The Reinvention of Household Medicine by Enslaved Africans in Suriname
- ↵*Naturalis Biodiversity Center / Leiden University, PO Box 9517, 2300 RA Leiden, the Netherlands. Email: tinde.vanandel@naturalis.nl
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Tinde van Andel is a NWO-Vidi Research fellow in Ethnobotany at Naturalis Biodiversity Center. She and her PhD students have carried out fieldwork in Suriname, Ghana, Benin and Gabon to study the link between Afro-Caribbean and Western African medicinal and ritual plant use. Ongoing research focuses on the sustainability of the herbal medicine trade in Western Africa and trans-Atlantic types of household medicine and cultural-bound health syndromes.
Abstract
Enslaved Africans in Suriname faced not
only a harsh environment and brutal conditions, but the challenge of
sourcing therapeutically
useful plants in an unfamiliar land. How did they
discover medicinal herbs in the New World? Literature suggests that
slave
medicine was already well developed in
eighteenth-century Suriname, while herbaria prove that Old World plants
were present
since 1687. Current vernacular plant names reveal
European, Amerindian and African influence. Ethnobotanical research
among
present-day Afro-Surinamers and related West
African groups demonstrates that although most plants used by
Afro-Surinamers
are Neotropical, preparation methods and
applications are still very African. This illustrates the durability and
persistence
of household medicine despite the disruption during
the Middle Passage. Afro-Surinamers have reinvented their household
medicine
by using familiar Old World plants, selecting New
World plants that were related to African ones, incorporating knowledge
of other ethnic groups and deploying trial and
error.
