Wild Coast

by John Gimlette

He spat and looked away towards the far bank.

  I asked him whether he’d ever like to live over there again, in Suriname.

  He hauled his cloak up and glanced at me over his shoulder.

  ‘Pourquoi je voudrais? C’est merdique. J’habite ici. Je suis français.’

  (Why would I? It’s shitty. I live here. I’m French.)

  At the end of the Cottica campaign Stedman returned to the city to ponder his future. His first priority was his health. After months in the forest he was a ‘miserable debilitated tatterdemalion’, a mass of boils and bites. But he also had many months of back-pay, and so he rented a ‘very neat small house’ on the Waterkant, opposite the Red Steps. There he settled down with Joanna and Johnny, almost as happy as they had been out at L’Espérance.

  But there were no easy options from here. On the one hand, it was tempting to stay on in Suriname, as a dozen soldiers would. He had his family here, and the governor had offered him 400 acres of land. On the other hand, there was the problem of money. Stedman knew no other trade except soldiery and had no funds to develop the land. With what he had, he could only just afford the freedom of Johnny. This was more than most marines could manage. At least forty other children, the offspring of the expedition, would remain behind, in a state of perpetual slavery.

  Then there was Joanna. It wasn’t just that she was unaffordable or the property of someone else; she herself was still wary of freedom. She dreaded the prospect of becoming valueless, of being nothing, and of losing her status as a prestigious slave. For months Stedman tried to persuade her to come with him to Holland. There were tears and letters and long nights of pleading, but Joanna had decided. She’d give up everything, but not the dependence that defined her. Eventually Stedman realised it was hopeless and prepared himself for the loss that lay ahead. He placed Johnny under the guardianship of two Scots who were staying behind and gave instructions that, when the time was right, the child was to be baptised.

  By the end of March 1777 the troopships were ready to sail. Stedman spent his last few days with Joanna and his son, and then, on 1 April, the order was given for him to embark. ‘Joanna’, he recalled, ‘was unable to utter one word. The power of speech also forsook me, and my heart tacitly invoked the protection of Providence to befriend them. Joanna now shut her beauteous eyes – her lips turned the pale colour of death … Here I roused all my remaining fortitude and leaving them, surrounded by every care and attention, departed and bid God bless them.’

  Soon the transports were under sail. ‘Motionless and speechless,’ wrote Stedman, ‘I hung over the ship’s stern until the land quite disappeared.’

  Much of his life after that savoured of regret and remorse. It was as though, in Suriname, he’d lived life so intensely that the years after that were merely a time of reflection. For a while he hung around in Holland with the Scots Brigade, slowly divesting himself of the previous five years. He stopped drawing and writing. He then gave away his enormous collection of maroon artefacts to the Royal Dutch Cabinet of Curiosities. (They were later sent to the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde in Leiden, where they remain to this day.) He also remarried, recognising that not only was his first union invalid but that – after five years – it was also part of his past. His new wife, Adriana Wiertz van Coehorn, was well heeled, saintly and severe, all of which were qualities that, in her marriage to Stedman, she’d need in abundance.

  Then, in 1783, Joanna seemed to reappear in Stedman’s life. News came through that, at the age of twenty-four, she’d been poisoned, a victim of envy. Stedman had clearly never forgotten her, and now he seemed to feel the pain all over again. This time he called for Johnny and the boy was shipped to Holland along with a draft for £200 (his mother’s legacy and, coincidentally, her value as a slave). That same year Holland allied itself with the nascent American colonies, and the Scots Brigade was disbanded. Stedman left behind his country of birth and took his family to England.

  There they settled in Tiverton, in Devon, and became famous for fighting their neighbours. Stedman also made regular trips up to London, attending theatres, dances and bawdy houses. Adriana was constantly threatening to return to Holland, but in the end she settled for low-grade warfare with the English servants. She also bore Stedman another six children, including a Joanna. All of their sons would die on military service, including Johnny, who was drowned off Jamaica at the age of seventeen.

  Somehow, amid the threads and ructions of his tumultuous life, Stedman managed to assemble a memoir. The first draft of Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, in Guiana on the Wild Coast of South America was so explicit that, when it first appeared in 1790, it had been vigorously bowdlerised. It was another six years before an unexpurgated version appeared, but the result was a triumph. With illustrations by William Blake, the book was underwritten by – among others – the Archbishop of Canterbury, Warren Hastings and the good Mrs Godeffroy. It ran to several editions and was translated into Dutch, French, Italian, Swedish and German. Everyone seemed to find something different in it; to many it was a rollicking adventure; to the abolitionists it was an inspiration; to Charles Kingsley the story of Joanna was ‘one of the sweetest idylls in the English tongue’. Only V.S. Naipaul seemed to find it all too much to stomach. It was, he said, ‘a nauseous catalogue of atrocities’ like those about the Nazis.

  But, idyllic or emetic, the success of Expedition came too late for Stedman. He died the year after publication, on 5 March 1797. He was only fifty-two, but – after all he’d been through – even that felt like a generous allowance. He’d made careful plans for the afterlife and asked to be buried in Bickleigh churchyard, next to Bampfylde Moore Carew, the self-styled ‘King of the Gypsies’. Perhaps in Carew he thought he’d find a fellow-wanderer and rebel. Clearly, however, Adriana was having none of it, and so now the two old rogues find themselves at opposite sides of the graveyards, with the church in between.

  After my return from the Cottica I also found lodgings on the Waterkant. It was a large wooden house, white and clinker-built, with big sash windows, dark green sills and drainpipes, and verandas up the front. At first I’d rather quaintly imagined the Stedmans sitting up there, sipping their punch, with a view of the river. But then I discovered that the entire quarter was burned down by maroons in 1832, and that this house had only risen from the cinders.

  I never discovered who owned it, or who the other guests were. Occasionally, I’d find that my room had been cleaned, or that curtains had been opened or that bits of furniture had vanished or been replaced by something else. But the only person I ever saw was a woman called Felisie, who used to come in at night and sit in the hall, answering the phone. She was one of those Surinamese who could be either mostly African or mostly Indonesian, or perhaps even Jewish, depending on the light. ‘I’m Dutch,’ she told me, ‘I only came back to discover my roots.’

  The other odd thing about the house was that at some stage it had been completely scooped out and then fitted out in plastic. It had vinyl walls and a glossy floor, and even the air was chilly and false. Only the stairs were original, worn down by six generations of sea-boots and two generations of slaves. Right up in the roof was my room. It was clammy and white, like a sandwich box, and whenever I opened the door there was a faint hermetic hiss. Up here I couldn’t hear or smell anything of the city. Once I opened the window but was so startled by the blast of heat and roasted street that I never opened it again.

  That night I sat on the bed trying to work out how things had come to this. At first the city had seemed so expansive and open. Then I’d begun to notice that people disappeared or could only be found in casinos. Now here I was unable to taste or smell anything at all. It was almost as though the experience of Paramaribo had left me swaddled in film, deprived of my senses. But was it me, or was it Paramaribo? I’d often read about the city’s opacity. No one ever seemed to know exactly what was happening. According to one writer, Andrew Westoll, even the truth
here was never absolute but always democratic.

  Something had to be done, and so I decided to call the last of my contacts. It was the other Marxist, the second of Dr Roopnaraine’s comrades. From the start I had a feeling that I’d never get to meet him but that the quest would be intriguing and that, along the way, I’d get to peek beneath the surface. The man was already something of a myth, who’d emerged from nothing and was now disappearing again, hardly ever seen in public. People said that he’d been a chicken farmer and long-distance runner, that he was part Amerindian, that he was pale-skinned, that he never looked at anyone directly and that, in the army, he’d never been more than a sergeant-major, teaching PT. Still, I thought, he shouldn’t be difficult to find. On 25 February 1980, at the age of thirty-four, Désiré Delano Bouterse had seized control of the country.

  Downstairs, I asked Felisie to help me find his number.

  ‘Desi?’ she gasped. ‘You know him?’

  ‘No, I’m just trying to get in touch …’

  She studied me for a second. ‘You know he’s a powerful man?’

  I said I’d read a bit about him.

  ‘OK,’ she said, ‘we’ll try,’ and, with a tiny tremble she found the number for his office. She dialled, spoke for a moment, listened, spoke again and then hung up. ‘They say he’ll call us back.’

  ‘That was his office? So he’s still in politics?’

  Felisie nodded, avoiding my gaze. ‘Yes, he’s very strong.’

  ‘But he frightens you a little?’

  Felisie shook her head. ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Then why are we whispering?’

  Across the city I’d come across several reminders of Desi’s coup. There were the old barracks on the waterfront, now no more than a burned-out carcase. The Ministerie van Financiën had also been charred a little later, and all that remained was an outline. There was even a monument to the day, a large bas-relief made from slabs of concrete. It depicted soldiers with hunting rifles, and was made with so little conviction that now the slabs were peeling away and tumbling into the street.

  Everyone now thanks Holland for what happened, or blames it. Five years earlier, Suriname had been a bubbly little colony, with guilders splashing around and more bauxite than it knew what to do with. But then came a call for autonomy, and in 1975 – in a fit of over-indulgence – Holland granted not only independence but also passports for anyone wanting to leave. Over the next five years a third of the country took up the offer. Businesses closed, millions of dollars left the country, and so did a whole generation of graduates, taking with them whatever chance the country may have had of surviving on its own. Instead of leadership, it was left with two decrepit factions known as the Ruziemakers, or ‘Troublemakers’, and the Oude Ratten, or ‘Old Rats’.

  During the shambles that followed, Suriname was easily overwhelmed. In all the press cuttings Desi has a beard and a hunting rifle and looks like The Deer Hunter, except that he knows about nothing except chickens. But people would still believe him. He declared a revolutie, and marched his enemies out onto Independence Square, dressed only in their underpants. Democracy, he promised, would follow, and out on the wall of the barracks he left a box labelled ‘Suggestions’. Even The Hague seemed to like him at this stage, and – say some – may even have put him in power. In the hands of the Chicken Hunter, Suriname seemed secure.

  But it wasn’t long before Desi was burning books, and everything that follows. Parliament and the constitution all failed in the ensuing months. Paramaribo seized up with strikes, and even the palace was reduced to using candles. Only Desi seemed to flourish, and made himself a colonel. Although he wasn’t a natural Marxist, he was soon closing down papers and punishing the bourgeoisie. ‘We have stooped long enough beneath the yoke of capitalism,’ he declared. By 1982 his only friend was Cuba, and it had no money to spare.

  Then events took a turn for the worse. Dr Roopnaraine told me that until that time the ‘Caribbean Left’ had supported Bouterse. ‘He was one of us,’ said my Guyanese friend, ‘but then something happened, and things got much worse. We never saw him after that.’ What caused the change? Who knows, perhaps a visit from Maurice Bishop, the Lenin of Grenada? ‘The Surinamese revolution is too friendly,’ he told Desi. ‘Reactionary forces are too strong. You have to eliminate those who are not with you.’

  When I got back later that evening, Felisie was there by the phone.

  ‘Has Bouterse called?’ I asked.

  ‘No, he won’t call back.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’ll think you’re the CIA.’

  ‘Maybe I should visit him, just turn up?’

  ‘Better to call,’ said Felisie.

  ‘Why is everyone so scared of him?’

  She pretended not to hear. ‘Desi for Presi, that’s what we say.’

  I smiled, letting a little silence gather between us.

  ‘The fort,’ she said quietly, ‘you need to look inside the fort.’

  The next day I walked down the waterfront to Fort Zeelandia and, for the first time, found that it was open. The inside was even stranger than I’d imagined, like an acre of Europe that had somehow got lost. Everything was made of rock or bricks, which made voices sound different and gave footsteps a dry, unfamiliar ring. Around the courtyard was a small pentagon of mansions, housing an apothecary, dining-rooms, state apartments and some hot, stuffy gun-decks up in the attic. Nowadays it was a museum with a pitiless tale to tell. No one, it seems, had ever benefited from possession of the fort. The man who captured it from the English went bust. His successor, Lord Sommelsdijk, was dragged up onto a bastion by his own men and shot like a sheep. The fort hadn’t even withstood a good siege, and eventually it was reduced to a jail.

  The dungeons were still there, deep below the mansions. Its inmates must have felt they’d been bundled away to die in the drains. Countless visionaries had perished down here, reconsidering their perspective with the help of pincers or racks, or just years of neglect. A candle still burned for them, the room’s shadows trembling in the glow. Stedman had always hated the fort and called it ‘the gloomy mansions of despair’.

  Just below the east bastion, Bastion Veere, was the kitchen. Not long ago, in 1982, it too had become an oubliette. With such an impressive record for persuasion, the fort had seemed perfect to Desi. It would be his Tower of London, or a miniature Bastille. That year he snatched it back from the museum service and began filling it with those who opposed him.

  By 7 December the kitchen was like a little parliament, an assembly of all the best brains the country had left. Later, Desi’s men would struggle to justify the round-up. ‘It was them or us,’ said one of his prime ministers, Wim Udenhout. But the prisoners were hardly desperadoes – just unionists, journalists, the dean of the university and a few of their lawyers. Desi called them ‘the Underworld’, and at midnight they were marched up the stairs onto the bastion itself.

  At the top of the stairs it was dark, and I became aware of someone else, standing in the shadows. He was stooped and had narrow, rheumy eyes, and skin like a date. Despite the heat, he was wearing a cardigan and suit, and I had a feeling he wasn’t supposed to be there. He explained how he’d once been a teacher, and that now all he did was show people round. ‘OK,’ I said, ‘then perhaps you can show me the Bastion Veere?’ And, with that, we stepped outside into the sunlight.

  It was still a crime scene, with a temporary fence from wall to wall.

  ‘That’s where they was standing,’ said the old teacher.

  Just like Sommelsdijk, I thought: lined up, facing soldiers and wondering how all this would end. Some say that Desi himself appeared, hauling a belt of twinkling cartridges and some dire weapon, which he unleashed on the group. Others say it was the fort’s commander, or that the men died trying to escape. This was the explanation that Desi preferred, and the one which, the next day, he broadcast over the radio. It was never a great story and looked even shakier when fifteen corpses turned
up at the hospital, bruised and beaten, and spattered with gunfire from front to back.

  The shellstone rampart was still deeply scarred and pitted. I asked the teacher about the groove around each hole.

  ‘Dutch detectives. A few years ago, they cuts out the bullets.’

  ‘And did they discover anything?’

  ‘Yes, my friend, they did. None of this was planned.’

  ‘How could they tell?’

  ‘Because the killer weren’t standing here at all.’

  I was puzzled. ‘Then where was he?’

  ‘Right up there. In the roof.’

  Nothing about the killings would, I realised, make much sense. They’d become known as the Decembermoorden, or ‘December murders’, a historical riddle at the heart of Suriname. A few years later a detective had tried to investigate them but had himself been hauled in front of the fort and shot through the head. Even now the case was fraught with distortion. All the pieces of the jigsaw were there – scene, motive, weapon and killer – and yet nothing seemed to fit together. There was even a murder trial, which Desi occasionally attended. He had his own courthouse, with its own new road, and the trial looked set to become an institution that would trundle on for ever. It hadn’t even got beyond the wearily procedural and had already scrambled the wits of three different judges. Every now and then Desi appeared on television, silvery now and slightly heavier around the jowls. He seemed quite sure that one day he’d be president once more.

  ‘Do you think he will be?’ I asked the teacher.

  ‘We all got blood on our hands.’

  ‘I don’t understand …’

  ‘We lived with this so long, we don’t believe anything no more.’

  After the killings Suriname would never be the same again. At first, it was merely isolated. Each of its neighbours shrank away, except Brazil, which moved 20,000 troops up to the border. Meanwhile, the Dutch pulled out, taking all their money. At the funerals of those who’d died in the fort the mourners stopped outside the embassy and shouted ‘Help us! Help us!’, but there was nothing the Dutch could do. Desi was already recruiting new bedfellows. China built a stadium, and the Iranians called by in the hope of something cheap. Then came the Libyans, looking for rice, but even they found Desi too cranky and drifted away. In desperation Desi turned to private enterprise, and by 1985 the country was floating along on the profits of Colombian cocaine.