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Winner of the Gordon K. Lewis Memorial Award for Caribbean Scholarship from the Caribbean Studies AssociationWinner of the J.I. Staley Prize for Excellence in Anthropology from the School of American ResearchWinner of the Albert J. Beveridge Award from the American Historical Association
In the early 18th century, the Dutch colony of Suriname was the envy of all others in the Americas. There, seven hundred Europeans lived off the labor of over four thousand enslaved Africans. Owned by men hell-bent for quick prosperity, the rich plantations on the Suriname river became known for their heights of planter comfort and opulence--and for their depths of slave misery. Slaves who tried to escape were hunted by the planter militia. If found they were publicly tortured. (A common punishment was for the Achilles tendon to be removed for a first offense, the right leg amputated for a second.) Resisting this cruelty first in small numbers, then in an ever increasing torrent, slaves began to form outlaw communities until nearly one out of every ten Africans in Suriname was helping to build rebel villages in the jungle.
Alabi's World relates the history of a nation founded by escaped slaves deep in the Latin American rain forest. It tells of the black men and women's bloody battles for independence, their uneasy truce with the colonial government, and the attempt of their great leader, Alabi, to reconcile his people with white law and a white God. In a unique historical experiment, Richard Price presents this history by weaving together four voices: the vivid historical accounts related by the slaves' descendants, largely those of Alabi's own villagers, the Saramaka; the reports of the often exasperated colonial officials sent to control the slave communities; the otherworldly diaries of the German Moravian missionaries determined to convert the heathen masses; and the historian's own, mediating voice.
The Saramaka voices in these pages recall a world of powerful spirits--called obia's--and renowned heroes, great celebrations and fierce blood-feuds. They also recall, with unconcealed relish, successes in confounding the colonial officials and in bending the treaty to the benefit of their own people. From the opposite side of the negotiations, the colonial Postholders speak of the futility of trying to hold the village leaders to their vow to return any further runaway slaves. Equally frustrated, the Moravian missionaries describe the rigors of their proselytising efforts in the black villages--places of licentiousness and idol-worship that seemed to be a foretaste of what hell must be like. Among their only zealous converts was Alabi, who stood nearly alone in his attempts to bridge the cultural gap between black and white--defiantly working to lead his people on the path toward harmony with their former enemies.
From the confluence of these voices--set throughout the book in four different typefaces--Price creates a fully nuanced portrait of the collision of cultures. It is a confrontation, he suggests, that was enacted thousands of times across the slaveholding Americas as white men strained to suppress black culture and blacks resisted-- determined to preserve their heritage and beliefs.
In the early 18th century, the Dutch colony of Suriname was the envy of all others in the Americas. There, seven hundred Europeans lived off the labor of over four thousand enslaved Africans. Owned by men hell-bent for quick prosperity, the rich plantations on the Suriname river became known for their heights of planter comfort and opulence--and for their depths of slave misery. Slaves who tried to escape were hunted by the planter militia. If found they were publicly tortured. (A common punishment was for the Achilles tendon to be removed for a first offense, the right leg amputated for a second.) Resisting this cruelty first in small numbers, then in an ever increasing torrent, slaves began to form outlaw communities until nearly one out of every ten Africans in Suriname was helping to build rebel villages in the jungle.
Alabi's World relates the history of a nation founded by escaped slaves deep in the Latin American rain forest. It tells of the black men and women's bloody battles for independence, their uneasy truce with the colonial government, and the attempt of their great leader, Alabi, to reconcile his people with white law and a white God. In a unique historical experiment, Richard Price presents this history by weaving together four voices: the vivid historical accounts related by the slaves' descendants, largely those of Alabi's own villagers, the Saramaka; the reports of the often exasperated colonial officials sent to control the slave communities; the otherworldly diaries of the German Moravian missionaries determined to convert the heathen masses; and the historian's own, mediating voice.
The Saramaka voices in these pages recall a world of powerful spirits--called obia's--and renowned heroes, great celebrations and fierce blood-feuds. They also recall, with unconcealed relish, successes in confounding the colonial officials and in bending the treaty to the benefit of their own people. From the opposite side of the negotiations, the colonial Postholders speak of the futility of trying to hold the village leaders to their vow to return any further runaway slaves. Equally frustrated, the Moravian missionaries describe the rigors of their proselytising efforts in the black villages--places of licentiousness and idol-worship that seemed to be a foretaste of what hell must be like. Among their only zealous converts was Alabi, who stood nearly alone in his attempts to bridge the cultural gap between black and white--defiantly working to lead his people on the path toward harmony with their former enemies.
From the confluence of these voices--set throughout the book in four different typefaces--Price creates a fully nuanced portrait of the collision of cultures. It is a confrontation, he suggests, that was enacted thousands of times across the slaveholding Americas as white men strained to suppress black culture and blacks resisted-- determined to preserve their heritage and beliefs.
- GenresHistory
472 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1990
55 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 16, 2025
This book is beyond impressive, and if I could read anything for the first time again it would be this. The invaluable insight I gained regarding the Maroon community of Saramakas and the testimonies of the Moravian missionaries cannot be put into words. This is, in many ways, the history of encounter, where the complexity of brutality and dominance meets true spirituality and resistance in Suriname. It is a book about adventure, and from a literary point of view, the descriptions of Suriname that Price includes filled my head with unique images. A line I still remember, “take courage and everything will go well.” Thank you to my Professor for bringing this to my life.
May 13, 2011
Alabi's World concerns Maroon history of Suriname, a small country in the northern part of South America. In general the word "Maroon" refers to people who escaped European slavery in the Americas or the Caribbean and established their own communities, often with the help of native peoples. The book deals, even more specifically, with the history of one particular Maroon tribe, the Saramakas (and one of their forefathers, the titular Alabi), who still live along the Saramacca River in Suriname. (I employ here a common spelling variant of the tribe's name, useful in distinguishing references to the people from the geographical region.) The Saramakas' founders lived in slavery in Dutch-colonial* Suriname. Beginning in the seventeenth century, these ancestors of today's Saramakas fled captivity (primarily, though not exclusively, from Jewish-owned plantations) into the surrounding forests and waged a war of liberation against the colonists. Methods of Maroon warfare included frequent raids on plantations, destruction of property and the freeing of additional slaves. The Maroons of Suriname, including the Saramakas, were so successful in interrupting the economic life of the Dutch colony, evading capture, and assimilating new escapees into their communities that the Dutch sought a peace treaty with them in 1762, a full century before general emancipation in Suriname. As Alabi's World depicts, post-treaty life for the Saramakas was still difficult and fraught with challenges - to keep the peace and maintain their freedom, to provide for themselves, and to retain their culture in the face of conversion and acculturation efforts by Christian missionaries.
And, while I have strayed to the topic, Saramakan culture contained a unique amalgam of practices, language, rituals and art from a number of sources: diverse African peoples (including Dahomey, Loango and Yoruba among many others), Native Americans (primarily Arawak), and even from the European cultures represented in Suriname (Dutch, Belgian, Moravian missionaries, Jewish planters, et al.) This distinctive hybrid culture persists to this day and remains dynamic. By the time of Price's writing, in 1990, Saramakan culture maintained many aspects that would have been familiar to their eighteenth-century forebears. Though, Price observes, the culture had certainly begun to change under the influences of technological modernization as well as political and social conflicts that have troubled Suriname since its (alarmingly recent) independence from the Netherlands in 1975.
Even in 1990, the Saramakas yet maintained vivid and intricate oral histories of their tribe's origins. Price learned these histories through several years he spent living among the Saramakas and they comprise the nucleus of Alabi's World. He cross-referenced these detailed oral histories with written primary sources produced by Dutch bureaucrats of the period and by German Moravian missionaries who proselytized to the eighteenth-century Maroon communities of Suriname.
Over the course of years Price accumulated, compared, and interpreted an astonishing amount of source material, written and oral, to meticulously lay out the story of the Saramakas during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries within the pages of Alabi's World. Unusually, but compellingly for an academic work of this kind, Price uses his own interpretive narrative only sparingly, instead favoring large sections of direct quotations: from the oral histories of modern Saramakas (which he gleaned through personal conversation in most cases), from the bureaucratic documents left behind by Dutch postholders, and from the journals, letters and memoirs of Moravian missionaries stationed in Suriname during the eighteenth century. Additionally, extensive endnotes occupy a full half of the book - and not merely endnotes full of citations, but full of narrative, more lengthy quotations from Price's primary sources, and relevant images. You will want to read each and every one of these notes.
Sagely, Price chose the liminal figure, Alabi, as his focal point upon which to balance the broader story of the Saramaka and colonialism in Suriname. For Alabi converted to Christianity, one of the first among his people to do so. He developed sympathy for the white folks in Suriname and feelings of pacifism. But, for over 30 years, he also served as tribal chief over the Saramaka and the other Maroon tribes of the area (most of whom remained non-Christian). Thus, he had to arbitrate over internal conflicts and represent his people to the Dutch and Moravians, even while feeling increasingly distant from his people and their religion. A convergence of cultures created Alabi and his difficult situation of constant negotiation between those cultures. In a number of ways, he embodies the broader tensions and conflicts evident in colonialism itself - cross-cultural interaction, power relationships between cultures, self-identity and crafting of the "Other", freedom of self-determination, finding and preserving a sense of home and belonging.
Alabi's World tells a captivating and frequently harrowing story. Moreover, Price exhibits great evenhandedness and empathy in his presentation of this historical moment in Suriname's colonial history, while dealing forthrightly and untimidly with the racism and violence displayed by colonialists, missionaries and Saramakas alike (though displayed in different degrees and for different reasons, unquestionably). I have never read any work of history or anthropology like this and am eager to explore more of Richard Price's works, many of which also deal with the Saramakas. The lack of jargon and focus on primary sources also makes Alabi's World an engaging read, even for a casual reader.
*Although Dutch-administered, Suriname also was the site of the plantations of colonists from many European nations.
And, while I have strayed to the topic, Saramakan culture contained a unique amalgam of practices, language, rituals and art from a number of sources: diverse African peoples (including Dahomey, Loango and Yoruba among many others), Native Americans (primarily Arawak), and even from the European cultures represented in Suriname (Dutch, Belgian, Moravian missionaries, Jewish planters, et al.) This distinctive hybrid culture persists to this day and remains dynamic. By the time of Price's writing, in 1990, Saramakan culture maintained many aspects that would have been familiar to their eighteenth-century forebears. Though, Price observes, the culture had certainly begun to change under the influences of technological modernization as well as political and social conflicts that have troubled Suriname since its (alarmingly recent) independence from the Netherlands in 1975.
Even in 1990, the Saramakas yet maintained vivid and intricate oral histories of their tribe's origins. Price learned these histories through several years he spent living among the Saramakas and they comprise the nucleus of Alabi's World. He cross-referenced these detailed oral histories with written primary sources produced by Dutch bureaucrats of the period and by German Moravian missionaries who proselytized to the eighteenth-century Maroon communities of Suriname.
Over the course of years Price accumulated, compared, and interpreted an astonishing amount of source material, written and oral, to meticulously lay out the story of the Saramakas during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries within the pages of Alabi's World. Unusually, but compellingly for an academic work of this kind, Price uses his own interpretive narrative only sparingly, instead favoring large sections of direct quotations: from the oral histories of modern Saramakas (which he gleaned through personal conversation in most cases), from the bureaucratic documents left behind by Dutch postholders, and from the journals, letters and memoirs of Moravian missionaries stationed in Suriname during the eighteenth century. Additionally, extensive endnotes occupy a full half of the book - and not merely endnotes full of citations, but full of narrative, more lengthy quotations from Price's primary sources, and relevant images. You will want to read each and every one of these notes.
Sagely, Price chose the liminal figure, Alabi, as his focal point upon which to balance the broader story of the Saramaka and colonialism in Suriname. For Alabi converted to Christianity, one of the first among his people to do so. He developed sympathy for the white folks in Suriname and feelings of pacifism. But, for over 30 years, he also served as tribal chief over the Saramaka and the other Maroon tribes of the area (most of whom remained non-Christian). Thus, he had to arbitrate over internal conflicts and represent his people to the Dutch and Moravians, even while feeling increasingly distant from his people and their religion. A convergence of cultures created Alabi and his difficult situation of constant negotiation between those cultures. In a number of ways, he embodies the broader tensions and conflicts evident in colonialism itself - cross-cultural interaction, power relationships between cultures, self-identity and crafting of the "Other", freedom of self-determination, finding and preserving a sense of home and belonging.
Alabi's World tells a captivating and frequently harrowing story. Moreover, Price exhibits great evenhandedness and empathy in his presentation of this historical moment in Suriname's colonial history, while dealing forthrightly and untimidly with the racism and violence displayed by colonialists, missionaries and Saramakas alike (though displayed in different degrees and for different reasons, unquestionably). I have never read any work of history or anthropology like this and am eager to explore more of Richard Price's works, many of which also deal with the Saramakas. The lack of jargon and focus on primary sources also makes Alabi's World an engaging read, even for a casual reader.
*Although Dutch-administered, Suriname also was the site of the plantations of colonists from many European nations.
May 2, 2007
Price's discourse concerns the cultural confrontation between the Saramakas and the Colonials of Surniame. There is no thesis or arguement in this book. The author uses post modern methods through out the text to show this cultural confrontation. Price treats the subject matter with a holistic perspective and that is why there is no index to this monograph. The primary sources are awsome!!! Price uses these sources more then his own narrative for the discourse. A good book, since the reader can gain the perspective of how the Saramakas saw themselves and how they were seen.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews