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Outside Magazine February 2003

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The Hard Way
Up the Creek (Cont.)

I'D COME TO SURNAME, a country slightly larger than the state of Georgia and sitting on the right shoulder of South America, to canoe through the homeland of the Saramaka people. Descendants of escaped slaves, the Saramaka have, for centuries, sustained a remote wilderness civilization in the country's jungle interior, along the banks of the Suriname River.

As with most Saramaka, Marvin's family history is based on fact, not folklore. Runaway slaves were called maroons, a term derived from the Spanish word cimarrón, which means "wild one" and originally referred to feral cattle. The first maroon absconded just as the slave trade was beginning, in 1502, into the mountains of Hispaniola, the island that today comprises Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Thousands followed, banding together and creating fugitive settlements.

Within an hour the dugout was sinking. Frankie sliced off a strip of his boxer shorts and plugged it into a crack in the hull.

"The wilderness setting of early New World plantations made marronage and the existence of organized maroon communities a ubiquitous reality," writes Richard Price, a leading authority on maroon culture, in his book Maroon Societies. "Throughout Afro-America, such communities stood out as an heroic challenge to white authority and as the living proof of the existence of a slave consciousness." Between 1672 and 1864, more than 50 maroon settlements were established in North America, with hundreds more in the Caribbean and Central and South America.

Suriname is home to the largest extant maroon population in the world. Like many emerging postcolonial states—Suriname received its independence from Holland in 1975—this nation of 460,000 citizens has slogged through military coups, guerrilla wars, colossal corruption, land settlements, and embry- onic parliamentary government. Of the six distinct maroon peoples living in Suriname today—the Saramaka, Kwinti, Matawai, Ndjuka, Paramaka, and Aluku—the Saramaka, 20,000 individuals living in some 70 settlements along the Suriname River, have arguably been the most successful survivors.

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