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Outside Magazine February 2003

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The Hard Way
Up the Creek (Cont.)

WE CAMP ON THE BANKS of the river or in small villages. I set up my tent; Marvin and Frankie string their hammocks. One morning I awake at 4 a.m. to rhythmic thumping and laughter. It is a sound I haven't heard since my last journey to Africa, and it gives me enormous pleasure. I lie there listening, drifting through dreams, until dawn. When I unzip my tent I find a group of women using heavy, baseball-bat-size pestles and tree-trunk mortars to pound palm nuts into mush, which they will boil over wood fires for several days to transform into palm oil.

That afternoon, we buy three catfish from a boy fishing with a string from a listing dugout. Frankie, being a quiet bachelor, turns out to be something of a chef, acquiring onions and tomatoes and rainforest vegetables I don't recognize to produce an inspiring fish stew for dinner.

On the second evening, we paddle through a thunderstorm, a warm rain exploding the surface of the river. Marvin and Frankie just keep paddling and singing. I think it might be some ancient Afro-American river song.

"Hah!" Marvin shakes his head. "It's a Saramaka rap tune, mon."

One glassy morning I foolishly decide it is my turn to sit in the stern and steer. The dugout doglegs radically right, then left, then right again. I can't get the boat to go straight to save my life. Marvin and Frankie peal with laughter.

When we stop to rest on rock islands, Marvin tells me about the Saramaka government. The Saramaka are divided into 12 matrilineal lôs, or clans. The gaanman, the king (currently Songo Aboikoni), holds office for life, and each village is administered by a kabiten, or captain. Crimes and disputes are settled through a kuutu, an oratory governed by elaborate rules and often conducted by captains and other village elders.

Near the end of the trip, I ask Marvin if he would like to boat on, past Atjoni, and cross W. J. van Blommestein Lake.

"It is not possible," he replies flatly. "This boat would sink and we would be eaten by piranhas."

I chuckle, but Marvin is serious: "That part of Saramakaland is gone forever."

Blommestein Lake is actually a 600-square-mile reservoir created by the Afobaka hydroelectric dam, built by Alcoa and the Suriname government in the early sixties. The reservoir, one of the largest in the world, flooded roughly half of the riverine land of the Saramaka, forcing the removal of 6,000 villagers.

"What you have seen is all we have left," Marvin says.

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