Consideratien van bewinthebberen der generale geoctroijeerde West-Indische Compagnie deser landen over de directie van de colonie van Suriname ende het gouvernement van den heer Van Sommelsdijck aldaar (ca.1687)
De Sociëteit van Suriname was een particuliere Nederlandse koloniale onderneming in Amsterdam, opgericht in 1683 en opgeheven in 1795 die verantwoordelijk was voor de kolonie van Suriname. In mei 1683 werd de Geoctroyeerde Sociëteit van Suriname opgericht. Deze particuliere onderneming had als doel winst te maken met het beheer van de kolonie. Er waren drie aandeelhouders die elk voor een derde zeggenschap hadden: De West-Indische Compagnie (WIC), de familie Van Aerssen van Sommelsdijck en de stad Amsterdam. De aandeelhouders moesten de aanvoer van slaven, het werven van nieuwe planters én de bescherming en het bestuur van de kolonie garanderen.
Cornelis van Aerssen van Sommelsdijck (uit: Geschiedenis van Suriname. J. Wolbers. Amsterdam, 1861)
In de Buku Bibliotheca Surinamica collectie bevindt zich een belangrijk boek dat een bijzonder licht werpt op het bestuur van Suriname in die vroege periode: Consideratien van Bewinthebbern der Generale Geoctroyeerde West-Indische Compagnie deser Landen over de Directie van de Colonie Surinam en het Gouvernement van den Heer van Sommelsdijck aldaar. In dit 17e eeuwse boek wordt het octrooi van de Sociëteit uit de doeken gedaan en worden de voorwaarden weergegeven waaronder de Heer van Sommelsdijck en de stad Amsterdam ‘in den eygendom van Suriname syn ingelaten door de West Indische Compagnie’. Het staat vol met bepalingen van de Sociëteit, mededelingen van Van Aerssen van Sommelsdijck en de stad Amsterdam. Een heel bijzonder licht op de vroege koloniale geschiedenis geeft de lijst van slaven die op 28 april 1683 zijn geleverd door het schip D’Orangeboom o.l.v. kapitein Cornelis Jansz. Pyl. Hier vinden we een opsomming van planters in Suriname die door de WIC slaven geleverd kregen voor hun plantages. Deze planters moesten de WIC betalen door suiker te leveren. Commandeur Laurens Verboom bijvoorbeeld heeft geleverd gekregen: Negentien zowel mannen als vrouwen tegen elk 3000 pond suiker. Hij moet dus in totaal 57.000 pond suiker leveren. Ook dominee Johannes Basseliers kocht slaven, zes in totaal voor 18.000 pond. De joodse planter Samuel C. Nassy kreeg er vijftien slaven, tegenwaarde 45.000 pond suiker. Aron de Silva nam er slechts één. Everhart van Hemert kocht ‘een jongen’ die slechts 2.600 pond moest opbrengen. In totaal werden er 155 slaven verkocht die tezamen 455.800 pond suiker moesten opbrengen.
Gezicht op Sommelsdijk in Suriname. Bienfait, 1827. Het chirurgijnsetablissement Sommelsdijk lag op de splitsing van de Commewijne en de Cottica rivier. (collectie Rijksmuseum Amsterdam).
We vinden in deze publicatie ook een lijst van alle Nederlandse- en Engelse schepen die tussen januari 1685 en april 1687 Suriname aandeden. Dat het koloniale gezag grote moeite had om fraude met slaventransporten tegen te gaan blijkt uit de vele ‘missiven’ van ‘den Heer van Sommelsdyck’, de gouverneur. Zo had een zekere Engelse schipper, genaamd Hennery Fermes, twee ‘Negers’ naar Suriname gebracht die hij had gestolen op St. Jago. Er werd streng op toe gezien dat de slavenhandel volgens de regels van de WIC en de Sociëteit verliep. Veel kapiteins tilden nog wel eens de boel door een aantal slaven buiten de administratie te houden en die illegaal te verkopen.
Cornelis van Aerssen, heer van Sommelsdijck (1637-1688), kocht voor fl. 86.666,- 33% van de aandelen van de Sociëteit van Suriname. Hij liet zich door de andere twee aandeelhouders tot onbezoldigd gouverneur van Suriname benoemen. Op 24 november zette de eerste gouverneur voet aan wal in Suriname. Hij verbeterde het beheer van de plantages door gebruik te maken van sluizen en het bouwen van dijken. Lang heeft hij niet kunnen genieten van zijn leven als planter en gouverneur. Op 19 juli 1688 werd hij door een groep ontevreden soldaten, die betere voeding en meer geld eisten, vermoord.
Dit boek helpt ons de vroegste geschiedenis van de kolonie Suriname een beetje beter te begrijpen. Het zal voor verzamelaars niet mee vallen een exemplaar van dit boek te vinden. Ik ben het in de afgelopen veertig jaar slechts één keer tegen gekomen. Dit exemplaar bevindt zich nu in de collectie Buku Bibliotheca Surinamica.
De Lepra Commentationes. Recensuit J.D. Hahn. Gottfried Willem Schilling. Leiden/Utrecht: Luchtmans/ Paddenburg, 1778.
De Surinaamse bibliotheek kent een bescheiden aantal boeken die in het Latijn zijn geschreven. Zo verscheen in 1763 in Uppsala Dissertatio Botanico-Medica Sistens Lignum Quassiae, een proefschrift van Carolus Blom over het Quassie-hout in Suriname. Het is geen toeval dat juist de medische literatuur in het Latijn geschreven werd. Zo konden wetenschappers uit verschillende taalgebieden toch elkaar informeren over hun onderzoek en nieuwe inzichten.
Titelblad van De Lepra Commentationes (1778)
In 1778 verscheen De Lepra Commentationes van de hand van Gottfried Willem Schilling; één van de zeldzaamste Surinamica. Over de auteur Schilling weten we niet veel. Lange tijd dacht men dat hij geboren was in Priegnitz in Brandenburg. Vervolgens ontdekte historica prof. dr. Natalie Zemon Davis dat hij volgens de akte van zijn verloving, met Elisabeth Diderica Baldina de Graaff, rond 1733 in Wijk bij Duurstede geboren is. Dankzij uitstekend speurwerk van Philip Dikland weten we nu dat er twee personen waren met de naam Gottfried Schilling in Suriname die bovendien in dezelfde tijd leefden. Dit waren Godfried Wilhelm Schilling, chirurgijn, later Doctor Medicinae (de auteur van ons boek) én Godfried Schilling, kapitein, later Raadsheer van het Hof van Politie. In 1766 komen we de Duitse chirurgijn Gottfried Wilhelm Schilling tegen en wel in een Amsterdanse acte uit 1766 (GAA) waarin wordt vermeld dat een bemanningslid van een schip werd behandeld door “dokter G.W. Schilling”.*)
Als scheepsarts (mogelijk op een slavenschip) kwam hij in 1757 in Suriname terecht. Hij werkte er behalve als arts ook als luitenant in het koloniale leger. Na zijn terugkeer naar Nederland behaalde hij in 1769 aan de Universiteit van Utrecht een doctorsgraad en schreef een proefschrift over lepra in Suriname (Dissertatio medica inauguralis de lepra. Trajecti ad Rhenum, : ex officina Joannis Broedelet, 1769).
Na verschillende reizen in Europa keerde Schilling in 1772 weer terug naar Suriname. Hij vervulde een aantal belangrijke posities. Zo was hij geneesheer in het militair hospitaal in Paramaribo dat in 1760 werd geopend. In 1781 wordt Schilling benoemd tot de president van het Collegium Medicum, het hoogste medische orgaan in Suriname. Hij werkte in totaal bijna 20 jaar lang in Paramaribo.
Militair Hospitaal Paramaribo
Het boek bestaat uit drie delen. Schilling begint met een verhandeling over de verschillende vormen en de symptomen van lepra. Ook de besmettelijkheid en de behandelmethoden komen in de eerste deel aan de order. Het tweede deel gaat over de dissertatie uit 1709 van Philip Ouseel, een Duitse wetenschapper (Dissertatio de lepra cutis Herbraeorum) en het commentaar van Schilling hier op. In het laatste deel tenslotte gaat hij in op de nieuwe behandelmethoden en het gebruik van planten uit ‘de Nieuwe Wereld´.Mijn medische kennis nagenoeg nul. Laat ik me voorzichtigheidshalve beperken door te melden dat Schilling geloofde dat de ziekte lepra veroorzaakt werd door een combinatie van weersomstandigheden, klimaat, voeding en de leefomstandigheden. Schilling ging er van uit dat de huidziekte lepra (of boasi) door Afrikaanse slaven in Suriname was geherintroduceerd. Als gevolg van hun ontucht en losbandigheid waren zij een makkelijke prooi voor de ziekte. Toen ook Europeanen hieraan ten prooi vielen werd het seksuele verkeer met Afrikaanse slavinnen als oorzaak aangewezen. Schilling probeerde wel verschillende behandelmethoden maar vond isolatie van de zieken noodzaak. Daarom droeg hij bij aan de totstandkoming van opvang van leprozen op Voorzorg aan de Saramaccarivier. Iedere slaaf, vrije zwarte en vrije kleurlingen werd gedwongen de rest van zijn of haar leven daar te slijten. Witte Europeanen met boasi mochten met beperkte bewegingsvrijheid thuis blijven wonen.
Koor van melaatse zangers. Gerardus Majella Stichting. Paramaribo, Suriname (ca. 1902)
Slechts weinig particuliere verzamelaars zullen dit in hun verzameling hebben. Vanwege de taal is dit niet een boek dat men aanschaft om te lezen. Het is voor verzamelaars eerder een object van begeerte vanwege zijn zeldzaamheid én vanwege de macabere illustratie, ‘Horridior Morte’, op de titelpagina. Het exemplaar in de Buku Bibliotheca Surinamica collectie is afkomstig van de bibliotheek van de Boston Medical Library. Gelukkig bezit Suriname sinds kort ook een exemplaar. Professor Derk Bruynzeel, oud hoogleraar dermatologie aan de medische faculteit van de Vrije Universiteit schonk een exemplaar aan Suriname. Henk Menke, dermatoloog en medisch historicus die onderzoek doet naar de Surinaamse leprageschiedenis, heeft het boek op het medisch historisch congres in januari 2017 overhandigd aan het Nationaal Archief in Paramaribo. Op dit moment wordt er wereldwijd slechts één exemplaar van dit boek te koop aangeboden. Wie zijn boekenkast met deze trofee wilt verrijken moet wel diep in de buidel tasten; het boek kost €1200,–.
Carl Haarnack
*) met dank aan Philip Dikland. Zie zijn Biografie van Gottfried Wilhelm Schilling (1724-1804)
Verhaal van een togtje in Suriname (1823) geschreven is door vrouw. Dat is bijzonder omdat we bijna alleen maar oude (non-fictie) teksten over Suriname kennen die door mannen zijn geschreven. Of de dame in kwestie (helaas kennen we haar naam niet) door een andere bril naar het koloniale leven in Suriname keek, moet iedereen maar zelf beoordelen.
Jodensavanne,Suriname. Litho J.E. van Heemskerck van Beest naar G.W.C. Voorduin (1860)
De reis vindt plaats in het gezelschap van een hoge ambtenaar waardoor de ontvangst overal zeer goed is. Het reisgezelschap vertrekt om elf uur ‘s morgens vanaf de platte brug in Paramaribo. Behalve de schrijfster en haar ‘beide lieve jongens’ maken ook hun trouwe Victoria, haar Flora en ‘den voete-boy Charles’ deel uit van het gezelschap. Deze drie vormen ongetwijfeld slaven die het leven van de reizigers moesten veraangenamen. Maar er moeten meer mensen aanwezig zijn. Want na een ‘kwartieruurs’ geroeid te hebben komen ze bij de plantages Beekhuizen en Livorno. We kunnen er gerust van uit gaan dat het zware roeiwerk gebeurde door mensen die niet in het verhaal genoemd worden. Vanaf dat punt heeft men mooi uitzicht op de nieuwe huizen van de stad Paramaribo die sinds de brand van 1821 opnieuw gebouwd zijn. Om drie uur ’s middag komt het gezelschap aan op de plaats van bestemming, een plantage waar een Malthezer, ‘een beschaafd en geschikt mensch’, directeur is. Daar wordt men verkwikt met een glas wijn dat onder de schaduw van enige tamarinde- en ‘mamiabomen’ wordt genuttigd.
Boottocht in Suriname. Ets (19e eeuw)
De plantage aan de overkant van de rivier gelegen is heeft een stenen plantagehuis, dat doet denken aan een klooster of ‘regthuis’. Dat is voor Suriname zeer ongebruikelijk. Er worden wandelingen gemaakt in het bos. Daarbij gaan ‘een paar Negers’ met houwers voorop om een weg te banen door de dichtbegroeide struiken. Tijdens een ander uitstapje wordt een plantage bezocht die, volgens de schrijfster, veel overeenkomsten vertoonde met een Gelderse buitenplaats. De directeur, die hevig stottert, wordt niet bij naam genoemd maar is een zoon van een vaderlandse treurspeldichter.
Ook staat een trip naar Jodensavanne gepland. Deze is volgens de schrijfster ‘aller schilderachtigst’ gelegen, gedeeltelijk op de helling van een berg. Wij kennen de Jodensavanne alleen als een plek waar grafstenen en ruïnes stille getuigen zijn van een bewogen verleden. Maar toen woonden er nog zo’n acht gezinnen op Jodensavanne. Het gezelschap wordt ontvangen in het huis van den heer P. Daar worden zij door de man des huizes en enige andere ‘Israëlitische heren’ deftig ontvangen terwijl zijn vrouw, ‘in eene zeer vreemde kleeding’ met twee aardige kleine meisjes op de sofa wachtte. Het geheel werd omringd door een grote hoeveelheid slaven en slavinnen die, ‘op het fraaiste uitgedost en blinkende van gouden sieraden’, thee, gebak en confituren serveerden. De synagoge (Beracha Ve Salom / Zegen & Vrede, ch) die net als de huizen in 1832 door brand verwoest zou worden, werd nog gebruikt. Deze was, volgens onze ooggetuige, groot en herinnerde aan de welvaart van de stichters van deze plek. Het gezelschap luisterde naar het avondgebed dat in het Portugees werd uitgesproken. Het gedeelte van de ‘kerk’ dat voor vrouwen bestemd was werd als school gebruikt. Naast de synagoge was een ‘regtkamer’ waar vroeger recht gesproken werd. Nu kwamen de regenten van de Joodse gemeente er nog vier maal per jaar samen om over geldzaken te beslissen. Het kerkhof, waar enige grote en mooie marmeren grafzerken te bewonderen waren, was door een eenvoudig hekwerk omsloten.
Indianendans Benoit (1830)
Een bezoek aan een indianendorp viel in het water omdat de indianen (hier ‘Bokken’ genoemd) weer verder getrokken waren. Er werden voortdurend wandelingen gemaakt waar bloemen, planten en dieren de revue passeren. Aan het eind van de plantage-reis, die acht dagen duurde, werd met eb weer naar Paramaribo geroeid.
Wat dit reisverslag bijzonder maakt is dat de auteur hier niet noodzakelijkerwijs de grote geschiedenis van Suriname wil duiden of natuurkundige kennis over ons wil uitstorten. Het doel van de reis is te genieten van het mooist dat de natuur te bieden heeft. Er komen slaven in het verhaal voor (alsof het de gewoonste zaak van de wereld was en dat was het anno 1823 natuurlijk ook) maar het gaat niet over slavernij. Morele oordelen daarover ontbreken volledig. Juist de alledaagse dingen worden opgemerkt en beschreven. Ik ken bijvoorbeeld geen verslagen van mensen die de oude synagoge bezocht hebben.
Zou het niet fantastisch zijn wanneer we ergens een verslag uit een dagboek van de foetoe-boi Charles, of de slavinnen Victoria en Flora zouden vinden? Die zouden aan het verhaal toch iets wezenlijks hebben kunnen toevoegen?
Carl Haarnack
Verhaal van een togtje in Suriname (in: Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen. Amsterdam: G.S. Leeneman van der Kroe en J.W. IJntema, 1823)
Verhaal of brief aan de ingezetenen van de colonie van Suriname, behelzende eene apologie of verdediging van de heeren S.P. Pichot, [en anderen], ingezeetenen en planters. Door Samuel Paulus Pichot (ca. 1749).
De 18e eeuw is misschien wel de boeiendste periode uit de Surinaamse geschiedenis. Het is de eeuw waarin de plantage-economie tot grote bloei kwam maar ook de eeuw waarin, na de beurscrash in Amsterdam in 1773, de neergang werd ingezet. Halverwege de 18e eeuw bereikte het verzet van weggelopen slaven een hoogtepunt. Deze marrons waren in aantal zo sterk gegroeid en in hun aanvallen op plantages zo geslaagd dat zij een bedreiging vormden voor het voortbestaan van de kolonie. Suriname werd bestuurd door de Sociëteit van Suriname die in Amsterdam gevestigd was (vergaderingen vonden plaats in het paleis op de Dam!). De stad Amsterdam, de West-Indische Compagnie (WIC) en de familie Van Aerssen van Sommelsdijck waren de drie aandeelhouders van de Sociëteit die de gouverneur in Suriname benoemde. Er waren voortdurend conflicten tussen de planters in Suriname en de gouverneur. Vaak gingen deze conflicten over de kosten van de bescherming tegen de aanvallen van weggelopen slaven.
De wapens van Suriname, Bernard Picart, 1720 (collectie: Rijksmuseum)
Samuel P. Pichot werd in Paramaribo geboren als zoon van Isaac Pichot en Alida de Swart. Net als Elias Luzac (zie Parbode vorige maand) kwam Isaac Pichot rond 1680 vanuit Bergerac (Frankrijk) als Hugenoot, via Amsterdam naar Suriname. Samen met Salomon du Plessis (ook een Hugenoot), die advocaat was bij de West-Indische Compagnie, was Pichot in conflict geraakt met gouverneur Jan Jacob Mauricius (1692-1768). Salomon du Plessis was de vader van de beruchte Susanna du Plessis. Hij was getrouwd met een rijke weduwe van de broer van Samuel Paulus Pichot, Daniel. Zij bezat verschillende plantages. Samuel Paulus Pichot was eigenaar van o.a. de plantages Sorg en Hoop, Mon Tresor en l’Esperance aan de Commewijne, Caramawippibo aan de Carameca-kreek, Wederhoop aan de Cassewinica en tenslotte plantage Patience aan de Cottica. Hij getrouwd was met Anna l’Espinasse. Behalve planter was Samuel Paulus Pichot ook Raadsheer van Politie.
Fort Zeelandia (collectie Rijksmuseum)
Dit uitermate zeldzame boekje speelde een belangrijke rol in het conflict tussen een aantal plantage-eigenaren en gouverneur Mauricius. Het boekje, 64 pagina’s dik, werd in 1749 gemaakt door Samuel Paulus Pichot (1714-1763). Hij liet het in Amsterdam drukken want in Suriname bestonden nog geen drukkerijen. In de Koninklijke Bibliotheek in Den Haag of bij universiteitsbibliotheken zult u tevergeefs naar deze titel zoeken. Voor zover bekend is er slechts één exemplaar te vinden en wel in de bibliotheek van Harvard University. Uiteraard beschikt de Buku-Bibliotheca Surinamica ook over een exemplaar dat permanent bewaakt wordt. Dat is hetzelfde exemplaar dat in 1982 door de vermaarde Amsterdamse antiquaar Simon Emmering in catalogus nr. 42 te koop werd aangeboden.
Carl Haarnack
Pichot titelblad (collectie: Buku – Bibliotheca Surinamica)
Van 30 januari tot en met 14 juni 2015 presenteert het Joods Historisch Museum de tentoonstelling Joden in de Cariben. Bezoekers van de expositie zullen de joodse geschiedenis van Suriname en Curaçao ontdekken. Het is een geschiedenis van bijna vierhonderd jaar waarin handel, plantages, slavernij en vermenging van culturen een grote rol hebben gespeeld. Het is voor het eerst dat aan dit onderwerp een overzichtstentoonstelling wordt gewijd. Joden in de Cariben vertelt het verhaal van de joodse gemeenschappen die zich vanaf de zeventiende eeuw vanuit Amsterdam vestigden in een onbekende, nieuwe wereld: via Brazilië en Nieuw-Amsterdam (nu New York) trokken Portugese joden naar Suriname en Curaçao. Dankzij de grote economische en religieuze vrijheid die joden in deze landen genoten en door hun wijdvertakte handels- en familienetwerken, ontstonden daar bloeiende joodse centra.
Pierre Jacques Benoit, Litho uit Voyage à Surinam, Brussel (1839). Collectie Kenneth Boumann
In de tropen waren de specifieke maatschappelijke omstandigheden anders dan in Nederland en deze leidden tot een nieuwe uitdrukking van de joodse identiteit. De samenlevingen van Curaçao en Suriname vertonen wel verschillen. Terwijl in Curaçao sprake was van een handelscultuur, ontwikkelde zich in Suriname een plantagecultuur. Dit verschil was mede bepalend voor de mate waarin de joodse gemeenschap assimileerde met de overige bevolking. Door de omgang van de Portugese joden met de Afro-Surinaamse bevolking, aanvankelijk op de plantages en later in Paramaribo, vermengden hun culturen. Op Curaçao was ook sprake van vermenging, maar in mindere mate. Na de bloei in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw zette in beide gebieden de neergang in. In de loop van de negentiende eeuw trokken veel joden weg naar Nederland of Amerika.
Jodensavanne. Foto: Julie-Marthe Cohen
Tegenwoordig is de joodse gemeenschap in Suriname en op Curaçao klein. De sporen die de joodse cultuur heeft nagelaten in bijvoorbeeld culinaire tradities, taal en religieuze gebruiken zijn echter talrijk, zowel in Suriname als op Curaçao. De tentoonstelling Joden in de Cariben is chronologische opgezet en bevat schilderijen van onder meer Frans Post en Job Adriaansz Berckheyde, prenten en dagelijkse en religieuze voorwerpen. Verder zijn er veel oude foto’s en boeiende interviews met Surinaamse en Curaçaose joden te zien. Daarnaast maken de persoonlijke portretten uit het project ‘Suri-joods’ deel uit van de expositie. In deze filmpjes vertellen Surinaamse Nederlanders over wat de joodse cultuur voor hun identiteit betekent.
Bij de tentoonstelling verschijnt de rijk geïllustreerde publicatie Joden in de Cariben dat wordt uitgegeven door Walburg Pers. In tien hoofdstukken schrijven verschillende auteurs over de betekenis van deze joodse gemeenschappen in de voormalige Nederlandse koloniën (prijs: € 34,50)
(Op deze tentoonstelling zijn ook een aantal bruiklenen te zien uit de collectie Buku- Bibliotheca Surinamica)
This article describes the sources for, and the origins and uses of, the creole languages in the Dutch colony of eighteenth-century Suriname – those created and spoken among slaves on the plantations, among the free black Maroons in the jungle villages and among the mixed population (freed/slave, Christian/Jewish, French/Dutch, etc.) of the town of Paramaribo. The rich sources derive especially from plantation managers and Moravian missionaries, at their best working with black or coloured collaborators. These creoles, both the Englishbased Sranan and the Portuguese-based Saramaccan, allowed generations of Africans and Surinamese-Africans of diverse background to discuss matters of family, health and religion, to tell stories, to establish intimacy and mount quarrels with each other, to consider relations with masters and settlers, to plot resistance and sometimes to construct a past history. The uses of the creole languages by settlers are described, including their limited employment for religious conversion. The article concludes with the Dutch and Sranan poems published in the seventeen-eighties by a Dutch settler married to a mulatto heiress, poems casting in doubt hierarchies of colour.
Caribbean creole languages are especially instructive for the historical study of communication. These creoles were created by people wrenched from their own language communities and by the children of such uprooted parents; by people eager to have a language in which to conduct their lives amidst a surrounding babel of tongues and in lands far away from those of their progenitors. They illustrate the ingenuity of human populations in difficult straits and the wide range of situations and subjects they wanted to be able to talk about in relatively short order.
Linguists took their time to decide that colonial creoles were not just ‘broken’ or ‘bastard’ or ‘aberrant’ versions of genuine languages, but were new languages in their own right and worthy of study. In that change of view, the Suriname creoles had a role to play. In 1829, when the British and Foreign Bible Society published a New Testament, translated by the Moravian Brethren missionaries into ‘Negro-English’, the Suriname English-based creole, it was immediately assailed by the Edinburgh Christian Instructor for ‘putting the broken English of the Negroes . . . into a written and permanent form . . . embody[ing] their barbarous, mixed, imperfect phrases’. Whereupon in 1830 the philologist William Greenfield, himself a biblical specialist and translator, published an answer showing that the Suriname creole was an autonomous ‘rule-governed’ language, with connections to both English and Dutch, but separate from them. He reminded critics that the origins of the Suriname creole were not that different from the origins of English, once held in contempt as ‘a barbarous jargon, neither good French nor pure Saxon’. And against those claiming that Africans lacked the ability to master the English language, Greenfield wrote, three years before the abolition of slavery in England: ‘The human mind is the same in every clime; and accordingly we find nearly the same process adopted in the formation of language in every country’.1
Hugo Schuchardt (1842-1927)
Suriname creole languages also figured in the abundant work of the Austrian Hugo Schuchardt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Celebrated as ‘the father of creole studies’, Schuchardt continued to undermine Eurocentric judgement of language:
When the [Suriname] Black . . . says ‘go-take-come’ (go teki kom . . . ) for ‘fetch’, we regard it with astonishment as an African peculiarity, though [fetching] is actually a question of three distinct acts. The peculiarity is ours . . . Is it more natural to say ‘I have hunger’ [ j’ai faim] than ‘hunger have me’ ( . . . hangri kisi mi)?2
Schuchardt published eighteenth-century texts in both the Suriname English-based creole, now called Sranan, and the Suriname Portuguese-based creole, called Saramaccan, noting that there was overlap in words between the two and that both creoles were richly endowed with African words. Describing these and other Atlantic creoles, Schuchardt used two modes of explanation: certain practices, such as putting verbs at the front of a phrase or stringing them along in a series, he attributed to precise African practices (what the linguists now call ‘substrate influence’); other features found in all the creoles, such as using infinitives rather than inflected verb forms, he explained by ‘parallelism’, or what linguists now call ‘universal processes of creolization’.3
In the development of creole studies since the nineteen-thirties and their explosion in the last forty years, such modes of describing and explaining have been at the forefront of lively debate. Are the similar forms found in the Atlantic creoles to be explained solely by universal properties of language inborn in all of us (the ‘language bioprogram’, as a leading proponent, Derek Bickford, calls it)? Or are similarities in phonology and syntax to be explained by substrate influences, that is, influences from west African languages? Are creole languages created in a single generation by slave children who are born in the Americas and who take the pidgin of their displaced parents and turn it into a real ‘nativized’ language? Or are they rather created over several generations, with the influx of new speakers from Africa making a difference? The best current wisdom, some of it drawn from the study of the languages and demography of Suriname, combines these alternatives. Both language bioprogramme and west African substrate can play a part in the first emergence of a creole; and though the creole might ‘jell’ in a generation, it could acquire new features afterward from the flood of arrivals from Africa, some of them children, who learned to speak it as a second language, and from other processes of language change.4
Suriname was an English colony from 1650 to 1667.5 The first settler population at its height was about 1,000 people, many of them coming from other English colonies in the Caribbean. The 2,000 slaves who worked their sugar plantations on the Suriname and Commewine rivers included Arawak Indians, but most of them were Africans, transported on Dutch slave boats especially from the Slave Coast and Loango. Purchased at the Paramaribo slave market or in some instances born on the plantations, these men, women and children spoke the Gbe and Bantu Kikongo languages to whatever compatriots they had, and in the early years used an Englishbased pidgin for intra- and inter-plantation communication. By 1667, when the Dutch acquired the colony, the pidgin was expanding into a creole with an English and west African lexicon. During the sixteen-seventies most of the English-owned slaves were taken from Suriname by their departing masters, but not before they had passed on their creole to a new generation of Africans purchased by the Dutch planters. Other recent arrivals from Africa learned the creole directly from those slaves and the slaves of English proprietors who stayed on. By around 1700 the language was known in Dutch as Neger Engels or Neger Engelsche.6 Not long after, it was also taken into the woods by runaway slaves, and became the language of the Djuka Maroons.
Meanwhile in these same decades, a second, related creole emerged in Suriname. In 1664–5 a group of Portuguese Jews won permission from the English to establish themselves in Suriname with all liberty to practice their religion.7 Families came from Amsterdam, nearby Cayenne and elsewhere, and in a spirit both entrepreneurial and eschatological (these are the years of the proclaimed Messiah Sabbatai Zevi), they set up sugar plantations part way up the Suriname River and established a village nearby, a New Jerusalem of their own. When the colony became Dutch, all their privileges were confirmed by the governor, and by 1680, the Jews of the Portuguese Nation (as they called themselves) owned about thirty plantations. On them, some 1,200 slaves were speaking to compatriots the same range of west African languages (Gbe, Kikongo and others) as on the Christian estates, but had developed for cross-plantation communication a creole with a Portuguese and African lexicon, and with many English words as well. By 1690, the first escapes from the Portuguese-Jewish plantations had occurred, and the Maroons who set themselves up near the Saramacca River carried this creole with them, to be used by other slaves who fled to them in the next decades. The language, when spoken on the plantations, came to be called Dju-tongo, the Jewish tongue, and when spoken in the bush, Saramaccan.8
The speakers of these creoles increased in number in Suriname over the course of the eighteenth century. In 1701, some 8,500 people of African origin were slaves on the plantations and perhaps 1,000 more had escaped to the forests. At the same time some 700 people of European origin were living in Paramaribo and on the plantations: Dutch, Portuguese-Jewish and even some German-Jewish families, Huguenots from France or other places of refuge after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and English.
By 1774, almost 60,000 people of African origin were living on the plantations, though because of a high mortality the number would soon sink to around 50,000 for the next decades. The majority of these men and women had crossed the Atlantic on a slaver, some still from Loango, many others from the Gold Coast and Windward Coast, bringing with them their Akan languages and other west African tongues. Native-born blacks were a minority among the slaves, but by the seventeen-seventies, if not well before, the word ‘criolo’ appears on the plantation inventories and the word ‘kreól’ or ‘crioolo’ is used in the Neger Engelsche tongue to indicate a person born in Suriname.9
While the slave population multiplied six- or seven-fold across the eighteenth century, the European settler population tripled – estimates in the seventeen-eighties are in the range of 2,000–3,000 people – and European languages increased as well. So prevalent was the French of Huguenots and Swiss soldiers that sermons in the Reformed Church were given regularly in both French and Dutch.10 In the streets of Paramaribo and in the great houses of certain plantations, one heard Swedish, German and English (and English with a Scottish burr). Jewish families made up a third of the settler population in 1787, according to David de Isaac Cohen Nassy, a descendant of one of the earliest Jewish planters: about 830 Jews of the ‘Portuguese nation’, who continued to speak Portuguese among themselves, and nearly 500 of the ‘German nation’, some of them coming from as far away as Poland, and speaking Yiddish to each other.11
Finally, there were free people of African descent or part-African descent: over 5,000 Maroons living in the forest villages and speaking varieties of Neger Engelsche and Saramaccan at the end of the century; and between 650 and 1,000 free blacks, mulattos and other people of colour living in Paramaribo and elsewhere in the years 1787–95, whose languages will be discussed below. Our sources for these creole languages in action in eighteenth-century Suriname are good, especially for Neger Engelsche, which, following the practice of linguists today, I will usually call Sranan. We have two Sranan-Dutch vocabulary or phrase books. One is brief, with only introductory phrases, inserted for ‘the entertainment of the readers’ into an extended description of Suriname by Jan Herlein, a young Dutch Huguenot who lived in the colony for several years until 1704. He reported what he had seen and heard, but also learned much from the governor, from a Paramaribo merchant and from a plantation manager on the Commewine River. Herlein worked over his notes, publishing his book only in 1718, long after his return to The Netherlands.12
Another vocabulary, much fuller, was compiled in 1765–70 by Jean Nepveu as part of an unpublished revision of Herlein’s entire book, which he thought was ‘not up to much’. Nepveu was in good position to judge: a Dutch Huguenot who spent most of his life in Suriname, he had risen through a sequence of colonial offices to become deputy governor in 1756–7 and then governor of Suriname in 1769. The world of the slaves he knew as owner of five coffee plantations and of a sugar plantation with some 150 slaves on the Commewine River; the world of the Maroons from many inquiries into their raids and from sporadic peace negotiations with their leaders. In 1767, as he was writing his Annotations on Herlein’s book, he took as his second wife a widow, herself an heiress to plantations and said to be the daughter of a wealthy free mulatto.13
Our most remarkable instruction book in ‘Neeger Engels’ (as its author called it) and Dutch was put together around 1763 by one Pieter van Dyk. He had spent years in Suriname, most likely as a plantation manager or as a ‘white overseer’ on the Commewine River, and published the New and Unprecedented Instruction in Amsterdam after his return to The Netherlands, patiently working with printers who had never set such a text in type before. Van Dyk dedicated the book to his friend Tepper (addressing him before the Dutch boats from Paramaribo had brought van Dyk news of Tepper’s burial in August 1763 by the Lutheran church on the Commewine): with Tepper’s thorough knowledge of Neeger Engels and of the life of a plantation manager, van Dyk hoped he would approve of the book. Writing for merchants and craftsmen in Suriname, and especially for plantation owners and managers so that they could ‘understand the slaves and be understood by them’, van Dyk included extended vocabulary and dialogues and a fascinating play set on a plantation.14
Some years later two missionaries of the Moravian Brethren in Suriname prepared manuscript dictionaries showing word use and grammar for their fellow Herrenhuter there. Christian Ludwig Schumann began the process in 1778 with a dictionary in Saramaccan and German. Born in 1749 to a Moravian missionary in neighbouring Berbice, Schumann spent his boyhood and young adult years in Germany, returned to the Herrenhuter settlements in Suriname in late 1776, and immediately plunged into learning ‘Negersprache’, first in Paramaribo and then at the mission at Bambey, far south on the Suriname River near Saramacca settlements. He could practice his Saramaccan on his two Bambey household slaves, a man and a woman, but especially he worked on his dictionary with the aid of the remarkable Johannes Arrabini, as the Saramacca tribal chief Alabi was called after his baptism in 1771.
Alabi was also a major resource for Brother Johannes Andreas Riemer, who put together a Saramaccan-German dictionary during a brief stay two years later: ‘the baptized Negro captain Johannes Arrabini [was] of invaluable service to me, on a daily even an hourly basis.’ While the inexperienced Riemer found Saramaccan ‘poor in words’, the learned Schumann delighted in ‘the vast quantity of unchanged Latin words’ he found in the language, explaining their presence by the fact that these ‘Free Blacks’ (that is, Maroons) were the descendants of the runaway slaves of the Portuguese Jews. Before Schumann returned to Germany in 1783 he also compiled a Sranan and German dictionary, and included some words with a Portuguese lexicon drawn from Dju-tongo.15
Namens het bestuur van de Stichting voor Surinaamse Genealogie (SSG) nodigt Antiquariaat Buku u uit voor een genealogische en historische Komakandra op 8 november 2014 in de Christus Triumfatorkerk in Den Haag.
Twee gerenommeerde historici zullen die dag indringende verhalen uit de Surinaamse geschiedenis toelichten. Onderwerpen waar niet alles over bekend is en waar veel van te leren is.
Dr. Alexander Heldring bespreekt het Saramacca Project. Al in 1938 leven er plannen om joodse vluchtelingen te vestigen in een nieuw thuisland. Suriname komt in beeld. Nederland neemt deel aan internationale discussies over de plannen. Antisemitisme, racisme, gevoel van superioriteit en angst om Duitsland voor het hoofd te stoten, spelen een rol. Na de oorlog komt er een concreet plan om joodse overlevenden in Saramacca te vestigen, maar het gaat uiteindelijk niet door. Waarom niet? Van wie kwam verzet? Kwam er steun of verzet uit Suriname? Deze vragen komen aan de orde en er is natuurlijk ruimte voor discussie.
Dr. Leo Balai bespreekt het Slavenschip Leusden. Het vergaan van de Leusden in 1738 in de monding van de Marowijne is de grootste maritieme ramp in de Nederlandse en Surinaamse geschiedenis. Naar schatting 664 mensen komen om want het ruim is dichtgespijkerd. Het boek over de ramp is in 2011 uitgekomen. Daarna is onderzoek gestart naar de mensen die bij de ramp zijn omgekomen. Wie waren zij en waar kwamen ze vandaan? Waar ligt het wrak? Dr. Balai vertelt over het boek en over de status van het onderzoek. Heeft u zelf onderzoek gedaan naar soortgelijke slavenreizen uit die tijd? Ook hier is er weer tijd voor discussie.
Zoals gebruikelijk is de zaal om 09:30 open en we beginnen om 10:30. Tot 11:30 bespreken we bestuurlijke zaken, inclusief afscheid van recent afgetreden bestuursleden. Daarna is het woord aan Dr. Heldring en Dr. Balai volgt om 12:30. We pauzeren om 13:30 voor een gezellige lunch.
In de middag is er ruimte voor discussie en netwerken en uiteraard zullen er weer goed gevulde boekenstands zijn van Antiquariaat Buku en Boekencollectief Eldorado. De boeken van Dr. Heldring en Dr. Balai zijn te koop, maar ook oude nummers van Wi Rutu, antiquarische boeken, oude almanakken, prenten en bronpublicaties. We sluiten de Komakandra rond 15:30 uur.
Uiteraard kunt u familie, vrienden en kennissen meenemen. Graag zelfs! Wij vragen een bijdrage van €7.50 voor bezoekers die geen donateur zijn, te betalen aan de zaal.
Locatie:
Christus Triumfatorkerk
Juliana van Stolberglaan 154
(hoek Laan van Nieuw Oost-Indië)
2595 CL Den Haag (Bezuidenhout)
Routebeschrijving: Vanaf het Centraal Station is het ongeveer 15 minuten lopen, of u komt met tram 2 of 6. Vanaf Station Laan van NOI is het 10 minuten lopen, of u neemt vanaf dit station bus 23 of tram 2.
Parkeren in de straten rondom de kerk is gratis op zaterdag.
We gebruiken de ingang van de kerk aan De Carpentierstraat, een zijstraat van de Juliana van Stolberglaan.
met vriendelijke groet,
Carl Haarnack
Buku – Bibliotheca Surinamica
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In February 1792, David Nassy, secretary and associate treasurer to the Mahamad of the Portuguese Jewish Nation of Suriname, penned a letter of lament and supplication to the “Dignissimos Senhores” of that august body and to its Adjuntos, the council members of the Nation.1
He signed his letter David Nassy rather than David de Isaac Cohen Nassy, the name he was given at his birth in 1747 to Sarah Abigail Bueno de Mesquita and Isaac de Joseph Cohen Nassy, a descendant of early settlers of the colony. Before this, though, David had written his full name often enough, as, through the decades, he carried out the obligations of his many roles in the community: he followed his father for a term as sworn notary (jurator) of the Portuguese Jewish Nation; served as gabay, secretary, and one of the regents (parnasim) for the Mahamad; translated texts from Portuguese and Spanish into Dutch for the Suriname Court of Policy; ordered inventories to be made of his plantation and possessions; purchased medicines for his pharmacy,and contributed manuscripts in French and Dutch to the more general intellectual culture of the colony. Then, in January 1790, he went before the current jurator of the Nation and formally shortened his name to David Nassy: he claimed it was for the sake of simplicity— too many men had similar long names—but he also wanted to appear more modern.2
Jodensavanne, Suriname (Benoit, 1839)
The tone of Nassy’s supplication to the Mahamad and Adjuntos was plaintive, but this did not mean that he could not look back from 1792 on a life of accomplishment and some fulfilled hopes—for himself, for the “benefit of the Nation and the glory of the Jewish name,” and for the literary life of Suriname, where, despite limitations, he and his fellow Jews enjoyed “a kind of Political Patrimony.”3
Nassy married his cousin Esther Abigail de Samuel Cohen Nassy in 1763, and four years later Esther gave birth to their daughter Sarah. Nassy’s purchase of the Tulpenberg coffee plantation on the Suriname River in 1770 had ended, partly through mismanagement, in financial disaster by 1773. (A fate suffered by other Suriname planters who had relied naively on easy credit arrangements offered from Amsterdam). But, thanks to bequests from his father Isaac, who died in 1774, and property brought to the marriage by his wife, David Nassy still owned land on creeks off the Suriname River, houses at Jodensavanne on the Suriname River and in the town of Paramaribo, and slaves. In 1777, he set up a partnership with Solomon Gomes Soares, “doctor and apothecary” at Jodensavanne: they would practice pharmacy together and Gomes Soares would instruct him in the art of healing. The partnership fared so well that by 1782, Nassy and his wife hired an agent in Paramaribo to acquire medicines for them. That same year, Esther’s jewelry case included diamond rings and gold bracelets.4
In the 1780s, Nassy was also able to celebrate the Portuguese Jewish Nation. The year 1785 was the hundredth anniversary of Beraha VeSalom (Blessing and Peace), the synagogue at Jodensavanne. By that time, a wooden synagogue had been built at Paramaribo for the Portuguese Jews (the synagogue for the Jews of the German Nation was nearby), but Beraha VeSalom was a splendid brick construction and the oldest religious building in the colony. David Nassy was impresario and director for the Anniversary Jubilee held in October 1785. Tableaux on themes of persecution, tolerance, and charity were presented to the Governor, the councilors of the Suriname courts, the militia officers and the Jewish dignitaries; songs were sung, Hebrew prayers recited, and poems declaimed. Then, Christians and Jews banqueted and danced the night away.5
At about this same time, Nassy began to agitate for the reform of the Ascamoth—the ordinances of the Jews of the Portuguese Nation— that had been last issued in 1754. His plea reflects the language and ideas of the European Enlightenment: “it is necessary to purge our ecclesiastical institutions of their errors, to uproot our old habits, and cut away our prejudices, the source of all our divisions.” Nassy won his case, and, with support from the Suriname government, submitted a revised Ascamoth that was approved in 1789. In fact, the new ordinances strengthened the hand of the parnasim against restive members of the congregation and the possible criticism of the rabbi, “who [was] not to preach about anything but morals in general.”6
In these same decades, David Nassy’s role also expanded in the wider cultural life of Suriname. The Portuguese Jews had been pioneers in the acquisition of books in European languages from Amsterdam, and Nassy’s own collection, inventoried in 1782, was perhaps the largest. His shelves contained approximately 450 volumes in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Latin, and Hebrew—a collection that included classics of the Enlightenment, European poetry, romance, and history, and medical and pharmacological texts. Collectors, both Jewish and Christian, later established a public library, which, according to Nassy’s perhaps exaggerated boast about his fellow settlers, “was filled with books on every subject, and yielded to no other library in all of America.”7
In 1774, the first printing press was set up in Suriname, and learned societies emerged alongside it. Nassy, unsurprisingly, took part in these societies; he read a paper on medicinal plants to the new Natural History Society, and another, on the meanings of the words roman (novel) and romance, to the new Society of Friends of Letters.8
The Portuguese Jews founded their own literary society as well, the Docendo Docemur (“we are taught by teaching”), and devoted many of their meetings, in 1786, to a French translation of Christian Wilhelm von Dohm’s recent plea for Jewish emancipation, Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden. Out of their discussions of this work came Nassy’s decision to write a book about the history, economy, government and cultural life of Suriname, which would give full and hitherto unacknowledged credit to the role of its Jews. A few years later the two-volume Essai historique sur la Colonie de Surinam (Historical Essay on Suriname) appeared. The work’s title page named the Regents of the Portuguese Jewish Nation as author, and gave its place and date of printing as Paramaribo, 1788. In fact, David Nassy was the author, (who wrote in his preferred literary language of French), and the book had been printed by the busy Amsterdam publisher Hendrik Gartman, who did not get the pages back to Suriname until the spring boats of 1789.9
Looking merely at this public record, we would be hard-pressed to understand the melancholy mood of David Nassy’s 1792 supplication to the Mahamad and Adjuntos. But there is more to the story. In November 1789, Nassy’s wife, Esther Abigail, died, leaving him with their only child, Sarah, who remained unmarried in 1792 at the age of twenty-four—an age when three-quarters of Portuguese Jewish women had already found a husbands and borne children.10 Sarah was mentally astute, as shown by commercial transactions, signed in a fine, clear hand, in which she was involved even as a teenager. But she seems to have faced some other difficulty. In detailing his unhappy lot to the Mahamad and Adjuntos, Nassy did not explicitly mention the death of his wife, but he did speak of the “well-known infirmity . . .of this poor daughter, to whom nature has assigned me all the care.”11
The main burden of Nassy’s complaint to the Mahamad and Adjuntos concerned calumnies against him, uttered by “a vile conspiracy” (“hua vila Cabala”), which were making it difficult for him to continue his many services to the Nation and were endangering his livelihood in Suriname. What was behind these intrigues? Possibly some men from established Portuguese Jewish families objected to Nassy’s restructuring of the Ascamoth. In any case, that Ascamoth, and Nassy as its framer, were the targets of strong criticism by the newer mulatto Jews, whose status as lesser members of the congregation of Portuguese Jews—mere congregaten, with special seating arrangements, rather than full jehidim—Nassy had maintained in the 1789 Ascamoth. But attacks from the congregaten may not have worried Nassy much: in 1791 he was writing against their claims to full ritual and ceremonial status, and he was fully backed in this by the parnasim.12
Instead, the “calumnies” and “conspiracy” that troubled Nassy were those provoked by his Essai historique. Fending off these criticisms, he reminded the Mahamad and Adjuntos how he had “courageously written a defense of our Nation” and made public “facts unknown to our own people and forgotten in the old papers of [our] Archives, [which] do honor to the Portuguese Jews of Suriname.”13 (Nassy might have added how much the book contributed to the general history of Suriname, including its economy and population, but he was here trying to persuade the parnasim and other worthies.) Possibly some members of the Nation itself had been put out by the way the Essai favored certain families—the Nassys, the Pintos, the de La Parras—and paid less attention to others. But it is sure that the directors of the Societeit van Surinam, which owned the colony, made objections from Amsterdam, and questions were raised in Paramaribo by its current governor, Wichers, even though Nassy had written of his fiscal and cultural policies with praise. Meanwhile, a faction among the Christian planters who had long been unhappy about the Jews’political role in the colony would have found much to disagree with in the Essai. Indeed, Nassy was later to write of his book that while English and French journalists had spoken of it “to advantage,” the Essai had been “disparaged” (“décrié”) in the colony.14
Faced with this “conspiracy,” Nassy told the Mahamad and Adjuntos he had no other choice but, with “tearful sentiments . . . shortly to leave my native land. . . to abandon my responsibility and care for the interests of the Nation and deprive myself of the company and affection of my worthy friends and protectors.” Reviewing the many services he had performed for the community over the years, Nassy requested that the Mahamad and Adjuntos grant him a threeyear leave of absence, or “furlough” (he used the Dutch word Verlof), reminding them that his salary as secretary to the community had been raised in 1789, and that in addition his salary covered his extra work as translator. It would be difficult to maintain himself and his “poor and helpless daughter” (“pobre e desvalida filha”) in foreign lands; the climate would be different, his health was fragile. Thus, he requested some funding for the three years of his leave, although the bulk of his salary would of course be going to his replacement as secretary. For the latter post, he nominated Abraham Bueno de Mesquita, current jurator of the community. Nassy described him as his friend and relative (Nassy’s mother was a Mesquita), and indeed, as a friend to most of the parnasim—a man of “zeal and integrity in his service to the Nation.”15
But Nassy had another request. Since 1774, he had had on rental and “under his authority” a young slave named Mattheus and his sister Sebele. Mattheus and Sebele were part of the estate of the late David Baruch Louzado, bequeathed to and administered by the Portuguese Jewish Nation. Mattheus had learned the art of carpentry, Nassy’s request went on, but, through some misfortune, around 1788 swollen spots began to appear on his body. Doubts were raised about whether his disease was contagious—Nassy himself believed that Mattheus had a skin condition particular to Africans and not leprosy—but the Mahamad and Adjuntos decided he could not be put up for public sale in 1790, when some other slaves from the Louzada estate were auctioned off. In fact, a government ordinance prohibited public sale in such circumstances.
Nassy asked that he be allowed to purchase Mattheus. The young man had shown such loyalty and goodness caring for the sick in Nassy’s house that Nassy believed he would be a great help to him as well in his “sad days . . . in foreign lands.” Since Nassy could never sell Mattheus publicly and was therefore taking a risk in purchasing him, he thought it fitting for the Mahamad and Adjuntos to sell him Mattheus at a reasonable price.16
How would Mattheus have regarded all this? We can track him down and perhaps provide some answers to this question through the Mahamad’s accounts of the Louzada estate. Mattheus was born about 1770 to Diana, slave of David Baruch Louzada, and an unknown black father, and lived with his mother, his older sister, Siberi, and another slave family in Louzada’s household. Louzada did not own a plantation, so Mattheus’s earliest memories would have been of the hills and fields of Jodensavanne. At Louzada’s death in 1774, the Mahamad rented Diana, Mattheus and Siberi not directly to David Nassy, but to his mother Sarah Abigail for ninety-one guilders a year. Because his father, Isaac Nassy, had just died, and David Nassy’s plantation had gone bankrupt and been sold the year before, David was thus an inappropriate lessor; he and his widowed mother probably set up household together in those years of financial trouble.17
Mattheus spent his boyhood in Jodensavanne, where David Nassy’s daughter Sarah, three years older than he, was growing up as well. The language used most frequently between slaves and their owners at that time was presumably Dju-tongo, the Portuguese-based creole spoken among slaves on the Jewish plantations of Suriname. Although Nassy himself considered creole tongues mere “jargon,” he probably taught Portuguese only to those few mulatto slaves in his household whom he “instructed in the Jewish religion.” In the 1770s, Mattheus would have known Nassy’s mulatto slaves Moses, Ishmael and Isaac, all of whom were circumcised after their birth and destined for manumission.18
In the 1780s, when Nassy’s relations with his creditors had eased up, he was able to establish his household once again on Green Street in Paramaribo. There Mattheus received his training as a carpenter and was rented out by Nassy (as were other slave carpenters) for building tasks in town. Mattheus became familiar with the town’s markets and varied population, including its free blacks and persons of color. Much outnumbered by the slaves in Paramaribo, free blacks and people of color plied trades of all kinds, peddled goods, and mounted balls attended by men and women dressed in fine silk and chintz. Sometimes they as well would own a slave or two, whom, at their deaths, they would manumit or bequeath to a relative. Mattheus would also have taken note of the Paramaribo prayer house of Darhe Jesarim (Way of Righteousness), the brotherhood of the free Jewish persons of color, whose status as an independent institution was soon to be of great concern to David Nassy and the Mahamad. Mattheus would have seen the slaves who accompanied their owners as they went about activities in town and who were dressed to do honor to their masters and mistresses. He himself, perhaps, carried an umbrella over the heads of David and Esther Nassy on their way to the Paramaribo synagogue of the Portuguese Nation and waited for them outside until the service was over.19
This period was also a time of loss for Mattheus. In 1783, the Mahamad announced in the Surinaamse Courant the sale of some slaves from the Louzada estate, and we can deduce that Mattheus’s mother was likely to have been among them, as David Nassy’s rental payments to the Mahamad for 1788 mention only Mattheus and his sister, now called Sebele (Sebele may be a version of Siberi, but perhaps Diana had another daughter).20
It was also in this year that the swollen spots cropped up on Mattheus’s body. Physicians and close observers of slave life in Suriname in the eighteenth century have described two serious illnesses of the skin especially affecting persons of African origin: yaws, and an incurable illness known in the Suriname Creole as “boisi” or “boassi,” which was compared variously to leprosy and elephantiasis.21 Nassy’s denial to the Mahamad that Mattheus was afflicted with “boassi” (in his request to purchase him) would lead us to believe that Mattheus’s lesions evidently suggested the disease, and we can imagine Mattheus’s anxious conversations with his fellow slaves about remedies and rituals for healing. Nassy also must have done his best, and he may even have used herbal baths learned from African healers in his attempts to cure Mattheus, for, despite his contempt for their “frightful ceremonies,” Nassy admired the healers’ knowledge of local medicinal plants.22 In any case, despite Mattheus’s skin condition, he was very much alive and ready for travel four years later.
The Mahamad and the Adjuntos granted both of David Nassy’s requests, though Mesquita’s replacement salary and Nassy’s leave benefit may have been less than requested. Interestingly enough, Mattheus is recorded in the accounts as sold to Sarah Nassy rather than to David, similar to how he had been, previously, leased to her grandmother. In the next months, father and daughter were busy with preparations for what they now specified as a trip to North America: they settled with creditors and gave power of attorney to Mordechai de La Parra to represent them in their absence.23 And they arranged for passage on a spring boat from Paramaribo to Philadelphia.
Why Philadelphia? News from North America was printed regularly in the Surinaamse Courant: Nassy could read there of the successful revolution of the English colonies against their mother country and of the debates about the new constitution in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. News also came to Suriname through travellers and letters. The Moravian missionaries in Suriname, for example, had frequent exchanges with their Brethren in Pennsylvania, and Jews had connections as well. In 1784, Eliazer Cohen, a schoolmaster in Philadelphia, set up two German Jews in Suriname to be his agents for the estate of his father Eliazer David Cohen, who had lived and died in Suriname. By the early 1790s, Eliazer Abraham Cohen—possibly the schoolmaster himself—was cantor and then rabbi at the German Jewish synagogue in Paramaribo.24 In Philadelphia, Nassy could expect a political and intellectual atmosphere suited to his Enlightenment curiosity and his constant interest in projects for betterment, a Jewish community in which he and his daughter could make a start, and a medical establishment that would perhaps welcome him.
Nassy must have, in some ways, prepared Mattheus for the trip. By now, since Mattheus had served not only as a carpenter but also as a close personal servant in the household, Nassy may well have taught him Portuguese or, perhaps, French, Nassy’s preferred second language. In any case, both master and slave had a language challenge ahead of them, for neither knew English beyond those words embedded in the Suriname creole. Possibly Mattheus got news through the slave and free-black networks in Paramaribo of the flourishing movement in Philadelphia for the abolition of slavery, but David Nassy would have been loath to broach the subject with his slave even if he had had information about it. No friend of abolition, Nassy went no further in his views than the most enlightened of the Suriname planters and preachers: slavery was an acceptable institution but must be conducted with humanity and beneficence, without (as Nassy wrote in the 1789 Essai) the “rage that [some] Whites conceive against the Blacks,” and without “the cruel tortures they make them suffer.”25
On 21 April 1792, David Nassy, his daughter Sarah Nassy, “and her slaves Mattheus and Amina,” left Paramaribo on the American ship Active for Philadelphia. Amina was a little girl of about ten, a mulatto, and evidently important to Sarah.26
David Nassy’s first stops that we can trace in Philadelphia were the Mikveh Israel synagogue and the court for manumission. Built in 1782, the Mikveh Israel synagogue drew Jewish families of varied geographical origin, but its ritual followed the Sephardic liturgical practice familiar to Nassy. By the Jewish New Year of 5553 (September 1792), he had paid his synagogue dues for the entire past year of 5552, even though he had arrived in Philadelphia only in the spring.27
Among the worshippers at Mikveh Israel Nassy soon met the merchant and entrepreneur Solomon Marache. This was an appealing connection for Nassy because, among other reasons, the two men could chat in Dutch: Marache had been born in Curaçao and lived there until, as a teenager in 1749, he was taken to New York by his widowed mother to learn his trade. Marache had since flourished in Philadelphia and become an important figure in the congregation Mikveh Israel already in the years before the synagogue was built. After 1787, when he took a widowed non-Jewish woman as his second wife, Marache no longer served as treasurer to the congregation, but continued to attend services. As Nassy himself described it: “The Maraches . . . and [men of] several other families [are] lawfully married to Christian women who go to their own churches, the men going to their synagogues, and who, when together, frequent the best society.”28
Through his second wife, Solomon Marache was in fact in contact with people who believed in the abolition of slavery. Since the 1780s, a number of worshippers at Mikveh Israel had been manumitting their slaves, especially encouraged to do so by two of their brethren, Solomon Bush and Solomon Marache. Bush, a member of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in 1789, was the only Jew to be associated with the organization in its early days. He married a Quaker woman in 1791, and, when he died in 1795, Bush at his own earlier request was buried in the Friends cemetery, where he would lie among those who had founded the Society. Solomon Marache’s second wife—born Mary Smith—had a Quaker mother and cousins, and her brothers and maternal cousin George Aston, who was both an officer of the society and especially close to Mary, were members of the Abolition Society.29
On 9 August 1792, Solomon Marache accompanied David Nassy together with his daughter Sarah, Mattheus and Amina to the court chambers of Philadelphia. There David Nassy “late of Surinam now of the City of Philadelphia, Doctor of Physick” manumitted and set free “his Negroe man Matheus aged about twenty two Years.” Nassy went on to “reserve his servitude,” that is, to indenture Mattheus for seven years. At this time he also changed Amina’s name to Mina—“my Mulatto Girl named Mina aged about ten years”—and after freeing her reserved her servitude as well, to himself or to those he would assign, for eighteen years.30 In this ungenerous manumission, Nassy was following Pennsylvania’s Gradual Emancipation Act of 1780, which provided that any personal slave brought into Pennsylvania by a new resident must be freed at the end of six months, but within that period of six months, the master could indenture a slave until the age of twenty-eight (the case of Mina) or for seven years if the slave was not a minor (the case of Mattheus).31
Solomon Marache must have tried to persuade David Nassy to become more open to the importance of abolition. Also, Nassy is known to have had conversations with other Philadelphia opponents of slavery, such as the celebrated physician Benjamin Rush, a major figure in the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, to whom Nassy presented a copy of his Essai historique in June 1793. But Nassy’s three years in Philadelphia seem to have moved his thoughts little on this score. Writing in February 1795 about “the means of improving the colony of Suriname” and referring undoubtedly to recent events in Saint Domingue, he commented that:
for Blacks who have not come to a certain level of civilization, the ideas of liberty and equality throw them into a state of drunkenness (“espèce d’ivresse”), which does not pass until they have destroyed everything . . . Until freedom has been preceded by enlightenment . . . it will be the most disastrous present one can give to Blacks.
Nassy recalled manumitted slaves in Suriname who, he claimed, “had of their own volition returned to the discipline of their former masters to be fed, clothed, and cared for in their maladies.”32 Nassy may also have been justifying here the seven years of service he was in the midst of requiring from Mattheus.
Much went on in the medical, pharmaceutical, intellectual, and political life of David Nassy during his “furlough” in Philadelphia which we cannot consider here. Nor can we here speculate on the discoveries made during those years by Sarah Nassy and her mulatto servant Mina, and the interesting possibility that Sarah took Mina with her to the women’s section of Mikveh Israel.
But, we do wish to imagine some of the experiences of the indentured servant Mattheus. Philadelphia was a hub of black— especially free black—life in the new United States. In contrast to Paramaribo, the free black population of Philadelphia (somewhat more than 1800 when Mattheus arrived there) outnumbered the slave population more than six to one. If David Nassy arranged for Mattheus to work as a carpenter in Philadelphia, he would have come into direct contact with this world. Surely he was aware of the Free African Society, a benevolent association founded in 1787 by two remarkable ex-slaves, Absalom Jones and Richard Allen (Jones went on to establish the African Episcopal Church, where the first sermon was delivered in July 1794, while Allen set up a place of worship for black Methodists the same year). Rather than accepting a pattern of life in which manumitted slaves went on to acquire slaves of their own, as in Suriname, Jones and Allen entreated “the people of color .. . favored with freedom…to consider the obligations we lay under to help forward the cause of freedom, we who know how bitter the cup is of which the slave hath to drink, O how ought we to feel for those who yet remain in bondage?”33 Part of a Jewish household, Mattheus would probably not have attended such services, but he surely heard word of the pleas of Jones and Allen.
Mattheus may well have been involved, however, in the assistance provided by Philadelphia blacks during the devastating yellow fever epidemic of August through November 1793. Benjamin Rush believed—mistakenly as it turned out, but perhaps conveniently— that blacks were immune to the illness; thus they were called upon, or volunteered themselves, to care for the sick and bury the dead. Nassy, whose wise and moderate methods of treatment managed to keep most of his patients alive, did not subscribe to Rush’s view. He speculated, rather, that “foreigners,” that is, those not native to Philadelphia, were less susceptible to the epidemic because their “temperaments” and “constitution” were linked to the climate and air of the places in which they had grown up; those whose constitution was linked to the climate and air of Philadelphia were more likely to be infected.34 Thus, Mattheus would have served at Nassy’s right hand, or in attendance to others, during the epidemic not as a black man, but as a “foreigner” like the master to whom he was indentured.
Finally, Mattheus met with adventures and conversations of a less risky sort as well. Nassy had early made contact with Peter Legaux, a Frenchman from Lorraine, who was trying to establish viticulture in Pennsylvania. Legaux gave a copy of Nassy’s Essai historique to the American Philosophical Society in the autumn of 1792, and not long after presented Nassy himself; but, of more import to Mattheus, Legaux introduced Nassy to the French aviationist Jean Pierre Blanchard, who had come to Philadelphia for North America’s first aerial voyage. On 9 January 1793, when Blanchard prepared to rise in his hydrogen-filled gas balloon, Pierre Legaux and David Nassy were holding the restraining ropes. President George Washington had shaken Blanchard’s hand before he boarded his basket, but the servant Mattheus was surely nearby, watching the balloon rise and drift away on its successful fifteen mile flight.35
Legaux had spent some years in Saint Domingue before coming to Philadelphia in 1785, but Nassy also had connections with émigrés who had witnessed and fled the later great revolts on that island. Solomon Moline came to Philadelphia with his family and slaves not long after the first Saint-Domingue slave uprising in 1791; Nassy would have seen him at Mikveh Israel, where Moline was close to Benjamin Nones, a leading figure in the congregation. Indeed, Nones accompanied Moline to court when he manumitted his slaves without requiring further servitude.36 Later, in August 1793, as the end of slavery in Saint Domingue seemed assured, the physician Jean Devèze arrived with his family and slaves from Cap de François with tales of a recent bloody battle, of continuing uprisings, destruction, and slaughter. In Philadelphia, Devèze immediately plunged into the treatment of those stricken by the epidemic, and, with a medical approach very similar to that of Nassy, they became friends. Reports from Moline and Devèze must have been among the sources fuelling Nassy’s image of the “state of drunkenness,” into which he believed blacks were thrown when they had not yet been “enlightened” by instruction.37
For Mattheus, however, conversations with the slaves that Moline and Devèze had brought with them—soon to become ex-slaves by Pennsylvania law—would have had a different tenor.38 They would have found a way to communicate—either in French if they knew it— or in a pidgin constructed from their differing creole languages. From such exchange Mattheus could hear of a hoped-for republic, where blacks and people of color would be free citizens administering their own polity, in contrast with the societies of free Maroons he knew of in Suriname, living in tribal clans with respected kings, and with the free black communities in Philadelphia, enterprising and aspiring, but still subaltern in a society dominated by white folks.39
In the spring of 1795, the three years of David Nassy’s furlough were up, and he sat down to write a letter in English to the merchant house of Brown, Benson and Ives in Providence, Rhode Island asking for passage on one of their boats to Suriname. His “family of four” would make their way by land to Providence, he wrote, making clear that Mina and Mattheus were still part of the picture.40 We may wonder why Mattheus did not run away rather than return with his master to Suriname. His previous illness and residual skin condition, which surely made Mattheus dependent on the physician Nassy—or at least less able to initiate new permanent relations in a foreign land—may have been a factor. Also, in Suriname, Mattheus had his sister Sebele and other kin. Furthermore, Nassy’s 1792 letter to the Mahamad and Adjuntos suggested his paternalistic attachment to the young man.
The “family” left sometime after 19 June 1795, the date when Nassy bade farewell to the American Philosophical Society. On the way back, Nassy decided to have the four of them disembark at the Danish island of Saint Thomas, where he visited its growing Jewish community and had himself examined by a learned Danish royal physician who was there on a brief visit. By January 1796 he was back in Paramaribo, recounting his adventures to the Mahamad of the Portuguese Jewish Nation; a few months later he was signing documents once again as Secretary to the community.41
If his furlough in Philadelphia had not changed Nassy’s mind about the legitimacy of slavery, it had deepened his commitment to educational reform. By the fall of 1796 he had published a new proposal for a college in Suriname and was far advanced in raising money for it: the school would be dedicated to letters and sciences, liberal arts and crafts and trades suitable for “American lands in the tropics.” It would be for boys only, but for boys both rich and poor (funding would be provided for the latter), and for Jews and Christians both. The pupils would, of course, be free in status (the only slaves listed in his prospectus are those rented for kitchen, washing, and maintenance duty), but there is no mention in Nassy’s prospectus of a color bar. I think we can see here the influence of what he had observed in Philadelphia: the intensive social and cultural exchange between Jews and Christians and the energetic efforts of free people of African descent to achieve the “enlightenment” that he thought essential to the “social man” and “civilization.”42
As for Mattheus, his contracted service to Nassy was to last until the spring of 1799. We may wonder whether Nassy taught him to read and write Portuguese and/or Dutch in those years, if he had not already done so. There is no sign of him, however, among the congregaten of the Portuguese Jewish Nation in the late 1790s or the early years of the nineteenth century, although he may well have remained associated with the blacks and people of color that he had known in the Jewish households in which he had grown up. In 1799, now twenty-nine years of age, Mattheus was free to put up his own wooden sign as a carpenter, with a surname added on. Because manumitted slaves in Suriname took the last name of their former master or mistress preceded by “de” or “van, Mattheus’s surname would almost certainly have been de Nassy or van Nassy.”43 We can imagine Mattheus in one of the small Paramaribo shops, recounting to his neighbors stories of Blanchard’s balloon, the frightening epidemic, and the Free African Society. And we can find it likely that when he needed help in his carpentry, he hired a young lad for wages rather than acquiring a slave. From Philadelphia, he could have carried with him, if not the words, then the spirit of Absalom Jones and Richard Allen: “to consider the obligations we l[ie] under to help forward the cause of freedom, we who know how bitter the cup is of which the slave hath to drink.”44
David Nassy’s “Furlough” and the Slave Mattheus
1. Nationaal Archief, The Hague, the Netherlands (henceforth NAN), Archief der
Nederlands-Portugees-Israelitische Gemeente in Suriname (henceforth ANPIG) 87,
made-first-us-aerial-voyage-in-1793.htm accessed on 22 February 2009.
36. Wolf and Whiteman, 191. They give Moline’s arrival date as 1793, but he is
already listed along with Benjamin Nones among those Philadelphians subscribing to
a turnpike road between Philadelphia and Lancaster in June of 1792 (Charles I. Landis,
The First Long Turnpike in the United States [Lancaster, Pa., 1917], 136). Moline’s
decision not to indenture his manumitted slaves may have been made from conviction
or simply from his having passed the six-month deadline for such an arrangement.
37. Jean Devèze, Recherches et Observations, Sur les Causes et les Effets de la
Maladie Epidémique qui a régné à Philadelphie [printed in French and English
translation] (Philadelphia: Parent, 1794), 2–3. Nassy mentions their friendship during
the epidemic in his Observations, 44.
38. On the influx of about 500 slaves from Saint Domingue and their manumission in
the years 1793–1796, see Nash, 141–142.
39. For the model developed in the French colonies in the wake of the revolution,
see Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in
the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2004). For the model of freedom in the Maroon communities of Suriname, see Richard
Price, Alibi’s World (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).
40. John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island, Brown Papers (1795), 26
April 1795.
41. Early Proceedings, 232. Bijlsma, 71. Judah M. Cohen, Through the Sands of Time:
A History of the Jewish Community of St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands (Hanover,
NH: Brandeis University Press, 2004), 14–16. NAN, ANPIG 198, 4, 9 August 1796
(AJAmf 185).
42. David Nassy, Programma de Huma Caza d’Educaçao, ou Seminario de Criaturas
na Savana de Judeus [trilingual text in Portuguese, Dutch, and French] (Paramaribo:
A. Soulage, Jr., 1796).
43. Among examples of Jewish congregaten who had once belonged to a Nassy:
Joseph de David Cohen Nassy, Simcha de Jacob Nassy. An example from the
Reformed Church in 1787: Vrije Janiba van Adjuba van Nassy (Januba was the
daughter of Adjuba, who had been manumitted earlier by David Nassy). For an image
of such shops, see Benoit, fig. 32.
44. Jones and Allen, 26–27.
***
This essay was originally published in: Pamela S. Nadell, Jonathan D. Sarna and Lance J. Sussman, eds., New Essays in American Jewish History: Commemorating the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Founding of the American Jewish Archives (Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives, 2010).
It was placed on this website with the kind permission of Natalie Zemon Davis and Dana Herman, Ph.D. Managing Editor & Academic Associate, The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives.
Natalie Zemon Davis is a Canadian/American professor of history at the University of Toronto in Canada. Davis is regarded as one of the greatest living historians and has written a large number of books and articles. She has also written a number of articles about Suriname. Buku – Bibliotheca Surinamica is very honoured to host this essay by Natalie Zemon Davis.
For questions and comments please mail us at: surinamica@gmail.com
De Boschnegers in de Kolonie Suriname: Hun Leven, Zeden en Gewoonten. A.M. Coster. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch Indië. ‘s-Gravenhage : Martinus Nijhoff, 1866.
Dit werkje van A.M. Coster telt slechts 36 pagina’s. Toch vormt het een belangrijke publicatie uit de Surinaamse Bibliotheek. Dat komt vooral door het feit dat de schrijver, A.M. Coster, ons een beeld schets van de wereld die hij met eigen ogen waarnam. Coster was bovendien een ingezetene van Suriname, niet iemand die slechts op basis van een kortstondig verblijf over Suriname schrijft. Hij was getrouwd met P. Abrahams die in januari 1862, volgens een advertentie in de Surinaamsche Courant, ‘voorspoedig bevallen is van een welgeschapen zoon’. Hij schrijft dat hij na ‘het plantageleven in de kolonie Suriname verlaten te hebben’ besloot om hout naar Nederland en België te sturen. In 1857 kocht Coster een houtzaagmachine die werd aangedreven door stoom op Combe. In krantenadvertenties adverteert hij met zijn ruime aanbod van planken van kopie-, wane-, ceder, bruinhart-, purperhart-, groenhart- en bolletriehout, dat gratis in de stad wordt bezorgd.
Coster maakt deel uit van de joodse gemeenschap in Paramaribo. Hij is voorzitter van het ‘kerkbestuur der Nederlandsche Israëlitische gemeente’ in Paramaribo. Coster heeft zich ook verkiesbaar gesteld voor de verkiezingen voor de Koloniale Staten in 1856 maar kreeg slechts drie stemmen. Coster is overleden voor 12 januari 1872 omdat dan bekend wordt gemaakt dat de 250 akkers aan de Coppenamerivier, weer door het domein worden teruggenomen
Advertentie Surinaamsche Courant 6 april 1865
Coster probeerde, zo schrijft hij, het vertrouwen van de ‘boschnegers’ te winnen door geschenken uit te delen en hen te laten delen van zijn drankvoorraden zoals wijn, bier, brandewijn, jenever en dram (‘inlandsche rum, zg. suiker-spiritus’). Aan de vrouwen en kinderen gaf hij vaak beschuit, koek of ‘eenige geldstukken’. Zonder enige bescheidenheid schept Coster op dat er voor hem geen enkele blanke was die zozeer het vertrouwen van de ‘boschnegers’ genoot: “Is er iets geheimzinnigs onder hen, dat ik gaarne wensch te weten, zoo zullen zij het mij op mijn verzoek dadelijk zonder eenige beschroomdheid mededeelen.”
Maar als we even deze dikdoenerij door de vingers zien dan blijf er een bijzonder aardig verhaal over de marrons van Suriname. Coster schrijft over hoe deze groepen zijn voortgekomen uit de slaven die van de plantages wegvluchtten. Hij schrijft over de wetgeving, wapens, huisvesting, zeden en gebruiken, voedsel, drank, feesten, godenrijk, huwelijksleven, deugden en ondeugden, ziekten, odo’s en vertellingen, reizen, sieraden en tatoeages. Dit alles gebeurt zonder de afstandelijke neerbuigendheid die vaak zo kenmerkend is voor 19e eeuwse reisverslagen. De ‘boschneger’ heeft, zo schrijft Coster, veel eerbied voor de ouderdom, zij zijn eerlijk, ze zijn niet lui maar werken onvermoeid wanneer het moet en ze zijn gul. Coster ondernam vele reizen naar de binnenlanden en verbleef o.a. in de marrondorpen Sparri Passi en Manjaondro als gast van Kwassi Jenni. Zijn nauwe contacten met de marrons hebben natuurlijk een belangrijke rol gespeeld in zijn beschrijvingen. Die contacten beperkten zich niet tot het binnenland. Zo trok een Aucaanse vrouw, na het overlijden van haar man, in bij Coster en zijn vrouw in Paramaribo. Toen een granman in het binnenland kwam te overlijden bleef zijn echtgenote ook bij het gezin van Coster wonen, zo schrijft hij. Zij verrichtte allerlei huishoudelijke diensten maar ‘weigert uit liefde voor ons elke geldelijke belooning’.
Advertentie uit De Kolonist, 4 februari 1866
Ook de litho (steendruk) die de tekst begeleidt draagt bij aan het bijzondere karakter van deze publicatie (zie illustratie). De litho werd gemaakt door Wed. E. Spanier & Zn. in Den Haag. Er bestaan tenslotte maar weinig 19e eeuwse afbeeldingen van marrons in Suriname. Deze prachtige ingekleurde litho behoort zeker tot de fraaiste.
Geschiedenis der kolonie Suriname. Geheel op nieuw samengesteld door een gezelschap van geleerde Joodsche mannen aldaar. Amsterdam – Harlingen: Allart Van der Plaats, 1791.
Eén van de belangrijkste boeken over de geschiedenis van Suriname verscheen in 1788, in het Frans geschreven, onder de titel Essai historique sur la colonie de Surinam. Het werd geschreven door een gezelschap van geleerde joodse mannen in Suriname bestaande uit S.H. Brandon, M.P. de Leon, S.J.V. de la Parra en J. de la Parra en David de Ishac Cohen Nassy. Deze Nassy, geboren op de Joden Savanne in 1747, was eigenaar van de koffieplantage Tulpenburg en de belangrijkste auteur van dit boek. In 1776 echter moest hij om schuldeisers te ontlopen naar de Jodensavanne vluchten waar hij secretaris van de Sefardische gemeenschap werd. In 1791 verscheen de Nederlandse vertaling die als titel mee kreeg Geschiedenis der kolonie van Suriname.
Gesigt van de Jooden Savane, in de Colonie van Surinamen (collectie Edwin van Drecht – Amsterdam)
Voor wie de essentie van Suriname in de 18e eeuw wil begrijpen is dit boek een must. Volgens Nassy telt de stad Paramaribo slechts tweeduizend blanke inwoners waarvan er meer dan de helft joods is (615 Portugese joden en 430 Duitse joden). Daarnaast zijn er zo’n 650 mulatten en ‘vrije negers’ in de stad, terwijl de hoeveelheid slaven ca. 50.000 bedraagt. Eén van de belangrijkste vragen die men zich bij de bestudering van de geschiedenis van Suriname moet stellen is hoe het mogelijk was dat zo weinig Europeanen zoveel slaven van Afrikaanse komaf onder de duim konden houden. Dat systeem kon natuurlijk niet alleen maar door repressie en onderdrukking standhouden. Er waren ook Afrikanen die het systeem actief ondersteunden. Zo werd er in 1772 werd het ‘korps der vrygemaakte Negers’ opgericht. Dit korps, bestaande uit tweehonderd man, bestond, zo schrijft Nassy, uit de beste slaven die gekocht waren van alle plantages in de kolonie. Voor een kleine bezoldiging en andere voordelen namen deze vrijgemaakte slaven succesvol deel aan de tochten om tegen de weggelopen slaven te vechten.
Nassy, die later zelf de titel van doctor medicinae zou verwerven, vraagt zich af waarom men in Suriname niet meer gebruikt maakt van de grote kennis van geneeskundige planten bij de Afrikanen. Want als deze ‘houten en kruiden’ in handen zouden komen van ervaren geneesheren zou er een ‘schat voor het menschdom’ van te maken zijn. Rond 1782 keert Nassy weer terug naar Paramaribo waar hij een apotheek begint. In 1806 overlijdt hij en wordt hij begraven op de Jodensavanne.
De Geschiedenis der kolonie van Suriname van Nassy is naast Stedmans Narrative of a five years’ expedition against the revolted negroes of Surinam (1796) het belangrijkste boek over de geschiedenis van Suriname. Het is een uitermate zeldzaam boek. In 2004 brachten de originele Franse editie en de eerste Nederlandse editie op een veiling bij Sotheby’s in New York gezamenlijk US$18.000,– op.
