few people of color in the Netherlands, he came into contact with the Indonesian nationalist students, such as Mohammed Hatta, who would later play such an important role in the political awakening and liberation of Indonesia. It was partly thanks to them that De Kom’s political consciousness was raised. Another contributing factor was Black activism in the Americas, the work of Marcus Garvey among others. He met left-wing Dutch writers and became a good public speaker, giving lectures on his country, Suriname, and against colonialism.
“A socially engaged man, quiet and modest, but fierce in his response to injustice and exploitation,” say those who knew him.
In December 1932, De Kom returned to his homeland for family reasons. The social situation there was disgraceful. Nothing had changed since 1920: the same high child mortality rate, the same malnourishment, the same unemployment, the same slums, the same poor health care. De Kom decided to found a consulting agency. He listened to the complaints of the people and urged solidarity and organization.
All this was seen by the colonial authorities as a threat. They intervened and arrested De Kom.
On February 7, 1933, hundreds of Afro-, Indo-, and Javanese Surinamese went to the colony’s chief public prosecutor to demand the release of the man who had stood up for their rights. The police unexpectedly opened fire on the crowd. Two people were killed and a number of others were wounded.
After three months’ imprisonment without trial, De Kom was put on a ship to the Netherlands in May 1933. His expulsion, his political activities, and the Great Depression made life far from easy for him and his family in the Netherlands.
In World War II, he opposed fascism with vigor. Because of his writings for the underground press, he was arrested by the Germans in August 1944 and deported to a concentration camp in Germany, where he died in April 1945. Others interned there later described the courage with which De Kom had borne the humiliations of his captivity and recalled how often he spoke of his beloved Suriname.
The value system by which he lived – the unhesitating rejection of poverty, oppression, and exploitation – can still be found in his book We Slaves of Suriname.
The story of his life, despite its tragedy, holds a message of optimism and hope. For a short time, De Kom was able to unite his homeland’s diverse ethnic groups in a struggle for life with dignity!
May this bring the Surinamese lasting hope and inspiration.
On behalf of the De Kom family
March 1981
“Sranan,” Our Fatherland
From 2 to 6 degrees south latitude, from 54 to 58 degrees west longitude, spanning from the blue of the Atlantic to the inaccessible Tumuc-Humac Mountains, which form the watershed with the Amazon Basin, between the broad expanses of the Corentyne and Maroni Rivers, which separate us from British and French Guiana, rich in immense forests, where the greenheart, the barklaki, the kankantri, and the prized brownheart grow, rich in wide rivers, where the heron, ibis, flamingo, and wiswisi nest, rich in natural treasures, in gold and bauxite, in rubber, sugar, plantains, and coffee … poor in humankind, poorer still in human kindness …1
Sranan – our fatherland.
Suriname, as the Dutch call it.
Their country’s twelfth and richest, no, their country’s poorest province.
Between the coast and the mountains our mother, Sranan, has slumbered for a thousand years and a thousand more. Nothing has changed in the dense forests of her unknown interior.
The primeval forests of the uplands seem sunk in a centuries-old silence, coming alive only at nightfall with the murmuring hum, like secret music, of thousands of insects. More romantic, but also more savage, is the landscape of the savannahs and along the rivers. Winding curtains of vine hang from the trees and block the way; wild orchids bloom; here skittish pakiras make their home, capuchin monkeys balance on branches, parrots let out their shrill cries, the jaguar lurks, and an armadillo probes for ants with its pointed tongue.
For thousands of years, the dark forests of Mother Sranan have been waiting, untouched and undeveloped. They harbor strange creatures whose names are hardly known in the West:2 tree-dwelling tamanduas and prehensile-tailed porcupines, vireos and tanagers, the tigriman and the blauwdas, golden-collared toucanets on the high tops of the palms, and swarms of butterflies: the magnificent blue morphos and the yellow and orange cloudless sulphurs, often rising to just below the crowns of the trees.
People?
People are scarcely present to enjoy this beauty.
In the lowland live the Waraos, the Arawaks, and the Caribs, Indian tribes now weak and dying out, powerless descendants of the indigenous peoples who were expelled from the best places by the whites. In the highland, the Trios and the Wayanas. Their beadwork, artful braiding, and delicate ornaments for dancing all express their innate sense of beauty.
There are around 2,450 Indians in all, and some 17,000 maroons – Negroes living in the forests, of whom we will speak later.
No more than twenty thousand people inhabit Sranan’s interior, an area almost five times the size of the Netherlands. Beyond that, the forests are peopled solely by sloths and agoutis, by spider monkeys, tapirs, and capybaras, by the howler monkey, the anteater, and the aboma sneki.
History has passed Mother Sranan by; three centuries of Dutch colonization have left her interior untouched. Her rapids power no engines; her fertile land is unsown, the rich treasures of her forests unexploited; in abject poverty, in shabby ignorance, the wild tribes live amid a natural bounty that goes to pointless waste.
Whites rarely venture into these wildernesses, where only the Indians and the maroons know the way. Along the river courses, a discharged French soldier, a British rowdy, or a Dutch naturalist sometimes penetrates the landscape. He plunges his knife into the white skin of the balata tree, releasing its precious, milky sap. But the former soldier returns to the coast, the rowdy drinks himself to death in a whisky haze by his lonesome campfire, the Dutchman is taken back downriver by maroons in a canoe; the wilderness is left behind, the wounds in the rubber trees scar over, and the deserted camp is overgrown with creepers.
Of Dutch influence, Dutch energy, and Dutch civilization there is not a trace in the Surinamese interior: not a road, not a bridge, not a house in which Dutch history is inscribed. The whites felt nothing but fear in the face of that wilderness, where their escaped slaves sought refuge. A pathetic, neglected railway, which goes nowhere and was never completed, is the sole remnant of a brief fever dream of gold.
The wide plains of the savannahs, the forests, and the tall granite mountains of Mother Sranan have been sleeping for hundreds of centuries.
For them no history has yet been written.
Only on the thin ribbon along the coast, here and there at the mouths of the big rivers, on the most fertile of the alluvial grounds, does the red, white, and blue of the Dutch tricolor wave.
Red –
”Look, Mother,” the little white boy says in astonishment in Magdeleine Paz’s wonderful book Frère noir (“Black Brother”), “you see? The Negroes have red blood too!”
White –
The color of Crommelin’s peace treaties.
And blue?
Is it the color of our tropical sky, at which we gaze up through the dark leaves of our trees, to read in the twinkling stars the promise of a new life?
No, it is the deep blue of the Atlantic Ocean, across which the slave ships carried their African prizes, their living merchandise, our parents and grandparents, to their new fatherland Sranan.
Notes