Lethal overwork in Suriname forced constant African importation and cultural syncretism

Evidence

The conditions that produced the maroon communities and ultimately the genesis of new peoples in the Guianas and Suriname were a product of a slave system in extremis. Its most important characteristic was that for African labor Suriname became the most lethal colony in the New World. As Price remarks: “The most striking feature of Suriname’s demographic history is the extraordinary cost of its slave system in human lives.” And R. D. Simons exclaimed: “[W]e have seen some plantations swallow as many as four slave complements in a period of twenty-five years.” The Dutch West Indies Companies and their successors were hard pressed to supply and resupply the colony’s need for fresh African workers. 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.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 690

Categorization

• XREF: The demographic-annihilation mechanism recalls similar accounts of the South Carolina and Caribbean slave systems that crop up in comparative slavery scholarship.
• DEEPTHINKING: Robinson’s core point here — that demographic and cultural destruction are the same process, that new culture emerges from the slave system in extremis — is a dense, paradigm-shifting observation deserving focused return.