Eigendomsstrijd

Property struggle: The history of slavery and emancipation in Suriname would be the title in English of this rich study by one of the upcoming young Dutch historians of slavery.Karwan Fatah-Black rightfully claims that until now most studies of slavery in Suriname have focused on plantation slavery, slave trade, and marronage, without including developments in the colony's capital, Paramaribo, or the free non-white inhabitants, as he calls them.This accessibly written book fills that gap, based on a large quantity of legal wills, endowments, inventories, and other notarial sources.Fatah-Black makes an effort to portray the process in which Afro-Surinamers, by more or less adjusting to the colonizer, obtained their freedom in various ways, and how they could then acquire a piece of land in the city, buid a house, and create a new life for themselves and their descendants.It is, in his view, the success of this less visible self-emancipating group that laid the foundation for the Afro-Surinamese population, and started to determine the image of Paramaribo after slavery.That is intriguing, though he does not explain why this group in particular dominated the city's image.Fatah-Black's reconstruction of the long road to freedom begins on the plantation.He illustrates the paradoxes of slavery by telling the story of a white man who angrily has his black concubine killed, but later has a new concubine and their children manumitted and endowed with a yearly pension, after which each of their two daughters married a rich plantation owner.Following this demonstration of black women using their sexuality to "buy" their and/or their children's freedom, the book's focus shifts to Paramaribo, via chapters about the lively waterfront with its hustle and bustle of sailors, marketpeople, free, unfree, fugitives, and criminals; the Saramaccastraat with its small shops, crafts workshops, and (smuggling) bars; and especially the neighborhood of Frimangron (Free Man's Land), where plots of land were given out to free Blacks.This structure reflects Fatah-Black's microhistory approach which gives him ample room to present the wealth of material he managed to collect.This in itself makes a welcome book.The pitfall of the approach, however, is somewhat less analysis than one might wish.An interesting case, for example, concerns the creation in the 1770s of a regiment of black soldiers who were manumitted expressly for this purpose; they were called the Redi Musu, a name referring to their red caps.To this day that term is used by Surinamers for a traitor or defector.However, Fatah-Black argues that when enslaved men were chosen for the black military corps and faithfully served their white officers, this was actually an active strategy for

Ancient history · Emancipation · Genealogy · Political science · Politics · Population · Sociology · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Demography · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law