Wild Coast

by John Gimlette

  The drugs didn’t help. There was marijuana for the hunger, and heroin for everything else. Some N’Djukas could shoot so much of this stuff that it would make their eyes glow red. That’s when the trees started walking and the sky turned to snakes. On Langatabbetje Island they began worshipping a severed head that had been set on a stake still wearing its helmet. But nearer the enemy the constant zip and thwack of bullets seemed only to amplify the trip. At a place called Frontline the warriors would baptize themselves in a large drum of human soup, made of body parts and water. Once, on a high like this, Django and the shaman set off to take on the National Army and were immediately captured, to be slowly and thoughtfully killed.

  Even Ronbo was diminished by the war. By the end he was no longer the muscly, guns-blazing video star but a retiring figure, greedy and compulsive. He spent most of the conflict way up the Marowijne, out of reach of the government planes. There he whiled away his days playing Space Invaders, and trying to rekindle his vigour with other men’s wives. Having blown up all the bridges and power lines, he had no idea what to do next. For months nothing happened. ‘It’s kind of hit-and-miss,’ he told journalists, ‘we don’t have the weapons …’

  Things were little better on the other side. At the height of the war Desi had only 2,535 men at his disposal, mostly Creoles. They were terrified of the Hinterlands, and the N’Djukas, whom they thought of as ghosts. Most would only enter the forest behind an armoured car, with its .50 cal blindly pumping cannon fire into the trees. They did the same on the river, gunboats blasting away at anything: villages, manatees, mudbanks and monkeys. It’s said that one in ten of the soldiers deserted and fled to French Guiana. As for the rest, they soon lost sight of what the war was all about. It infuriated them that they could never find the enemy, and so they started killing maroons wherever they could. They pulled them off minibuses, or tracked them down in the city, and paid them visits at night.

  It was even better when the helicopters arrived. Villages were easy to spot in an Alouette. A man didn’t even need to get his boots wet. He could just sit there, above all the terror and stink, delivering death from above.

  Ahead was a small settlement, more like a camp.

  ‘Alfonsdorp,’ said Jupiter.

  Amid the tin and grass I spotted something familiar: bluish hair and Asiatic faces. Amerindians.

  ‘Yep,’ said Jupiter, ‘put there by government.’

  ‘You don’t sound as though you like them?’

  He sighed and then reached over for his mobile phone. ‘See this? The Amerindians think this is a god. They live all natural in the forest, right? But you promise them one of these, and they do anything you want. Anything. Give him a cell phone, he’s gonna do what you say, even kill anyone you want …’

  Like a game of chess where every move is stalemate, the war had soon seized up. Both sides needed champions to punch their way through to the other.

  The maroons had hired theirs in Amsterdam. They offered $500 a week, and $1 million if the revolt succeeded. This brought out all the riff-raff of the gun world – Rhodesians, Belgians and Afrikaners. There was even a band of fourteen Americans at one stage, although they never made it beyond New Orleans, where they were arrested with a cache of weapons and Fodor’s Guide to Suriname. But most of the mercenaries were British, former soldiers drifting around in search of a high. Few of them thrived. At least one drank himself to a standstill. Another was shot by his fellow Britons, in some Byzantine intrigue. (‘Why are you doing this to me?’ he pleaded, as they reloaded their weapons and fired again.) But the most notorious of all was a Liverpudlian called Karl Penta. In his memoirs he happily admits to having tortured his captives and claims to have built his own rockets and crippled the government all by himself. It’s a bold claim from such a stagnant war.

  Desi was more cunning in his choice of champions. He realised that they’d been there all the time, living in the forest. Only the Amerindians could survive this fight. Desi put out a rumour that he was one of them and made a grandiose promise of land. The tribes already had their own little armies, such as ‘Tucayana Amazonas’, and soon they’d be hunting maroons again, just as they’d done for the Dutch. But, unlike the Dutch, Desi was never much good with his promises. The Amerindians never got their land, just the odd little slum, like Alfonsdorp.

  A few miles up the road, the Alouettes had been at work. The day they landed at Moiwana, 29 November 1989, is still the most perplexing day in Suriname’s history. Never before had so many died in one morning or so pointlessly, and there’s been nothing like it since. Today Moiwana is no longer just a village but a byword for disbelief and horror. For years the forensic pathologists picked over the bones, but they never found a killer. The Inter-American Court would order the state to pay millions in compensation, but no one has ever worked out who did what, or why. Desi, of course, was never very far from the smoking gun. He’s often been quoted demanding an end to the maroons, or saying that it was he who ordered this mission. But now he denies everything, and you can even watch him on YouTube, beaming with innocence and hurt.

  The court did, however, establish what happened. From the blizzard of sand and whirring blades, men appeared. Most of the N’Djukas panicked and scattered into the forest. There was the faint snap snap of gunfire and the giddy reek of gasoline. Then the soldiers busied themselves among the stragglers, lopping the children, felling the women and wrenching them apart. ‘I just ran and ran,’ said one girl, then aged eleven, ‘and somehow I survived …’

  Many of the dead were butchered, chunked with machetes. It was like the old war, except for the gasoline and Alouettes. There was the same loathing, the same perfunctory rape and the same eerie sense of detachment. ‘Another soldier,’ recalled one witness, ‘grabbed a six-month-old baby and put the barrel of his gun in its mouth. The baby took it eagerly like a baby bottle. The soldier pulled the trigger …’

  Thirty-nine people died that morning, most of them children. Some were doused in fuel and burned, and the rest tossed into pits and left until the end of the war.

  Jupiter hesitated at the edge of the clearing, and so I walked ahead.

  Out in the sand were the monuments, ordered by the court. Each victim had his or her own huge polyhedron, either a cube or column or a rectangular prism, made from concrete and steel. Each one was different, like a sarcophagus for someone who’d vanished. Few remains had been found. These shapes were now all that was left of the village and the villagers. To maroons the geometry may have been perfect, but the emptiness was a constant reminder of something else. Along this road a way of life had died. After Moiwana, 10,000 N’Djukas fled to the city, and about the same number to Guyane.

  ‘They never coming back,’ said Jupiter, back at the car.

  ‘Because Desi’s still around?’

  Jupiter ignored this, and started up the car.

  ‘Because burning people,’ he said, ‘is the worst you can do.’

  ‘So what would get you all to come back?’

  Jupiter looked out over the clearing and the huge blocks of rust.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said at last, ‘except revenge.’

  At the end of the road was a small town that’s always felt like an island. In front of it is the Marowijne, like a strip of ocean, and behind it – on all three sides – there’s the forest, as dark as the sea. But along the waterfront there’s sand and little coves of shell and powdered coral. The first settler here was German, who thought it all so pale and gemütlich that he named it after his wife, Albina.

  There were still a few traces of the little lives that had prospered here. I spotted what had once been an esplanade, a line of boetieks and a fancy cinema called the Apollo. Trading with maroons had obviously been good business. By the 1930s all that had troubled Albina was the sight of French convicts swimming over the river. It had dealt with the problem by hiring a militia to shoot them on sight.

  Only for a moment did the town feel linked to the outside world. That wa
s when the highway came nosing through the forest, bringing with it cars and tourists and the Paramaribo rich. For a while, in the ’70s, Albina became a little Acapulco, and there were villas and tarts and a glittery casino. But then came the war and the closure of the road. For years Albina was once again reliant on the sea. Meanwhile, the maroons vented their fury on the town, torching the villas and taking potshots at anything that moved. That’s why Albina looks like a camp again, and why the Apollo now has a jungle growing up through the foyer.

  By 1989 the war that surrounded Albina began to look different. If it had ever been a struggle over land, it was now a war of turf. Even Brunswijk had realised that, in wartime, there were better things to do than fight. Planes started appearing, packed with cocaine, and there was talk of millions of dollars in counterfeit notes. While the foot soldiers slogged it out in the forest, the leaders cut a deal and shared out the spoils. Not even the little flurries of democracy, in 1987 and 1991, could reverse the decline. Desi was soon back at the levers, wielding control. Towns such as Albina became miniature kleptocracies, doing whatever made most money.

  ‘Be careful,’ said Jupiter, ‘there’s still bad people here.’

  It was time for him to return to Paramaribo.

  ‘I got to be off this road before it gets dark.’

  So it seemed Albina was an island once again, encircled by the night. I was happy to be leaving that same afternoon.

  I spent my last few days in Suriname on a journey of revival. The trees grew back, the river opened out, and people reappeared. I’d needed this, the perspective restored. Travel is so often a series of snapshots that gives us not a whole but a sequence of viewpoints. Could I really let my Surinamese travels end in empty tombs and ploughed-up roads? This was one of the most enchanting, enchanted countries I’d ever known, and here I was creeping out through the wreckage of its long-lost war. Almost half the population were now too young to remember it, and much of the horror had long since merged with the leaf mould.

  Even before leaving Paramaribo, I realised that another journey was needed. This time, I’d travel right to the far side of the Hinterlands, through the tail-end of its wars, and emerge in the present. It would be a journey up the Marowijne, and for this I’d managed to join a group of Germans and Dutch, departing from Albina. Our guide, as you’d expect in Suriname, didn’t seem to belong in this story at all and was a Lebanese, called Zaahid.

  Ahead, a beautiful river unravelled towards us. Although the Marowijne was almost two kilometres wide, it was barely navigable. The water looked as though it had been ploughed and then thrown down the stairs. Along the length of the river there were eighty-seven sets of rapids, each one a squall of gnashing and froth. According to Zaahid, these falls all had names such as ‘Spill your Wealth’, or Petrosoengoe, ‘Peter Sank’. Until the advent of the engine, the Marowijne was almost useless to Man, except as a refuge.

  Sometimes we saw whole islands of vegetation hurtling past, like gardens on the move. Or it might be tree trunks or other korjalen, loaded with oil drums. Our own canoe wasn’t much more than a tree trunk, split down the middle and sharpened at one end. But when it came to the rapids, the boatman, Jacobus, simply gunned the engine, and we lumbered up over the torrents. It felt as though we were climbing an escalator the wrong way, with the river in our faces and bulging over the gunwales. But it was all second nature to maroons. Jacobus seemed to feel his way through the currents, and if ever we touched a rock, the boat just grunted and carried on up. Everyone used these korjalen, even the gendarmes over on the French side. We could often see them skimming over the water to see who we were.

  At other times the channel took us right across, and we could peer into their lives. It might be a brand new school, or a television mast, or a line of soldierly pants drying in the sun. To the maroons this strange, rich world was known simply as ‘France’. Most of the villagers, however, were – just like them – les marrons noirs. After two centuries of Hinterland wars, almost a third of all bush negroes were now holed up in French Guiana, and probably would be for ever. At Apatou we stopped to visit the oldest of all the refugee communities, that of the Bonis.

  I asked Zaahid what the Bonis now thought about the Creoles.

  ‘Same,’ he shrugged. ‘Baccra slaaf. The white man’s slave.’

  I turned to Jacobus, but he hadn’t understood.

  ‘That tooth,’ I said pointing to the fang on his necklace.

  ‘Jag-u-ar. Mi kiri en,’ he said, and then never spoke again.

  Beyond Apatou the river narrowed and became fiercer than ever. But despite the ferocity, there were still gold-dredgers bobbing around in the froth. They looked like little factories, complete with their floating slums. Nestled in among the drums of mercury there were always girls, and babies with faces like old men. For the time being this, I suppose, was the future of the river: a quick buck and poisoned fish. It was probably better than war. The Marowijne had proved an enthusiastic participant. It had even got revenge on the Alouettes by sucking one into the rapids and smashing it to bits.

  After an hour we passed Langatabbetje Island. This was where the Jungle Commandos had worshipped the severed head. It looked quiet now. In a last fit of rage the government had bombed it with phosphorus, crisping anybody left. After that, the war just petered out.

  Peace came from an unexpected quarter: France.

  For years the French had encouraged the Jungle Commandos. But then, after 10,000 refugees and the occasional bomb, they decided enough was enough. The Treaty of Kourou, in 1992, was a shameless pact. The maroons kept what they’d always had, which was a little autonomy, and Desi kept his booty. He remained in power, off and on, until 2000, when democracy finally prevailed. But by then Desi was rich, and had houses and girls all over the country. At his last election all he could offer was irony, and a heartless slogan: Niks no fout, or ‘No Harm Done’.

  Ronbo, too, prospered in the aftermath. He retired to the fortified house and built up a logging company, a football team (called Romeo Bravo) and a political party with the splendidly vague name, Algemene Bevrijding en Ontwikkelingspartij’, (or ‘The General Liberation and Development Party’). He’d also managed to squeeze in a conviction in Holland – in absentia again – for trafficking cocaine. Not that it bothered him. In Paramaribo, Ronbo was often being arrested for beating up referees and rivals, and it always ended in red tape.

  ‘How does Suriname put up with these two?’ I asked Zaahid.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Two big men, the drugs, the stupid names, and terrible pasts …’

  ‘Sure,’ said Zaahid, ‘but everyone did terrible things.’

  After fifty miles the forest ahead rose up in front of us, crumpled and blue. I suddenly realised I hadn’t seen mountains for weeks. Although the Nassaus weren’t much on the map, that morning they felt like a wall. They were also tufted in vapours, which made them feel as though they’d just been popped – still steaming – from the mould. Everything here felt new, the glistening trees and the rock the colour of pig iron. As we passed through a gap in the hills, there was a sense of leaving the Hinterlands, and the thick, claggy air of the coast. At that moment a sudden storm split the sky and sent us another river, thundering down from above.

  The canoe filled with water, and the engine spluttered for air. Sometimes we seemed to slide sideways into the currents, and the prow would rise up and then slap down with a sound like a cannon. At other times the river beneath Jacobus would disappear, and the propellers would squeal with rage. The Upper Marowijne, it seems, had always defended itself like this. The Dutch had seldom ventured this far, and until the 1940s almost every expedition had ended in disaster. It wasn’t just the water and the malaria. The river had its human guardians too, such as the Roucouyenes and the mysterious ‘Long Ears’, or Oyaricoulets. In their most productive purge, at the turn of the twentieth century, they ambushed a French expedition and slaughtered forty-nine men, and had never been heard of si
nce.

  The Surinamese forest is as awesome as ever. Whilst, these days, we appreciate its beauty, the early Dutch saw only monsters. (Illustration credit 8.5)

  Zaahid said that the maroons here were different too.

  ‘They live on islands,’ he said, ‘away from the snakes.’

  They were mostly Oucas, he said, or Paramaccaners. They’d never had much to worry about, except the Long Ears and The Monkey in the rapids. In 1761 they’d signed a treaty with the Dutch and then padded up here, to their bold new world, and shut themselves in. Once we stopped to visit some, on an island called Skin. Their lives were partly Amerindian and partly like those of maroons elsewhere. There were the tethered animals, the same prismatic pictures and the altars covered in togas. But there was also a persistent aura of abstraction. I remember a generator producing nothing but Techno, and a clearing decorated with old toilet bowls like the garden of Marcel Duchamp.

  Zaahid appeared. ‘This is the chief.’

  Beside him stood an old man in a camouflaged smock.

  We shook hands. ‘A soldier?’ I said, and Zaahid translated.

  A long time ago.

  ‘Do you ever see the Jungle Commandos now?’

  Not any more. They once had their hideout near here.

  ‘I heard they handed in their guns.’

  Just the muskets, not the dagadagas.

  ‘But I thought they had to hand over everything …?’

  Would you? What if the treaty’s no good?

  During those last few days in Suriname nature was at its most insistent, and I could feel my affection restored.

  We stayed opposite Skin Island, at a place called Loka Loka. It was a collection of painted wooden huts, high on the banks. By day the entire landscape seemed to slide past, steaming and restless, and at night there was the constant rumble like some great migration of watery hoofs. The owner of the huts was a Paramaccaner, who was proud of their design. He said it was from Africa, a place called the Ivory Coast. All his pots and pans, I noticed, were polished up like silverware, and he also had two canoes, called Lobi Sweet (or ‘Love is Sweet’) and No Harm Done.