Javanese and East Indian women clearing up a cacao plantation in Dutch Guiana
Javanese celebrating the week-end holiday with their native musical instruments
Wash-day in Dutch Guiana
The gold fields of Dutch Guiana are above Kwakoegron, and the purpose of the barrier is to prevent gold from getting out without paying the seven per cent. ad valorem tax to the government. Miners are said to favor the method, because it does away with stealing by workmen. Yet it is scarcely worth while to try to smuggle gold into town, for it must be sold secretly to “fences” who seldom pay as much as honest gold brings after going through the government process. Arrived in Paramaribo, the packages held by the conductor are turned over to the police, examined, and the next day the owner comes and pays his tax and then sells his gold to a registered dealer. It is even unlawful for the man who dug it to bring his own gold to town with him. Government officials who handle the yellow metal are reputed to be honest, but not so much can be said for the government itself, which accepts gold stolen in French Guiana, merely charging a higher tax and keeping an official record of it. Naturally, the government of Cayenne retaliates.
I saw and heard much more of the “Bush Negroes” before I left Surinam. Scattered all over the colony between the well-settled coast and the Indians at the southern end, they constitute the chief interest of Dutch Guiana, as the white convicts do in the adjoining French colony. The government makes no attempt to rule them, no pretense of trying to bring them out of their savagery; indeed, it protects them in their wild state and gives them privileges not enjoyed by white residents,—as, for example, the right to carry firearms without a license. They have no schools or other civilizing influence, except a few missions of the Moravians. It may be that they are better off under this plan; certainly they are finer specimens of manhood than the average domesticated negro. All those I saw were jet black, but there are said to be rare cases of their mixing with the whites, the offspring of such mixture almost invariably losing his “bush” instinct and drifting to town. Descended from some of the hardiest tribes of Africa, many of them still have traditions of belonging to the wealthy class in that continent, their ancestors owning many cattle and having been captured by trickery. The men make good carriers and bush guides, but are incredibly heavy eaters. Their principal commerce with the outside world is bringing wood to town, paddling their hollowed-out tree-trunks, often forty or fifty feet long, in and out of the network of rivers. The men clear a different patch of jungle every year, and the women plant cassava, rice, bananas, and plantains, and do all the manual labor about the camp. Polygamy prevails, and the relations of the men are rather free, though the women are held strictly to account. If a domestic misdemeanor is discovered, a conclave is held and both the man and the woman are beaten, but the latter usually carries her marks the longer. When a “Bush Negro” dies, his body is placed on an elevated platform for eight days, and every day the men come and rub their bodies with the juice, if it may be so called, of the corpse, for the double purpose of adding to their own strength and insuring the entrance of the dead man into their heaven. They have many of the superstitions, strange primitive rites, and Mumbo-Jumbos of their African ancestors. Any mark called a charm or curse before a door will keep them from entering it. Though very suspicious of strangers, those who have won their confidence find them staunch friends, gay and good-hearted, but ready to do anything for rum or tobacco, which there is no law against giving them. Never having been subdued, they fear no one, and live under their own tribal laws, punishing even with death those who disobey them, without government interference. A few years ago four West Indian blacks stole a “Bush Negro’s” canoe along the Maroni River and left him to struggle back to his village through the jungle. Nearly a year afterward the West Indians returned from their gold prospecting in the interior, passing down the river in the same canoe. The owner recognized it, raced back to his village and, collecting a group of his fellows, overtook the thieves farther down, killed them, recovered the canoe, and stood the heads of the four up on a rock jutting out into the river. The British Government was still demanding punishment for the deed, but the Dutch were showing no intention of doing anything about it.
The “Bush Negroes” have no color-line, but treat clothed blacks just as they do white men or Indians, and do not hesitate to make slaves of French convicts who fall into their hands. Not only do they pay no taxes or dues of any kind to the government, but the latter, ever afraid of an outbreak among them, pays them annual tribute. Once or twice a year the “gran man” of each tribe comes to town in frock-coat and silk hat, but bare feet, wearing a great bronze coat-of-arms of Holland across his chest and followed by an obsequious valet, to call upon the governor and receive greetings from Queen Wilhelmina, a letter renewing the treaty between his tribe and the Dutch, and a small sum of money or some trinkets to distribute among his tribesmen. Of late years the “Bush Negroes” have been required to wear clothing when they enter the capital, but they interpret this demand not into shirts and trousers, but into a multicolored, silky strip of cloth which they drape about their naked bodies in an ornamental rather than concealing manner. A bit of contact with urban civilization makes them crafty. One day in Paramaribo I drifted down to the river where, among lumber piles, a whole colony of “Bush Negroes” was stopping while they exchanged the wood they had brought for useless finery. I offered a Dutch quarter to one of them in fancy drapery to pose before my kodak. He only agreed on condition that he could be taken with one hand on a camp chair, evidently for the same reason that some of our countrymen prefer backgrounds of skyscrapers, since he had certainly never owned, and probably never sat in a chair in his life. No sooner was I done with him than another man, better built and more joyfully dressed, stepped out, offering to pose for a similar sum. Then a still more gorgeous one put in an appearance, and the procession evidently would have continued indefinitely, as nicely graded as the characters in a Broadway musical comedy up to the climax of spotlighted heroine, had I not professed myself out of Dutch quarters.
“Bush Negroes” form new words onomatopoetically. Thus, when the first motor-boat approached their retreat, one of them, putting a hand behind his acute ear, said, “Hah! Packapacka walkee disee way,” and “packapackas” they have been ever since. Their language is the “taki-taki” of all the uneducated natives of Dutch Guiana, though they use many words, chiefly African in origin, not familiar to their clothes-wearing brethren. The basis of “taki-taki” as its name suggests, is English with considerable Dutch and traces of all the languages that have seeped over the borders of the colony during its long and checkered history, all mixed together in the same concoction, in keeping with a childish intelligence, and spoken with negro slovenliness. It was my privilege one Sunday to hear a sermon in “taki-taki” in one of the wooden churches of the Moravians up a coastal river. While the congregation did not consist exactly of “Bush Negroes,” it was of a similar grade of intelligence; and the same missionary preached on alternate weeks in a village of wild blacks, using the same language, though not quite so many Dutch words. Canoe-loads of negroes appeared from up and down the placid river soon after the bell had rung out from the steeple of the home-made church, standing out incongruously against the great green forest. Those who lived near were already in their Sunday best; the rest stopped in the bush above or below the church to change their clothes. Three rooms in the minister’s house had been set aside for that purpose, but they prefer the outdoor dressing-rooms. My host and I were the only white men in the congregation, and we were led to special benches beside the pulpit and facing the rest. There were a hundred or more negroes in the church, almost all of them jet black; the sexes were separated, with the children on the front benches. What we call Moravians, but who call themselves “Brüdergemeinte,” must be married, and in this case the burly, bearded, German missionary stalked in followed by his cadaverous, Quaker-looking wife wearing the approved sour expression of many Protestants engaged in the business of saving heathen souls. She was wearing drab black and a little monkey-like cap, and took her place on a platform in front of the female half of the church, where she remained absolutely motionless throughout the long service. A black Dutchman, who taught a class of negro children in the mission school during the week, tortured a little melodeon from time to time. Greater solemnity could not be imagined; the place was full of sanctimonious, breathless negroes with pillar-of-the-church expressions—who, according to my companion, were past masters at stealing anything they could lay their hands on outside it. The dialect used in the sermon has been reduced to writing by the Moravians, which is the reason a printed page of the “taki-taki” Testament or the “Singi-boekoe,” does not look more familiar to those of us whose native tongue is its basis. For, being Germans, the translators have given German or Dutch values to the letters, so that while the word “switi” might not be quickly intelligible to us, we would have no difficulty in understanding it as “sweety.” “Joe,” “wi,” “bekasi,” and “Loekoe!” are simply Dutch-German ways of spelling “you,” “we,” “becausee,” and “Looky” or “Look ye!” “Hij wan bigi man,” as it appears in the “taki-taki” Bible, would be readily recognizable if written “He one bigee man.” “Mama” has the same meaning as in all languages, but “father” is “tata,” as among the Indians of the Andes. “Pikien” for “child” may have come from the African “piccaninny,” from the Spanish pequeño or the Portuguese pequeno. “Masra Gado” was “Lord God,” the “a” always retaining the broad open-mouthed West Indian form. Both in vocabulary and grammar “taki-taki” shows the most primitive, childlike minds at work and the spoken language suggests nothing so much as a group of negro children on a Southern plantation trying to express themselves in the language of their elders. Thus the word “switi” means “good” in any of its forms,—in taste, quality, condition, or character; “Hij maki wi” may mean anything from “He makes us” to “He would have made us.” The text that day was St. Luke, Chapter XVI, Verse 25:
