Wild Coast

by John Gimlette

  After that, Suriname seemed to slip deeper and deeper into a moral malaise. It became a sort of narco-dystopia, a Colombian Guiana. Airstrips were rented out at the rate of $1 million a year, and there was always a general to help things through. At one point Suriname was filtering cocaine into Europe at the rate of twenty tons a year. Once Desi himself went to Brazil to buy the necessary ether (and was only accidentally arrested because he had so much cash that the whores thought he was a robber). Meanwhile secrecy thrived, and so too did fear. The streets started emptying at night, and bodies appeared, wrapped in plastic and blasted with shells. A new order had developed, under the cover of government. In Holland, Desi and a few of his lackeys were tried in absentia and convicted of trafficking. They all had guns and boats and planes of their own.

  Most of this had gone now, and Suriname’s a much better place than it was. But it’s said that on every flight to Amsterdam there are still a few ‘mules’. The Desi years explained everything: the casinos, the poverty, the fear of darkness and the politicians driving around in Humvees on $20,000 a year. Even now there were still occasional reports of ministers importing girls or building drop-sites in the bush.

  But in 1985 there was far worse to come. The talk of booty had awoken a giant. It was the Hinterland War, about to restart, more vicious than ever before.

  By now I was phoning Desi four times a day. I realised I’d never find him, but the hunt was intriguing. I always got someone different, usually a woman. ‘Who?’ they’d say. ‘What you wanna ask him? He gonna call you back.’ He never did. Felisie gave me some more numbers, and I’d phone them all sequentially, to find that Desi was in three different meetings all at once. One woman even said he was abroad, a thrilling idea for a man now wanted all over the world. But I never gave up and hounded him down from number to number. Felisie said he had houses everywhere, although what I suspect she meant was girls. Desi was notoriously demanding.

  In some ways his persistent inability to get to the phone came as a relief. What do you say to a man who’s been found guilty of war crimes and trafficking drugs? Would I become shrill or just silly with nerves? And if he asked me to meet him, would I go to his house, hidden away behind the razor-wire and trees? I decided that, while I’d keep pestering Desi, I needed someone else, calmer with the facts. But who? Would anyone talk about the new rebels, and the new Hinterland War, and how it all began? Then I discovered that Desi’s old prime minister, Wim Udenhout, worked around the corner. Between 1984 and 1986 he’d fronted an unhappy coalition, but then – as the regime corrupted – he’d found himself miles away, as ambassador to Washington. Nowadays, he ran a conservation organisation and was a model of reform. Surely he’d put everything in place? I gave him a call.

  ‘OK,’ he said, ‘I can see you for an hour.’

  When I first met Udenhout, I was so fascinated by his appearance that I hardly absorbed a word. Although a little older, he was exactly like those Surinamese I’d seen on television all those weeks before: slim, black, buttoned-down and suave. We were sitting in his office on huge velour sofas, mine so deep and plush that it made my handwriting bounce all over the page. It was like being in one of those adverts, everything verging on perfect. There was only one unsettling feature, and that was Mr Udenhout’s tie, which hung on a hook above his desk. It was all looped and ready-knotted, as though at any moment he might throw it over his head and bound off into a crisis.

  I don’t think he’d noticed my lapse of concentration, and was already in full swing. ‘… when I first saw maroons, they were like curiosities …’

  Next to us was a large map of Suriname, and across it a red laser dot darted backwards and forwards, picking out the tribes. Mr Udenhout explained how the maroons now lived in harmony with the coast, how they were developing and becoming urbanised, how their women were going to university, and how old structures were changing. It would take time; nothing would happen overnight. ‘If you want to educate a man,’ he beamed, ‘you have to start with his grandfather.’

  I smiled back, uncomfortably conscious that I was a congregation of one.

  ‘You make it all sound very simple,’ I said.

  Udenhout laughed and then leaned forward, talking with politician’s hands. ‘Yes, of course the old tensions are still there. They go back years. The coast and the maroons. But, after independence, it was different. The Creoles began to discover their identity. We began to appreciate our blackness. The maroons, however, weren’t interested, not at all. They’d never had an identity problem! They didn’t even accept the leadership of this country, and had no interest in independence. They said their treaties were with the Queen of Holland, and no one else. It caused a lot of resentment on the coast …’

  ‘Just resentment?’

  Udenhout held out his palms. ‘They don’t trust us, we don’t trust them.’

  ‘You’ve often been criticised for your treatment of maroons …?’

  ‘In the foreign press, you mean?’

  ‘Well, yes, and all those judgments in the Inter-American Court …’

  The little red eye flickered angrily over the room. ‘Outsiders,’ said Udenhout, selecting his words with care, ‘still seem to believe in a noble savage. It’s far from the reality, really it is! This is not about human rights, it’s about politics. The maroons just use these false, idealist arguments for their own political gain … They say they want communal rights. But we say the state protects the rights of individuals, and, by joining the electoral process, they’ve elected to be part of our state! Believe me, give them an inch and they take a mile …’

  ‘But they’ve lost a lot of land, hunting, gold …?’

  Udenhout shook his head, and said that whatever was out there was never theirs. ‘The crux of the problem is that a people happy in isolation have discovered that it’s not really their country and that the resources don’t belong to them …’

  ‘And under your administration it led to a war?’

  ‘The maroons were led by a bank robber …’

  ‘But with quite a lot of support?’

  ‘That was the Dutch,’ said Udenhout, ‘the Dutch Secret Service.’

  ‘And what about Desi? Didn’t he once say he’d wipe out the maroons?’

  Wim Udenhout looked at his watch, and sighed. ‘I think if we’re going to talk about Mr Bouterse,’ he said, rising to his feet, ‘it’ll have to wait until another time.’

  When I told Felisie that I no longer needed my room, and that I’d be going in the morning, she seemed almost relieved. It was as though, at last, she could say what she wanted, safe in the knowledge that her thoughts would go with me, travelling west and harmlessly leaving the country. It was such a sad valedictory that I wrote it down almost word for word.

  ‘I’m also leaving soon,’ she said, ‘I can’t live here any more. I can’t stand it. I had such high hopes when I came. I was brought up in Holland but I always felt different. There was something missing. So I came here. Do you understand that? Maybe not, why should you? I thought it would be paradise. But it isn’t. It’s hell. No one is who they seem to be, and beneath the surface everything’s a lie. I now know something I never knew before: I’m not African. I can’t connect with Africans. I’m Dutch. Maybe it’s all about slavery? We were fed and housed. We never had to think, never had to use our initiative. This place is mad. You know the politicians here? They fight in their parliament. They actually kick and punch! How can I live here, and teach my children how to behave? People here have no respect for anything, not even your life. I hate it. I hate it here.’

  As I read these words back, I still don’t know what to think. Did other people feel like this? Perhaps it was a mark of the superficiality of my travels, but I was sorry to be leaving. I’d never quite fallen out of love with Paramaribo, even if, the longer I was there, the less I felt I knew it. So did Felisie really mean what she’d said, or believe it with such vehemence? I’d often wondered how well she’d known Desi, and whether they’d
ever been lovers. How did she have all those numbers, and how did she know what he’d say?

  As I was leaving Udenhout’s office, he’d said something to me that I’d taken as admonition: ‘In Suriname,’ he’d warned, ‘take nothing at face value. Nothing is what you’d expect.’

  The last stage of my Surinamese journey took me west, through the sweltering forests of the new Hinterland War. This time the war was fought not along a river but along a road: the Oostwestverbinding, or East–West Highway. It was a battlefield two lanes wide and 144 miles long, ending on the Marowijne, the border with Guyane. Although the killing was supposed to have ended in 1992, it was said that there were still a few stragglers, fighting on. There were also minefields scattered through the verges. Never travel at night, people said, and never leave the road.

  I rang up Jupiter and asked him if he’d take me.

  ‘OK, man. Sixty euros. Pick you at 4 a.m.’

  The great thing about travelling with Jupiter was that I always knew when he was telling the truth. It didn’t take long to work out that he’d organised his honesty geographically. In Paramaribo, Jupiter was inventive and sly. Until we got back out to the Commewijne bridge, everything he said had to be carefully assessed. He told me he was ex-special forces, that he’d travelled with the president and that he could kill a man with a single blow, driving the nose up through the brain. At one point, about an hour out of Paramaribo, we came across a large anaconda, lying dead across the road. ‘The Chinese will come and eat this,’ he said. ‘They eat everything. They even ate my dog.’

  But beyond the bridge Jupiter changed, and became more self-assured. The flippancy went, and with it the drawl of the street. Perhaps being back on ancestral lands made him feel he no longer needed to impress. At the very mention of the N’Djukas he became serious, even fleetingly withdrawn. They were the poorest of the maroons, he told me, but probably the oldest. There were still 25,000 of them, scattered through the forest. ‘Once we had double that,’ he said, ‘but then they all run away …’

  The jungle too was different after the bridge. Jupiter loved the way it seemed to wrap around us, and talked about his childhood. All the best bits were about trees. He remembered hiding for weeks, and hunting for monkeys. There were seeds that could knock you out, and wood that could make a chainsaw spark. There was even a palm nut with juice just like a mother’s milk. ‘And this leaf here,’ said Jupiter, ‘this is bush papaya, which we make into tea.’

  At that point he spotted a stake in the verge, mounted with a gourd.

  ‘Good, someone selling podosiri.’

  With that he veered off the road through a leafy tunnel and out into a large clearing of blackened stumps and sand. At the far side was a village made of grass, and, as no one was around, we got out and walked through the huts. I felt sure that we weren’t alone, and were being carefully studied from out in the shadows. There was a monkey tethered to a post, and fresh fruit on all the altars (bananas and cassava, said Jupiter, left out for mama-bouchi, the goddess of the bush). There was also a cage full of peccaries, who squealed at us and made themselves as unappetising as possible with a collective fart of rotting vomit. The foul acid reek caught me right in the gullet. ‘Shit!’ I gagged. ‘How can anyone eat that? I’d rather have roadkill, that old anaconda …’

  ‘We don’t touch snekis …’

  ‘But all that oil …?’ I said (thinking of Stedman).

  ‘Too dangerous. The sneki is a friend of the water monkey …’

  At that moment an old woman appeared. She looked as though she’d been chemically shrunken, or packed in ash. She wore only a thin, dusty dress, and around her neck she had a string of seeds that seemed fat and voluptuous against her shrivelled skin. Her eyes were yellow, and the pupils swivelled nervously between us. She told Jupiter there were no children, she was too old to find the pina fruit, and so there was no podosiri. She then stood there, her hands shaking, willing us to leave.

  ‘She looks very frightened,’ I said, as we got back to the car.

  Jupiter nodded and tried to explain. These were difficult times for the N’Djukas. Many of them had only just returned. The dead had not been properly buried, and some had never been found. Their spirits would wander the forest for ever. Mama-Bouchi was angry, and the land was broko. Once, only little things – such as a knife – became paiyé, or cursed. Now it was everything. People wondered if the soldiers would come back. You don’t forget that noise, the boom-boom and dagadaga. The worst, however, was the Alouette. It was like the water monkey except it came from above.

  Further down the highway we crossed the Cottica river.

  ‘This is where I was,’ said Jupiter, ‘when the war began.’

  Just off the highway was a small town, Moengo. It had been built by a bauxite company and had a spry, American feel. Everything was widely spaced and dusted in pink, and occasionally large contraptions rumbled through, coughing up smoke and ore. Most of the shops were Chinese, but there was also a mosque and a glossy, incongruous bank. It was here, in 1986, that the old war of the Hinterlands had restarted, with what seemed like an ordinary bank raid. The robber was only twenty-four, an N’Djuka called Ronnie Brunswijk. He’d been one of Desi’s bodyguards until they’d fallen out over money. After that, he’d taken his guns and headed back to the forest, where he’d become an army of one. His friends had called him Ronbo.

  ‘I remember him then,’ said Jupiter, ‘I was only a kid …’

  ‘I heard he was just a thief …’

  ‘No. He was the only man who cared about maroons.’

  I’d often seen pictures of Brunswijk in his extravagant togas. Although he was meaty and powerful, he’d always been a man of outfits. During the fighting he’d affected mirror glasses, a crossbow, a full-length wig and a fancy holster. The maroons had loved him; he was brash, generous and brutal. He’d also realised that there was more to running away than robbery. He became the focus of N’Djuka discontent. Desi was an impostor; the interior belonged to the maroons, along with everything in it. By the end of that year Brunswijk had rallied over 300 fighters, enough to call themselves an army. At first they were the SLA but, as this didn’t sound like a movie, they changed it, and became the Jungle Commandos. Brunswijk even found them their own flag, and amulets to ward off the bullets.

  ‘That’s his house,’ said Jupiter, as we pulled out of Moengo.

  Set back in the bush was a large dirty-white villa, surrounded by an eight-foot wall. Behind the wall I could see a watchtower and a haze of aerials and wire. Once, the medieval equivalent of this fortified house could be found all over Britain. Everything about this war, I suddenly realised, was beginning to feel feudal and old. In time, Brunswijk’s men would control an area the size of Wales but without any law at all. Only the weaponry would be state-of-the-art. Every other aspect of modern life would falter, and for the next six years the western hinterlands would once again seal themselves off from the outside world. All communication would fail, and so would the rivers. The tugs would run for a while, but then the pirates would bring them all to a halt. Moengo too would empty, forcing families such as Jupiter’s into a city for the first time in their life. ‘And once we did that,’ he said, ‘we forgot how to live, and we’ve never come back.’

  Meanwhile there was still a national army to be defeated. The N’Djukas began by raiding the mines and stealing all the dynamite. They then crept back to the highway and started snuffing out the present.

  From now on there was always some reminder of the upheavals on this road. It was either buildings, charred and black like empty hearths, or whole villages, reduced to their stumps. At one point the road itself had been viciously gashed up the middle and then repaired with new white concrete. For almost twenty miles we followed this gash as it wriggled away in front of our eyes. ‘It was the Jungle Commandos,’ said Jupiter. ‘They once steal a digger, and dig up the road.’

  Elsewhere, the road fell away in holes, but Jupiter kept up his speed.
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  ‘Never stop for the potholes, or they going to rob you.’

  ‘Who’s they?’

  ‘Just people. They don’t have much.’

  Almost everyone was diminished by this war. Some merely lost everything, while others were stripped down to their screaming, primeval selves.

  Among the Jungle Commandos there had never been much idealism. A few Hindu officers had ended up among them, but at the first whiff of voodoo most had drifted away. They could never understand the amulets and effigies, and the strange decisions, divined from smoke and offal. Even those that stayed often found their loyalty taxed and would slowly fall apart, and then be killed as traitors.

  For the N’Djukas warfare had seemed a bold enterprise at first. Most of the rebels had happily joined up, although a few had needed beating. Some had almost no experience of guns, while others – such as the infamous Django – were notorious criminals, pleased to be killing. In the first surges the N’Djukas fought like the Bonis and almost reached the city. But then the war slowed, and their squalor seemed to gather in around them. Weapons rusted, garbage mounted, camps were scattered with faeces and the men reverted to wearing feathers and bone. To secure even the most incidental compliance Ronnie would have to flog them hard, with an old steel cable.

  But after a while the N’Djukas no longer seemed to feel their own pain. Perhaps that’s why they were so curious about the pain of others and were always trying to prise their captives apart with sticks and bayonets. As for themselves, they were invincible, or so their shaman told them. He also gave them magic talismans – made from reinforcing rods – and herbs with which to make themselves invisible. They’d become their own little gods, oblivious to mortality.