South America’s Dutch voice still speaks under ninety percent forest
Suriname, on South America’s north coast and often grouped with the Caribbean, sits slightly north of the equator with over 90 percent rainforest—the world’s second-highest forest cover share. It is the only independent country outside Europe where Dutch is the official language of government, business, media, and education.
With about 613,000 people in 2021 across some 165,940 square kilometres, Suriname is South America's smallest country by both measures, and roughly half its residents live in Paramaribo. The name may come from the Surinen people, with the ending -ame possibly from a Lokono word for a river mouth. In 1630 English colonists settled at Marshall's Creek, the earliest European outpost there, and the English spelling Surinam lasted until 1978, surviving still in Surinam Airways and the Surinam toad.
In 1667, at the Treaty of Breda, the Dutch chose to keep this young plantation colony and let the English have New Amsterdam, soon renamed New York. Jewish settlers expelled from Iberia won religious freedom in 1665 and at one point owned more than half the sugar plantations. Around 300,000 enslaved Africans were shipped in, and the historian C. R. Boxer judged their treatment among the cruellest anywhere.
Escapees fled into the forest with Indigenous help and forged Maroon nations such as the Saramaka, Ndyuka, Aluku and Matawai, who raided plantations until colonial authorities signed treaties granting them sovereignty inland. Abolition came in 1863, marked each 1 July as Ketikoti, but freed people had to keep working for ten more years; afterward many left for Paramaribo. Abraham Lincoln's government briefly explored sending freed Americans there, an idea dropped after 1864.
Indentured workers then came from British India and the Dutch East Indies, which is why no ethnic group now forms a majority and the Hindu and Muslim shares rank among the highest in the Americas. Suriname joined the Kingdom of the Netherlands as a constituent country in 1954 and became independent on 25 November 1975. Bauxite, gold and petroleum sustain its economy.
Source: Suriname
