Constant new African imports produced syncretic new cultures rather than preserved African ones.

Evidence

Suriname’s laboring population, then, was constantly being revitalized biologically and, as it turns out, culturally. In a colony where the ratio of Blacks to whites became as high as 25:1 (in the eighteenth century), and whose population maintained fewer than 10 percent Creoles for the first century, where labor was concentrated on large sugar, coffee, cacao, and then cotton plantations, Price seems entirely justified in asserting that “inter-African ‘syncretism’… was almost everywhere the central process.” … We can assert with some confidence, then, that within the earliest decades of the African presence in Suriname, the core of a new language and a new religion had been developed; and the subsequent century of massive new importations from Africa apparently had the effect merely of leading to secondary elaborations. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 690

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• DEFINE: Explains inter-African syncretism as the core cultural process in Suriname.
• XREF: Connects to the earlier chapter on marronage and the genesis of creole cultures.

Related

• Lethal overwork in Suriname forced constant African importation and cultural syncretism (similarity 0.87)
• New languages and religions formed in Suriname within decades of slavery’s start (similarity 0.86)
• African culture formed a shared shield against dehumanization in the New World (similarity 0.83)
• Forced transport across the Atlantic made the colony the Africans’ new birthplace (similarity 0.82)
• Slaves’ West and Central African roots shaped New World resistance to slavery. (similarity 0.82)
• African slaves carried their full cultures and consciousness into the New World (similarity 0.81)
• Enslavement transferred complete African ontological and social systems to the Americas (similarity 0.81)
• Shared African culture, not tribal origin, is what resisted European dehumanization (similarity 0.81)
• Racial dehumanization intensified precisely as enslaved Africans assimilated colonial culture (similarity 0.80)
• Enslaved Africans carried coherent cultures into the New World, not merely labor. (similarity 0.80)
• Enslaved Africans carried intact cultural systems, not deculturated minds, into slavery (similarity 0.80)
• Enslaved Africans carried their cultures and consciousness into slavery, contradicting primitive accumulation (similarity 0.80)
• Trinidad’s African Creoles preserved the slave radical tradition through culture (similarity 0.79)
• New World Africans favored spiritual preservation over violent confrontation (similarity 0.79)
• Slaves maintained an autonomous culture and consciousness apart from their rulers (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• African culture formed a shared shield against dehumanization in the New World #contradicts (0.70)
• Shared African culture, not tribal origin, is what resisted European dehumanization #contradicts (0.70) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 396
• Enslaved Africans carried their cultures and consciousness into slavery, contradicting primitive accumulation #contradicts (0.60)
• Slave trade’s Egyptian imprint was cultural rather than biological #complicates (0.55)