The First Rebels

History question: Who were the first black slaves in the Americas to gain independence from their white overlords? If your answer is the Haitians, you are wrong by more than 100 years. Correct answer: the bushmen of Surinam, formerly Dutch Guiana, who escaped from their Dutch slave masters in the early 1600s, established a nation of small villages in the jungle and won a century-long guerrilla war against the European colonists and their mercenaries.

By the accounts of the time, the rebel slaves were shrewd and able people. The men raided the plantations for black women and supplies. They built their own villages at the head of river rapids (where intruders could be sighted during portage) and raised crops far from the villages so that Europeans would be unlikely to find them. English Mercenary Captain John Gabriel Stedman, who fought against the bush people from 1772 to 1777, wrote of one military maneuver: "This was certainly such a masterly trait of generalship in a savage people, whom we affected to despise, as would have done honour to any European commander, and has perhaps been seldom equalled by more civilized nations."

Tilting Coffin. The most striking aspect of the bush society is its remarkable stability. Two U.S. blacks from Harvard, Neurobiologist S. Allen Counter Jr. and Admissions Officer David L. Evans, have spent five years studying the 5,000 surviving bush people of the interior and have produced a one-hour documentary film, The Bush Afro-Americans of Surinam and French Guiana:

The Connecting Link. Says Counter: "These people represent for all of us a historical control group. They represent to American blacks a mirror of the best example of what we would have been like if we had chosen not to live in slavery and had removed ourselves to another place."

The film shows a healthy, handsome and cheerful people organized as a matrilineal society under tribal chiefs, or "Gran Men." Their laws and customs date back to a precolonial Africa uninfluenced by European rulers. In one scene, a group of pallbearers carries a coffin from door to door so that the obeah, or medicine man, can ask if someone in the house was involved in the death. "Death is rarely considered natural," Actor James Earl Jones says as narrator of the film, "and certain people are divined to be responsible." If the coffin tilts toward a particular house during the ritual procession, the owner is considered guilty and must provide gifts to the survivors.

The bush people speak a language that combines Dutch, English, French, Portuguese and six West African languages. Much of their design and decoration, including sculpture, chairs and dugouts hollowed from felled trees, resembles that of West Africa. In fact, two Gran Men who recently traveled to West Africa at the expense of the Surinam government were able to recognize certain shrines and could communicate with Africans though the two cultures have had no contact for centuries.

The jungle environment helped the original bush people to re-create Africa in America. They found similar medicinal plants and similar game, including monkeys to be eaten and then celebrated in monkey dances that resemble West African gorilla dances. The bush people also retained a reverence for the silk cotton tree, which flourishes in Surinam as it does along the Niger River, and they found the same white clay they had used in their homeland to decorate their bodies during rituals. One of their villages, where priests live, is called Dahomey and is barred to all whites, including government officials.

Like primitive peoples everywhere, the bush people are now threatened by creeping civilization. Highways will soon slice through the heart of their territory, and many of the young have been lured to jobs in coastal towns. Says Evans: "They know technology is coming, but they refuse to allow it to disrupt their lives." Last year, when Surinam's Premier explained that the Dutch territory would soon be independent, a bushman chief wondered: "What is the independence you offer? We have been independent for 300 years."

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