Suriname

Rainforest covers nearly all of Suriname behind a muddy, mangrove-lined coast and a belt of old beach ridges and savanna, rising to granite domes such as the Voltzberg. Broad rivers such as the Suriname and the Coppename run north to the Atlantic. In 1964 the Afobaka Dam began flooding a vast tract of forest to form the Brokopondo Reservoir, whose power ran the aluminium smelter at Paranam. Leatherback turtles nest on the beaches at Galibi.

English planters settled among the Kali’na and Lokono peoples of the coast in 1650. The Dutch captured the colony in 1667, and at the peace of Breda the English kept New Amsterdam, the future New York. Enslaved Africans who fled into the forest founded Maroon societies; the Ndyuka and Saramaka won treaties securing their freedom in 1760 and 1762. Slavery was abolished in 1863, a day marked each July as Keti Koti, ‘broken chains’. Contract workers then came from British India and Java. Independence followed in November 1975.

A mosque and a synagogue stand side by side on Keizerstraat in Paramaribo, and the ruins of Jodensavanne, a seventeenth-century Jewish settlement, lie upriver. Sranan Tongo is the common speech of Hindustani, Creole, Maroon, Javanese, Indigenous and Chinese Surinamese. Roti, Javanese saoto soup and pom, baked chicken with grated pomtajer root, appear at parties. Dutch football stars Clarence Seedorf and Edgar Davids were born here. Bauxite from Moengo long led exports; gold, oil from Staatsolie and rice from Nickerie followed.