ABSTRACT
Strikingly African or non-European, it was at the same time clearly influenced by the experience of plantation slavery. Considerably more details are now available, however, concerning the subsistence activities of certain former slaves and their descendants the eighteenth-century Saramaka Maroons of Suriname, who concluded a peace treaty with the Dutch crown in 1762. Other crops sweet potatoes, maize, bananas; sugar cane and so on had their specialized uses and was served outside of the main-meal framework. Throughout Afro-America cooking and eating were core areas of cultural resistance and persistence, as well as foci of ongoing creativity and dynamism. And, yet more important, Saramaka men were almost constantly engaged in political interactions with colonial officials within Saramaka territory that kept very much alive the adversarial relations that had characterized slavery and would mark their entry into wage labour following general emancipation in Suriname in 1863.
