but there can be no doubt that De Kom generally avoids italicizing “foreign” words, especially words from the Sranantongo language, and that this choice emphasizes the integrity of his distinctively Surinamese idiom. I have done the same in English but included a glossary of Surinamese terms in the back of the book, so that readers unfamiliar with Sranantongo and Surinamese idiom can better follow De Kom’s vivid descriptions of his country. Where Sranantongo or other foreign terms are glossed in the main body of the book, the glosses were introduced by De Kom. I have adopted modern Sranantongo spelling throughout the book (with the indispensable aid of Professor Michiel van Kempen), both for the sake of readers familiar with Sranantongo and to improve readability and usability for readers who do not speak the language but might wish to learn more. I hope De Kom would have approved of this choice and felt, as I do, that it disentangles his work from the spelling conventions of the Dutch colonial power.
When De Kom first published his book, it was not edited to today’s professional standards, and Dutch editions up to the present day have remained largely unchanged in this respect. De Kom was a political activist and a writer rather than a professional historian, and his access to research materials was severely limited; he had to rely heavily on a few main sources, mostly secondary works that quoted at length from primary sources. For these reasons, some proper names and titles contain obvious errors, and many names are given only in part (often the surname only). While this is not a critical or scholarly edition, I have attempted, with much-valued assistance from Professor G.J. Oostindie and Professor Van Kempen, to correct such errors and fill in missing names where possible. No doubt some errors remain, and I apologize for any that I have unintentionally introduced.
De Kom included both a scholarly apparatus of endnotes and a few footnotes defining terms or offering additional context. In this edition, his two sets of notes have been merged into a single series of endnotes. I have added a number of translator’s notes, often intended to clarify cultural references that might otherwise puzzle modern English-speaking readers; these too can be found among the endnotes, marked with “Translator’s note” or “TN.”
I am grateful to Professors Oostindie and Van Kempen, David Colmer, Professor Gloria Wekker, Dr. Duco van Oostrom, Tessa Leuwsha, and Lucelle Pardoe for their insightful input, which made a tremendous difference to the final version. My thanks also to the Dutch publisher Atlas Contact, particularly Hayo Deinum, for taking the initiative for an English-language edition, to Mireille Berman and others at the Dutch Foundation for Literature for their financial and institutional support for the project, and to Elise Heslinga, John Thompson, Susan Beer, Evie Deavall, and their colleagues at Polity Press for publishing this English-language edition and giving me the opportunity to translate it. I was very fortunate to be in the right position at the right time to translate this book for publication; others who have done much more than I to promote De Kom’s legacy, such as Professor Oostindie and Dr. Karwan Fatah-Black, deserve special mention here. Finally, a generous 2021 ICM Global South Translation Fellowship award from the Institute for Comparative Modernities at Cornell University enabled me to devote additional time to the daunting task of writing a translation worthy of De Kom’s landmark book.
Frimangron Tessa Leuwsha
I am in the Frimangron district of Paramaribo, standing in front of the birthplace of Anton de Kom. It’s a corner building. On the sidewalk in front of the house is a memorial stone with a quotation from the famed Surinamese resistance leader: “Sranan, my fatherland, one day I hope to see you again. The day all your misery has been wiped away.” Less than fifteen feet behind the stone, the two-story wooden house looks broken down. Drab vertical beams hang askew from nails, and part of the zinc roof has caved in. One window shutter is open, a curtain pulled aside; this is still someone’s home. Beside it, a plantain tree half-conceals the low house next door. Down the walkway between the two homes, a skinny black man comes out of the backyard. His hair and beard are gray. His T-shirt is too big for him; so are his flip-flops. Holding a flower rolled up in newspaper, he sits down on the stoop in front of the former De Kom family home. I’m curious who the flower is for. He pays no attention to me – so many people take photos here.
In the 1930s, hundreds of people stood waiting here to speak to Anton de Kom. Many were unemployed; others were workers struggling to survive on meager wages. After the abolition of slavery in 1863, the Dutch authorities had rounded up indentured workers in what were then British India and the Dutch East Indies to work on the plantations of Suriname. Later, when the agricultural economy went into decline, those workers had followed in the footsteps of the once-enslaved people, flooding into the city to find work. But Paramaribo, too, was riddled with poverty. They hoped for a chance to sit down at the little table in the back garden with the man who had returned from Holland with a fresh wind of resistance.
Cornelis Gerhard Anton de Kom was born in Paramaribo in 1898. He earned a degree in bookkeeping and worked for a while at the offices of the Balata Compagnie, which was in the business of harvesting balata, a kind of natural rubber. De Kom was struck by the difficult lives of the balata bleeders: laborers, mostly creoles (the term then in common use in Suriname for the descendants of freed slaves), who tapped the rubber trees in the stifling heat of the rainforest. He resigned and, in 1920, left for the Netherlands, where he married a Dutch woman, Petronella Borsboom.
As one of the few people of color in the country, De Kom came into contact with Javanese nationalists who were fighting for an independent Dutch East Indies: in other words, for Indonesia. That was when he first felt the winds of freedom blowing. He began to write articles for the Dutch Communist Party magazine; at the time, that was the only party with a clear anti-colonial stance. His articles and the revolutionary thrust of his arguments caught the attention of the Surinamese labor movement. He was especially popular with that group for criticizing wage reductions for indentured workers.
In late 1932, De Kom and his wife and children, four by then, returned to Suriname by ship to look after his ailing mother – who died during their voyage. Like-minded Surinamers were eagerly looking forward to De Kom’s visit. In the backyard of his childhood home, he set up an advisory agency and took meticulous notes on his visitors’ grievances. The Javanese, who felt disadvantaged relative to other ethnic groups, were the most likely to turn to “Papa De Kom,” as they soon began to call him. Their heartfelt wish was that De Kom would lead them back to Java like a messiah. He wrote about them in We Slaves of Suriname: “Under the tree, past my table, files a parade of misery. Pariahs with deep, sunken cheeks. Starving people. People with no resistance to disease. Open books in which to read the story, haltingly told, of oppression and deprivation” (p. 203). De Kom promised to submit their grievances to the colonial authorities, but the unrest he caused was anything but welcome to Governor Abraham Rutgers.
On February 1, 1933, Anton de Kom led a group of supporters to the offices of the administration. He was arrested on suspicion of attempting to overthrow the regime.
From the street, none of the backyard is visible. The sidewall of the house is completely covered with zinc, and a large mango tree leans on the roof. In front of the neighboring house on that side, a woman is raking the fallen leaves and fruit into a pile. She is wearing a pink skirt, a tight sweater, a cap, and dark glasses. Like many people here, she probably bought her outfit from one of the cheap Chinese clothing shops found all over Paramaribo. The few with more to spend buy their clothes abroad or online. In some respects, today’s city remains much like the Paramaribo in which De Kom grew up in the early twentieth century – even if the rich no longer live in the white-and-green mansions in the historic center, but in modern stone villas in leafy suburbs with names like Mon Plaisir and Elisabeths Hof.
It is not surprising that a revolutionary such as De Kom had his roots in a working-class district like Frimangron. In the days of slavery, enslaved people who had managed to purchase their freedom settled on the undeveloped outskirts of the city. Before then, emancipated house servants had made temporary homes in
