sranantongo and Dutch, and French loanwords have crept into the Saamakatongo spoken in Guyane. But our overall sense in the villages along the river was that the joy of speech and sociability was as vibrant as ever.

On the other hand, our trip bore witness to just how many aspects of life from the previous era had changed. Brazilian anthropologist Rogério Brittes, who conducted research in the Christian Saamaka village of Botopasi from 2011 to 2013, described how during the “traditional” funeral of Gaama Belifon Aboikoni, instead of men going far upriver for the traditional week of intense hunting to provide game and fish for the thousands of expected visitors, a large quantity of frozen supermarket chicken was simply brought upriver from the city. He wrote, dryly:

There is tourism, including luxury hotels, all along the Upper Suriname River; almost every village has at least one store which sells imported food and other products; … almost all villages have generators that provide [a few hours daily of] electricity; some have durotanks that store rainwater for periods of drought … But the idea of progress is always on the horizon. There is a strong desire for more progress/modernization. As a twenty-something man remarked to me, “It’s going to become like the city—it may take a hundred years, perhaps I won’t see it, but this is going to turn into the city.”

Brittes 2015:319

Similarly, Vinije Haabo—an educated Saamaka living in the Netherlands—was asked by an interviewer about the future of Saamakas currently living in traditional upriver villages. His prediction was that:

In twenty years’ time there will hardly be any original inhabitants left in the Surinamese interior. Multiple mixed social groups will live there … Chinese, Brazilians, and other foreigners … who are only there to extract the raw materials and leave as soon as possible … I expect that there’ll be an exodus [of Saamakas and other traditional forest dwellers] and we’ll see ghettos in the big cities just like in Africa and [elsewhere in] South America.

Haabo in Meijer 2010

Vinije’s expectations match some of the Suriname government’s proposals, though these ebb and flow as different political parties take power. One such plan, still being considered, includes a road that runs through the heart of both Saamaka and Ndyuka territory and connects with the Brazilian national highway system—some plans call for a railroad as well (Van Dijck 2013).

Such projects would make the villages (and forest) in Saamaka and Ndyuka territory easily accessible to tourists, land speculators, miners, loggers, and other outsiders. Based on available information, we now believe that the intention of successive governments is to steamroller the rights of Maroons and Indigenous people before the Inter-American Court or anyone else really takes notice, and to effectively empty the forest of its current inhabitants in order to permit economic development that benefits the state and those in power. As Hugo complained to a reporter for De Ware Tijd during our visit, “The way things are going now, Suriname’s interior is being made almost unlivable … And then [when Saamakas move to the city] we are forced to live in deplorable conditions in neighborhoods like Ephraimzegen and Sunny Point. Now that the rainy season has arrived, the president should drive around these neighborhoods and see how people literally live in the mud.”¹⁰ Saamakas told us bluntly that living in these Paramaribo ghettos was “hell.” A Dutch anthropologist visiting Sunny Point in 2024 noted that amenities such as running water and electricity were very rare and reported witnessing a traffic accident in which “a man lay half dead with his moped in a deep ditch and had to wait an hour for an ambulance.”¹¹ (For reports by an American anthropologist who lived for months in that neighborhood, see Strange [2021].)

We conclude that the strong Saamaka political solidarity, led by the VSG, that lasted into the early years of the new millennium and that fueled their victory before the Inter-American Court, has now largely degenerated into an each-man-for-himself ethic that has spread almost like a disease from the city. Since the 1980 coup d’état, Suriname has operated as either a dictatorship (from the 1980s into the 1990s) or an authoritarian “democracy” (narcocracy?) where corruption, banditry, patronage, and nepotism rule political life. Many Saamakas, including many of their leaders, now seem to be following the example of their city brothers in putting venal self-interest first. Party politics, with all its corruption, has spread from the city to the riverine world.

During our visit, we often asked ourselves whether the unmitigated pride that Saamakas once had in First-Time values, in their own way of life, was slipping away. We wondered whether a bleak new day had in fact dawned and whether the ideological principles that had stood at the foundation of Saamaka life for three centuries were finally being leached of their meaning.

Can Hugo and his VSG, or Gaama Albert and his Volkstribunaal, change that and turn back the clock?¹² Can “merdonisation” be held back, or at least effected with greater Saamaka input? We foresee an uphill fight.

13 Our Last Hurrah

We spent our final couple of days on the outskirts of the tiny Saamaka (and Ndyuka) village of Haarlem, next to the Saramacca River, some twenty miles from Paramaribo (which we hesitated to visit for reasons of personal safety, given previous death threats from the military). It’s far enough from the capital and sufficiently unpopulated to lack both cellphone service and a paved road. But there are several large, modern houses that we were told belong to Saamaka drug dealers who live in the Netherlands.

We also visited the small village of Santigoon a few times, just down the road. Like Haarlem, it dates from the late-nineteenth-century move of Maroon men toward the coast for forestry work, and seems a halfway house between upriver Saamaka villages and the ghettos of the city like Sunny Point. Both are located by the (Saramacca) river, so a man can hunt and fish and use the river for a boat—conceptually, the river remains important to every Saamaka. These two places are also “villages” in terms of social life, with people—even when in dispute with one another, as often happens today—personally knowing the other residents, many of whom are kinfolk. People in both places are mixed Saamaka and Ndyuka, with part of Santigoon even being affiliated with the Matawai gaama rather than the Saamaka one. Recently established Evangelical churches complicate the mix. Haarlem and Santigoon people speak either Saamaka or Ndyuka as their first language but all can communicate in both. Those who are at least partly educated also speak Dutch and everyone speaks Sranantongo. Many have jobs closer to the city and there are buses that provide transport; some people have cars. We saw considerable alcoholism and drug use in both places, rarely passing two or three adults sitting together, men or women, without a bottle of beer or cheap liqor between them, almost like the stereotype of an American Indian reservation. We also saw both men and women strung out on drugs wandering the road near Haarlem. Overall, we felt considerably less enthusiastic about the conditions in these places than have some other recent researchers (see, for example, Campbell 2020:76–79). But these Maroon outposts still remain a healthy breadth away from Sunny Point and other Paramaribo shantytowns.

It was in Haarlem and the even smaller nearby settlement of Maho that, in the late 1800s, a remarkable Saamaka man named Kodyi from far up the Suriname River discovered (or invented) three major elements of Saamaka religion—Mamagadu, Dungulali Obia, and the cult of Wenti Gadu (R. Price 2008:9–22, 133–45, 277–86). In 1901, he moved to Guyane, becoming the first captain of the thriving village of Tampaki on the Oyapock River, where at its height in the 1920s, some 300 Saamaka men and their local Creole wives and children resided. Close by the riverbank, we visited the tomb of Kodyi’s son, known as Commandant Kodyi, who after his father’s death in 1923 served as captain of all the Saamakas in Guyane until his own death in 1972.

Haarlem is now divided between traditional Saamakas and a group, mainly Ndyukas, that moved there in the past few years from just-upstream Totikampu, who are born-again Christians. An Evangelical woman had died six weeks before our visit and had just been buried. We arrived during what these Evangelicals practiced of the traditional Saamaka limba uwii ceremony, the last stage of every Saamaka funeral. When Rich walked into the village to buy a phone card, he was confronted by a group of 10 or 12 visibly drunk men in their 20s, near a landing place strewn with empty bottles of beer and whiskey, just a few paces from Commandant Kodyi’s tomb. His notes from that evening report:

Suddenly, one of the youths, a strong, strapping guy who I later learned was Saamaka, came up to me, violently pulled me to him, and held me tight. With his face 3 inches from mine, spitting as he shouted in Ndyuka and Sranantongo mixed with Dutch, “Your voorouders [ancestors] enslaved my voorouders!” I replied in Saamaka “Not true!” But he insisted, “WHITEMAN! You did it!” as he grabbed my nose and twisted it painfully. I managed to shove him away, muttering that my voorouders were Russian, not Dutch. Quickly changing tone, he asked politely, “Do you know Putin?” When I said yes, he dropped to one knee, put his hands together as if in prayer, looked up at me and, almost angelically, declared, “That’s wonderful! That’s good!” Meanwhile some of the other drunk bystanders, including one woman, were calling out, “For Heaven’s sake, leave the man alone!” I was able to walk on, a bit shaken, without further incident.

We’d bet that Commandant Kodyi, the epitome of a dignified traditional Saamaka man, was turning over in his white tiled grave.