Suriname

No country in the Americas is as evenly divided among religions as Suriname, and the division was assembled by Dutch labour recruitment over two centuries. Moravian missionaries began work in 1735 and Catholic missions followed, so the Afro Surinamese and indigenous populations are largely Christian. Indentured labourers were brought from British India from 1873, bringing Hindus and Muslims, and from Java from 1890, bringing Javanese Muslims. Chinese immigration added further communities. The Muslim share of the population is the highest of any country in the western hemisphere.

Paramaribo makes the point physically. The Neveh Shalom synagogue and the Keizerstraat mosque stand next to one another on the same street, sharing a car park, and the arrangement is used domestically and internationally as an image of what the country is.

One Javanese Surinamese practice deserves recording because it is unique. Some Javanese mosques in Suriname face west rather than east. The direction of Mecca from Java is west, and the first generation continued to orient their prayer that way after crossing the Atlantic, where the correct direction is east. When the discrepancy was raised the community divided over whether to follow the geography or the inherited practice, and the split has never fully closed, so both orientations exist.

The Maroon peoples, descended from those who escaped the plantations and established independent societies in the interior, principally the Saramaka and the Ndyuka, maintain Winti, an Afro Surinamese religion of ancestral and nature spirits. It was legally prohibited until 1971.

Winti is the Afro Surinamese religion of the coastal Creole population and, in related forms, of the Maroon peoples of the interior. The word names both the religion and the kind of being at its centre: a winti is a spirit, and the spirits are grouped by domain, associated with the sky, the earth, the water and the forest, each group with its own characteristics, drum rhythms, colours and prohibitions. Ancestors, the yorka, are addressed alongside them.

The characteristic event is the winti prei, in which drumming and song call particular spirits, and a spirit takes the head of a participant and speaks. Much of the practice is concerned with illness, misfortune and the repair of relationships, both among the living and between the living and the dead, and a bonuman or ritual specialist diagnoses which winti is involved and what is owed.

It was illegal. Colonial ordinances suppressed African religious practice on the plantations, and the prohibition survived into the twentieth century in provisions of the criminal code aimed at what was described as superstition and the calling of spirits. Those provisions were repealed in 1971. That is recent enough that people who practised under prohibition are living, and the memory of concealment shapes how openly the religion is discussed.

Since independence in 1975 Winti has moved steadily toward public acknowledgement as a Surinamese religion rather than a survival, and it is practised in the Netherlands as well by the large Surinamese Dutch community.

Initiated knowledge is not published here. What is set out is the structure as described in the ethnographic and Surinamese scholarly literature.