ABSTRACT
The small country known as Suriname (from Surinam, an Arawak name) in its early colonial period, then as Dutch Guiana before its independence in 1975, and today as Surinam or Suriname, is unique because of its cultural extremes. It is home to native Arawak- and Carib-speaking inhabitants of its interior forests; it is the domain of the most African-derived subcultures in South America, the Maroons (formerly “Bush Negroes”) in its interior forests and savannas; and it is the home of descendants of Portuguese Jews and indentured workers from China, India, and Indonesia. Added to this are an overlay of Dutch and English culture and a population speaking mostly Sranan, an English-based creole, along a partially urbanized and highly populated Atlantic seaboard (Manuel 1995:222).
