Suriname’s judiciary sanctioned extreme torture of slaves as official colonial practice

Evidence

Others were whipped to death with what was called the Spaanse bok (Spanish whip), or quartered alive, burned alive, decapitated, impaled with a meathook, or broken on scaffolds. Price argues that the multiplicity of travelers’ accounts and local reports attesting to the “unusual brutality” of the Suriname planters of both Dutch and Portuguese Jewish origins fully substantiate that such practices were neither isolated nor unofficial: “the colony’s judiciary was often as brutal as the individual planters.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 697