Richard Price - Equatoria

Richard and Sally Price have been learning and writing about Afro-Caribbean life for thirty years. RPs most recent books include First-Time and Alabis World; SPs include Co-wives and Calabashes and Primitive Art in Civilized Places; together they have written Afro-American Arts of the Suriname Rain Forest, Two Evenings in Saramaka, and Stedmans Surinam. They have taught at Yale, Johns Hopkins, Minnesota, Stanford, Princeton, and the University of Paris, and now live in rural Martinique.

The authors wish to thank Roger Abrahams, Ken Bilby, Leah Price, Niko Price, Peter Redfield, Dan Rose, Gary Schwartz, and Baj Strobel for very helpful comments on a draft of this manuscript. Thanks also to Mimi Chicha for generous advice on the artwork.

All objects illustrated in this book (with the exception of the village founders stool from Asisi) now form part of the permanent collection of the Muse Rgional de Guyane, Cayenne. In those cases when the artists name is not mentioned in text or caption, it was not known to the Maroons with whom we discussed the objects history.

Travel guides often include practical suggestionsa light wrap for cool tropical evenings, a sundress or two for the city, a pair of comfortable walking shoes, some sunblock. The voyager through Equatoria need be equipped with only a minimum of special baggage, a few printed souvenirs from previous forays into the region.

The English word maroon derives from Spanish cimarrn, a term with Arawakan [Native American] roots that by the early 1500s had come to be used in plantation colonies throughout the Americas to designate slaves who successfully escaped from captivity. The Saramaka, today some 22,000 people, are one of six Maroon (or Bush Negro) groups in Suriname and French Guiana [the others are the Ndjuka, the Matawai, the Paramaka, the Kwinti, and the Aluku]. Their ancestors were among those Africans sold into slavery in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to work Surinames sugar plantations. They soon escaped into the dense rain forest where for nearly one hundred years they fought a war of liberation [against the Dutch]. (R. Price, Alabis World [1990], p. xiii)

In 1760 and 1762, the two largest groups of Maroons (the Ndjuka and the Saramaka) had won their independence by treaty. But the succeeding decade witnessed unexpected and lively hostilities involving newer maroon groups that lived just beyond the borders of the flourishing plantations. About 1765, the thirty-five-year-old Boni, together with his senior, Aluku, became joint leaders of the largest of these new rebel groups. (Editors Introduction and Notes, in John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative [1790/1988], pp. xxixxii, 64142)

The Boni [the French name for the present-day Alukus, a group of some 2000 Maroons] remained practically free of any direct Western influence [into the late 1950s], and their way of life centered largely on subsistence. Unfortunately the situation has greatly changed since then. Arbitrarily declared French citizens in 1970, subject to compulsory schooling and social security, and receiving government allowances, the Boni have been profoundly disrupted. (Jean Hurault, Analyse comparative [1980], p. 123)

In July 1986 an armed struggle began between the national army of Suriname and a group of rebels, the Jungle Commandos, under the leadership of Ronnie Brunswijk [a young Ndjuka Maroon]. The fighting began in eastern Suriname and the first victim of the civil war was a [Maroon] child shot dead by the army near the Maroni River. Soon the fighting spread. (Thomas Polim, Berichten van de Vluchtelingen [1988], p. 33)

With its economy shot and its politics in turmoil, Suriname now languishes. The military has not budged. The countrys insurgencies and drug trafficking continue, while nearly 10,000 Maroon refugees remain in French Guiana, uncertain of their status and fearful to repatriate until a relocation policy is defined and their safety guaranteed. What will happen next is unclear. (Gary Brana-Shute, Suriname Tries Again [1991], p. 35)

Mariposa House, the Stanford Humanities Center. A rambling Victorian structure in a setting of academic privilege. As visiting scholars, we were installed in commodious offices overlooking well-watered lawns, bright-eyed students, earnest professors, and the campus bike shop. On this spring morning, wed extracted from the bank of mailboxes in the downstairs library a letter from French Guiana (Guyane), and were facing the fact that wed have to make a decision.

Just a year earlier, at a conference in Cayenne probing the characteristically Guyanais package of Identity, Culture, and Development, we had been approached by several persons of standing in the former French colonys ruling bourgeoisie who had been granted generous amounts of government money first to plan and then to put into execution a regional anthropology museum: the Muse de lHomme Guyanais. (We recalled our involvement, as guest curators, with Santo Domingos Museo del Hombre Dominicano in the early 1980s. Is that, our colleague SWM had queried archly, the Dominican Museum of Man or the Museum of Dominican Man?) Clearly, if we were going to get involved in this thing wed need to argue for a new name, but that could come later. The question now at hand was whether we wanted to play any part in the new museum at all. Our earlier solution to ambivalent feelings had been a decision simply not (yet) to say no; now we were being asked to commit ourselves to a definite yes. Would we agree to supervise the part of the museum that would be devoted to Maroon life and material culture?