Natalie Davis - Slaves Experience of Criminal Justice in Colonial Suriname

8/20/2019 Natalie Davis - Slaves Experience of Criminal Justice in Colonial Suriname

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Judges, Masters, Diviners: Slaves’ Experienceof Criminal Justice in Colonial Suriname

NATALIE ZEMON DAVIS

“Two negroes hanged,” John Gabriel Stedman wrote in his Suriname jour-nal for March 9, 1776, and then two days later, among his purchases of “soap, wine, tobacco, [and] rum” and his dinners with an elderly widow,he records, “A negro’s foot cut off.”1 Stedman expanded on these eventsin the later Narrative of his years as a Dutch – Scottish soldier ghtingagainst the Suriname Maroons:

And now, this being the period of the [court] sessions, another Negro’s legwas cut off for sculking from a task to which he was unable, while two

Law and History Review November 2011, Vol. 29, No. 4© the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2011doi:10.1017/S0738248011000502

Natalie Zemon Davis is Henry Charles Lea Professor of History Emerita fromPrinceton University and Adjunct Professor of History at the University of Toronto< [email protected]>. Among her many publications are The Return of Martin

Guerre (Harvard University Press, 1983), Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Talesand their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford University Press, 1987),The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), Slaveson Screen: Film and Historical Vision (Vintage Canada and Harvard UniversityPress, 2000), and Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds(Hill and Wang, 2006). This article was originally presented in a shorter version asthe 2010 John Ll. J. Edwards Lecture for the Centre of Criminology, University of Toronto, and she is grateful to colleagues there for their discussion. She thanks SaraBeam, William A. Christian, Jr., Colin Dayan, Malick Ghachem, Linda Heywood,Martin Klein, Paul Lovejoy, Melanie Newton, Rebecca J. Scott, and John

K. Thornton for their valuable advice, although none of them is responsible for anyerrors in this essay. Her research assistant, Kate Creasey, was of great help in trackingdown sources in the history of Dutch law.

1. John Gabriel Stedman, The Journal of John Gabriel Stedman 1744 – 1797 , ed. StanburyThompson (London: Mitre Press, 1962), 164.


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more were condemned to be hang’d for running away altogether. The heroic behavior of one of these men deserves particularly to be quotted, he beg’donly to be heard for a few moments, which, being granted, he proceededthus ––

“I was born in Africa, where defending my prince during an engagement, Iwas made a captive, and sold for a slave by my own countrimen. One of your countrimen, who is now to be my judge, became then my purchaser, inwhose service I was treated so cruelly by his overseer that I deserted and

joined the rebels in the woods . . .”To which his former master, who as he observed was now one of his

judges, made the following laconick reply, “Rascal, that is not what wewant to know. But the torture this moment shall make you confess crimesas black as yourself, as well as those of your hateful accomplices.” To

which the Negroe, who now swel’

d in every vain with rage [replied, holdingup his hands], “Massera, the verry tigers have trembled for these hands . . .and dare you think to threaten me with your wretched instrument? No, Idespise the greatest tortures you can now invent, as much as I do the pitifulwrech who is going to inict them.” Saying which, he threw himself down onthe rack, where amidst the most excruciating tortures he remained with asmile and without they were able to make him utter a syllable. Nor did heever speak again till he ended his unhappy days at the gallows.2

Stedman’s heroic runaway slave is given the sentimental expression soappreciated by English readers of his day, including an elevated translationof the lively Creole (Neger Engelsche, or Sranan as it is now called) that the African would actually have spoken before his judges.3 But Stedmandid witness the event (he visited the man with the mutilated limb a fewdays later 4) and his account includes some of the features of criminal jus-tice that would be important for Suriname slaves in the eighteenth century:the link between judges and slave owners, the use of an extreme form of

2. I am quoting here from the excellent published edition of Stedman’s Narrative, drawn

from the 1790 manuscript of this text: John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, ed. Richard and Sally Price(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 480 – 82 (hereafter

Narr 90). I have reproduced here the eighteenth-century spelling found in the manuscript, but not its capitalization and punctuation. The published version of 1796, sometimes con-siderably edited by the publisher, is in this instance quite faithful to the original manuscript:John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative, of a Five Years’ Expedition against the Revolted Negroesof Surinam, in Guiana on the Wild Coast of South America; from the year 1772 to 1777 , 2vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1796), 2: 208 – 10 (hereafter Narr 96).

3. For an introduction to and further bibliography on the Creole languages of Suriname,see Eithne B. Carlin and Jacques Arends, eds., Atlas of the Languages of Suriname (Leiden:

KITLV, 2002) and Natalie Zemon Davis, “Creole languages and their uses: the example of colonial Suriname,” Historical Research 82 (2009): 268 – 84.

4. Stedman, Journal , 164 (March 22, 1776).

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torture, the imposition of the death penalty for running away, and the mem-ory of Africa.

In this article I describe the varieties of criminal justice experienced byslaves in Suriname in the late seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenthcenturies, both those endured under their masters and the colonial govern-ment, and that which they created themselves on their plantations. I am

addressing here certain gaps in the history of slavery in those centuriesand also in the history of criminal law and prosecution. Studies of slaveryin the Americas and the Caribbean, immensely rich as they have been, havedescribed the disciplinary regimes on plantations and the harsh punish-ments meted out for revolt.5 The various law codes governing the statusof slaves, their conduct, and the conduct of their owners toward themhave been examined, Elsa Goveia’s West Indian Slave Laws of the 18thCentury (1970) being the pioneering venture.6 But the whole cluster of activities considered as “crime” in regard to slavery, their detection, and

Figure 1. A runaway slave being executed onthe rack in 1776. Source: John GabrielStedman, Narrative of a Five Years’ Expeditionagainst the Revolted Negroes of Surinam

(London: J. Johnson, 1796), vol. 2, facing p. 296.

5. Evidence and discussion of slave crime and punishment are found in several sections of Philip Morgan’s splendid Slave Counterpoint, Black Culture in the Eighteenth-CenturyChesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill and London: University of North CarolinaPress, 1998), 261 – 67, 385 – 98, 468 – 73. An example of material on crime and law in regardto slaves in nineteenth-century east Africa is Frederick Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the

East Coast of Africa (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977), 164 – 67.6. Elsa V. Goveia, The West Indian Slave Laws of the 18th Century, Chapters in

Caribbean History 2 (Barbados: Caribbean Universities Press, rst edition 1970, reprinted1973). Alan Watson, Slave Law in the Americas (Athens and London: University of

Georgia Press, 1989) is a useful examination of diverse legal codes and ordinances by aspecialist in Roman law, although the author ’s lack of familiarity with the actual socialand legal practice in the various American colonies leads him to make deductions from

Judges, Masters, Diviners 927


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their punishment — including the slaves’ own efforts at policing — have been little treated as such. Therefore, my intention in “Judges, Masters,Diviners” is to expand for Suriname the paths opened by Philip

J. Schwarz in regard to slaves and the criminal law in Virginia; byMindie Lazarus-Black in regard to slave laws, slave courts, and slaveresistance in Antigua and elsewhere in the British Caribbean; and byDiana Paton in regard to the af rmation of masters’ power in the slavecourts of Jamaica.7 As for the African past, innovative studies haveunearthed continuities from or transformations of African beliefs and prac-tices in the realms of slave healing, religion, and agriculture.8 I will go onhere to suggest possible carry-overs or creolization in detecting, judgingand punishing crime. Memory will play a role in my account: memories

from the African societies from which slaves had been wrenched and mem-ories of slave experience bequeathed to future generations.Historians of European criminal law and prosecution have rarely made

the crime and punishment of slaves in the colonies part of their story,even though most settlers and plantation owners and their law codeswere European. Studies of the early modern Netherlands have taught usmuch about the experience of working people and the poor in the criminalcourts there and about the reform of criminal law and public execution inthe eighteenth and early nineteenth century, but have not extended

the codes about, for example, the presence or non-presence of racism, which are not sup- ported by historical evidence.

7. Philip J. Schwarz, Twice Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia, 1705 – 1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988) and Slave Laws in Virginia(Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1996); Mindie Lazarus-Black, “Slaves,Masters, and Magistrates: Law and the Politics of Resistance in the British Caribbean,1736 – 1834,” in Contested States. Law, Hegemony and Resistance, ed. MindieLazarus-Black and Susan F. Hirsch (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 252 – 81;Mindie Lazarus-Black, Legitimate Acts and Illegal Encounters. Law and Society in

Antigua and Barbuda (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994);and Diana Paton, “Punishment, Crime, and the Bodies of Slaves in Eighteenth-CenturyJamaica,” Journal of Social History 34 (2001): 923 – 54. Also see Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999),chap. 8, 183 – 201, “Crime and Punishment.”

8. For example, Sharla M. Fett, Working Cures. Healing, Health, and Power on SouthernSlave Plantations (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002);James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the

African-Portuguese World, 1441 – 1770 (Chapel Hill and London: University of NorthCarolina Press, 2003); José C. Curto and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds., Enslaving Connections.Changing Cultures of Africa and Brazil during the Era of Slavery (Amherst, N.Y.:

Humanity Books, 2004; and Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585 – 1660 (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2007), chap. 4, 169 – 226.



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themselves to comparison with the busy Dutch slave world.9 Cross-culturalreviews of colonial law tend to pick up the account in the nineteenth cen-tury where the “creating a docile, disciplined labor force” by imperial gov-

ernments is discussed primarily in terms of “

groups released from thecontrol of masters, owners or chiefs.” With a longer historical perspective,Lauren Benton has incorporated polities with slave systems into her Lawand Colonial Cultures, and they add much to her analysis of “legal plural-ism.”10 I hope “Judges, Masters, Diviners” will provide an example helpfulfor her approach and also suggest further ways to think about relations

between the practice of criminal law in the slave colonies and in Europeduring the early modern period.

♦

Founded initially as an English settlement, Suriname had passed to theDutch after the 1667 Treaty of Breda and was eventually owned by thechartered Society of Suriname, the Society’s shares being divided betweenthe West India Company, the city of Amsterdam, and the well-bornSommelsdijck family. Under the sovereignty of the States-General, the“exalted” Directors of the Society oversaw the colony’s activities fromthe Netherlands, appointing the governor and sending him directives onthe Dutch boats that plied the Atlantic during the sailing season.11

Around 1700, some 700 people of European origin were living in the

town of Paramaribo and the plantations along the Suriname,Commewijne, and Cottica Rivers: Dutch, Portuguese Jews, Huguenotsfrom France and the Netherlands and other places where they had takenrefuge after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and English men andwomen who stayed on from the initial settlement. Some 8,500 people

9. Sjoerd Faber, Strafrechtspleging en Criminaliteit te Amsterdam, 1680 – 1811. De nieuwe Menslievendheid (Arnhem: Gouda Quint, 1983); Florike Egmond, Underworlds: Organized Crime in the Netherlands 1650 – 1800 (Oxford: Polity Press, 1993); and Pieter Spierenburg,The Spectacle of Suffering. Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a

Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1984).

10. Sally Engle Merry, “Colonial and Postcolonial Law,” in Blackwell Companion to Lawand Society, ed. Austin Sarat (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 569 – 88, quotations 572, 574; and Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes inWorld History 1400 – 1900 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

11. A still useful general introduction to Suriname is R. A. J. van Lier, Frontier Society. ASocial Analysis of the History of Surinam (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971); and on itsgoverning structure, G.W. van der Meiden, Betwist Bestuur. Een eeuw strijd om de macht inSuriname, 1651 – 1753 (Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 1987). Valuable eighteenth-century sources are Jan Jacob Hartsinck, Beschryving van Guiana, 2 vols. (Amsterdam,

1770; facsimile edition, Amsterdam: S. Emmering, 1974), 521 – 962; David Nassy, Essai his-torique sur la colonie de Suriname, 2 vols. (Paramaribo: n. p. [ sic for Amsterdam: HendrikGartman], 1788).



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from Africa were producing sugar as slaves on the plantations, and already,approximately 1,000 more Africans had escaped to the rain forests to liveas Maroons, sharing that space with indigenous Caribs, Arawaks and

Wayanas.By the 1780s, the European population had increased to approximately2,000 – 3,000 persons, with Swedes, Germans, and Swiss added to the mixand with Portuguese and German Jews representing approximately a thirdof the settlers. To the sugar so arduously produced on the plantations had

been added coffee, chocolate, cotton, and timber. The slave populationraising these crops had multiplied sixfold to more than 50,000 people,and now some 5,000 Maroons were living in forest villages, divided intothree tribes with their own kings and headmen.12

Although the word “criolo”—

that is, born locally —

was appearing moreoften next to a slave’s name on the plantation inventories after the middleof the eighteenth century, the majority of slaves were still born in Africa.From 1730 to 1780, more than 124,000 persons were transported toSuriname on the slave boats.13 Some had been brought up in the CentralAfrican kingdoms in Angola and the Kongo, where the Bantu Kikongolanguages were spoken, others in the Akan and Asante kingdoms of theGold Coast (present-day Ghana). Many more had come from the SlaveCoast, that is, from the polities of the Gbe-speaking peoples along the

Bight of Benin (in present-day Benin, Togo), such as the coastal kingdomsof Arda and Hueda and the powerful inland kingdom of Dahomey. Othersyet were Yoruba-speakers from the ancient kingdom of Oyo and elsewherewest of the Niger River. Although some children were on board and sur-vived the Middle Passage, most of the people crammed into the slavedecks were in the preferred age range of fteen to thirty-ve.14

♦

Let us rst consider the notions of crime, its detection, and its punish-ment, which these Africans brought with them to Suriname — as well as

we can know them from late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century12. On the population of Suriname, see Nationaal Archief, The Netherlands (hereafter

NA), Sociëteit van Suriname (hereafter SocSur), 228, f. 391v (census of 1701); Nassy, Essai historique, 2: 39, note a; National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom (hereafter NAUK). WO/146, 1v – 3v, census gures 1794 – 1798.

13. Johannes Postma, “Suriname and its Atlantic Connections,” in Riches from AtlanticCommerce. Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585 – 1817 , ed. Johannes Postmaand Victor Enthoven (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), 306, table 11.5.

14. Johannes Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade 1600 – 1815 (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1990), 228 – 32, 257, table 10.13; 395 – 401, appendix 19.

Willem Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea, Divided intothe Gold, the Slave, and the Ivory Coast. . . Written Originally in Dutch. . . and now faith-

fully done into English (London: James Knapton and Daniel Midwinter, 1705), 364.



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sojourners and slavers among the farmers, merchants, shermen, and war-riors of the coastal kingdoms of west Africa. Our sources will be the mem-oirs and accounts of men such as Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi, Capuchin

missionary to the kingdoms of Kongo and Angola in the mid-seventeenthcentury; Willem Bosman, factor for the Dutch West India Company on theGold and Slave Coasts for fourteen years in the late seventeenth and earlyeighteenth centuries, and Ludewig Ferdinand Rømer, factor for the DanishWest India and Guinea Company on the Gold Coast in the 1740s; WilliamSnelgrave, who began as a young sailor on his father ’s slaver in 1704 andthen captained his own English slave boat on into the 1730s, and the sur-geon John Atkins, who served on an English slave ship in the early 1720s;Olaudah Equiano, who lived as a boy among Igbo-speaking villagers in

what is now southeastern Nigeria in the late 1740s and early 1750s untilhe was kidnapped and forced to endure the Middle Passage as a slave;and the Moravian Brother Christian Oldendorp, who in the late 1760sinterviewed slaves on Saint Croix and other Danish islands about their African past.15

15. Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi, Descrição Histórica dos Três Reinos do Congo, Matambae Angola, trans. Graciano Maria de Leguzzano, 2 vols. (Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do

Ultramar, 1965). The Capuchin Cavazzi was a missionary priest in the Kongo andAngola from1654 to 1667; his Istorica descrizione was rst published in Italian inBologna in 1687. Bosman, Description, A2v; Postma, Dutch, 64, 136, 363 – 65. LudewigFerdinand Rømer, A Reliable Account of the Coast of Guinea (1760), trans. SelenaAxelrod Winsnes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Rømer served as agent at Fort Christiansborg in present-day Accra from 1739 to 1749. William Snelgrave, A New

Account of Some Parts of Guinea, and the Slave Trade (London: James, John, and PaulKnapton, 1734), A3r, 165. John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-Indies;

In His Majesty’ s Ships, The Swallow and Weymouth (London: Caesar Ward and RichardChandler, 1735); Atkins’ voyage took place in 1721 – 1723 (255 – 65). The Interesting

Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by

Himself was rst published in London in 1789; I am using here the ninth edition, publishedin 1794: Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (London and New York: Penguin Books, 2003). Equiano’s self-description as hav-ing been born in Africa was put into question by Vincent Carretta in 1999, after his discov-ery of two documents giving Gustavus Vassa’s birthplace as South Carolina. Criticaldiscussion by Paul Lovejoy and others on the provenance and functions of these two docu-ments and on the character of Equiano’s description of Igbo life conrm his birth in what isnow southeastern Nigeria. For a review of the evidence and the bibliography, see JamesSweet, “Mistaken Identities? Olaudah Equiano, Domingos Álvares, and theMethodological Challenges of Studying the African Diaspora,” American Historical

Review, 134 (2009): 279 – 81, 301 – 4. Christian Oldendorp, History of the Mission of the

Evangelical Brethren on the Caribbean Islands of St,. Thomas, St. Croix, and St. John,ed. J. J. Bossard, trans. Arnold R. Higheld and Vladimir Barac (Ann Arbor: KaromaPublishers, 1987). Oldendorp’s charge was to write a history of the missions and their



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The actions named as “crimes” were murder, poisoning, witchcraft,theft, adultery (a serious crime in these polygynous societies), kidnapping,and major physical injury. “Trivial crimes” included beating someone,

especially a young man beating another, and reviling another person, atroubling act in kingdoms where mutual deference and politeness wererequired in even a brief encounter. In some places lying could be punishedas an offense.16

Along the whole range of the Guinea Coast and inland kingdoms, thegods were always drawn upon for divination and detection — not the highgod who ruled more distantly over all, but one of the pantheon of respon-sive lesser gods, the voudun or orisha, who ruled realms of the sea or theair, were embodied in a special kind of tree or snake, or were more inti-

mately connected to an ancestral spirit. The diviner ’

s rod or “fetish”

asthe Europeans called it, encapsulated the god’s presence, often a woodenrod lled with earth, oil, bones, feathers, hair, or other objects imbuedwith divine aura.

Seers/diviners were called in at the earliest stages of crime detection,including when the victim and others were unsure who had been the per-

petrator. An Akan diviner could conjure the power of a god into some foodor drink and leave it in place where it would entrap a thief whose identitywas unknown. Death was usually assumed to be “unnatural,” that is, to

have a source in some human or divine agency, and the dead personwas asked to assist in uncovering it. To catch an unknown poisoner, asOlaudah Equiano remembered from his Igbo village, the diviner orderedthe corpse to be carried toward the grave, whereupon instantly the bearerswere compelled to run to a house in which the poisoner lived. In upper Guinea, among the Mende and Temne peoples of the Sierra Leone region,the bearers questioned the corpse about a possible witch or poisoner responsible for his or her death and were impelled toward a special

current state; he spent seventeen months collecting materials and interviewing slaves on SteCroix, and the other Danish islands during 1767 – 1768.

16. Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery. A History of Slavery in Africa, 2nd ed.(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 4, 86. Bosman, Description, Letter 10,155; Letter 11, 167 – 77; Letter 18, 341; Letter 19, 357. Equiano, Narrative 35, 37.Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans, 59. Samuel Johnson, The History of theYorubas from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the British Protectorate , ed. O.Johnson (London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1921), 101. Samuel Johnson was a Yorubaand Christian minister in Oyo in Nigeria. His book, completed in 1897, was based onYoruba oral traditions and extensive interviews. European observers do not comment onthe general meaning of “crime” in African societies they visited, that is, on whether “crime” was thought to pollute a community or put it at odds with the gods and on whether African general understandings of “crime” resembled those with which they were familiar inEurope.



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bough if they hit upon a suspicious name.17 Meanwhile in the kingdom of Akim along the Gold Coast, an accuser alerted the village drummer toassemble the inhabitants and made his or her charge in public.18

Once accused of a crime —

for example, theft, murder, adultery, poison-ing, kidnapping — a person who wanted to establish his or her innocencehad to go through a test with the diviner. The rite was sometimes witnessed

by only the accusers and kin of the accused, other times it was enacted before many spectators. Three major ordeals were used. One combinedoath-taking with imbibing a special drink or sometimes food. In anAkan polity along the Gold Coast, the accused took a drink before the divi-ner ’s sacred rod, was smeared with supernaturally powerful ingredients,and then called on the god for death in various horrible ways if he or

she was guilty. In the Kongo region, the nganga (the priest –

diviner) prepared the drink of “ purication” or “ purging” from the red bark of an ordi-narily poisonous tree; he then intoned before the gods and those present that an innocent person would drink it and remain well.19 A second ordeal

17. Bosman, Description, Letter 10, 148; Equiano, Narrative, 42 – 43; Oldendorp, History,176 – 77; and John Matthews, A Voyage to the River Sierra-Leone, on the Coast of Africa . . .

By John Matthews, Lieutenant in the Royal Navy; during his residence in that country in the years 1786, 1786, and 1787 (London: B. White and Son and J. Sewell, 1788), 123 – 24.

18. Jean Barbot, A Description of the Coasts of North and South-Guinea, and of Ethiopia

Inferior, vulgarly Angola in A Collection of Voyages and Travels, 3rd. ed. (London: printed by Awnsham and John Churchill for Henry Lintot and John Osborn, 1746), 5: 301. TheFrench Huguenot Barbot was an agent for the Compagnie du Sénégal and made voyagesto the Guinea Coast in 1678 – 79 and 1681 – 82. After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, he moved to England, where he nished this book shortly before his death in1713. It was rst published by the Churchills in 1732. For an evaluation of the reliabilityof Barbot ’s work, see Robin Law, “Jean Barbot as a Source for the Slave Coast of West Africa,” History in Africa 9 (1982): 155 – 73.

19. Bosman, Description, Letter 10, 149 – 50. A similar procedure in Sierra Leone: a per-son accused of causing another ’s death by poison was allowed to escape to the headman of anearby village, where he or she proclaimed innocence and asked for a draught test as proof.

The person, wearing only plantain leaves, was placed on a high chair in public, given a littlerice or cola nuts, and then required to drink several quarts of “red water.” If the accused sur-vived, vomiting up the rice or cola nuts unchanged, and survived other ordeals as well, he or she was proved innocent. Cavazzi, Descrição, 1: 102 – 6; Atkins, Voyage, 52 – 53 on the “redwater ” test; and Matthews, Voyage, 125 – 26. A full description of the “red water ” test isgiven by the physician Thomas Winterbottom, An Account of the Native Africans in the

Neighbourhood of Sierra Leone, 2 vols. (London: John Hatchard and J. Mawman, 1803),1: 129 – 32. Oldendorp, History, 172 – 73. Rømer described an ordeal in Accra where thegod was present in a specially stuffed snake skin; the accused took some dough placedon the skin and swallowed it saying, “If I have stolen this or that, then let [the god] killme” (Rømer, Account , 100 – 101). In Loango, a “ poison ordeal” was administered by the

mwene nkisi, the religious gure who presided over shrines in different parts of the kingdom(Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans, 106. The “ poison ordeal,” known as benge, wasstill being administered to attest to innocence or guilt among the Nzakara people in the



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used heat to test the esh of the accused. In Kongo, the diviner put a rockin a pot of boiling water, which the suspect had to remove; along the SierraLeone River, the diviner might add a special bark to the boiling water to

make it stronger; in a region of the Gold Coast, a cowrie shell had to beretrieved from a pot of boiling oil. If the person was guilty, the armwould become ulcerated.20 Yet a third ordeal put to test the suspect ’s ton-gue. In the kingdom of Benin, the diviner passed a cock’s quill through thetongue of the accused; among the Akan on the Gold Coast, the diviner might use a sewing needle. Easy removal demonstrated innocence.21

In all these tests, we can see what leeway the diviner had in the choice of drink and ointment and their strength, the temperature of the water, and thesize of the cock quill or needle and in the examination of the esh or ton-

gue afterward. Father Cavazzi reported that the nganga had met with bothaccused and accusers before the test ceremony and had negotiated giftsfrom each side. In the Sierra Leone region, the surgeon Atkins heardthat the diviner made the “red water ” used in the oath-test drink stronger or weaker depending upon what he had surmised about the guilt of theaccused. Rømer, too, said that among the Akan, small gifts to the diviner affected the outcome for the suspect in cases such as theft, but in most instances the diviner must have been inuenced by what he or she hadlearned about situation and the crime.22 A nice example of this is the

choice of the river test along the Slave Coast in the kingdom of Hueda:the guilty person would sink, the innocent would swim. “They all swim

Central African Republic in the 1960s (Anne Retel-Laurentin, Oracles et ordalies chez les Nzakara [Paris and The Hague: Mouton, 1969], 25 – 31, 72 – 84).

20. Sweet, Recreating Africa, 122 – 24; Cavazzi, Descrição, 1:109; Matthews, Voyage,134 – 35; Rømer, Reliable Account , 101; and Oldendorp, History, 101 (“the suspect must attempt to lift a red hot iron ring out of a pot three times with his bare hands ”). Cavazzireported an additional version of the heat test in the Kongo, the mbau, where a hot iron

was placed on different parts of the body; if the accused was innocent, the heat wouldnot hurt the skin; a person whom the diviner wanted to help would be given a special oint-ment to protect him or her ( Descrição, 1:104).. Rømer observed the bodily heat ordealamong the Akan — drawing a glowing knife over the arm (p. 101) — while a slave fromthe Loango region reported to Oldendorp that a diviner there used “a red hot knife,” rubbedalong the suspect ’s leg (p. 173).

21. Bosman, Description, Letter 21, 450 – 52; and Rømer, Reliable Account , 101. Bosmanalso witnessed an eye test while he was visiting the kingdom of Benin: a diviner put “green juice” into the eyes of the accused; if the eyes became red and inamed, he or she was guilty(451). Matthews reported an eye test from Sierra Leone: the diviner splashed water from a pot over which pepper had been suspended into the eyes of the accused. If the accused was

guilty, the eyes would be covered with white lm and sight would be lost (Matthews,Voyage, 134 – 35.

22. Cavazzi, Descrição, 1: 104. Atkins, Voyage, 52 – 53; and Rømer, Account , 101.



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well,” commented the Dutch observer Bosman, “I’ve never seen anyoneconvicted.”23 Clearly, the diviner knew when to allow this ordeal.

If found guilty, the person was given a sentence by the king and hiscouncil of great men, by a regional governor, or by a local headman andhis advisors.24 The death penalty was possible in cases of murder andother crimes viewed as especially vicious, such as witchcraft, but it was

by no means regularly pronounced. For adultery, death was the expected punishment for one of the many wives of a king or of a great governor

and for her lover. A French ship-captain witnessed such an execution inthe kingdom of Hueda in the 1720s: the man was burned to death, thewoman was scalded with boiling water by other royal wives. But if adultery were committed by one of the wives of a rich merchant, a large

Figure 2. The hot water ordeal in Central Africa.Watercolor by GiovanniAntonio Cavazzi, “Missioneevangelica al regno deCongo, 1665 – 1668”;courtesy Manoscritti Araldi,Collection of MicheleAraldi, Modena, Italy.Reproduced in JamesH. Sweet, Recreating

Africa. Culture, Kinship and Religion in the African-Portuguese World,1441 – 1770 (Chapel Hill andLondon, University of NorthCarolina Press, 2003), 124.

23. Bosman, Description, Letter 19, 359; and Barbot, Description, 5:337 – 38. Bosmanalso describes a river test in more dangerous waters in the Kingdom of Benin (Letter 21,452).

24. Description of such assemblies for judgment can be found in Cavazzi, Descrição, 1:

155 – 58; Bosman, Description, Letter 11, 165 – 67; Letter 19, 357, 359; and Equiano, Narrative, 33; his father was one of the local elders or “ Embrenché,” “who decided disputesand punished crimes . . . The proceedings were generally short.”



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payment to her husband could excuse her, whereas the wife of a simplefarmer might be beaten and sent away and her lover ’s property conscated

by the husband. Indeed, nes and compensatory payments were often the

preferred penalty —

very much higher if the victim had been a free personrather than a slave — and execution performed only in the absence of pay-ment. Theft was almost always punished with payments: the restitution of the stolen goods and nes, adjusted to the ability of the person to pay.Thieves who could not pay were beaten. Kidnapping was sometimes repaid

by the recompense of a male or female slave.25

And yet for all these crimes, one punishment was becoming more fre-quent: enslavement. In the past, exile had been a possible penalty for serious crime, which usually led to enslavement in Africa itself. But

now the punishment involved the sale of the criminal to European slavers.In the somewhat exaggerated words of Francis Moore, a factor for theRoyal African Company in Senegambia in the early 1730s. “Since thisSlave-Trade has been us’d, all Punishments are chang’d into Slavery;there being an Advantage in such Condemnations, they strain very hardin order to get the Benet of selling the Criminal. Not only Murder,Theft and Adultery are punish’d by selling the Criminal for a Slave, but every triing Crime. . .”26

In the outer reaches of the kingdom of Benin decades later, Equiano’s

Igbo villagers were selling to African traders not only their war captives, but also “such among us as had been convicted of kidnapping or adulteryand some other crimes, which we esteemed heinous.”27 Although the largemajority of slaves transported across the Atlantic continued to be captivesof war or victims of kidnapping, persons condemned for a crime wereamong them, especially when they could not pay nes or makecompensation.28

25. Bosman, Description, Letter 10, 155; Letter 11, 167 – 77; Letter 12, 201; Letter 19,352; Letter 21, 442, 449 – 50, 452; Jean-Baptiste Labat, Voyage du Chevalier Des

Marchais en Guineée, isles voisines, et à Cayenne, Fait en 1725, 1726, 1727 , 4 vols.(Paris: Saugrain, 1730), 2: 81; Snelgrave, New Account , 158; Atkins , Voyage, 204 – 205,216 – 17; 231 – 32; Equiano, Narrative, 33; Oldendorp, History, 172, 177; A.F.C. Ryder,“Dutch Trade on the Nigerian Coast during the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the

Historical Society of Nigeria 3 (1965): 201; and Lovejoy, Transformations, 89.26. Jan Vansina, “Connement in Angola’s Past,” in A History of Prison and Con nement

in Africa, ed. Florence Bernault (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003), 62; Francis Moore,Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa (London: Edward Cave, 1738), 42; and Ryder,“Dutch Trade,” 196.

27. Equiano, Narrative, 37.28. Snelgrave, New Account , 158; Atkins, Voyage, 176 – 77; Oldendorp, History, 177;

Lovejoy, Transformations, 88 – 89; and Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans, 223.



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There were two memories the Africans would not have carried across theocean. Few of them would have seen or heard of incarceration as punishment for crime among their own peoples. In their forts along the Guinea Coast, the

Portuguese, Dutch, and other European traders might include a small impro-vised prison, but this was for offenders among their ranks or, on occasion, for a trouble-making African in their own circle, and was quite apart from thespaces reserved for captive slaves. The great rulers of the Songhay Empirewere said to have used some form of connement for political offenders inthe late fteenth and sixteenth century on an island near their palace at Gao. But, on the whole among the African polities, structures of incarcerationfor criminals were not built until the nineteenth century. Persons accused of crimes were kept from running away by their families in their compounds.

Enclosure was conceived rather as a setting for ritual exclusion, as when men-struating women had to live in a special hut.29

Furthermore, although the execution of persons condemned to death inkingdoms along the Guinea Coast and inland involved painful and pro-longed torture and humiliation of the body (not to mention the degradingtreatment of the corpses of war captives), branding and mutilation wererarely used as penalties for living persons. One of the few examples wasemasculation, said to have been practiced on the royal eunuchs of the king-dom of Oyo because they had previously been engaged in incest, bestiality,

or adultery with one of the king’

s wives. Scarication of the face and bodyand piercing of the hair and lips were not “mutilation,” but rather ancient and honorable marks of identity, beauty, and status.30

♦

29. Vansina, “Connement,” 57 – 59, 61 – 62; Thierno Bah, “Captivity and Incarceration in Nineteenth-Century West Africa,” in History of Prison, ed. Bernault, 70 – 71, 76; and ArnoldW. Lawrence, Trade Castles and Forts in West Africa (London: Cape, 1963), 190; in themid-eighteenth century, the Cape Coast Castle, belonging to the English Company of Merchants, included a room to be used as a “ prison for criminals,” adjacent to rooms for

artisans and for soldiers. On the hut for menstruating women: Bosman, Description,Letter 12, 210; and Equiano, Narrative, 42.

30. Examples of extreme cruelty in execution in the kingdom of Axim in Bosman, Description, Letter 11, 169; in the kingdom of Hueda, Letter 19, 357 – 58; William Smith, A New Voyage to Guinea (London: John Nourse, 1744), 204; and among the Amina peopleof the Gold Coast region, punishing an adulterous woman of high status, Oldendorp,

History, 172. Vansina, “Connement,” 61; in the 1640s, the Queen Njinga of Kongo insti-tuted mutilation of the genitals as punishment for indelity among her male consorts, “ but this is a unique case, and the queen subsequently abandoned this practice.” On emasculationas punishment of the royal eunuchs of Oyo, see Johnson, History, 60 and Robin Law, TheOyo Empire c. 1600-c.1836. A West African Imperialism in the Era of the Atlantic Slave

Trade (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 70. Barbot claims that male adulterers near theGold Coast European settlement of Little Comendo had one of their ears cut off ( Description, 5:300). On marks of scarication and their meaning, see Oldendorp,



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The Africans purchased by European traders were kept in barracoonswhile awaiting the boats that would take them to the Americas; at Elmina Castle, the prisons were damp ground-oor rooms similar to

those used for storing goods. “

We pay two pence a day,”

said a factor for the Dutch West India Company, “which serves to subsist them likeour Criminals on Bread and Water.”31

The slave ship itself was a “ portable prison,” in the phrase of one of itseighteenth-century defenders, a “oating dungeon” in the words of a critic,to which the slaves arrived in chains or ropes and branded with the name of the Company or the purchaser that owned them.32 The ship operated under instructions from the Company or other owner, who warned that precau-tions were required lest the crew be attacked by their African cargo, but

who also insisted that the slave men and women “not be deled or mis-treated by any of the of cers and crew members” (to quote from thosegiven to a Zeeland ship, De Nieuwe Hoop).33 How these instructionswere fullled depended upon the captain, his surgeons, and his sailors,

History, 169 – 70; Johnson, History, 104 – 9; and Paul Lovejoy, “Scarication and the Loss of History in the African Diaspora,” in Activating the Past: History and Memory in the Black

Atlantic World , ed. Andrew H Apter and Lauren H. Derby (Newcastle upon Tyne:Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 99 – 138. Visiting Yorubaland in 1828, Richard Lander reported

that men found guilty of very serious robbery had their scarication cut off and replaced bythe scarication of another people, after which they were driven to the coast and sold to slavetraders (Richard Lander, Records of Captain Clapperton’ s Last Expedition to Africa, 2 vols.[London: Frank Cass, 1967], 1: 283 – 84). This is a single and late mention, however; there isno indication of such facial disgurement in the descriptions that come from Caribbeanobservers in the eighteenth century.

31. Bosman, Description, Letter 19, 364; Postma, Dutch, 237 – 38; Lawrence, TradeCastles, 158; and Robin Law, Ouidah. The Social History of a West African Slaving ‘ Port ’ 1727 – 1892 (Athens: Ohio State University Press and Oxford: James Curry, 2004),139 – 40.

32. “Portable prison” in Alexander Geddes, An Apology for Slavery: or Six Cogent

Arguments against the Immediate Abolition of the Slave Trade (London: J. Johnsonand R. Faulder, 1792); “oating dungeon” in James Staneld, The Guinea Voyage, A

Poem in Three Books (London: James Phillips, 1789). Staneld was a critic of theslave trade, who had made such a voyage. Both men are quoted by Marcus Rediker,The Slave Ship. A Human History (New York: Viking, 2007), 45 and 370, n. 12.Bosman, Description, Letter 19, 364. Robert Harms, The Diligent. A Voyage throughthe Worlds of the Slave Trade (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 250 – 53. and Law,Ouidah, 141 – 44. On the prison features of the Danish slave ship Fredensborg , departingfrom Fort Christiansborg in Accra in 1768 with 260 slaves, see Leif Svalesen, The SlaveShip Fredensborg , trans. Pat Shaw and Selena Winsnes (Bloomington and Indianapolis:Indiana University Press, 2000), 92, 105.

33. Postma, Dutch, Appendix 8, 366 – 67. Similarly, the instructions of the Danish GuineaCompany to the captain of slave boats read: “It is recommended to the Captain that the great-est importance is attached to the conservation of the slaves. He shall personally and



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the latter themselves often ill-paid and harshly disciplined. WilliamSnelgrave, captain of many an English slave voyage, instructed hiscrews that “ Negroes be kindly used,” as this was the best way to avoid

revolts. Once the boat was well away from the coast, he allowed irons to be removed from the men, a practice reserved on many boats only for women and children. But any “disturbance” the “kindly” captain met with “severe” ogging and other punishment, and any attempt at mutinywas met with death.34

For the Africans, as is well known, the discipline and punishment of the“ portable prison” were devastating, leading to death and suicide — inaddition to the pain and humiliation of rape and the mortality caused byill health and disease. But in the holds, other activities were taking place

that created bonds and perhaps even a form of “ justice”

among theAfricans. Although captains had sometimes acquired their human cargofrom different ports or had arranged to have different language groups rep-resented among their hundreds of slaves so as to minimize the danger of revolt, nonetheless there were always groups who shared a language(some were from the same family or village) or could understand relatedlanguages. A provisional pidgin was surely created, and some Africansfrom coastal regions knew the Portuguese pidgin that was current alongthe Guinea Coast. A sort of kinship was established among those chained

or sleeping or working on the decks near each other: in Suriname survivorsof the voyage recalled the tie afterward by the Sranan term sippi,shipmate.35

frequently see to it that the of cers ensure their proper treatment on board the ship, and that no member of the crew strikes or kicks them” (Svalesen, Fredensborg , 102).

34. Snelgrave, New Account , 163, 168 – 73. Harms, Diligent , 314 – 15 on different practicesin regard to shackling male slaves once the boat was on the high seas: “ perhaps the most common practice . . . was to watch the captives closely and reward the ones who seemed

most cooperative by removing their shackles.” The captain of the Fredensborg punishedthe slaves involved in a planned rebellion by beatings and by placing them in both ankleand wrist irons connected to long chains (Svalesen, Fredensborg , 114).

35. Snelgrave, New Account , 187, warning another ship captain “that he had on board somany Negroes of one town and language.” Equiano, Narrative, 56 – 57; Rediker, Slave Ship,276 – 79, 303 – 6; and Bosman, Description, Letter 9, 130 – 31. According to the linguist Norval Smith, “it is well known that West African Pidgin Portuguese was spoken on theGold Coast until the 18th century . . . and on the Slave Coast even longer ” (“Pernambucoto Surinam 1654 – 1665,” in Spreading the Word. The issue of diffusion among the

Atlantic Creoles, ed. Magnus Huber and Mikael Parkvall (Westminster: University of Westminster Press, 1999), 293. Rømer speaks of “ Negro-Portuguese terms” during his

years at Fort Christiansborg ( Reliable Account , 164 – 65). Winterbottom, Account , 1: 211 – 12; and Christian Ludwig Schumann, Saramaccanisch Deutsches Wörter-Buch (1778; here-after SD Wörter-Buch), in Die Sprache der Sarmakkaneger in Surinam, ed. Hugo



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Leaders emerged among the captives, both on their own and createdfrom the of cers’ deck. The captains themselves appointed “quartermas-ters” or “bombas,” as they were called on the Danish ships: slaves who,

they believed, would be cooperative and who, in return for extra pro-visions, would help organize the eating arrangements and oversee thecrews washing the decks. Some of these leading men and women mayhave also been diviners or healers in their African communities.Ludewig Rømer actually recommended to Danish captains that womenhealers take over from the ship’s surgeons in the face of African illnessessuch as worms, and that they be given oils and spices with which to pre-

pare their remedies, while an English captain reported on the presence of “religious Priests” on his ships in the 1760s to 1780s and their role in

urging insurrection. But all these leaders could have drawn on techniquesthat they knew, or improvised new ones to arbitrate and quiet the quarrelsthat broke out among men closely shackled or from tribes with grievancesagainst each other.36

And one of the wives of the great King Agaja of Dahomey, sent off toslavery for having aggrieved him, found her place on the women’s deck of Captain Snelgrave’s galley Katherine in 1727. The Captain saw her as anagent of pacication of the “noise and clamor ” of “the female captives whousually give us great trouble,” but I think we can perceive her as providing

leadership and arbitration that was of service to the women as well.37

Insuch ways did the Middle Passage help survivors get started toward estab-lishing their own justice one day on shore.

♦

Once docked in Paramaribo, cleaned and oiled for the auction block, purchased and branded again by a new owner, the African was rowedup one of the rivers to the plantation at which he or she would henceforthwork and live. The plantation will be the site for my next discussion of “criminal justice” even though the people deciding on offenses and punish-

ing offenders were authorized by property ownership (“

domestic jurisdic-tion,” in the Roman law) rather than as agents of a “state.” Indeed, thecourts of Suriname themselves had the mixed status of so many colonialgoverning institutions of the day: they were the creation of a charteredSociety in the Netherlands, which owned the colony through purchase,

Schuchardt (Amsterdam: Johannes Müller, 1914), 102: “ sippi, skippi Schiff,Schiffskamerad.”

36. Harms, Diligent , 315 – 16; Svalesen, Fredensborg , 86; Rømer, Reliable Account , 199;and Rediker, Slave Ship, 270 – 73, 307.

37. Snelgrave, New Account , 97 – 106.



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while acting under the aegis of the States-General. (Already we can see that Suriname is a tting illustration of Lauren Benton’s “legal pluralism.”)

In contrast with Louis XIV and his Code Noir, the States-General issued

no edict governing the features of slave conduct, treatment, and religion inDutch colonies. Rather the Suriname governor and the Court of Policy andCriminal Justice issued ordinances from time to time, spelling out the per-missible limits for the punishment of slaves on the plantation. In their gen-eral form, they resemble the rulings on the master ’s punitive power over slaves found in other Caribbean societies.38 Early in the colony’s existence,in the 1680s, the governor had prohibited owners from imposing death or mutilation on their slaves. The next major edict on the matter was morethan seventy years later in 1759. No manager or white of cer was to use

rods on a slave, but only the customary local whips, with which theycould give between twenty-ve and fty or at most eighty moderate strokesand only on the lower limbs. They were to order their black drivers to

behave accordingly. Any heavier punishment could be given only at theorder of the owner, who would place limits according to his or her ownscruples. No slave should be threatened with being shot except in caseof absolute self-defense. The penalty for violation was 300 Dutch guilders.A 1784 ordinance repeated these limitations and the penalty for violation,although it now forbade whipping a slave who had been hanged from his or

her wrists from a tree.39

Fines were in fact imposed only when the killing of a slave was discov-ered and prosecuted (as we will see more fully), although excessive crueltyon a plantation could tarnish the reputation of an owner or manager. Still,when the governor proposed in 1762 that something more than a ne beinstituted for beating a slave to death, the councilors on the Court of Policy and Criminal Justice, all of them plantation owners, demurred:

38. The classic introductory text is Goveia, West Indian Slave Laws. Further description of

laws regarding masters’ treatment of slaves in Jamaica in Diana Paton, “Punishment,” 926 – 27; in Antigua and the Leeward Islands in Lazarus-Black, Legitimate Acts, 33 – 34; and in theBritish Caribbean more generally in Lazarus-Black, “Slaves,” 258 – 59. On the importance of masters being specically forbidden to “torture” their slaves in the French Code Noir of 1695, see the major study of Malick W. Ghachem, “Prosecuting Torture: The StrategicEthics of Slavery in Pre-Revolutionary Saint-Domingue (Haiti),” 985 – 1029, in this sameissue of Law and History Review. Article 42 of the Code Noir reads: “Pourront pareillement les Maîtres, lorsqu’ils croiront que leurs Esclaves l’auront mérité, les faire enchaîner et lesfaire battre de verges, ou de cordes, leur deffendant de leur donner la torture, ni de faireaucune mutilation de membres . . . ”

39. Van Lier, Frontier Society, 128; and J. A. Schiltkamp and J. Th. de Smidt, eds., West

Indisch Plakaatboek. Plakaten, Ordonnantiën en andere Wetten, uitgevaardigd in Suriname1667 – 1816 (hereafter Plakaten), 2 vols. (Amsterdam: S. Emmering, 1973), no. 556, articles15 – 17 (December 27, 1759); no. 876, articles 13 – 14 (August 31, 1784).



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“Athough no owner should ever arrogate the power over life and death over his slaves, it is nonetheless of the utmost importance that slaves shouldcontinue to believe that their masters possess that power. There would

be no keeping them under control if they were aware that their masterscould receive corporal punishment or be executed for beating a slave todeath.”40 The law remained as it was.

Punitive practice varied on the plantations. Suriname was knownthroughout the Caribbean for the extravagant cruelty of plantation punish-ment. Observers’ accounts from Suriname in the late seventeenth throughthe eighteenth century talk of extended beatings with whips chosen for their sting, after which the open wounds were rubbed with lime juiceand pepper, and of the “Spaansche Bok ,” (the Spanish buck, as it was

called), when the slave was whipped rst on one side then the other,with hands tied around the knees and a stick holding him or her to theground. The latter was declared illegal in Suriname only in 1828.41

Especially telling is a play written in 1760 or thereabouts, in Sranan andDutch, by Pieter van Dyk, long-time manager of a coffee plantation on theCommewijne River. The play, The Life and Business of a Suriname

Plantation Manager , was included in a book of instruction on the Creolelanguage of Suriname, as part of Van Dyk’s effort to convince “ownersand managers . . . to make [themselves] respected and loved, without com-

mitting the inhuman cruelties that sometimes become part of the work.”

Van Dyk used the topos of the drunken plantation manager acting in theabsence of the owner: the manager orders his black driver to beat awoman slave till her skin comes off her back for being late bringing hiscoffee and to give the Spanish buck to a male slave asking to get off work because of being sick and to another for picking unripe coffee

beans. The manager ends up shooting and killing his hunter slave becausehe had failed to bring back game two days running and then had protestedagainst being punished. Van Dyk’s cruel manager, a composite of actual

cases, illustrates the conduct targeted by the ordinance of 1759.42

40. Van Lier, Frontier Society, 134, quoting from the minutes of the High Court of Policyand Criminal Justice, September 29, 1762.

41. Petrus Dittelbach, Verval en Val der Labadisten (Amsterdam: Daniel van den Dalen,1692), 55; J.D. Herlein, Beschryvinge van de Volk-Plantinge Zuriname (Leeuwarden:Meindert Injema, 1718), 112; Hartsinck, Beschryving , 916; Van Lier, Frontier Society,127; Goveia, West Indian Slave Laws, 51; and Alex van Stipriaan, Surinaams Contrast.

Roofbouw en overleven in een Caraïbische plantagekolonie 1750 – 1863 (Leiden: KITLV,1993), 371 – 73.

42. Pieter van Dyk, “Het Leeven en Bedryf van een Surinaamsze Directeur, met de

Slaaven, op een Kof -Plantagie,” in Nieuwe en Nooit Bevoorens Geziene onderwyzingein het Bastert Engels, of Neeger Engels (Amsterdam: Widow of Jacobus van Egmont, n.d. [ca. 1765]) reprinted with English translation in Jacques Arends and Matthias Perl,



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John Gabriel Stedman’s descriptions of what he saw during hisSuriname years (1773 – 1777) included punishments ordered by ownersand managers both. His book, written after his return to Europe and pub-

lished only in 1796, was in part a defense of slavery as benecent for Africans, as long as it was humanely conducted, and in part a ferociousattack on the cruel punishment of slaves. (Indeed, his vivid pictures of that punishment, some of them engraved for his Narrative by WilliamBlake, were intended to arouse indignation against the perpetrators andempathy for the slaves.)43 It was not the simple fact of beating that both-ered him: in the Netherlands, where he had grown up, he was accustomedto seeing servants and workers beaten by masters and mistresses, and hewas glad that the “unmerciful whipping” of his own father had cured

him of a boyish habit of petty stealing.44

While in Suriname, he beat hisslaves, for example, for slipping their boat away from his boat on theCommewijne River, and he beat the soldiers under his command for theft.45

What he deplored for the plantation slaves was the excess in punish-ments and their inappropriate use. (Likewise he had earlier opposed the“despotick cruelty” of of cers in his military unit back in the

Netherlands, who executed or whipped soldiers through the streets for small infractions.46) One of his rst sights in Suriname was a woman

who had been given 200 lashes and forced to bear a heavy chain attachedto her leg for months as punishment for having simply failed to meet her work quota. Visiting plantation Sporksgift, Stedman learned that his friend,

Early Suriname Creole Texts (Frankfurt: Vervuert and Madrid: Iberoamericana, 1995), 93,165 – 239.

43. Stedman’s defense of slavery as an institution, as long as it is humanely conducted, inStedman, Narr 90, 168 – 74, 533 – 36; and Narr 96, 1: 201 – 7, 2: 279 – 81. For an insightful dis-cussion of the character and impact of Stedman’s pictures of punishment in the setting of late

eighteenth-century sensibility and theories of the sublime, see Mario Klarer, “HumanitarianPornography: John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the

Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796),” New Literary History 36 (2005): 559 – 87.44. John Gabriel Stedman, “The Progress of Modern Ambition, or the Outlines of a

Military Life, being a genuine Narrative founded on facts by John Gabriel Stedman Esq,”James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota, MS 1772oSt, 2r-v. Stedman was gladthat he was “unmercifully whipped” by his father for his petty thefts as a boy as it “cured[him].” Sent from the Netherlands to Scotland at age eleven to live with his uncle,Stedman was neglected by his uncle and got into mischief with “ bad companions,” breakinginto the church to steal the parson’s pigeons and getting into street ghts. Here he was beatenonce again, “sometimes for things actually done, sometimes for not ”(3r-v).

45. Stedman, Journal , 132 (August 27, 1773), 143 (January 29, 1774), 145 (March 7,1774), and 150 (April 17, 1774).

46. Stedman, “Progress,” 28r-v.



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the Scottish owner John MacNeil, had ordered the hamstringing of a hand-some young slave because he had been running away from his work. OnL’Espérance plantation, where Stedman’s military post was established,

the manager departed after ogging a slave to death for having let another slave slip out of his hands to the woods. “His humane successor,” Stedmancommented sarcastically, “ began his reign by one morning ogging all theslaves of the estate, male and female, old and young . . . for having [over]slept their time about fteen minutes.” Stedman then visited a neighboring

plantation on the Commewijne only to come upon a young unclothedwoman tied by her wrists to the branch of a tree, her back bleeding from200 lashes given by the black drivers at the command of the manager – the punishment prohibited a decade later in the ordinance of 1784. “Her

only Crime,”

Stedman discovered, “had consisted in her rmly refusingto submit to the loathsome embraces of her despisable executioner,which his jealousy . . . construed to disobedience.”47

Of course, there were plantations where such practices were not found.Stedman singled out Mrs. Godefroy, the elderly widow with whom heoften dined, as a model of the good proprietor. Born of English parentsin Suriname in 1713, Elizabeth Danforth had outlived two husbands,who had left her sugar and coffee plantations with hundreds of slaves.Victor-Pierre Malouet, a French adminstrator of the nearby colony of

Cayenne, visited her sugar plantation in 1777 and conrmed Stedman’

s judgment: “the most serious punishment [for the slaves] is being prohibitedfrom seeing their mistress and from being on her path when she passes by.Any one of them would prefer a hundred strokes of the whip to this excom-munication.” Although it seems unlikely that Mrs. Godefroy’s slaveswould describe their feelings in Malouet ’s words, it may well be that Mrs. Godefroy had instituted on her plantations a policy of very limiteduse of whipping.48

47. Stedman, Narr 90, 39, 94 – 96, 264 – 68; Narr 96, 1:15, 94, 325 – 29 (the editor changedStedman’s “despisable executioner ” to “detestable executioner ”; Journal , 150 (April 17 and23, 1774), 152 (June 29, 1774), and 185 (September 7, 1776).

48. Stedman, Narr 90, 94, 366; Narr 96, 1:93, 2:59. NA, Suriname Oud Notarieel Archief (hereafter SONA), Burgerlijke Stand, Reformed marriages, vol. 1, p. 262. G. Debien and J.F.Kraal, “Esclaves et plantations de Surinam vus par Malouet, 1777,” West-Indische Gids 36(1955): 57 – 58. Pierre-Victor Malouet (1740 – 1814) served as an administrator in the colonyof Saint Domingue for several years and then for a time in Guyane. He wrote of Mrs.Godefroy’s plantation also in his Collection de Mémoires et Correspondances of cielles

sur l ’ Administration des Colonies, Et notamment sur la Guiane française et hollandaise,

5 vols. (Paris: Baudouin, l’an X [1802]), 3:43: “J’avois vu chez madame Geoffroy cingcens esclaves ne connoître d’autre bonheur que celui de la servir, et son atelier gémissant sur le sort d’un domestique qu’elle avoit par punition chassé de sa presence.”



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Mrs. Godefroy’s plantations were not shaken by slave uprisings over thedecades, and according to Malouet, her slaves actually kept Maroon incur-sions at bay. Such stability is one of the possible signs of a plantation con-

ducted in a fashion at least tolerable to its workers. An example isFauquemberg sugar plantation on the Commewijne during the almost twenty years (1750 – 1768) it was managed by a recently arrivedDutchman named Anthony Tielenius Kruythoff. The plantation had beenfounded in the early eighteenth century by a Dutch settler family, but by1753 its owners were living in Amsterdam and Kruythoff was administer-ing and running the estate himself. During his tenure, the slaves, roughly190 in number, did not organize uprisings or escapes to the Maroons,nor did the Maroons attack the plantation. The birth rate was relatively

high among the slave families, and a good number of the children livedto be young adults.49

Kruythoff was an of cer in the Suriname militia and, with a troop of armed men, was called upon to quell slave uprisings along theCommewijne and to track escaped slaves in the rain forests. In the midst

Figure 3. The whipping of a slave with her wrists tied to a tree in 1774. Source: Stedman,

Narrative, vol. 1, facing p. 326, engraved byWilliam Blake after a drawing by Stedman.

49. I am making a major study of this plantation over several decades in my current book Braided Histories: Four Generations of a Slave Family in Colonial Suriname. The docu-ments being analysed here are NA, SONA 194, pp. 950 – 990; SONA 202, pp. 605 – 43,and SONA 695, pp. 497 – 516. Fauquemberg was sold to a new owner in 1768, who was

unable to nance his purchase properly; Kruythoff was replaced by a succession of man-agers, and in early 1772 the most important male slaves ed the plantation for theMaroons (SONA, 240, pp. 587 – 612).



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of slave rebellions in 1759, he blamed such resistance on masters and man-agers who overworked and underfed their slaves, threatening to shoot or

behead them if they did not complete impossible tasks. He himself kept

a close eye on the white driver at Fauquemberg and rewarded his slaveson occasion with gifts.50 I suggest that the tolerability of the regime at Fauquemberg and other such plantations goes beyond Kruythoff ’s formu-lation: it emerged not just from the humane heart or practical concern for

property of masters and managers, but from the systems of governance and justice organized among the slaves themselves. We have glimpses of suchsystems in reports from Jamaica and Antigua; here I would like to sketchout a fuller picture of the possible structures and practices of slave-initiated

justice in Suriname.51

♦The African newcomers to a Suriname plantation took weeks and

months to nd their way among the slaves. Given a new name for use at least among the whites, assigned a place to live in the palm-leaf-coveredningre hosso (slave houses) and a work slot in the elds, buildings, waters,or houses of the plantation, the African gradually learned the local Creoletongue — Neger Engelsche or Sranan on the Christian plantations,Dju-tongo (or Saramaccan as it came to be called) on the Jewish ones.The discipline and punishment practices found on the Suriname plantations

would have contrasted in some ways with what Africans would haveobserved in the multiple slave systems back home. On the one hand, theAfrican owner could dispose of the life of his slaves without responsibility,at least in non-Islamic lands: for example, the great kings of Dahomey inthe eighteenth century were being buried with hundreds of their slaves,while in the nearby kingdom of Benin, a person sentenced to death for amurder might offer a slave in his stead.52 On the other hand, even in

50. Wim Hoogbergen, The Boni Maroon Wars in Suriname (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990),

34 – 35; and Harry van den Bouwhuijsen, Ron de Bruin, and Georg Horeweg, Opstand inTempati, 1757 – 1760 (Utrecht: Instituut voor Culturele Antropologie te Utrecht, 1988),13 – 16, 64.

51. For the existence of “courts that slaves convened among themselves” in Jamaica,Antigua, and other places in the British West Indies, see Lazarus-Black, “Slaves,” 260 – 61. Philip Schwarz makes interesting speculation about the slaves of Virginia “develop[ing] their own customary law . . . rules to which slaves commonly attempted to bind them-selves, as opposed to those regulations to which masters tried to force slaves’ conformity.”But he considers that the slaves “obviously could not transfer the laws and judicial insti-tutions of their homelands to the New World “(Slave Laws, 52 – 53). I will be here consider-ing “ judicial” practices and processes among the slaves, some of them carried over in

adapted form from Africa.52. Bosman, Description, Letter 13, 231 (burial of slaves with kings in Gold Coast poli-

ties); and Letter 21, 450. On the burial of slaves with the king of Dahomey and other royal



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those African societies in which slavery did not slide into a kin relation andwhich were “hierarchical [and] market oriented,” the exploitation of slavelabor was not accompanied by so punitive a regime. I follow Martin Klein

here, who found the harshest treatment of African slaves was at themoment of their capture and the early weeks of their “seasoning,” wherethey might be forced to sleep in chains. “[Even] in the most market oriented African systems,” says Klein, “slaves worked for their mastersabout half as much as in the U.S. South.”53

In Suriname, the gures of authority and prestige within the slavecommunity prepared newcomers for the shock of the local regime.54

Such men and women were central to the institutions and procedures onthe plantation — some carried over from Africa, others improvised or

invented in Suriname —

which helped slaves survive and sustain an inde- pendent cultural life, keeping peace among them and acting as buffersagainst or setting limits to the arbitrary power of the owner and the owner ’sagents. These slave leaders gained their authority partly through their owndoing, partly through the decision of the owner or manager.

Let us begin with the black driver, called negerof cier or zwarte of cier (“ black of cer ”) in Dutch and ningre bassia, or just bassia in Sranan.(Interestingly enough, the word bomba was sometimes used in Surinamefor the black driver, thus carrying over a title familiar from the slave

ship.)55

Up to now in my account, we have seen the black driver inSuriname with a whip in his hand, punishing the slaves at the commandof his white superiors. But he was a complex gure, who had the ear of his superiors and, if he were to have any success at all, was trusted by

sacrice of slaves, see Melville J. Herskovits, Dahomey. An Ancient West African Kingdom,2 vols. (New York: J. J. Augustin, 1938), 2:53 – 55. Burial of the “life-slaves” with the kingof the Akim along the Gold Coast in Rømer, Account , 184.

53. Martin A. Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), chap. 2, especially 1 – 15, quotationsdrawn from 2, 5, 13. Klein’s evidence moderates the harsher and more schematic view of Claude Meillassoux in his pioneering Anthropologie de l ’ esclavage. Le ventre de fer et d ’ ar-

gent (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986), 117 – 18, 270 – 72. Klein’s view is con-sistent with the overall picture of slave regimes in Africa given by Paul Lovejoy,“Relationships of Dependency, 1600 – 1800,” in Transformations in Slavery. A History of Slavery in Africa, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 112 – 39.

54. Oldendorp, History, 220; and Stedman, Narr 90, 175; and Narr 96, 1:207.55. Van Dyk gives the Neger Engelsche bassia for the Dutch word of cier (“Leeven,”

168, 174); a 1798 language book gives basja and basian for the Sranan and bastiaan for

the Dutch translation (G. C. Weygandt, Gemeenzaame Leerwyze om het Basterd of Neger-Engelsche [Paramaribo: W. W. Beeldsnyder, 1798], 137 – 38). The word is connectedwith the Dutch baas. Hartsinck, Beschryving , 916 (“bomba”).



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his fellow slaves. A plantation with many slaves — say, 125 and higher — usually had two or even three bassias, whereas those with fewer slaveshad only one. Appointed rst as young men, the bassias either were

creoles, that is, born in Suriname, or had arrived at the plantation at anearly age, and they were virtually always the sons of black parents rather than of a black slave woman and a white man. Sometimes they wereeld workers or hunters, other times plantation craftsmen. At Fauquemberg, the eld worker Cupido and the young creole Quimanaappear as bassias in an inventory of 1753; a few years later, Quamina isthe senior bassia together with the young eldworker Bienpayé, the twoof them holding those posts through 1768.56

A bassia had to combine the political skills of an African chief, learned

from his father and/or the many other newcomers from Africa on the plan-tation, with creole savvy about what was necessary to tell their white bosses, to whom they spoke in Neger Engelsche or Dju-tongo. For a bassiato be acceptable to the slaves, it was said, he must never raise his whip to

punish on his own behalf or ever be believed to be doing so. In Van Dyk’s play, the black driver beats only at the manager ’s command, while begginghis drunken superior to hold back from such harm: “Have mercy, master.I gave that woman a hundred lashes already.” He tries to help a slave wifefree herself from the manager ’s sexual demands, although he is unsuccess-

ful in his efforts.57

The historical record presents bassias more forceful than Van Dyk’srespectful slave. As one white driver put it to his fellow of cers, “ Never trust a bassia, for his solidarity lies not with the plantation staff, but with the slaves.” A nal weapon in the bassia’s hands was contact withthe Maroons. In some instances, he was a major gure in resistance tothe Maroons: this occurred when the slaves did not want any of their num-

ber, especially their women, to be kidnapped. In other instances, Maroon

56. On the black drivers, see Stipriaan, Surinaams Contrast , 276 – 83; Gert Oostindie, Roosenburg en Mon Bijou. Twee Surinaamse plantages, 1720 – 1870 (Dordrecht andProvidence: Foris Publications, 1989), 67, 105 – 106, 165 – 66; Rudi Otto Beeldsnijder,“ Om werk van jullie te hebben”: Plantageslaven in Suriname 1730 – 1750 (Utrecht:Instituut voor Culturele Antropologie te Utrecht, 1994), chap. 7; NA, SONA 194, pp. 982, 984; SONA 202, pp. 632 – 33; and SONA 695, p. 509. Of the many plantationinventories I have examined, I have found only one, La Conance on the SurinameRiver, where in 1752 one of the two bassias was described as “mulat ” (NA, SONA 193, pp. 855 – 70).

57. Stipriaan, Surinaams Contrast , 278; and Van Dyk, “Leeven,” 166, 184 – 85, 18 – 88.

Thomas Pistorius, Korte en Zakelyke Beschryvinge van de Colonie van Zuriname(Amsterdam: Theodorus Crajenschot, 1763), 90: the black of cer must not be maliciousor arrogant. Weygandt, Gemeenzaame Leerwyze, 138.



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attacks on Suriname plantations were at the invitation of the bassias;and some of the mass escapes to the Maroons had bassias at their head.58 The bassia’ s status is suggested in a painting made in 1707 or

thereabouts by Dirk Valkenburg, an Amsterdam artist who was then book-keeper and scribe for the sugar plantation Palmeniribo on the SurinameRiver. A religious dance is being performed in front of the slave houses,where some of the participants are possessed by the gods. The bassiastands tall and aloof, a European hat on his head and a small knife tuckedinto the strip of cloth around his hips.59 Of course, some bassias wereseriously at odds with their co-slaves, and on occasion slaves accusedthe bassia of trying to poison one or more of their number.60

Putting pressure on the bassias from among the ranks of the slaves was

an impressive group of skilled men and women, some born in Suriname,others youthful arrivals from Africa. The men were carpenters, coopers, bricklayers, and other plantation craftsmen, whose names appear directly below the black of cers’ on the inventories. Such were the men the master or manager armed with ries to accompany him and his white servants insearch of runaways; this had the side-result of allowing the elite slaves tolearn the location of Maroon trails. The women were cooks, knitters, andseamstresses, many of them also serving at the great house, their namesappearing at the top of the lists of female slaves. (Amiba, the lead

woman on one of the Jewish plantations, is actually called “of cieresse”

).

58. Stipriaan, Surinaams Contrast , 277 – 78; Hoogbergen, Boni Maroon Wars, 26, 33, 69,89 – 90, 132 – 33. The slave revolt on the Danish island of St. John had black drivers or bom-bas in its leadership.

59. Dirk Valkenburg, Slave Play in Suriname (ca. 1797), Den kongelige Maleri-ogSkulptursamling, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, KMS inv. 376. OnValkenburg’s stay in Suriname and on the Winti dance being portrayed in the painting,see Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins. Three Seventeenth-Century Lives

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 190 – 91.60. For example, during the period from 1730 to 1750, ve slaves on the plantation

Vlammenburg on the Commewijne River claimed their bassia was a poisoner. In 1735,on the sugar plantation Crawassibo on the Commewijne with 133 slaves, the bassiaMingo was accused of poisoning a female eld slave. He claimed that earlier she had dis-simulated serious illness, and therefore when she had become actually ill, she was not taken seriously, and she died. Although Mingo’s story was believed by the court, it isclear that he was not on good terms with his co-slaves. Beeldsnijder, Plantageslaven, chap. 7;http://archiefsuriname.com/geschiedenis/plantages/boven-commewijnerivier/crawassibo(accessed July 7, 2010). The Nationaal Archief Suriname had this website in July 2010. Sincethat date, the website has been suspended for reconstruction. The date at which the website will

be reopened and its new address are still unknown (email letters from Audrey Koenders andTanya Sitaram of the Nationaal Archief Suriname, December 8 – 10, 2010). Readers seekingfurther information about material derived from this website can contact me.



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Some of these women had memories of African families where their

mothers were co-wives; although there were surely quarrels among them,they helped sustain order and amity among the slave women, the eldmaids, and others. Sometimes, too, they had their own channels to the

Figure 4. The bassia (black driver) surveys a slave dance at Palmeniribo plantationDirk Valkenburg, Slave Play in Suriname (ca. 1706 – 1707); National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen, KMS376. © SMK Photo.



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white bosses by which to seek favors or protection for their families and for other slave women.61

The third group of inuential gures in the slave community were the

religious specialists and healers, most born in Africa in the early gener-ations, some born in Suriname. Every plantation had its healer or healers,whose knowledge of local plant lore, coupled with incantation, was moreuseful than the surgical implements kept in the plantation medical cabinet.Many plantations had a priest – diviner, known as a Lukuman in Sranan, or a priestess – diviner. Given the honoric name of Granman and Gran Mama,they called upon the gods and served humans in the ways we have seen inAfrica.62

A few such sacred leaders were reputed throughout the colony. Granman

Quassy was born in West Africa in the 1690s and spent his young man-hood on a sugar plantation in Suriname. By the 1740s he was celebratedas healer, diviner, seer, and creator of obia, packets or amulets in whichthe various feathers, hair, shells, and other objects carried with them the

presence and power of African gods., He was also the discoverer of aspecial bark that would bring down fever; transmitted to Linnaeus by aSwedish settler in Suriname, it was named Lignum Quassiae. Quassytoured to different plantations, whereas the priestess – diviner Gran MamaDana was consulted by her supplicants in her “secret chamber,” with

its clay gures of persons and animals, its huge pot of water, and its livesnakes — equipment similar to that found among the diviners of theGbe-speaking peoples of the Slave Coast kingdoms.63

61. Oostindie, Roosenburg , 100 – 107, 164 – 66; Oldendorp, History, 225 – 26; NA, SONA,202, pp. 632, 634 – 35; and SONA, 228, pp. 9 – 37 (“Amiba of cieresse”). On the “slave mis-tress”. . . “who acquiesced to her master ’s demands but also used the privileges she wrestedfrom her master to benet her enslaved compatriots,” see Trevor Burnard, Master, Tyranny,and Desire. Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill

and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 228 – 29.62. Hartsinck, Beschryving , 904; Stedman, Narr 90, 521; Narr 96, 2: 262 – 63; and Nassy,

Essai historique, 2:64 – 69. Using an example from the 1820s, Humphrey Lamur hassuggested that the role of driver and priest were combined (Stipriaan, SurinaamsContrast , 282). This may well be the case some of the time in the nineteenth century,when diviners were reacting to the increase in Christian missionary actitivity on the planta-tions, but in the eighteenth century, what evidence we have suggests these are ordinarily sep-arate roles.

63. Frank Dragtenstein, “Trouw aan de Blanken.” Quassie van Nieuw Timotibo, twist en strijd en de 18de eeuw in Suriname (Amsterdam: KIT Publishers, 2004); Stedman, Narr 90,581 – 82; Narr 96, 2: 346 – 48; Natalie Zemon Davis, “Stedman’s Suriname Book in Sweden,”

in Vänskap over Gränser. En Festkrift till Eva Österberg , eds. Kenneth Johansson and MarieLindstedt Cronberg (Lund: Historiska institutionen, Lunds Universitet 2007), 85 – 86; and Nassy, Essai, 2: 69 – 70.



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What kind of procedures of justice did slave leaders try to put in place ontheir plantations? Resistance to the master ’s punitive regime could rangefrom controlling the ow of information about slaves to the whites, onup to the threat or actuality of revolt. Discussion meetings were held tomake plans. In Van Dyk’s play, the bassia meets together with a leadingfemale house slave and several men; they call each other “master slaves,”“mastra negeri,” using the forms of customary politeness. They delegate

one of the men to sneak away and inform the owner in Paramariboabout the brutality of the manager.64

We can eavesdrop on an actual meeting in 1707 at the sugar plantationof Palmeniribo with its 148 slaves, whose bassia we have just seen inValkenburg’s painting. Mingo, a slave born in Kongo, had been preparingto visit his wife on another plantation, although the owner had forbiddenhim to do so. Whereupon the owner smashed Mingo’s canoe. Mingothen met with his brother Waly and several other blacks, who urged himto go the owner and demand compensation: “Mingo, you’re no man” [if

you don’t do it], Waly said to him in Sranan, “ Mingo jou no man.” “Iam a man,” said Mingo. “You go then.” As it turned out Mingo’s missioncoincided with other grievances on Palmeniribo, especially the owner ’srevoking the previous owner ’s grant of Saturdays free from work. Mingoled a delegation shouting “ jou no meester voor mi.” An uprising ensued;some slaves escaped to the Maroons, others were prosecuted, but the slavesof Palmeniribo got their free Saturdays back.65

Figure 5. A womandiviner at work inSuriname, ca. 1830.Source: PierreJacques Benoit, Reisdoor Suriname.

Beschrijving van de Nederlandsebezittingen inGuyana, ed. ChrisSchriks (Zutphen: DeWalburg Pers, 1980),

g. 36.

64. Van Dyk, “Leeven,” 205 – 6.65. Margot van den Berg, “‘Mi no sal tron tongo’: Early Sranan in court records

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Natalie Davis - Slaves Experience of Criminal Justice in Colonial Suriname

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