What’s in a name?

December 13, 2020.Reading time 18 minutes.

Even though a lot of historical records have been digitized, researching your Surinamese family history can still be tricky at times. For instance, the enslaved Africans in Suriname only received a family name upon manumission or emancipation. This makes digging through the slave registries still a very tricky process. You constantly have to check and […]

Lurid finds

December 8, 2020.Reading time 8 minutes.

Content warning: This blogpost contains material that may be considered very disturbing to some. Discretion is advised. When doing research, I sometimes stumble upon very lurid stories. This is one of them. The following text contains an English summary of the newspaper article displayed in the image below. Semire, an enslaved woman of about 30 […]

Rebel Faces

November 10, 2020.Reading time 22 minutes.

A painting containing the actual faces of rebels who participated in one of the most well documented slave revolts.

We preserved…!

September 25, 2020.Reading time 5 minutes.

In my post They connected…! I posted a list of Surinamese words that have an African origin. Of course Suriname isn’t the only country that has persevered and has managed to preserve Africa in all aspects of life. This post will focus on how Africa was preserved in the languages of the Diaspora. Take for […]

Letter to Cecilia

August 19, 2020.Reading time 17 minutes.

Dear Cecilia, I will start off by saying that compared to the other letters I’ve written, this letter has been the hardest so far. I’ve started a couple of times but then stopped to post other things, which is something I normally don’t do. I may even end up drastically editing the post after I’ve […]