Affluence, deprivation and the flowering of Bush Negro religious movements

Abstract

Marx's dictum that 'being determines consciousness' was trae only for as long as it takes consciousness to acquire the art of estrangement; thereafter, consciousness is on its own and can both determine or ignore being."Joseph Brodsky (1979:32) 1. Introduction During the eighteenth century, the majority of Suriname's fugitive slaves succeeded in wringing peace treaties from their former masters.Although these Maroons, or Bush Negroes, as they prefer to call themselves today, practised their own form of swidden (slash-and-burn) cultivation, they also became involved in the economie life of the plantation colony at an early stage.For most of the nineteenth century, many Bush Negroes worked as independent lumberers, feiling trees, squaring logs and floating these, tied together as rafts, to buyers on the plantations or in the capital, Paramaribo.In the first quarter of that century, hundreds of Bush Negroes left their villages in the interior to settle along the rivers of the coastal plain, closer to their customers.

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