Leprosy and colonialism

Suriname under Dutch rule, 1750–1950

Stephen Snelders

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526113023
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medizin
• Subtopic: Medizinische Theorie, Praxis & Referenz

Leprosy and colonialism investigates the history of leprosy in Suriname within the context of Dutch colonial power and racial conflict, from the plantation economy and the age of slavery to its legacy in the modern colonial state.

PART I

LEPROSY IN A SLAVE SOCIETY

1

The making of a colonial disease in the eighteenth century

On 19 August 1755, the Swedish botanist Daniel Rolander was exploring plants and wildlife near a coffee plantation on the banks of the Perica river in Suriname when he came across a horrendous sight. He wrote the following in his journal:

[We] passed a few sylvan huts of blacks, where some sick unfortunates addressed us from afar, warning us not to approach any closer or enter their huts, because they said they were suffering from a contagious disease called ‘boise’ [boasie or boassie]. This disease is exanthematic and reminds one in some way of the leprosy of old and elephantism; it feeds upon the joints, and propagates via physical contact. Blacks infested with this disease are automatically relegated to a remote corner of the plantation, where they serve as guards and spend the rest of their time alienated from friends to keep the entire servile throng from contracting it.¹

The city physician of the Surinamese capital Paramaribo told Rolander that African slaves had brought the disease over the ocean from Guinea in West Africa.² ‘Boasie’ was supposed to be the name of the place in Africa where the disease had come from.³ By 1755, it was feared that boasie, quickly identified with leprosy, would spread from Africa via Suriname to Europe. African slaves were thought to carry the disease across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, where Europeans were then infected. Europeans could then in turn bring leprosy back to the Netherlands, where it had become extinct. To many observers, the health of the Dutch colonial and commercial empire was at stake.

This chapter argues that to the colonial rulers, boasie or leprosy’s first manifestations in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, came to represent not only a threat to the health of the slave population and public hygiene, but also to the Netherlands and the Dutch colonial empire as a whole. Although, the definition, symptomatology, and aetiology of the disease still had to be developed in the eighteenth century, contemporaries routinely equated boasie with elephantiasis graecorum or lepra arabum, that is, leprosy (or in Dutch melaatschheid), the dreaded disease of the Middle Ages.⁴ In the eighteenth century, many doctors and laymen regarded the disease as highly contagious.⁵ Rolander noticed that in Suriname, healthy persons were advised to stay as far away from the sufferers as possible, not to enter their dwellings or touch them, and not to breathe the same air.⁶ To many slave holders, leprosy seemed to endanger the health of their labour force and hence the functioning of the Surinamese slave society. Hence, boasie was not solely perceived as a medical problem, but came to be framed as a problem of geography and race, an economic problem disrupting the slave economy, and a socio-political threat. Knowledge was needed to counter this perceived threat, which resulted in a colonial framing of leprosy that influenced the perceptions and management of leprosy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and leading to quite early policies of compulsory segregation at the end of the eighteenth century.

A Dutch slave doctor played a key role in the construction and implementation of slave holders’ knowledge of leprosy. Godfried Wilhelm Schilling (1733–1734 – after 1795) had the idea that boasie was an African disease threatening the health of Europeans.⁷ In 1769, he wrote that the ‘Abyssinians’ (by which he meant black Africans) had brought the disease to America. He saw almost no cases of boasie among the ‘Aborigines’ (the Native Americans), and so believed that the disease had not existed in the Americas before the immigration of African slaves. Therefore, Europeans who had physical contact with Africans were in danger of becoming contaminated as well. Since more and more slaves were coming to Suriname, it was to be expected that the incidence of the disease would increase.⁸

As one of the few physicians in the colony of Suriname, and since he conducted the medical examinations of newly arrived slaves, Schilling played an important part in framing health policy measures around boasie in the 1770s to 1790s. A closer investigation of his work demonstrates that the need for medical knowledge of the disease was driven by its effect on the slave trade and the slave economy in Suriname. The driving forces and profit motives of the slave economy profoundly shaped the aims, methods, and personnel involved in the search for medical knowledge in the tropics. Ultimately, profits were at stake if changes in the disease environment were not met by changes in medical practice and healthcare, for which medical knowledge was needed. Schilling delivered the medico-scientific ‘evidence’ and underpinnings of a public health policy of isolation and segregation that was implemented in Suriname in the second half of the eighteenth century. A key role in the development of this policy was his formulation of a racial pathology used in the understanding of leprosy’s aetiology and epidemiology and in determining the measures that needed to be taken.

Suriname in the eighteenth century

The English had ceded Suriname to the Dutch in 1667. Apart from the Native Americans or Amerindians, just over 1,000 people lived in the colony, and among them 700 slaves. The colony came under the control of a private company, the Society of Suriname, composed of members of the Dutch West India Company (WIC), the city of Amsterdam, and a private investor. Under their control, the Dutch created a wealthy plantation economy based on African slave labour. By 1754, there were almost 1,500 Europeans (including many Jews who had settled there since the 1660s) and more than 33,000 slaves in Suriname. In 1783, there were probably more than 400 plantations, cultivating and exporting sugar, coffee, cacao, cotton, and timber. The plantations stretched along the rivers flowing from the Amazonian jungle into the Atlantic so from west to east: the Corantijn, Coppename, Saramacca, Suriname, Marowijne, and Amanibo rivers.

In 1783, the population had grown to over 2,000 Europeans and more than 50,000 slaves and included approximately 500 free coloured people and mulattos.⁹ The Native Americans, mainly Carib and to a lesser degree Arawak Indians, lived in the jungle interior. They comprised a few thousand families who had signed peace treaties with the Dutch in 1686. These treaties safeguarded the Indians from slavery. More belligerent were the Maroons, fugitive African slaves from the plantations who had created their own tribes and societies in the interior: the Ndyuka, the Saramaccans, the Matawai, and the Boni. Their total number is estimated to have been between 6,000 and 7,000 from 1738 to 1786. They made their living mainly from forestry and developed their own Afro-Surinamese culture and religion. Eighteenth-century Suriname witnessed a fierce and protracted guerrilla war between Maroons and the army of the Society of Suriname. Peace treaties were made with most of the tribes in the 1760s, with official recognition of Maroon autonomy. Their autonomy would continue until after colonial rule.¹⁰ Colonial leprosy politics were not directed at and did not apply to the Native Americans and the Maroons.

Travellers, merchants, soldiers, and slaves would arrive on ships from Europe and Africa at the mouth of the Suriname river. After passing the beach of Braamspunt, they would sail up the river and anchor at Fort Amsterdam. From there, the river led on to the administrative and social centre of the colony, the city of Paramaribo, where most of the Europeans lived. On arrival in Paramaribo in 1773, the Scottish–Dutch mercenary soldier John Gabriel Stedman was pleased to see a town that appeared ‘uncommonly neat and pleasing, the shipping extremely beautiful, the adjacent woods adorned with the most luxuriant verdure, the air perfumed with the utmost fragrance, and the whole scene gilded by the rays of an unclouded sun’.¹¹ However, it was not long before he was confronted with the other side of the tropical climate and the country: health hazards, disease-ridden jungles, and instances of brutal slave treatment.¹²

Racial differences in susceptibility to disease

Most sufferers of boasie in Suriname were Africans and thus Europeans came to the conclusion that boasie had come to the New World from Africa. Ideas about boasie’s African connections were related to more general ideas of possible racial differences in disease susceptibility – notions that doctors and surgeons in the Dutch West Indies shared with those from the French and British West Indies. For instance, in 1721, Laurens Horst, a physician and superintendent of the slave depot on the island of Curacao, claimed to have much experience with the ‘totally different’ character of European and African diseases, about which he planned to write a book.¹³

Others developed similar ideas independently. In 1745, Laurens Storm van ’s-Gravesande, the governor of the Dutch colony of Essequibo (to the west of Suriname and now part of the Republic of Guyana), wrote in a report on an outbreak of smallpox in his fortress: ‘I found it very noteworthy t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Leprosy in a Slave Society
• Part II Leprosy in a Modern Colonial State
• Conclusion
• Sources and select bibliography