ABSTRACT
In this paper, I will try to clarify the complex and formal relationship between church and state in Suriname. I can distinguish various historical phases. The ideas about free or forced migration and Diaspora are a constituent in the history and the historiography of Suriname. The majority of the ancestors of the Surinamese people reached Surinames via the sea. I use this specific title because religion was, and is, a vety important issue in the life of the migrants and in the Diaspora, sometimes at the fore-deck and sometimes at the afi:er-deck. They came with hope for the future (at the fore-deck) and with reverence and suspicion (in the backyard). It is a symbolic and imaginary terminology of us, for the God of the waters, rolling and floating as long as possible, at last entering a harbour. It is a matrix of life in Suriname itself. The proverb 'when you are eating with the devil, you need a long fork' can be applied here as the historiography of these issues in Suriname can be complex.
