Violence and Hope in a Space of Death: Paramaribo

Baltimore | Boston | Charleston | Chicago | Havana | Lima
Los Angeles | Mexico City | New Amsterdam | New Orleans
Paramaribo | Philadelphia | Potosi | Quebec City | Salt Lake City
Saint Louis | Santa Fe | San Francisco | Washington, D.C.

Richard Price
About 1710, J. D. Herlein, a Dutch visitor to Paramaribo, reported that a runaway slave from the town had been recaptured by the authorities. His sentence, which the court intended "to serve as an example to others," was "to be quartered alive, and the pieces thrown in the River." Herlein witnessed the execution: "He was lain on the ground, his head on a long beam. The first blow he was given, on the abdomen, burst his bladder open, yet he uttered not the least sound; the second blow with the axe he tried to deflect with his hand, but it gashed the hand and upper belly, again without his uttering a sound. The slave men and women laughed at this, saying to one another, 'That is a man!' Finally, the third blow, on the chest, killed him. His head was cut off and the body cut in four pieces and dumped in the river."
Herlein made clear that the harshness of this sentence was no anomaly, explaining to his European audience that "if a slave runs away into the forest to evade work for a few weeks, upon his being captured his Achilles tendon is removed for the first offence, while for the second offence, if they wish to increase the punishment, his right leg is amputated in order to stop him from running away; I myself was a witness to slaves being punished thus."
As in other capitals of New World plantation colonies, maintaining order among the mass of enslaved laborers was a central concern. In the idealized slaveocracy, planter hegemony would leave little room for slave response or maneuver and dramatic public executions, a veritable theatre of terror, played a central role toward this end. But the victims in the colonies, unlike those who suffered judicial penalties in the metropoles, generally refused to play their designated roles and mocked the system until their dying breaths, flaunting their individuality and resistance.
In the exercise of totalizing power, capital punishment constitutes a limiting case–yet for this very reason, it may be a good place to plumb the ultimate capacities of the oppressed to respond, resist, and create. An examination of the ways that condemned slaves went to their deaths reveals much about the limits of planter power and about the spirit that allowed slaves to create, within the limited spaces available to them, a world of their own, one that influenced not only every aspect of their own descendants' lives but also that of the descendants of their oppressors.
By the time of Herlein's visit, Paramaribo was a small, bustling town that served as the administrative and commercial hub of a fast-growing sugar plantation colony in northeastern South America. Named after the Amerindian village that had occupied the site, ten kilometers up the Suriname River from the Atlantic, it was dominated by the wooden fort (Zeelandia) that gave the town its name in the creole language created by the slaves: Foto. The first fort, and the town itself, were founded soon after 1650, when Frances Lord Willoughby of Parham sent out an expedition from Barbados to establish the English colony that lasted until the Treaty of Breda (1667), in which the English traded Suriname for New York with the Dutch.

Fig. 1. Paramaribo ca. 1710. From J. D. Herlein, Beschryvinge van de Volk-plantinge Zuriname (1718).

The town had grown from fewer than thirty houses in 1678–the homes of officials, inns, and public houses–to a couple of hundred structures with some five hundred people, only 3 percent of the colony's population but one-third of its Europeans (who included Dutch, French, Portuguese, Jews, Germans, Scandinavians, and others). The remaining whites lived either in and around the town of Jews Savanna fifty kilometers upstream, which had its own synagogue and where half the colony's slaves were owned, or on the plantations themselves. Paramaribo was the port where planters and their delegates did their shopping for slaves as well as other goods, all of which moved between town and plantations in boats rowed by slaves, and where they carried out their administrative affairs. In the early eighteenth century, over 95 percent of the colony's eighteen thousand slaves–almost all of whom had been born in Africa and two-thirds of whom had arrived during the previous decade–worked and lived on plantations.