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Negroes of the Woods

The Wild Life Led by the African of Dutch Guiana-A Strange People


Some native Africans were taken to Panama a while ago to join the thousands of laborers on the canal. These negroes, Says the New York Sun, became involved early last month in a row with other canal-diggers, and, after a fight with knives and stones, many of the black men ran off into the woods. The Panama newspapers say that they threw away their clothing, abandoned themselves completely to barbarism and lawlessness, and at last accounts the government had sent a force to repress this outbreak of African savagery.

These negroes evidently prefer the rude enjoyments of Africa and the lives of comparative idleness they led there to handling picks and shovels in the great ditch. They will hardly be permitted to found a savage community on the isthmus, but if they were removed about 1,800 miles down the Atlantic coast they would find congenial society in the forests of Dutch Guiana, where thousands of their own race have reproduced in the western hemisphere the customs and the characteristics of savage Africa.

On any good map of South America may be found in Dutch Guiana the names of a number of savage tribes inhabiting the wooded and hilly uplands of the interior. Among them the Aukan, Saramacca, Bekoe, and Bonis are full-blooded negroes, many of whose ancestors were brought to America nearly two centuries ago in slave-ships to labor on the coast plantations of their Dutch masters. Terribly maltreated in the early days of the colony, many of them took refuge in the almost inaccessible solitudes of the forests. Now and then they found means to tempt their friends still in bondage to join them in the mountain valleys.

The bondsmen played a sorry joke upon their masters in 1712, when Admiral Cassard attacked the Dutch settlement and hundreds of slaves were hurried into the interior for concealment. Peace soon came, but there were few negroes to return to the coast, for they preferred wild life with their friends near the headwaters of the rivers of Guiana to drudging their lives away on coffee and tabacco plantations. So the numbers of the self-released Africans increased and there their descendants have lived ever since, as distinct from the Indians around them as from the Whites of the coast. They have, apparently not grown in numbers for many years, but there are now about 8,000 of them, and they are known as the negroes of the woods. Their story is perhaps unique in the history of human migration. It is a story of wild savages transported across a wide sea to a new world, where they regained control of their persons and activities and reproduced amid new surroundings, the habitations and customs of their native country. Dim tradition alone has faintly preserved the memory of their fatherland, but none the less have they turned a bit of tropical America into a semblance of the negro's native home. Jet black in color, prognathous and thick lipped, they have preserved the pure negro type, have shown little aptitude for improvement, and are very low in the social scale. Like many an Africa missionary, who has fruitlessly toiled his life away, the Moravian brethren have labored for years among the negroes of the woods with little apparent result. In all essentials they live to-day like those negroes of the west coast of Africa, who have had considerable contact with the White race.

Their rectangular huts of wood and thatch, build along the water courses, are almost exact counterparts of those that are found on the lower Congo and among some of the tribes of the Ogowe river. Like the great Pahouin tribe of the French Congo, they divide their huts by thin partitions into two compartments, one of which they use for sleeping and the other for culinary purposes. Like many African tribes, they twist their wool into many little braids, wear arm and leg ornaments of copper, brass and iron and adorn their necks with strings of beads or the teeth of wild animals. Like the equatorial African, they tattoo their bodies without the adjunet of color, which is not uncommon among the Indians, but is practiced in Africa by only a few tribes, like the Pahouin.

In their villages they are generally naked, and they wear cotton coverings only when they visit the White settlements, where their scant attire of ornaments and paint would not be tolerated. They have abandoned their native custom of sleeping on the ground for the Indian hammock, which they weave of fibers.

White men rarely visit these Africans of the forests, chiefly, perhaps, because their streams, which, flowing to the sea, are the only highways into the interior, are very difficult of ascent. The negroes dislike to mingle with the Whites, and they never leave their savage homes, except when the need of rum and ammunition drives them to the settlements. Then the lazy men, who usually engage in no toil except fishing and the chase, cut down a few trees, skillfully fashion the trunks into canoes, and float them down the creels and rivers to sell them at the towns. Oftener still they make little rafts of valuable varieties of timber, and invest the proceeds in powder and ball, beads and bad liquor.

These four groups of blacks, like kindred tribes in Africa, are ruled by kinglets, and some of them take their names from chiefs who led them in the wars the Dutch long waged upon their escaped slaves, only with the result of driving them further into the woods. They live chiefly upon vegetable food, which the women raise and prepare. They make no pottery, not being descended from tribes in Africa that are skilled in this art. Calabashes made of gourds are the receptacles for their rice and cassava. The fact is specially noteworthy that these negroes of the woods are more buoyant in spirit than their kindred who for generations continued to toil on the coast plantations. They are all of the same origin, and they afford another proof of the fact that man can far better perpetuate his best physical and mental qualities in a state of savagism than under conditions where he is simply condemned to a hopeless life of unrequited drudgery. The negroes of the woods, however, have millions of other relatives in the New World, who, though bondsmen for generations after the Guiana blacks had freed themselves, were lifted by their surroundings to a higher plane, and under more fortunate influences, were finally fitted as freemen to walk with comparative ease in the ways of civilized and enlightened men. From the same coast that freighted ships with blacks for Guiana came the progenitors of the numerous people are now numbered among our fellow-citizens, and it is an eloquent and powerful argument in favor of the efforts now making to reclaim the millions of Africa, that so vast multitude of her sons, under circumstances by no means wholly favorable, have so clearly demonstrated the capacity of their race for improvement.

Source; https://archive.ph/Ab1mk