The Middle Passage Part 9

I had a little provincial excitement on my first morning, when I was awakened by a military band. The small procession of white and black soldiers in white, and black policemen in chocolate, pa.s.sed three times in the street below. The streets never offered anything like that again. In fact, very little happens in the streets of Paramaribo after midday. Because of the heat offices and shops open at seven in the morning and close for the day at half past one. As a result, everyone goes to bed early, and throughout the morning people are to be seen eating in offices.

A roof garden had been opened on the new Radio Apintie building. It was a club, Corly said; but as a foreigner I would be admitted without any trouble. There was no trouble. We were welcomed by the barman, who had no other customers and was glad of our company. We looked over the silent city. At the back of most private houses, grand and not so grand, there were whole ranges of ancillary buildings: the big house and tenants, in one yard: a relic of slavery, which was abolished here only in 1863.

'What,' Corly asked, 'do the Surinamers do when they are doing nothing?'

In Georgetown I had longed for the liveliness of Port of Spain. Now I longed for Georgetown, and the people of Paramaribo told me I didn't know what dullness was: I should go across the border to French Guiana.

The C.I.D. Man. I had met the Inspector of the C.I.D. Special Branch in one of the fine new banks where I was disadvantageously changing my British West Indian dollars for guilders. He invited me to visit him at headquarters, and when I did so I found him in a small white office which was full of newspapers from various West Indian territories. The Inspector read these newspapers diligently. His concern was the security of Surinam and it was his duty to study political trends in neighbouring territories. He was going to British Guiana to 'observe' the elections.

Below the shuttered afternoon calm, however, pa.s.sions were engaged. A fortnight before, an 'advisory council for cultural cooperation between the countries of the Netherlands Kingdom', had been set up with the aim, in Surinam, of promoting 'interest in and a knowledge of Western culture, especially in its Dutch manifestations'. The Nationalists had responded vigorously; and their four-page manifesto, issued while I was there, contained their denunciations and resolutions, together with the text of a radio talk by Dr Jan Voorhoeve. It is typical of the fairness and urbanity of the Dutch-inspired administration (which has produced the only incorruptible police force in the Western Hemisphere) that the Nationalists should have access to a radio station; and not surprising that Dr Voorhoeve is himself a Dutchman, a member, moreover, of the Netherlands Bible Society. Voorhoeve's intelligent, temperate talk was especially interesting for its a.n.a.lysis of the colonial society.

A colony is a strange sort of society, a society without an elite ... The leaders come from the motherland, are people with another culture ... The colonial cultural ideal has p.r.o.nounced bad consequences for the individual. It is in fact an unattainable ideal ... A few exceptional people ... come to great achievements, but thereby lose their nationality ... And what goes for them does not go for ten thousand others who must remain stuck in a soulless imitation, never achieving anything of their own. They learn to despise their own, but get nothing in its place. So, after the war there were many in Surinam who thought themselves far above the ordinary people because they had been able to a.s.similate the Dutch language and the Dutch culture. Sometimes they wrote a pretty little poem a la Kloos, or painted a pretty little picture, or played a Mozart sonata not without skill; but they were not capable of any true cultural achievement. When this new generation was able after the war to go to Holland in greater numbers ... they discovered their cultural emptiness with a shock. They came into contact with the great world, the community of nations, and stood there with empty hands. They did not have their own songs; they hardly had Mozart. They did not have their own literature; they only had Kloos. They had nothing and were worthless elements in the life of nations. What once was reason for pride a 'Surinam is the twelfth province of Holland' a was now reason for shame and disgrace.

Controversy at this level could scarcely become public in the British West Indies. True, there is talk about West Indian culture, but this is ingenuous where it is not political, and is rooted in the colonial att.i.tude which rejects as barbarous all that does not issue from the white mother country. That a colonial society might be one without an elite is too frightening even to be perceived. One reason for this British West Indian pa.s.sivity is that the British have never attempted to turn their colonials into Englishmen. They have in fact been irritated by the a.s.sumption, made so easily by the Dutch or French West Indian, that equal opportunities existed in the mother country. In their empire the British were 'Europeans', and the West Indian conception of the mother country has caused amus.e.m.e.nt, dismay and alarm in England. The Dutch have latterly encouraged Surinamers to think that they could become Dutchmen; and I was told of a club in Amsterdam where, over their genever, these Surinamer Dutch speak with regret of the loss of Indonesia. The paradox is that Dutch idealism is leading to rejection, while out of British cynicism has grown a reasonably easy relationship between colonials and metropolitans.

The Dutch have offered a.s.similation but not made it obligatory. Their tolerance and understanding of alien cultures is greater than the British, and the very reverse of the French arrogance which makes the French West Indian islands insupportable for all but the francophile. And one cannot help feeling it unfair that the Dutch should have their own cultural offerings spurned by their former colony. Surinam has come out of Dutch rule as the only truly cosmopolitan territory in the West Indian region. The cosmopolitanism of Trinidad is now fundamentally no more than a matter of race; in Surinam diverse cultures, modified but still distinct, exist side by side. The Indians speak Hindi still; the Javanese live, a little bemused, in their own world, longing in this flat unlovely land for the mountains of Java; the Dutch exist in their self-sufficient Dutchness, the Creoles in their urban Surinam Dutchness; in the forest, along the rivers, the bush-Negroes have re-created Africa.

Despite all the talk of culture, however, Surinamers have little idea of the diversity and richness of their own country. My recurring exclamations at the Javanese costume made my Creole friends laugh. The Creoles know only Europe; they have made no attempt to get to know the Javanese or the Indians and it is only recently, under the Nationalist stimulus, that they have tried to understand the bush-Negroes. One Nationalist even suggested that the existence of Javanese and Indian culture in Surinam was a barrier to the development of a national culture! This pointed to the confusion and the unexpected racial emotions that lie at the back of the Nationalist agitation. The cultural problem in Surinam is mainly a problem for the Negro; it is only he who has rejected his past, all that attaches him to Africa.

For the Negro of the islands Africa is no more than a word, an emotion. For the Surinamer Africa is almost in his backyard. Beside the rivers the bush-Negroes have maintained their racial purity, their African arts of carving, singing and dancing, and, above all, their pride. Rediscovery was not hard.

At Home. The minister, big and black and bluff, played bush-Negro songs on the record-player in the greenheart-floored drawing room of his fine new minister's house. 'You wouldn't have heard these songs in a drawing room a few years ago,' he said. Afterwards, as if emphasizing the new era, he told jokes in the local language, which is talkie-talkie for the irreverent, negerengels a Negro English a for the correct, and Surinam for the nationalist. Later he took the two other ministers, of different races, to the bar in the corner of the room for a political confabulation. While this was going on the three wives made little jokes about politics and the ways of politicians.

The Nationalists hope to replace the Dutch language by Negro English; and Mr Eersel, who has done much work on the language, explained the possibilities to me in his Volkslecturing office. I put Mr Eersel in his forties; he was grave and very gentle, with one of those sculptured Negro faces in which every feature appears to have been separately cast, so that one studies the face feature by feature. He said that Dutch was not properly understood or spoken by the majority of Surinamers, while everyone understood Negro English. They had already compiled a dictionary of Negro English; and the language was growing: they made up new words in conversation every day. I said that the adoption of this language would mean that every important book in the world would have to be translated: did they have the resources? They would manage. But what about the writers? Was it fair to ask them to write in a language spoken by only a quarter million people? That was no problem, Mr Eersel said; if they were good they would be translated. Was this language capable of subtlety? Was it capable of poetry? Mr Eersel asked me to test him. From a faulty memory I wrote: They flee from me that some time did me seek

With naked foot stalking in my chamber

I have seen them gentle, mild and meek

That now do scorn to remember

That they have taken bread from my hand.

He at once translated: Den fre gwe f'mi, d'e mek' mi soekoe so,

Nanga soso foetoe waka n'in' mi kamra.

Mi si den gendri, safri,

Di kosi now, f'no sabi

Fa den ben nian na mi anoe.

My memory had mutilated and simplified Wyatt's simple lines and Mr Eersel had simplified them further, but there was no denying the sweetness and rhythm of the language. I would have liked to see how it would handle something more abstract, but my memory failed me altogether.

I know no Dutch and relish it for its improbability, its air of recent and arbitrary manufacture. Oost woost thoos boost, you utter, or sounds like that, and you've said, 'East west, home's best'. While English breeds dialects that are recognizably English and scarcely modify the standard language, Dutch, because of its difficulty or improbability, breeds new and separate languages which very soon destroy Dutch. There is the kitchen Dutch of South Africa, the Papiamento of the Netherlands Antilles, the negerengels of Surinam. A pa.s.sion for bad grammar is one of the singular features of regional pride in Dutch territories. The Surinam district of Nickerie, which is noted for its independent spirit, has a cyclostyled newspaper called Wie for Wie. The paper is written, no doubt impeccably, in Dutch; but its name, which is simply ungrammatical dialect English a 'we for we' a proclaims the dialect as an exclusive possession.

The importance of English in Surinam dialect is puzzling until one remembers that British Guiana is next door a in Nickerie they even play cricket a and that Surinam was British until 1667. It is in fact the English left behind three hundred years ago, in the minds of the slaves, which is the basis of Surinam Negro English. And this is the true wonder. Though Trinidad was Spanish until 1797 and thereafter, with immigration from the French islands, French-speaking for three-quarters of a century, Spanish in Trinidad is dead and French survives only in a few phrases and constructions. In Surinam, however, after three hundred years, a form of English survives. At first the English element in Mr Eersel's translation seems negligible; but this is largely the effect of corrupt p.r.o.nunciation.

Ah dee day day we. This, improbably, is nearly all English, and from English-speaking, sophisticated Trinidad. Unscrambled: I did there there, oui: I did find myself there (to there, to find oneself, to be), yes: I was there. Considering the English the Surinam slaves must have spoken in 1667, and considering the p.r.o.nunciation of the time in England, it is remarkable that so many words are still recognizable. We can tell how the language had developed a hundred years later, in the 1770s, from Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam.

In one of the minor actions of the war a military detachment was cut to pieces in the forest by the rebellious slaves, who, following the custom of the time, began cutting off the heads of the dead soldiers. One soldier was only pretending to be dead, however; and before his turn came, the head-cutter put away his cutla.s.s, saying, 'Sonde go sleeby, caba mekewe liby den tara dogo lay tamara. a The sun is going to sleep. We must leave these other dogs till tomorrow.' During the night the soldier escaped. Though the sentence has been twice reported, first by the Dutch soldier and then by Stedman, it needs only to be spoken quickly to be recognized as English, English in the mouth of a West African.

You no sabi waar she iss? Dutch sounds so made up that at times it brings on a light-headedness in which you feel that anything said in a Dutch accent would be understood. In a restaurant in Arnhem I once found myself, with perfect seriousness, speaking pure gibberish to a waitress who continued misleadingly to smile. And something like this happened when I went to call on Theresia one afternoon. A woman from one of the tenements in the backyard (relic of slavery, I remembered) told me Theresia was out. Improvising an accent, the words coming from I know not where, I asked, 'You no sabi waar she iss?' 'Ik weet niet waar ze is,' the woman replied in careful Dutch, and tossed her head. 'Ik spreek geen talkie-talkie, mijnheer. I do not speak talkie-talkie, sir.' So I hadn't spoken gibberish; I had spoken negerengels.

It may be smart for ministers and others to speak negerengels, but for the proletariat, to whom it comes naturally, it remains a degradation. Until recently, according to Dr Voorhoeve, children whose mothers caught them speaking negerengels were made to wash out their mouths.

Sixty miles south of Paramaribo, at a place called Brokopondo, an American aluminium company is building a hydro-electric station for an aluminium smelting plant. There is more in the project for the company than for Surinam, but it is regarded as part of the country's development, and the Information Office laid on a tour in a large American motor-car of the 'estate' type.

At an important hotel we picked up an important Negro official from Aruba, and his photographer. In a dusty palm-lined street, at a pension less imposing than mine, we picked up Alberto. Alberto was an Italian magazine photographer who was making a whirlwind tour of South America. I had read in the Georgetown newspapers of his arrival in British Guiana a few days before I left that country; and his departure, I believe, preceded mine. Now he was in Surinam for a few days, on his way to French Guiana; he was hoping to reach Rio in time for the Carnival. Alberto was slender, of medium height, and his movements were of Italian 'elegance '. He had thick wavy brown hair, which he combed continually, a thick moustache in a plump reddish face, and busy eyebrows over large bright eyes. He was in his early twenties but a the moustache perhaps, and his journalist's self-possession a he looked at least thirty-five. His voice was hoa.r.s.e.

We were settling down for the long journey when we stopped at a middle-cla.s.s suburban housing development and three women ran happily out of a house towards the car. They were coming with us; and Alberto, the Aruban photographer and I were made to leave our comfortable middle seats and sit cramped in the back, facing the road. There were no compensations. One of the women was Brazilian, fat, with ugly white tights and an ugly white-and-yellow straw hat fastened with innumerable hairgrips to untidy brown hair. One was Dutch and young and ponderously girlish. One was tall and grave, married, older than the other two and slightly motherly towards them; she too was Dutch.

As soon as we started off the women burst into some incomprehensible song. We stared resentfully at the road. Asphalt gave way to dirt, and soon we were on the red road through the forest. We didn't see the forest; we saw only red dust. It blew into our faces and we turned up the gla.s.s. Red dust slid down the window, staining it, and presently little view-obstructing dust-drifts and dust-banks had formed, which we all three tried to clear by continually banging on the window with our palms, a discordant accompaniment to the songs at our backs. Fine dust had been coming through the rubber-insulated crevices and settling on us so gently that we didn't feel it. We didn't look powdered; we looked dyed, and the dye was getting deeper. The two younger women were now attempting close harmony. Whenever they failed they broke into girlish giggles.

In spite of all our pleas the women had their windows turned up to protect themselves from the dust created by the occasional pa.s.sing car. We stifled. Alberto lost his fresh, brushed look of the morning. Dust reddened his neglected hair. He ceased to talk of his travels (' 'Aiti was something disgusting') and sat hunched in his corner. 'I am suffering,' he said, his hoa.r.s.e voice fruity with anguish. I thought he wanted the car stopped and was too embarra.s.sed to ask. But at that moment the fat woman in the straw hat started on a Portuguese song; and Alberto, turning his eyes slowly to one side and frowning, the dust flaking off his forehead, cried out, 'Goodness, I'm suffering!'

A drink at the Brokopondo guest house refreshed us. Alberto recovered his journalist's energy and ruthlessness. He was full of questions and requests. Could he cross the river? Were there bush-Negroes in the neighbourhood? Could he be taken to a bush-Negro village? And while the man from the Information Office broke off a few needles from the Honduras pine in the garden of the guest house and offered them to the Aruban official a the Aruban photographer snapping away a and myself, to smell, Alberto was scrambling here, there and everywhere, taking photographs. Once I saw him far below on one of the rocks in the wide shallow river.

When he came back to us we drove on to the dam. On the river bank the fat woman stepped into some mud and lost her shoe. She uttered girlish cries of discomfiture. Alberto gave her a look of annoyed contempt and was off, up the steep mound, moving briskly and well for all his Italian elegance and hair-combing. 'No photographs!' the man from the Information Office cried. 'It is forbidden.' Alberto didn't hear; he had disappeared. When we saw him again he was at the far end of the site, squatting, rising, a tiny figure moving rapidly in short steps, knees close together, legs working from the knees down.

Two bush-Negroes, purple-black and shining and naked except for red loincloths, came up in a canoe and tried to sell us a watermelon. I hadn't seen any bush-Negroes before, but these were familiar: I had seen them on innumerable postcards in Paramaribo.

We waited in the shade of the huge new bridge for Alberto. At last he came, and was told of the bush-Negroes. 'But I want to see bush-Negroes,' he said, peeved. And the words became a refrain: 'Can't you take me to see bush-Negroes? I want to see bush-Negroes. Is that a bush-Negro?'

Back at the guest house, we both had showers before lunch, which was eaten rapidly. The fat woman with the straw hat ate mounds of potatoes. Conversation became general. Introductions were made a the Aruban photographer clicking away a and professions revealed.

The Dutch girl, still energetically girlish, said she had twelve children.

'Twelve children,' Alberto said sympathetically, refusing to see the joke. 'That's something dreadful.'

The girl tried again. 'I know a writer,' she said. 'In Rio.'

She scored. Alberto, pa.s.sionate for helpful South American names and addresses, softened. He took out his notebook. 'Is he nice?'

'He is fifty.'

Alberto lost his temper. 'I cannot understand you,' he said, putting away his notebook. 'I ask you whether 'e is nice and you tell me 'e is fifty.'

The Aruban photographer photographed the Aruban official, who was now relaxed and picking his teeth, his dark gla.s.ses reflecting the wild landscape of forest, rivers and rocks.

After lunch Alberto had his wish. We went to a bush-Negro village. It was in a clearing off the main road, a short dusty street with neat weatherboard boxes on either side, not at all what we had expected: no carved doors, no sign of the African-style handicrafts we had read about, only glimpses of radios in dim interiors, sewing-machines and one or two well-kept bicycles. The man from the Information Office reminded us that the village was near a modern project; the men worked on this project and wore proper clothes. But there were naked children rolling in the dust and the women had their b.r.e.a.s.t.s uncovered, pendulous things like squashed pawpaws. Alberto started clicking away. The women fled, smiling, into their boxes. The Aruban official looked about him with benevolence and was luckier. He had no camera, and a guilder persuaded a woman to do a dance with a dog behind her house. At the approach of Alberto and myself, non-paying visitors, she stopped.

'I must get a picture of these bush-Negroes,' Alberto said. But he was unable or unwilling to pay. We walked between the houses, women scattering before us, naked b.r.e.a.s.t.s swinging and flapping. 'That girl is completely idiot. Is he nice? 'E is fifty. Is completely idiot. Shh!'

Carefully he approached a woman at a sewing-machine. She took up her sewing and disappeared.

He rejoined me. Then he was off again, camera at the ready, his high fluffy hair bobbing with his quick little steps. This time he was more successful. I saw him enter a hut. Just then the girls bounded up. The Dutch girl gave a shriek, ran into the hut after Alberto, and Alberto instantly emerged, intensely irritated.

'G.o.d, I am suffering! But 'ow I am suffering!'

We started back, Alberto disconsolate. 'Goodness, I wanted a picture of these bush-Negroes.' And all the way to Paramaribo he worked off his irritation in talk. 'Did you 'ear that man at the dam? No photographs. But why? It is a completely idiot rule, and when something is so completely idiot the Italian says all right, but let me try to come to some arrangement to enable me to take photographs. I thank goodness I am Italian. Why are we going so slow? The road is empty. Why are we going so slow?'

'The speed limit,' the Aruban photographer said. 'And this is a government car.'

'Is an idiot reason. In Italy we would say because it is a government car-' He broke off and commanded, 'Stop!' He jumped out and photographed a bauxite crusher. 'I wish I 'ad more time,' he said, returning. 'Then I would take good photographs. 'Ello!'

A slip of paper had been put into his hand by the Dutch girl, who was staring ahead and smiling. The paper carried a schoolgirl's drawing of a woman's profile.

'What do I do with this?' he asked. 'I was just 'olding the 'and here and in comes this letter. What do I do?' He stuck it in his red-striped sock and whispered, 'Is this an insult?'

'G.o.d,' he said later, ' 'Ow I 'ave suffered today!'

Little boy lost. The West African calls himself a black man. For some West Indians, continually striving to make black white, this is too blunt: it suggests that evolution is impossible. Euphemisms vary from territory to territory, and in Surinam I was told of the description of a Negro boy which appeared in the Lost and Found column of a newspaper: een donkerkleurige jongen met kroes haar, a dark-complexioned boy with curly hair.

The leader of the Nationalists and possible the most discussed person in Surinam is Eduard Bruma, a Negro lawyer in his middle thirties. He is dark-brown, of medium height and build, with an unusually striking face: his brow puckers easily above the nose-bridge and he has high eyebrows that slope steeply outwards over deep-set intense eyes. When he drives around Paramaribo in his monster green Chevrolet boys and men wave, and there is a hint of conspiracy in their greeting. For though the Nationalist agitation is carried on openly, the Nationalists have as yet no official positions and the movement has a touch of the underground. I once saw a middle-aged woman pluck Eersel's sleeve in the street and whisper congratulations.

It was in Amsterdam, a city known to every educated Surinamer, that the Nationalist movement started. Bruma himself spent seven years there. He enjoyed his stay and claims that the movement has no basis in racial resentment and is not directed against any racial group. Not all of Bruma's supporters, who are mainly Negro, would agree; nor would the Dutch in Surinam. And it is hard to see how racial feeling can be avoided, for the cultural problem that exercises Bruma and his followers is essentially a problem for the Negro in the New World. In Trinidad and British Guiana there is no widespread realization that such a problem exists, and it is to the credit of the Nationalists in Surinam that they have made it a public issue without going to the extremes of the back-to-Africa Ras Tafarians in Jamaica or the Black Muslims of the United States. There is much in their thought, however, to frighten the respectable and excite the cry for the jehad. Their view of Christianity is historical: they see it as much a part of European culture as the Dutch language.

But how can Christianity a for the West Indian more than a faith: an achievement a be replaced? By the adoption of the survivals of African religion found among the bush-Negroes? By the adoption of Islam? Religions cannot be replaced by decree any more than languages can. Negro English is no subst.i.tute for a developed language. The bush-Negroes are interesting and in some respects admirable, but between these forest-dwellers and the sophisticated Continental Surinamer there can be no deep sympathy. It would appear then either that the solution to this problem has to be violent and extreme, or that there is no solution at all. And perhaps no solution is necessary, and all that is required is a profound awareness that countries and cultures exist beyond the white mother country, beyond Europe and America. To create this awareness is not easy. For just as Christianity is more fervently adhered to in Jamaica, say, than in London, so the provincialism of the mother country finds a more extreme expression in the West Indian colony: to the respectable black West Indian Italy is as foreign and ridiculous as j.a.pan or Nigeria.

Whether the Nationalists can create this awareness in Surinam without slipping into a futile black racism is problematical. That they have seen the problem so sharply is due, I feel, however paradoxically, to their Dutch inheritance and above all to their possession of the Dutch language. English belongs to all who speak it. Dutch belongs so clearly to the Dutch that the colonial who speaks it as his mother tongue cannot fail to be struck by the oddity of a situation which for the British West Indian is natural and proper. Speaking a language little understood by the outside world, the Dutch have become great linguists. So have the Surinamers. English, Dutch, French, negerengels: these are the languages spoken by the educated Surinamer; and to this list the Indian adds Hindi, the Javanese Javanese. Having access to so many worlds, the Surinamer is not as colonial-provincial as the British West Indian and is able to have a more objective view of his own situation.

A growing language. I showed Corly Eersel's translation of the lines by Wyatt and I could see that in spite of his differences with the Nationalists he was impressed. He read the translation again. 'Gendri,' he said at last. 'What is that word? I don't know what that word means. It has been in existence for only twenty-four hours.'

Not far from the international airport at Zanderij there is a bush-Negro village called Berlin. Corly, Theresia and I drove there one Sat.u.r.day afternoon. Not to see the bush-Negroes, who, living so close to the capital, are citified and corrupted and not genuine forest-dwellers. We went there for the black-water creek, these forest creeks, black water in snow-white sand, being the Surinamer's subst.i.tute for the bathing beaches which the muddy South American coast does not provide. We paddled in the lily-spotted creek, sunlight striking through the trees, turning the Coca-Cola water (the Surinamer's description) into wine. Theresia, more beautiful than Rembrandt's model, completed the Rembrandt picture.

Later we walked through the village, which had nothing to mark it as a bush-Negro village. Wooden houses in the Dutch style lined the dirt road, here and there were hedges; and there was even a refreshment shack with one or two advertis.e.m.e.nts. Two children rolled about in the dusty road, naked; but everyone else was clothed. Towards the end of the street we heard drums. Theresia was at once aroused. She ran into a yard and made inquiries in negerengels; she got offended replies in Dutch and came back to us, saying what sounded like 'Hit iss in de bos.' So we made for the bos.

The bush began just at the end of the street. And there, beyond a short wavering path through high gra.s.s, were the dancers, in a small shed roofed with corrugated iron. Corly was nervous; he said he heard people saying, 'Who are these bakra (whites, foreigners) coming to see? What do they want?' But the men and women who were not dancing were friendly enough, and we sat on a bench outside the shed and watched. Whisky was pa.s.sed around from spectators to dancers and back; beer, too, in gla.s.ses. The drummers, stick-beaters and tin-beaters sat at one end of the shed and before them, as before an altar, the dancers performed, each person absorbed in his individual dance: one man doing something like a cossack dance, another squatting and dancing only on his toes, an old woman, her eyes closed, going through stylized s.e.xual motions. The dancers' dusty feet were continually brushed with wet twigs by the spectators.

So far each dancer had been keeping to his corner of the shed, but now one thick-set man began throwing himself to the ground, rolling and groaning. I thought this was done for our benefit, but the sweat that broke out on his face was real enough. He rolled to where an old woman in a blue frock was sitting. She got up to give him room, and gave us a friendly smile. 'I don't like this,' Corly said, his face blank with distaste and alarm. Two men shammed a fight with nothing of play in their expression or manner. Corly wanted us to leave, but Theresia, tapping her feet to the drumming, was unwilling.

And then two striking figures appeared, a woman and a man, their faces and bodies chalked white. The woman wore a blue sarilike garment which left her shoulders bare, the man a red sarong and a red cap. They scarcely danced. In the midst of vigour they proclaimed their feebleness, and from time to time the man had to be supported by one of the dancers. His chalked face held no emotion; and he constantly chalked himself, sometimes pa.s.sing the chalk to the woman. The dance had become intimate, and I began to feel as anxious as Corly. I remembered that we were close to the city, that the airport was near ('Surinam is a member of the jet age,' the government handout said), but I was glad when, to Theresia's annoyance, Corly insisted that we should leave. As we stepped out of the bush a drunk old woman embraced Corly and a man embraced Theresia. And Corly, who throughout had been worried that he might be offered drinks, was made to drink a small gla.s.s of whisky.

'If I had stayed half an hour longer,' Corly said, 'I would have got heart failure.'

Corly was born in Paramaribo, just forty minutes away, but he could tell me nothing of the dance we had just seen; nor could Theresia. To both of them it was as new as it was to me. I had not thought Corly's agitation absurd, in spite of the nearness of the airport and the city, and the authority I consulted* did not offer complete rea.s.surance. If my observation was just and if I read right, the dance was 'spiritualist': Messages to the living may also be conveyed through a person who has become possessed in the course of dancing to the drums. The possessed conveys the message by singing. Apparently a person may feel that his G.o.d wishes him to convey some message to the living and in consequence feels a restlessness. This prompts him first to wash and then daub himself with white clay, white being the colour of the ancestors ... On the auspicious day the person bedaubs himself with more white clay, and perhaps some of the partic.i.p.ants in the ceremony too, and then prepares to go into a trance so that the G.o.d can speak through him. The rhythm of the drum helps to bring on possession.

Slavery was abolished in Surinam in 1863; so someone might still be alive who was born a slave. It was hard not to think of slavery, and not only because of the reminders on every side of big house and slave quarters. So many things in these West Indian territories, I now began to see, speak of slavery. There is slavery in the vegetation. In the sugarcane, brought by Columbus on that second voyage when, to Queen Isabella's fury, he proposed the enslavement of the Amerindians. In the breadfruit, cheap slave food, three hundred trees of which were taken to St Vincent by Captain Bligh in 1793 and sold for a thousand pounds, four years after a similar venture had been frustrated by the Bounty mutiny. And just as in the barren British Guiana savannah lands a clump of cashew trees marks the site of an Amerindian village, so in Jamaica a clump of star-apple trees marks the site of a slave provision ground. (Trinidad, with only forty years of slavery, has proportionately far fewer star-apple trees than Jamaica.) There is slavery in the food, in the saltfish still beloved by the islanders. Slavery in the absence of family life, in the laughter in the cinema at films of German concentration camps, in the fondness for terms of racial abuse, in the physical brutality of strong to weak: nowhere in the world are children beaten as savagely as in the West Indies.

West Indians are frightened and ashamed of the past. They know about Christophe and L'Ouverture in Haiti and the Maroons in Jamaica; but they believe that elsewhere slavery was a settled condition, pa.s.sively accepted through more than two centuries. It is not widely known that in the eighteenth century slave revolts in the Caribbean were as frequent and violent as hurricanes, and that many were defeated only by the treachery of 'faithful' slaves. In Trinidad almost nothing is known of the bush-Negroes of Surinam, though their story might promote a recovery of racial pride.

Negro slaves had always been escaping into the bush in Surinam-in the smaller islands there was no such possibility a but the movement did not become general until 1667, in the interval between the British withdrawal and the Dutch occupation. The movement continued throughout the next hundred years, brutality leading to escape, ma.s.sacres, reprisals, increased brutality. 'It is felt as a terror', an English traveller wrote as late as 1807, 'to menace a Negro with selling him to a Dutchman', and Stedman's Narrative shows why. 'The colony of Surinam', Stedman wrote, 'is reeking and dyed with the blood of African negroes', and this was no figure of speech. The first object Stedman saw on landing (and sketched for his book) 'damped' his pleasure at being in the tropics. It was: ... a young female slave whose only covering was a rag tied round her loins, which, like her skin, was lacerated in several places by the stroke of the whip. The crime which had been committed by this miserable victim of tyranny, was the nonperformance of a task to which she was apparently unequal, for which she was sentenced to receive 200 lashes, and to drag, during some months, a chain several yards in length, one end of which was locked round her ankle, and to the other was affixed a weight of at least 100 pounds ... I took a draft of the unhappy sufferer.

The lacerated slave with the chain, the artist with his pad: it is a curious scene. One wonders whether there was any local comment. Stedman reports none, and perhaps there was only that amused surprise which the native feels at the exclamations of the tourist. Torture was a commonplace in Surinam and never concealed. Stedman later spoke and gave a few coins to a slave who was chained for life in a furnace room; he sketched a slave who was hung alive by the ribs from an iron hook and left to die.

In the early nineteenth century the book of 'dear old Stedman' a the phrase is Kingsley's a was popular in England for its natural history and for the story of Stedman's romance with the mulatto slave-girl Joanna, which Kingsley thought 'one of the sweetest idylls in the English tongue'. And this popularity, this talk of idylls, is a puzzle; not only because eighteenth-century refinement falls flat today, particularly in someone like Stedman, to whom it does not come easily; but because Stedman's story is terrifying and in its nauseous catalogue of atrocities resembles accounts of German concentration camps during the last war. Stedman was no abolitionist a he went out to Surinam to help put down the slave rebellion of 1773 a and his work cannot be dismissed as propaganda. He tried hard to display the fine sensibility which was admired at the time a he apologizes, for instance, to his 'delicate readers' for speaking of lice a and he cannot be accused of sensationalism. Yet one needs a strong stomach to read Stedman today. The Surinam he describes is like one vast concentration camp, with the difference that visitors were welcome to look round and make notes and sketches. The slave-owner had less on his conscience than the conentration camp commandant: the world was divided into black and white, Christian and heathen. White might conceivably be expected to show some scruples in his relations with black; but the Christian had no such inhibition in his relations with the heathen. In fairness to the Dutch, however, the earlier quotation should be given whole: 'It is felt as a terror to menace a Negro with selling him to a Dutchman. The Dutchman, however, has a like terror in reserve, and threatens to sell his slave to a free negro.'

The runaway slaves fought with a spirit which could not be matched by the Dutch mercenaries or the 'faithful' slaves (in Stedman's regiment there were the Negroes Okera and Gowsary, who ten years before had betrayed Atta, the leader of the Berbice slave rebellion) and they were never defeated. Towards the end of the eighteenth century hostilities ceased, and the independence of the bush-Negroes was tacitly recognized. In the forest the bush-Negro reorganized his life on the African pattern; tribes were formed, tribal territories demarcated. The bush-Negro never married outside his tribe or race and was proud of his pure African descent: it marked him as a descendant of free men. Settled along the rivers, he developed his outstanding river skills. Isolated from the world, he remembered his African skills of carving, song and dance; he remembered his African religions. He developed his language; in the far interior it became Africanized. And fifty years ago he developed a script.

In 1916 Dr C. Bonne, a physician at the Government Hospital at Paramaribo, saw one of his patients, a Bush Negro by the name of Abena, of the Aucaner or Djuka tribe, writing strange characters. Abena was quite willing to explain their significance and said that they were originated by another member of his tribe, called Afaka. Bonne came to know this Afaka, who repeatedly explained to him and to Father Morssink (a Catholic missionary) how at the time of Halley's Comet he had a dream in which a Person appeared with a sheet of paper in his hand, ordering him to devise a script for his people. The first should bring the second, the second the third; and so on. Following this vision, he devised a sign every two or three days until in the end he had about 56 characters by which he could write down his thoughts. In 1917 Bonne made a trip to the Djuka country, and by means of the new script could send messages, which were understood and acted upon.*

Though Afaka was disowned by the Granman (the etymology is obvious) of his tribe for daring to produce a script without permission, and d.a.m.ned as 'na wissi-wa.s.si man' a that wishy-washy man a his script survived; in 1958 Mr Gonggrijp sent and received messages in it. Afaka Atumisi died in July 1918. On his grave was found a cross with an epitaph in his script: 'Masa Atumisi fu da Santa Katoliki Kerki', Atumisi was one of the Holy Catholic Church. This was not strictly true; but it was his Christian leanings which had made him suspect to the bush-Negro chiefs. Now here is the mystery: thirty-four of Afaka's signs are found in the script of the Vai tribe of Liberia. Is this an example of racial memory? Or did Afaka have a touch of the Moses of Thomas Mann's mischievous tale, The Tables of the Law?

An invitation to coffee. I telephoned Corly and invited him to have coffee with me at my pension. 'Yes,' he said, 'I will come to have some coffee with you. I will come at 7.30. We shall drink coffee until eight. But what shall we talk about after eight? The minister? Did you like your talk with the minister? Was it intellectually profitable? No? That is not the way I like it. We must fill our evening substantially. Let me see. Yes. Bruma. We shall talk about Bruma.' But at this stage I thought it better to withdraw the invitation.