Word: surinam
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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History question: Who were the first black slaves in the Americas to gain independence from their white overlords? If your answer is the Haitians, you are wrong by more than 100 years. Correct answer: the bushmen of Surinam, formerly Dutch Guiana, who escaped from their Dutch slave masters in the early 1600s, established a nation of small villages in the jungle and won a century-long guerrilla war against the European colonists and their mercenaries...
...bush society is its remarkable stability. Two U.S. blacks from Harvard, Neurobiologist S. Allen Counter Jr. and Admissions Officer David L. Evans, have spent five years studying the 5,000 surviving bush people of the interior and have produced a one-hour documentary film, The Bush Afro-Americans of Surinam and French Guiana...
...language that combines Dutch, English, French, Portuguese and six West African languages. Much of their design and decoration, including sculpture, chairs and dugouts hollowed from felled trees, resembles that of West Africa. In fact, two Gran Men who recently traveled to West Africa at the expense of the Surinam government were able to recognize certain shrines and could communicate with Africans though the two cultures have had no contact for centuries...
Morris has also arranged with other merchants-notably the Providence firm of Brown, Hopkins, Jenckes & Bowen-to seek out arms in the West Indies and Europe for 2½ percent commission. John Brown arranged to buy a cargo of gunpowder in Surinam last November and charged a price of 6 shillings a pound, which General Washington called "most exorbitant" (in December Brown made a profit of ?20,000 for such work). But the price is still rising. On Brown, Hopkins' latest shipment from the West Indies a month ago, the firm had to pay 14 shillings a pound...
...William Bryant of Trenton performed tests on a torpedo of Surinam and proved that it could send a shock "through metallic substances, like an old sword blade," but when the sword was "armed with sealing wax, the electric fluid would not pass...