Tambu

Chapter 2: White society.

Boeroes

LIFE IN THE SHADOWS
Slavery and slave culture in Surinam
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
The search for immigrants.
Skewed statistics.

This chapter focuses on the white masters, most of the others on the subservient blacks. It is necessary to understand the former, in order to understand the latter. The white overlords in slave societies were able to lay down the rules much more strictly than any other elite in history. The slaves might oppose the rules, but they were seldom able to change them fundamentally.

From the beginning, Surinam has displayed the characteristics of a plantation colony. One of the main distinguishing traits of such a society was the skewed ratio of black and white, man and woman, slave and free. A severe shortage of white settlers, especially women, was inevitable in these conditions and the authorities were acutely aware of this. In an exploitation colony, there usually was no genuine niche for white yeoman farmers and there were only limited opportunities for artisans and traders, in fact, for all workers not directly involved in plantation agriculture. For impoverished people, living in difficult circumstances but not starving, such a colony provided few prospects. Furthermore, the people in the Low Countries had a negative image of the tropical world in general: they saw it as a white man’s graveyard infested with dangerous subhuman beings. A person had to be extremely desperate, or extremely eager to make a fortune to venture there. Consequently, the push factors for emigration were not very strong in the Netherlands. As Charles Boxer has noted: “although the wages were usually very low and working hours very long, unemployment in the Northern Netherlands was never sufficiently severe to induce industrial and agricultural workers to emigrate on an adequate scale to the overseas possessions of the Dutch East and West India Companies.” However, small as the white minority in Surinam may have been (and it was always too small in the eyes of the men in power), its superior position, although sometimes a bit shaky, was never seriously threatened during the slavery era.

Unfortunately, the collection of statistics in colonial Surinam was very erratic. For most of the earlier years, the number of whites must be projected and finer distinctions cannot be made. For the years 1700 to 1745, however, we have the annual count of Whites and Red and Black Slaves, contained in the archives of the Society of Surinam. The soldiers were omitted from these counts, although they made up nearly half of the white population for most of this period. During the rest of the 18th century, the number of whites remained fairly stationary, although a large part of the plantation owners left. The statistics of the 19th century provide even more problems, because the population was often merely divided into slaves and free people and most of the figures pertained to Paramaribo only. In 1811, the English held the first census in Surinam history, which delivered a much more accurate picture. As a result, the population curve can only be drawn with the greatest hesitation. The most important conclusion nevertheless remains the same: the number of whites in the colony was always so low that they were painfully aware of the vulnerability of their position -and acted accordingly.

The only period during which it was not difficult to attract sufficient settlers to Surinam were the years of the Willoughby-colonization. In Barbados, where sugar production expanded quickly at the time, many white farmers were pushed from their small holdings by more powerful neighbours and indentured servants found no place to settle after the expiration of their contracts. These people were keen to join such a venture. Since they were experienced colonists and had already survived the first dangerous years in a tropical climate, they prospered. In 1665, Surinam counted 4000 inhabitants, of whom 1500 were capable of bearing arms (meaning they were free white men). A terrible epidemic cut their number in half and the departure of most of the English colonists after the Zeelandian occupation left Surinam practically depleted of white settlers. Therefore, the authorities spared no measure to lure new hopefuls.

Saidiya Hartman’s use of ‘critical fabulation’

Following on from our seminar discussions, see here for Saidiya Hartman’s use of ‘critical fabulation’ as a reaction to the “violence of the archive” –in which certain lives, histories and memories are systematically excluded from the archive as an operation of power. In brief, critical fabulation is a creative method for re-imagining histories that you cannot find and to re-embody these marginalized accounts (or ‘subjugated knowledge’) through acts of imagination (you can think of Toni Morrison’s Beloved as an example of this). In this method there is also an attention to the very mechanisms and textures of memory and its connections to truth and knowledge.
Like Morrison, Hartman considers (trans)atlantic slavery. Here it what Hartman says about critical fabulation:

Is it possible to exceed or negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive? By advancing …a critical reading of the archive that mimes the figurative dimensions of history, I intended both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling. The conditional temporality of “what could have been,” according to Lisa Lowe, “symbolizes aptly the space of a different kind of thinking, a space of productive attention to the scene of loss, a thinking with twofold attention that seeks to encompass at once the positive objects and methods of history and social science and the matters absent, entangled and unavailable by its methods.” …

By playing with and rearranging the basic elements of the story, by re-presenting the

sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view, I have attempted to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done. By throwing into crisis “what happened when” and by exploiting the “transparency of sources” as fictions of history, I wanted to make visible the production of disposable lives (in the Atlantic slave trade and, as well, in the discipline of history), to describe “the resistance of the object”…

Narrative restraint, the refusal to fill in the gaps and provide closure, is a requirement of this method, as is the imperative to respect black noise—the shrieks, the moans, the non- sense, and the opacity, which are always in excess of legibility and of the law and which hint at and embody aspirations that are wildly utopian, derelict to capitalism, and antithetical to its attendant discourse of Man.

(Hartman, 2008, 11-12)

I hope you can see the connections to counter-memory here. In terms of the final assessment, if any of you are creative writers you can also consider submitting a creative piece of writing too.

Red