Afro-Surinamese
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| (37% of Suriname's population) | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
|
Suriname (Paramaribo · Coronie · Brokopondo · Marowijne · Saramacca) Netherlands, United States |
|
| Languages | |
| Dutch, Sranan Tongo, Saramaccan, Ndyuka, Kwinti | |
| Religion | |
| Christianity and Indigenous religion |
Afro-Surinamese or Black Surinamese are the inhabitants of Suriname of Sub-Saharan African ancestry. They are usually divided into two groups, the Creole people and the Maroons. The Surinamese Creoles are the mixed-race descendants of African slaves and Europeans. The Maroons were runaway slaves who formed independent settlements together. They maintained vestiges of African culture and language.
Afro-Surinamese scholar, Gloria Wekker, argues, for example, that working-class Afro-Surinamese women retained pre-colonial African cultural understandings of gender, sexuality, and spirituality. She, and other theorists, argue that African cultural retentions are found most often in Afro-diasporic communities that either had irregular contact with dominant groups of the host community or that shielded their cultural retentions from their colonizers. As Wekker observes, Surinamese slaves socialized, communicated, and communed with little white cultural, social, or linguistic interference.
Most of the slaves imported to Suriname came from Central Africa (more than 66,900 slaves, 31.6% of the total number imported), Ghana (more than 53,000, 25% of the total) and Bight of Benin (more than 34,700, 16.4% of the total). Thousands of slaves also arrived from Senegambia (more than 1,300, 0.7% of the total) and the current Sierra Leone (more than 1,400, 0.7% of the total), Windward Coast (more than 7,520, 3.6% of the total) and Bight of Biafra (more than 4,300, 2.1% of the total).
The Akans of Fanti subgroup (a subgroup exported, at least, from the Ivory Coast) and Ashanti (from the Ashanti Region, in central Ghana) were, officially, the predominant slave group in Suriname. However, in practice, slaves from Loango, purchased in Cabinda, Angola, were the largest group of slaves in Suriname since 1670; they surpassed the number on the Gold Coast in almost all periods. Enslaved people including the Ewe (who live in southern Ghana, Togo and Benin), Yoruba (from Benin) and Kongo, all left their cultural footprints in Suriname.
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