1 History of the Dam

It was in 1954 that the colony of Suriname became officially autonomous in internal affairs, and continuing development money from the motherland ensured that Dutch politicians, scholars, and businessmen had a significant influence on Suriname’s projects for many years after that. In any case, initial plans for the dam were developed well before 1954.⁴

In 1948, the idea for the Afobaka project was launched by hydraulic engineer Prof. W.J. van Blommestein (who had not, at that time, ever set foot in Suriname but after whom the lake, or reservoir, is officially named and who once characterized it as just “a dam in the middle of the jungle”). Born and raised in the Dutch East Indies, Van Blommestein had developed plans for major dam projects in western Java, based in part on his studies of the hydroelectric system constructed by the Tennessee Valley Authority, before moving to The Hague just after Indonesian independence (Ravesteijn 2002:1–2, 9). In 1950, at the request of the Coördinatie College Suriname, he submitted his “Combinatieplan voor de Suriname-rivier,” based on 1948 KLM aerial photos of the area.⁵ This ambitious plan proposed combining the waters from several rivers with the aid of 15 dams to form a giant reservoir (Pollack 2016:154–63).

Van Blommestein’s first visit to Suriname came in 1951, when he was requested by the Suriname government to defend his plan, and his ideas about the dam and its potential for powering an alumina refinery and aluminum smelter in Paranam became the highlight of the recently established Suriname Planning Bureau’s 1952 “Ten-Year Plan for the Development of Suriname,” which stressed that the dam “would lead to the generation of 1 billion kilowatt hours of electricity per year, 90 per cent of which was intended to power … an aluminium smelter that would also be built under the Plan” (Lobach 2023a:9). The operation, locally, of a refinery to produce alumina and a smelter to produce aluminum would greatly enhance Suriname’s profits from its bauxite reserves, replacing the shipment of raw ore to the United States. At the time, (smelted) aluminum had a value eight times that of (refined) alumina, and alumina five times that of bauxite (Lobach 2023a:7). So, by Suriname’s logic of development, it could increase the value of what it shipped to the United States by a factor of 40, compared to simply shipping bauxite ore, as it was then doing. In 1954, the director of the Suriname Planning Bureau, Drs. Ir. M.H. Ekker, described the Brokopondo Plan as “certainly the largest and most daring project ever designed for Suriname, a project which, if it comes to fruition, will bring the entire economic life of our country to another level.”⁶

Various detailed economic and engineering studies, requested by the government of Suriname, had been underway since at least 1950, with reports and publications appearing throughout the decade—for example, an extensive 1952 report from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank); a 1952 preliminary report by the Société Anonyme des Grands Travaux de Marseille (discussing, among other details, whether a stone or earthen dam made more sense); a 1952 feasibility study (in Dutch and English versions) by NEDECO, an engineering firm from The Hague that was not enthusiastic about the proposal; and two 1954 reports from the Harza Engineering Company of Chicago. All except NEDECO supported the project.⁷

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Figure 1

Queen Juliana and Prince Bernhard visiting Operation Gwamba

Citation: New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 2025; 10.1163/22134360-bja10039

Photo from Walsh with Gannon 1967, following p. 208

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Simon Lobach reports that in addition, during this period, “several scientific committees were formed to study the impacts of the dam … but the research activities of these committees were effectively blocked by the Surinamese government until the dam’s construction was already a fait accompli” (Lobach 2023b:13). In fact, during the 1950s and early 1960s, there was a large number of scientific studies about the area to be flooded—hydrological, botanical, zoological, geological, and studies of timber resources—but nothing (except the work of District Commissioner Jan Michels; see below) about the people who were to be forcibly moved and their lifeways. As J.H. Westermann wrote, “technical preparations and financial-economic discussions continued while the ecological and sociological aspects were hardly discussed, if at all” (Westermann 1971:25). It is worth underlining, as Lobach pointed out, that “the many Maroon communities upstream of Brokopondo were only mentioned once in the [Ten-Year] Plan [on page 113, where] the authors stressed that the lake would create opportunities for fish farming, which could form an additional source of income for the 10,000 ‘Bush Negroes’ in the area” (Van Lier et al. 1952; Lobach 2023a:9). And in going through the 212-page set of 1950–51 Dutch archival documents preserved about Van Blommestein’s Combinatieplan (including letters and reports by Dutch and Suriname officials, scientists, and economists), I saw not a single mention of the effects of the project on the Maroons who lived in the area to be flooded.⁸

According to Saamakas I spoke with in the 1960s and 1970s, Queen Juliana, during her 1955 visit to Suriname, expressed enthusiasm for the colony’s modernization, including the dam. Then, in 1965, she and Prince Bernhard were taken out on the new lake in a dugout canoe to witness the effort to save the drowning animals. The transmigration of the 10,000 animals in this undertaking, dubbed Operation Gwamba,⁹ cost more money and received far more media coverage than the transmigration of the 6,000 human beings. When the Queen’s canoe returned to Afobaka, she was supposed to throw the master switch in the power plant of the dam to start the generators for the first time, but her canoe was delayed, and she never threw the switch (Walsh with Gannon 1967:190–91). One Dutch source suggests that the ceremonial launching of the operation of the dam was the primary reason she made the visit to Suriname (Van Nieuwenhuizen 2009:184–85), though Professor Gert Oostindie, an authority on recent Dutch royal history, told me that he doubts that it was this that prompted the royal visit (personal communication, 2024).

2 Alcoa and Suriname

Alcoa (the Aluminum Company of America) had a long history in Suriname, which began in 1915 when it first sent the elderly Civil War Confederate Colonel J.R. Gibbons, an engineer, to explore possibilities. By the end of the following year, the company had acquired all known bauxite lands in the colony and American engineers were seen everywhere in the districts (Lobach 2024:86, 92–96; Lobach & Storli 2021; Pollack 2016:22, 52, 56–64). During the early years of the twentieth century, as Suriname’s once-prosperous plantation economy fell further into ruins, Alcoa continued to buy up bauxite lands from poor peasants (at prices below US$ 2.00 per hectare). As Gibbons wrote, “the lands that contained bauxite [were] all owned by negros …, particularly persons … ignorant and superstitious” (cited in Lobach 2024:95).

Colonialism and international relations determined much of the subsequent history:

Alcoa relentlessly tried to, and in the end succeeded in, moulding [Suriname’s] bauxite legislation to fit its wishes and ideas … [Meanwhile] the Dutch Government was following a policy of accommodation to American wishes in an effort to ward off access of US companies to the oilfields in Indonesia … [while also] protecting the interests of Royal Dutch Shell in Texas against increasing pressure from the US State Department.

Pollack 2016:17

In 1929, these power plays between the Dutch and Americans ended with the Dutch keeping the Indonesian oil fields for themselves and giving the Americans free reign for bauxite in Suriname (Pollack 2016:23). As Harold Pollack concluded, “The Dutch Government chose to protect its more profitable interests elsewhere … Monopolization and outright blackmail had dominated the emergence of the bauxite industry in Suriname” (Pollack 2016:25, 46).

Fast forward to 1956, when Alcoa and the Suriname government began final negotiations that led to the Brokopondo Agreement of 1958 (“De Brokopondo-overeenkomst”), calling for the immediate implementation of the nearly 200-million-dollar project to dam the Suriname River. This agreement granted Alcoa significant tax advantages in the United States, since its investment in Suriname qualified under the terms of the Western Hemisphere Trade Corporation Act once Alcoa had set up a daughter company, Suralco (The Suriname Aluminum Company), registered in Delaware, which was the entity that officially signed the “joint venture” Brokopondo Agreement.¹⁰ Alcoa/Suralco agreed to finance, build, and maintain the massive dam and its six giant hydroelectric generators, keeping 90 percent of the electricity for its new alumina refinery and aluminum smelter at Paranam (both began operating in 1965) and sending the remaining 10 percent to provide electricity for Paramaribo. The agreement also called for Alcoa/Suralco to build a road to the capital and provided various long-term Suriname tax advantages to Alcoa/Suralco as well as (and this was especially important to Alcoa) a two-million-hectare concession to exploit for future bauxite mining.

The lengthy Brokopondo Agreement contained only one sentence about the 6,000 people living in the 43 villages that would be flooded by the dam—leaving it to the colonial government to “remove the population, the buildings and other property from the reservoir area.” This meant that Suriname had responsibility for all the costs and implementation of the “transmigratie.” (During a cocktail party, the CEO of Alcoa was overheard describing the transmigratie as “a hell of a job.”¹¹) In the end, more money was spent to support the rescue of animals trapped by the rising waters than for the whole transmigration of Maroons—nearly 6,000 Saamakas and several hundred Ndyukas who lived in Saamaka territory on the Sara Creek (Hoop 1991:11–25; Kambel 2002:39). The 271-page book on the project by the World Bank had a single mention of the inhabitants of the future reservoir area: “The reservoir area is relatively unexplored and only sparsely settled by Bush Negroes. Its preparation should cost very little since it would involve no relocation of roads or railroads, no resettlement of urban centers, no inundation of mines or other valuable property and no need to procure a right of way” (Demuth et al. 1952:207).

From the perspective of the Dutch government and Suriname’s politicians, this largest of all development projects seemed a natural stride into modernity. In 1958, the colonial government even published a pamphlet claiming that all sorts of benefits would accrue to the Saamakas as a result of the dam, and that it was really meant for the development of the interior, not primarily the coast. In Licht en kracht uit de oerwouden van Suriname (Light and power from the jungles of Suriname), published by the government’s Brokopondo Bureau (created by the Planning Bureau), the government

boasted about the improvements for the local [Saamaka] population that would result from the project: “A piece of wilderness will be taken away from them and their useless isolation will come to an end … So for them, also, the Brokopondo Project is therefore of great value.” It was promised that new, better houses would be built, new employment generated, and that the displaced population would receive compensation for lost lands and fruit trees, free distribution of food during one year, and a coop with chickens per family.

Lobach 2023a:14; Scholtens 1994:129

The brochure also mentioned, hopefully, that the lake could encourage tourism (Westermann 1971:11).

From the Suriname government’s perspective, aluminum was the country’s lifeblood. For the United States, it was equally important. During World War II, Suriname had become the world’s largest exporter of bauxite and provided two-thirds of the bauxite used for American aluminum production, building the country’s (more than 300,000) airplanes, (more than 1,000) combat ships, and electronics. (Two thousand US troops were sent to Suriname to protect the bauxite mines against sabotage and direct attack, incidentally introducing Coca-Cola and American cigarettes and beer.) Suriname bauxite was equally crucial for American industry during the Korean War.¹² By 1967, Suriname was exporting nearly 4 million tons of aluminum and ore each year—about 80 percent of all its exports—and it was the source of two-thirds of all the aluminum ore used by the United States. By 1994, alumina and aluminum accounted for 87 percent of Suriname’s exports.¹³

3 Saamakas and the Government

From the Saamaka perspective—not surprisingly—the whole Afobaka project was unthinkable, almost impossible to grasp. It defied Saamaka logic, beliefs, and historical experience.¹⁴ The government’s initial messenger, District Commissioner Jan Michels, was already a seasoned colonial hand and had a long-standing relationship with Saamaka Gaama (Paramount Chief) Agbago Aboikoni and his village captains. Born in Amsterdam in 1910, Michels had studied Indologie in Leiden and rose through the civil service to become the hoofd binnenlands bestuur (head of administration for the interior of the colony) in Suriname. He was put in charge of planning the future transmigratie as early as 1954 (Scholtens 1994:130). His 1958 mimeographed report, “Transmigratie van de Saramakkaners en Aukaners Boven Suriname” is a relatively thoughtful attempt to deal with the issue. Following his own census enumeration of each village to be flooded, his advice was that everyone should be moved south of the lake, upstream from it, which would allow them to retain a more traditional lifestyle. At least till the end of the 1950s, Michels maintained an optimistic picture of the dam and its consequences for the Saamakas.

Doctor Wim Vlaanderen, who in 1959 was sent out from the Netherlands by the Evangelische Broedergemeente (Moravian Church) to build and staff the first hospital on the upper Suriname River at Djoemoe, far above the lake, described his first chat with District Commissioner Michels, whom he called “een gezellige man” (a friendly chap):

He told me that the Suriname government would use the dam for the development of the interior. There was a lot of money available which allowed for big plans—not just for the migration of the residents [of the flooded villages] but rather for the whole district—[all Saamaka villages] would be brought to a higher level … The new villages will be larger and more beautiful than the old ones. But the villages on the Upper Suriname which will not be flooded will also profit from these developments. There will be roads, bridges, airfields, as well as many schools and stores. And as soon as the dam is up and running, every village will be connected to the electric grid.

Vlaanderen 2023:57–58

In his memoir, Dr. Vlaanderen commented “It sounded almost too good to be true.” And, of course, it was.

The Suriname government decided that the people who were flooded out would have to choose. They could move north, below the dam, into newly constructed, grid-pattern towns to be specially built for them. Or they could move upriver, above the new lake, squeezing their new villages in between already existing ones, thus creating considerable extra pressure on already scarce agricultural land. As the water rose, 4,000 people were moved below the dam and the rest above the lake. The government also held out the carrot of a job bonanza in construction work on the dam, boasting that it would bring back the boom days experienced during World War II when Americans, with the help of Saamaka laborers, constructed what later became Suriname’s international airport. Saamakas, while not believing that the great river could actually be dammed, certainly welcomed the promise of jobs. But in fact, between 1960, when construction started, and 1964, when the sluices were finally closed, an average of only 2,100 men worked on the project, most of them Saamakas from the very villages that would be flooded.¹⁵ The construction bosses were Americans, working for Alcoa.

It was only in 1959, a year after the Brokopondo Agreement to build the dam had been signed by Alcoa, that Michels decided he had to go to Gaama Agbago to inform him of what was about to happen. Some months later he persuaded the government to organize a large delegation to the gaama’s village, where the prime minister of Suriname officially informed the Saamaka people of the plan to build the dam and sink their villages. Michels (who once told me that he had the unenviable task of “selling the idea of cheap electricity for the city to jungle-dwelling Saamakas” and described it to a journalist as “the shady side of progress”¹⁶) reported that the gaama’s bitter, resigned, but astute reaction was: “This plan holds nothing for us and everything for the cityfolk … Old-time chattel slavery is now being replaced by economic slavery” (Scholtens 1994:129).

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Figure 2

Left: Michels, on the right, at the 1959 meeting [detail]. Right, Gaama Agbago Aboikoni

Citation: New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 2025; 10.1163/22134360-bja10039

Photo on left, source and photographer unknown; photo on right, R. Price, 1978

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According to Michels’s recollections about that official meeting in 1959, what truly enraged the Saamakas was that they were being presented with a fait accompli—a sentiment I often heard from Saamakas in the later 1960s as well. Remarkably, from the perspective of today’s notion of human rights, there had been no prior consultation of any kind with the Saamakas. In fact, just before the district commissioner paid a visit to Gaama Agbago Aboikoni in 1956, he was ordered by the minister of home affairs not to mention the plan. The damming of the river was to be kept secret from the Saamakas until the very last minute.¹⁷

When I spoke to Michels about his 1959 meeting with the gaama and other Saamaka dignitaries on the eve of the dam-building, he told me, in his flat, understated manner, that “Gaama Agbago and his advisors were very angry about the fact that a decision had been taken in Paramaribo to build a dam and hydroelectric generating station smack in the middle of Saamaka territory without our having consulted a single Saamaka representative.” Michels also admitted, “Making dams and moving people is spectacular, but there is also misery, believe me,” adding, “Of course, it’s not the Bush Negroes who will be getting electricity.”¹⁸ At this 1959 meeting, the Saamaka authorities insisted that they preferred all the people who were flooded out to be moved above the lake, so that they could maintain their traditional way of life, but the government completely ignored these wishes (Scholtens 1994:129).

Other accounts of the ministerial delegation’s visit to the gaama, which I took down from eyewitnesses in the late 1960s, emphasize the promises that Suriname’s government lavished on the Saamaka leaders: they immediately upped the salaries of captains and assistant captains; they promised a bonanza of new jobs; they promised that the river would become full of fish; they promised significant compensation for the material losses suffered by the residents of the villages to be flooded; and they brought as presents for the gaama 20 fancy armchairs (which still graced the gaama’s “office” in the 1980s) and four shotguns.

As for the role of Creoles (the descendants of those enslaved Afro-Surinamers who did not escape to become Maroons)—who were the main politicians in charge of the whole project—Saamakas have distrusted them since well before the landmark 1762 treaty with the Dutch crown that gave them their freedom, seeing them as allies of their ultimate enemies, the White colonists. Reciprocally, twentieth-century Creoles continued to view Saamakas and other Maroons as “primitives.” As one scholar wrote in 1979, “Deprecating stereotypes are widely foisted on Maroons by urban Creoles” (Brana-Shute 1979:119). Or, as another put it in 2007, “Indigenous Peoples and Maroons … still are perceived by urban residents as a kind of remnants of the stone age who need to be ‘developed’ or brought into the modern era” (Kambel 2007:75). Ethnic jokes about Maroons are common coin among educated Creole nationalists: “Have you heard the one about the two hunters who’d bagged nothing all day? Well, they sat down under a tree to rest, and by accident one of their guns went off. Luckily it was pointing straight up. Guess what fell out of the tree? A ‘Djuka’!” (R. Price 2011:59).

In the mid-twentieth century, when the dam was being proposed, Creole and Dutch stereotypes of Maroons repeatedly depicted them as obstacles to progress. These stereotypes stressed “Maroons’ primitivity, irrationality, laziness, childishness, and ecological wastefulness” (Lobach 2023b:21). For example, one Dutch biologist, after an expedition to Suriname’s interior, “described the century-old shifting agriculture system of the Maroons as ‘predatory agriculture’ (roofbouw) and ‘wasteful land use’ ” (Lobach 2023b:7). Lobach sums up these stereotypes:

The conviction that Maroons were useless “parasites” to the colony’s economy, while they sat on top of the country’s natural resources, caused them to be seen as obstructers of Suriname’s development … The emerging nationalist project, envisaging an autonomous country built on mineral extraction and industrialisation, perpetuated the idea that Maroons were obstructing Suriname’s development.

Lobach 2023b:8

One long document devoted to the plan to transform Suriname from an agricultural to an industrialized economy turns these stereotypes into a benefit: “In addition, the [Brokopondo] hydropower project will open up the unexplored interior, which offers the possibility to the approximately 10,000 Bosnegers living there, who at present play a very insignificant role in the Surinamese economy, to engage in socioeconomic life. If successful, this would be like an actual immigration of 10,000 souls into Suriname.”¹⁹

As late as the 1970s, a development project was drawn up that would have forcibly compressed all Maroons from traditional villages into several centrally planned new cities in various parts of the interior. It died on the drawing boards only for lack of funding. One Creole parliamentarian, responding to a question about whether this plan might not endanger Maroon culture, said:

Culture? Their culture in danger? Let me tell you something. They have no culture as such. Everyone’s always going on about culture but that’s a lot of horseshit. These folks are runaway slaves and all they’ve got in the interior is their little thatched roofs. But now they too will be able to benefit from the new Suriname!

Van Westerloo & Diepraam 1975:157

And in the summer of 1992, the head physician at the French hospital of St. Laurent (just over the border from Suriname), who had treated sick Maroons routinely for years there, described to us his shock, during a medical inspection he and a team of specialists had made to monitor the medical situation in Paramaribo, at the “utter disdain” shown by urban, educated Surinamers—including physicians and public health officials—for Maroons. He said that “[t]hey see them as the lowest of the low, as hardly human, and they firmly believe the French have been ‘spoiling’ the Maroons on their side of the river” (R. Price 2011:59–60). At the time of the transmigratie, Prime Minister Johan A. Pengel famously characterized Bosnegers as “domme, ongeschoolde mensen [stupid, uneducated people]” (Werners 1998:172).

District Commissioner Michels, for all his Dutch pleasantness, shared many of these views. (Saamakas would soon begin to refer to him as Tu-Buka-Goni—“double-barreled shotgun,” because he spoke of the transmigration out of both sides of his mouth.) Michels once remarked to me that speaking to Saamakas about Afobaka was ridiculous, saying that although he showed them films of dam projects in other countries and tried to explain what would happen, they wouldn’t believe that their river could be dammed. He said that they were like children or primitives and that his job of “selling the idea of cheap electricity to Saamakas was simply not possible.” Reminiscing about his task of informing the Saamakas that their villages would be drowned, he said: “Can you imagine anyone saying such an unreasonable thing? … The villagers couldn’t believe it—and I can’t blame them.”

Michels also played a key role in supporting the several-year-long operation to save the animals. As the secretary of the Society for the Protection of Animals in Suriname, he wrote a letter in 1964 soliciting money for the project that ended with the phrase “Time is short and the water rises” (Walsh with Gannon 1967:19–20). His proposition led to the largest single operation ever undertaken by the International Society for the Protection of Animals. The fact that Michels spearheaded both the badly botched and underfunded transmigration of Saamakas and the highly successful international animal rescue project suggests something of the priorities of the movers and shakers in Suriname at the time.

4 Closing the Sluices, Flooding the Villages

On February 1, 1964, Prime Minister Johan Pengel, Saamaka Gaama Agbago, and numerous other dignitaries attended the ceremonial closing of the dam. “Every person ate half a chicken!” I was told. The dam was festooned with celebratory firecrackers. A siren screamed. Drums were beaten. Many people—from the city as well as Saamakas—openly wept as giant cranes lowered the sluice gates, closing off the river forever.

In 2024, I spoke with elderly Captain Asadii of Piki Seei, one of the few surviving Saamakas who had worked (as a jackhammer operator) on the dam, as he reclined in his hammock. He described how, on that fateful day, Lindeman (the American construction manager) pressed and held the switch that controlled the descent of the final sluice gate, as it slowly went down, down, down. But when it got very close to the bottom, he said, Lindeman called over Gaama Agbago to push the switch for the very final descent, as the large crowd applauded. The captain then sang me a sweet rendition of the song Salamaka toonbe (see below), adding that he and the others who worked on the dam didn’t then realize they were “doing evil.”

Three months later, the first rapids were covered. After six months, the first villages went under—Watyibasu and Makambikiiki. As the waters approached, some people fled into the forest, others screamed and cried. When it reached the houses and people ran to the riverside with their belongings, they often couldn’t return to their house to get the rest. All sorts of possessions—pots, stools, clothes, obias, tools, shotguns, and more—were lost. Many people waited to leave until the very last minute. And as some of the flooded-out villagers arrived to establish new village sites above the lake—initially, 13 of these—there were tremendous fights over land.

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Figure 3

This interior door, carved about 1930 by Captain Heintje Schmidt of Ganzee, is one of the jewels of Saamaka woodcarving. District Commissioner Michels, who had it hanging on a wall in his Paramaribo office, told me that he rescued it just as the old captain was throwing it into the forest in preparation for leaving his beloved village for the last time. It is now in the Surinaams Museum.

Citation: New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 2025; 10.1163/22134360-bja10039

Photo Antonia Graeber, 1980

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In 1964, Michels took a New York Times reporter on a tour of the lake, who wrote, “Seated in a dugout canoe, and maneuvering between the treetops, Mr. Michels pointed out the village remains: the tops of coconut palms, the tank of a water tower and a church roof that floats up and down the lake through the dead trees” (Eder 1964b:43). The Prinses Juliana Zendingshospitaal—the only medical center in the whole region—was also destroyed under the lake.

Most Saamakas absolutely did not believe that the waters would flood them out until it actually happened. For them, the river was a sentient being, like a person—the river would never allow itself to be dammed … by anyone. Throughout Saamaka territory, the river, forest, gardens, and streams were highly ritualized, historicized, and meaningful places, as particular trees, bushes, boulders, streams, and other sites continued to hold enormous powers, usually related to historical events. From the varied and complex ritual “guards” hung in fruit trees to prevent theft to the disposition of protective and curative plants around houses; from the snake gods and forest spirits who share garden spaces with Saamaka men and women; and from the ancestor shrines that connect the living and the dead to the river and sea gods who share their village landing-places (and who form an intimate part of daily life), the relationship of people and their territory has always been rich, ongoing, systematic, and ever-developing. For Saamakas, their forest-and-riverine territory is their life—historically, spiritually, and materially. This is why they have reacted so strongly whenever their territory—from their perspective, guaranteed in the treaty of 1762—has been threatened by outsiders.

Michels held meeting after meeting in the soon-to-be-affected villages but had little success at convincing people that they had to plan to move. He told me in 1968: “Village captains would tell me they weren’t going anywhere—this was their land. They wouldn’t leave their houses. They would refuse to budge. It was less violence than passive resistance.” Government officials pleaded with people to leave their villages in an orderly fashion in advance of the floodwaters, bringing with them all the belongings that they could. But Saamakas waited until the last minute, believing that the waters would never arrive. Many insisted that the Whitefolks simply wanted to take over their villages.

Not knowing whom else to blame, many of the flooded villagers became convinced that Gaama Agbago had sold them out in some kind of monetary deal with the government. During the first half of the 1960s, whenever he traveled to the city, he went by plane rather than motor canoe, fearing the wrath of the lower-river villagers. And when he was in Paramaribo during that period, the government provided him with an armed bodyguard.

In 1978, in the middle of a discussion about other matters, Gaama Agbago spontaneously told me his own version:

The [1762] treaty says “from Mawasi to Atyamina [the source of the Saramacca River] and on up to the headwaters of this river [the Gaan Lio and Piki Lio, which feed into the Suriname River], that’s for us Saamakas.” But when they decided to close off the river, they didn’t tell us. They never said, “There’s this thing we’re going to do.” When they began to work [around Afobaka], I went to the government office in the city and said, “What are you doing up there?” They replied, “Well, it has to do with the bauxite we dig at Paranam. We’re going to make a machine up there [at Afobaka]. The water from the river is going to make the machine spin around.” I said, “Well, that’s our territory you’re using to make your machine turn around! How much are you going to pay us?” They answered, “Well, as for that, we’re not going to pay anything at all.” … Now, we’d already made the treaty with them where they said this land would be ours forever more. How can they take it back? … So, we argued until they said they understood. “We’ll discuss this later,” they said. Well, by the time “later” came, the Americans had already arrived. With all their heavy equipment! What could we do? They’d simply taken it away from us—our own land!

In 2007, when the Saamaka People were preparing their legal case for the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, they solicited various affidavits from witnesses to the transmigration. Here is part of what George Leidsman, born on April 6, 1929 in Ganzee (the largest of all Saamaka villages, with some 2,000 inhabitants) and who had served as a government civil servant for 30 years, offered as testimony:

I was 35 years old when the water flooded my village. I had sent my wife and my children away, but I wanted to see for myself if the water would really come. On 6 June 1964 I stepped out of my house right into the water. I had tears in my eyes. Those who stayed behind watched as the whole village was drowned, and we all wept … The government told us that it was to build a dam that would generate electricity for a bauxite refinery. They told us we would get electricity too, but we had to wait 35 years for that … Many people did not believe we would be flooded. The District Commissioner told us that it was true, that the village would be flooded and that all the villages would disappear. But he said that they would build a new village, and they would build it in such a way that we would forget our old village …

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Figure 4

Ganzee going under, 1964

Citation: New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 2025; 10.1163/22134360-bja10039

Photo Boy Lawson, Collection Wereldmuseum, coll. nr. TM-20028975

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We were not allowed to take anything with us. They said they would build everything anew. They did not even let us move the cemeteries. That is something that is really painful for us, whenever we talk about it, the old people from my village, we still cry. My father died six months before the flooding, and he was buried in the cemetery of the village. When we noticed that the water reached the cemetery, I went to look at my father’s grave and I went to tell my mother. We cried and we cried, my mother, the children and grandchildren, because we had to leave him behind under the water. That is what happened to all the people who were transmigrated. We could not take our loved ones with us. We had to leave them behind. Some of the coffins started floating on the lake and we could not even take those because by the time we heard about it, they had sunk again …

[A lawyer asked: Did you receive any compensation?] Yes, I did. They paid per family. A young couple without children received 4 Surinamese guilders (approximately US$ 4.00). Families with children received 12 guilders. My wife and I, with five children, received 12 guilders (approximately US$ 12.00) … it really felt to me like they looked down on us, that in their eyes we were not real people …

Do you know what that is like to lose the place where your navel string is buried, where the navel strings of your ancestors for many generations are buried? We still talk about it today, we still cry about it today … And then we were forced to move to a place where the land was not good. It was not fertile. And we knew this. We know what is good for us, we are forest people. We know which places are good to cut farms and plant cassava, and which places are not good.²⁰

As a Western-educated Saamaka woman summarized,

The forced relocation … has led to a crisis in the beliefs of the Maroon society. The gods and the ancestors, who are expected to protect the community, were unable to prevent these disasters. Traditional leaders who had assured their people that the water would not swallow their villages were proven wrong. Traditional medicine men and women stood helpless against forces from outside.

Vrede 2001

My fieldnotes from 1967–68 contain snippets of the chaos that still reigned in the flooded regions four years after the dam had closed. Several Saamaka men spoke disparagingly about responses to the water rising along the Sara Creek, where some Ndyukas had their villages.

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Figure 5

The church in the Ndyuka/Okanisi village of Kofikampu, on the Sara Creek, tipping over as the reservoir rises

Citation: New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 2025; 10.1163/22134360-bja10039

Photo from Pollack 2016:224; source: Suralco

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In Lebidoti, the carry-oracle Gaan Tata had made a big obia, an elaborate wicker screen designed to stop the water in its tracks. One week later the whole village was submerged. Or there was the obiama who shot a magical arrow at the water to halt it—but it just came faster. One whole group of people from the village of Kiikipandasi, I was told, were still moving up the Sara Creek little by little. They’d already moved themselves three times, directed by their Gaan Tata oracle. Their new village was now surrounded by rising waters and everyone had gone to the captain’s house at the top of the hill, the only dry place left, where Gaan Tata was still insisting that they should not move. People from another nearby village, Pisiang, who had moved further up the creek, had now sent desperate messages to the government that they wished to be moved down below the lake.²¹

One of the Saamaka men who worked at the dam construction was my late friend Tooy Alexander, a great healer and drummer, at the time in his late twenties. From 1960 to 1962, he told me, he was right in the thick of it. The end came suddenly, when a steel beam dropped seven meters, and he was unconscious from Saturday till Tuesday. So many men were dying in accidents, he said. “People drowning, machinery killing them, every sort of death you can imagine!”²² He decided to quit and went to live in the nearby Saamaka village of Balen, just below the dam.

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Figure 6

Workmen on the Afobaka dam, 1963

Citation: New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 2025; 10.1163/22134360-bja10039

Photo from Lord & Boselovic 2017, courtesy of Heinz History Center archives

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In the 1960s, soon after the dam was completed, Saamaka women far upriver were singing a song of lamentation about a husband who was off working at the dam site.²³

In Saamakatongo: “Mao lafu moo, mao lafu moo-ee, Di womi de a Lendemalio-ee.”

This translates as “I won’t laugh anymore/I won’t laugh anymore/The man [my husband] is off working at the Lendema lake” (“Lendema” was the American construction manager of the dam project. “Lendemawata” is still the Saamaka name for the giant reservoir.²⁴)

While Tooy was in Balen, Gaama Agbago came down from the Saamaka capital and lived in Balen for several months. There were repeated council meetings about damming the river, one lasting several days, that included the paramount chiefs of all the other Maroon peoples. They concluded that it wasn’t Agbago’s fault, that he couldn’t be held responsible for the dam. And the day they poured libations for Agbago, to ask the ancestors to exonerate him for the dam-building, it was Tooy who played the apintii drum. Every morning, Tooy told me, he was the one who woke up the gaama with the appropriate drum rhythms, playing his drum name, Nana-u-Kelempe, Kilintinboto-fu-Lambote.

The year after the dam was closed, a group of despairing village leaders wrote a letter to Queen Juliana, which captures some of their suffering:

To Her Majesty the Queen, from Brokopondo [District].

Let it be known:

We, Maroons of the Saamaka tribe, who have lived since the eighteenth century in the interior of Suriname … in various villages, are true-born Netherlanders under the law and, since the peace treaty signed with our forefathers on 18 September 1762, have been known as Free Bush Negroes, as free people who have their own territory etc.,

• that we have left our old villages and lands in the interest of the development of the land and people of our beloved Suriname;

• that we, some 5,000 Maroons who have been flooded out by the waters of the Brokopondo lake, have had to seek shelter elsewhere;

• that we have now been forcibly moved to places that we have not consented to;

• that we have come to the conclusion that we have suffered significant degradation in our spiritual/mental, physical, and communal lives;

• that we have suffered great losses when our houses, villages with fruit trees, churches, gardens and territory, etc., were destroyed; …

• that we wish to continue to live as free people knowing we have the right to a financial settlement for the loss of our former villages and lands; …

Faithful to the House of Orange Nassau, we seek rightful compensation for all these losses, and in the hope that our precious freedom shall not be lost …

[signed by five captains of destroyed villages, now living in transmigration villages, with a copy to the colonial governor of Suriname]²⁵

My first view of the great dam at Afobaka came in August 1966, as Sally and I ended our sweaty, bumpy, several-hour journey in the back of a truck from Paramaribo and transferred our gear, covered with red-brown bauxite dust, to a waiting Suriname government motor canoe for the several-day trip upriver to begin anthropological fieldwork. But it was only as the two Saamaka boatmen pointed the slim craft out into the artificial lake that we saw, looking back, the immensity of the construction, the broad sweep of concrete in between hundreds of meters of high packed red earth, looming out of the fetid water.

At last, we were on what Saamakas were still calling “the river,” and for the next few hours our winding, tortuous path was lined on either side with the bare grey tops of forest giants (what one observer has called “the riverbones” [Westoll 2008]), standing as skeletal sentinels in a vast space of death. As we followed the course of the twisting, ancient riverbed, far below us, the Saamaka steersman would point and call out to us the name of each submerged village, buried forever beneath the muddy waters, with its houses, shrines, cemetery, gardens, and hunting grounds, places where great battles had been fought and famous miracles effected.

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Figure 7

The Lendemawata (the lake) in 2005

Citation: New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 2025; 10.1163/22134360-bja10039

Photo Jason Rothe, from Westoll 2008:31

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After four or five hours of surreal travel, wending our way through the flat, unnatural, brown and eerie silence of the lake, amidst the walls of dead treetops, we heard a low roar, which grew louder as we approached and suddenly broke into the exuberance of the bright green forest and plunging waters of the most famous rapids on the Suriname River, Mamadan, “Mother of all Rapids.”

The river rushed at us from all sides, the foaming water coursing through numerous channels divided by giant boulders. After the boatmen poured libations on shore at the shrine for the gods of the rapids, and we spent a fitful night’s sleep on an island in the midst of this liquid plenitude, we continued upstream toward the first of the Saamaka villages that had not yet been sunk by the dam.

Handwritten notebooks from our initial stay in the Saamaka gaama’s village, far upriver, attest that during our first days there the one subject that I tried obsessively to record—and that Saamaka men were intent on teaching me—was the names (and clan affiliations) of the 43 villages that, during the course of the previous months, had been literally wiped off the map.²⁶ The colonial government’s permission for our fieldwork had specified that we neither write about nor study nor visit those Saamaka villages displaced by the hydroelectric project, in part for our own safety—the forced “transmigration” of villagers was not yet complete upon our arrival in 1966, and the threat of violence was real. When we accompanied the gaama to the city several weeks later, having achieved our goal of arranging tentative permission to return several months later to Saamaka for a two-year stay, the canoe slid down a final rapids to meet the flat waters of the lake—though the surrounding forest was still at that point as green and vibrant as ever—a couple of kilometers above what had once been Mamadan. Since our upriver journey, the greatest of all rapids had disappeared beneath Alcoa’s lake.

5 Continuing Effects

During the years after the artificial lake had risen to its present configuration, the social and economic problems of the squalid transmigration villages only increased. In the first decade after the construction of the 12 new villages below the lake, the population of the larger ones declined by some 40 percent (Hoop 1991:129). There were serious problems between the new villagers and the Canadian goldmining company that the government gave a concession to at the very same place where they’d also built a transmigration village. Indeed, these conflicts continue right into the present, including the tragedy in November 2023, that killed numerous Maroon goldminers.²⁷ One scholar concluded, “The great unhappiness among the people and the limited perspectives for the future offered by the transmigration villages have transformed them into mere half-way houses to the coast, French Guiana, and the Netherlands,” and a Saamaka schoolteacher compared the new villages, with their tiny, prefabricated houses, to “concentration camps” (Scholtens 1994:133). One American visitor, who had previously admired traditional villages upriver, commented on seeing Brownsweg, the largest transmigration village (with about 1,500 inhabitants—Westoll [2008:180] says 2,300—housing people from a number of different flooded-out villages):

Your reaction is shock. The new settlement no longer looks like a Bush Negro village … Instead of being scattered at random among the trees, [the huts] are jammed together in monotonous lines. The area is stripped of trees, and the row on row of houses bake in the tropical sun … They are clapboard houses, raised slightly from the ground on stilts, like so many corncribs. The roofs, covered with black tarpaper, soak up the heat … and turn the shacks into ovens … One look at a transmigration village, and you know you’re looking at the nation’s poor. You have the same feeling as when you drive through rows of weathered sharecropper shacks in Mississippi’s piney woods.

Walsh with Gannon 1967:51

Or, as an elderly Saamaka woman living in the transmigration village of Klaaskreek insisted to a researcher in 1995, “We suffer here like dogs” (Kambel 2002:40).

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Figure 8

Some of the 1000-plus prefabricated houses in Brownsweg, the largest transmigration village, shortly before Saamakas from various flooded-out villages were forcibly moved into them

Citation: New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 2025; 10.1163/22134360-bja10039

Photo: source and photographer unknown

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At the 2007 hearing before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Costa Rica, where I served as expert witness on behalf of the Saamakas and Sally served as interpreter for the two Saamaka witnesses, the witnesses testified movingly about the dam and its continuing effects. Captain Wazen Eduards from the large village of Piki Seei, which was far above the dam, reflected (speaking in Saamakatongo):

The laws of the coast [Suriname’s laws] do not provide protection for us. We have our laws, they have their laws. Let me give you an example. When I was a child, we lived at a very great distance from the city. Then they came and built a dam that closed off the river. All the trees, all the riches, everything was ruined above the place where they blocked the river. They didn’t even take away the trees for lumber before they built the dam and flooded the forest. When they built the dam, it flooded the villages and they moved people into areas where other people were already living, making for tremendous overcrowding. It was not only the people from the villages that were sunk who had a problem. It was also those of us who lived in villages where suddenly all these new people were brought to live. Everybody was impoverished by this. Nobody had much to eat … We tried and tried to speak with the government. They refused to deal with us because they don’t consider us to be human beings … We continue to have terrible problems. Our schools are simply not functioning. We no longer have decent health services. They built the dam to produce electricity but our villages remain without electricity. Our problems continue to get worse and worse … Our water is polluted. We and the city people, we black-skinned people, we all came over on the same ships from Africa. We are brothers, we had the same mothers and the same fathers. We should be living together as brothers but that is far from being the case.

R. Price 2011:163

And Captain Cesar Adjako, who was born and brought up in the village of Bedoti, which was sunk and destroyed by the dam, was forcibly moved while still in his twenties. He and his people moved to the new transmigration village of Kayapaati, upstream from the lake, where he resided and served as headman when he gave this testimony to the court:

The problems have certainly lasted into the present. Indeed, they are getting worse. Our whole way of life was destroyed by the flooding. When there is a development project, the idea is to make things better in the end. But exactly the opposite has happened. We have been impoverished by the dam. First, the government made us move to a different place and now they’ve started to take even that territory away from us, not to allow us to use it as we have in the past. So, first we were moved and then, on top of that, we are now not being allowed access to the new land where they put us. We didn’t come all the way to this foreign country [Costa Rica] to make trouble for Suriname. We are simply asking to be able to continue our lifestyle, the way of life that we had for hundreds of years without being impeded by foreigners coming into our midst and taking away access to our land.

R. Price 2011:168

George Leidsman observed in his 2007 affidavit:

Many people who were resettled moved to the city because they did not know how to live in the places that we were moved to. Many of them did not have an education so they could not find a job. That is why you now hear all about Maroon criminals … When the village got split up, there was no respect for the leaders anymore; our culture was destroyed and this affects all of us now and will also affect our children and our grandchildren …

In the old village, we had a collective way of living. For example, when cutting a new plot or building a new house, other people would come to help out … But everything changed after the relocation. Now you have to pay for everything. The young people do not help out unless you pay. This does not happen on the Upper Suriname River where Saamaka people and culture are strong, so I know that this is all because of what happened with the dam …

There are very few young people in the Brokopondo resettlement villages; it is really mostly old people like myself who live there now … Many of our people live in the ghettos of Paramaribo. These places are full of rats and diseases, diseases that kill their bodies and their minds. Other people spit at us and treat us as like dogs … Whenever we get together, at funerals or other gatherings, we, the people from Ganzee, we always talk about this. We talk about old Ganzee, and what we had to leave behind in order for us to become practically like beggars today. We cry because it hurts us very much.

Eddie Fonkie, head captain of all the transmigration villages in the Brokopondo district, gave his own affidavit for the Saamaka trial in 2007. Speaking about the situation 43 years after the forced migration, he stressed that

I was 24 years old when it happened and I remember it very clearly … They promised many things and told us how we would have a better life after we moved, but we still did not want to lose our land, which is our place, where our ancestors were buried and where the spirits knew us … The government built camps and sent buses or trucks to collect us to take us to the camps. Some Saamaka decided to go south to join our kin upriver because they did not want to go to the camps or to have to live too close to the city people. In the camps we were all mixed up, people from different villages and different clans were all mixed up … I can never forget what happened to us … We can no longer practice the same rituals and cultural ceremonies. These rituals can only be done in certain places and these are all now at the bottom of the reservoir … It affects all of us still today and I would say that it has really destroyed us as communities … Our communal life has been greatly damaged and we have become much more individualistic. It is like we are dying but we are still alive at the same time … We are very worried today that the spirits are angry with us and are punishing us for what happened with the dam. People get afflictions because the spirits are angry.²⁸

Dr. Peter Poole, international specialist in projects related to resource management and sustainable development, who had recently made seven field trips to Suriname, was called as an expert witness. His 2007 affidavit concluded:

It is clear that the Saamaka [who were forcibly moved] also maintain strong cultural and spiritual ties to the lands submerged by the dam. They feel a great sense of loss and pain because of the inundation of their sacred sites and burial grounds, and they are very worried about retribution by ancestral spirits …

I would also say that I was greatly impressed by how traumatic the flooding remains to the Saamaka today. They feel violated on a very fundamental level, and they speak about the flooding and their displacement with great emotion and obvious pain. They express enormous outrage that the graves of their ancestors and their sacred sites were desecrated. They are clearly deeply affected by the flooding even today and this was also true for the young people I met who were not even alive when the dam was built.²⁹

Finally, Dr. Robert Goodland, chief environmental adviser for 25 years at the World Bank, who was also called as an expert witness, noted in his 2007 affidavit, that “[i]n this case, Saamakas were impoverished so that bauxite could be made fractionally more profitable … Poor Saamaka communities subsidized the generation of power for distant city consumers and bauxite refining and smelting.” He then made an important observation about international norms: “The new World Bank Operational Policy 4.10 on Indigenous Peoples of May 2005 and the International Finance Corporation’s Performance Standards on Indigenous Peoples and on Resettlement all contain strong protections against any forcible or involuntary resettlement of indigenous peoples … Indigenous and tribal peoples’ agreement or consent is required for any resettlement [my italics].” Then he offered some observations about the continuing effects of the dam:

The tragedy is that there seems to have been little or no thought to what would happen to the people displaced by the reservoir … As most of the new villages are located away from the river and away from their traditional forest, the two mainstays of the society have been lost. Fish and forest resources were not replaced by other means of livelihood, so unemployment is very high, and quality of life very low. Displacement by the reservoir converted once dynamic and independent Maroon communities into traumatized and dysfunctional communities. The new villages have been abandoned by those youths able to obtain work in Paramaribo or elsewhere, leaving mainly elderly people in the villages … Displacement debased the once independent society into supplicants for their livelihoods.

He added: “We saw a demoralized people during our visit in 2005, 40 years after they had been displaced.” And he concluded, starkly, that “[t]he Afobaka dam can be cited as an example of how not to build a dam on both environmental and social grounds.”³⁰

6 Concluding Remarks

In 2024, during a several-week visit to Suriname, Sally and I saw evidence that the devastation and despair in the transmigration villages described by the witnesses at the 2007 hearing have only increased with time. Artisanal goldmining, drugs, violence, and other criminality is rife, and Brownsweg today more closely resembles an urban ghetto than an upriver Saamaka village. Just outside the town is the White House, originally a gas station and store near the entrance to the Brownsberg Nature Park, but now a very lively bar and whorehouse (replete with Dominicanas), every night frequented by gold diggers who work in the area. Ifna Vrede, the Saamaka who now directs the girls’ boarding school in the transmigration area below the dam, laments the continuing outmigration of youths: “They have lost their culture, their language, and the connection with us here in the district. Families broke up. In short, the community is no longer strong.”³¹ And a local women’s collective (“Tumaw” [Two Hands]), fearing that small-scale goldmining is turning their territory into “a gaping and polluted moonscape,” are seeking alternative development strategies, recently opening a small craft market and soliciting funds from NGO s, mining companies, and the government to open a “transmigration museum,” in the hope of attracting tourists.³² The prospects do not look bright (R. & S. Price 2025).

Sixty years earlier, just after the dam had closed, a woman from the village of Pempe named Waifolo composed a seketi song that was all the rage for a few years. She sang:

Salamaka toonbe-oo, Salamaka toonbe, luku,/Salamaka toonbe-ee, Salamaka toonbe-ee, gadu!/(Lendema-ee, Lendema-ee, Salamaka toonbe). Or, in English: Saamaka’s fallen, Saamaka’s fallen, look,/Saamaka’s fallen, Saamaka’s fallen, gods!/Lindeman, Lindeman, Saamaka’s fallen. (Lindeman was the American construction manager of the dam.)

Saamaka had indeed fallen, more than anything else in terms of the sovereignty that its proud and dignified people believed their ancestors had definitively won in the treaty of 1762.

For the 6,000 people whose villages were flooded by the dam 60 years ago, the effects were sudden, devastating, and enduring, depriving them of their land (which the eighteenth-century treaty guaranteed them); forcibly displacing them, without new rights to land or compensation; and subjecting them to a slew of indignities ever since. At the same time, the immediate effects on the bulk of Saamakas—who stayed in their traditional villages well upriver from the new villages—were relatively minimal. The serious degradation in the quality of life for these latter people came, rather, with the Suriname civil war of 1986–92, during which schools and other government programs were completely suspended and after which there was a gradual diminution of the authority of traditional leaders, the arrival of hordes of evangelical missionaries, U.S. Peace Corps volunteers, and, especially—after the government built the road around the lake to Atjoni—the development of mass tourism, artisanal goldmining, and Chinese (and other foreign) logging operations (R. & S. Price 2025).

For all Saamakas, the culminating moment of their history as a people had come in 1762, when, after nearly a century of warfare with the colonists, their ancestors accepted Dutch overtures for peace and signed a definitive treaty (sealed by drinking each other’s blood). The Saamakas agreed to desist from raiding coastal plantations or accepting new runaways, and in return the Dutch declared the Saamakas and their descendants free in their forest domain, far up the Suriname River. For nearly 200 years, that peaceful entente endured. Then came the government announcement—the Afobaka dam, at the very northern edge of traditional Saamaka territory as defined in the treaty, which would create an artificial lake flooding half of Saamaka territory—43 villages, home to 6,000 inhabitants. For the Saamakas, it was a clear violation of their 1762 treaty. And it in fact marked the beginning of the end of a whole way of life.

It seems clear that in the language of human rights, the construction of the Afobaka dam, including its continuing effects, fully qualifies as a crime against humanity. I leave for others to judge to what extent the guilt for this crime lies with the Netherlands and to what extent it lies with the colonial government of Suriname (and later the Republic of Suriname). But the guilt is clearly shared. Although I remain unsure as to whether this case can still be adjudicated at this late date, I would note that Human Rights Watch released a report in 2023 accusing the United States and the United Kingdom of crimes against humanity committed 60 years earlier in forcibly removing the Chagossians (predominantly descendants of enslaved plantation workers from Africa) to Mauritius and the Seychelles, where they continue to live in abject poverty, in order to build the U.S. naval base on Diego Garcia.³³ In any case, I would like to express my solidarity with the Stichting VSG and like-minded Saamakas in their continuing efforts to persuade the Republic of Suriname to honor all the requirements of the 2007 judgment of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, including the right of the Saamaka People to be awarded collective title to their traditional territory and the right to exercise considerable sovereignty over it.