How People Live in Suriname | The Most Forested Nation the World Forgot | 4K Documentary

[00:00:10]On the grass air strip at Palumu, a bush pilot cuts the engine of a six seat Cessna as a trio elder steps out [music] of the treeine to collect the crates of salt and fuel it has flown in from the coast. [music] >> [music] >> 400 kilometers north on Kaiser [music] Strat in Perameo, a caretaker touches a match to a brass candle inside a wooden synagogue as the call to prayer carries [music] over the wall from the mosque next door in the central [music] market. A vendor sets out brass weights beside cassava and hot peppers. This is Surinom, the smallest nation in South America, the only Dutch-speaking [music] corner of the continent. Roughly 600,000 people wedged between the Atlantic and forest that covers almost all the land [music] [music] here. Slavery was abolished in 1863.

[00:01:28]And yet the freed were bound to the same plantations under [music] the same masters for 10 more years until the debt was declared paid in 1873.

[00:01:49]What follows is a walk along one street [music] outward from the wall four faith share past the tables no migration would [music] merge to the rainforest the country is now quietly spending on Kaiser Strat In central Paramaribo, the day arrives one shutter at a time.

[00:02:19]The street is narrow, the wooden facads leaning close on both sides, the timber gray and green [music] with more than a century of wet season rain.

[00:02:31]A single figure crosses at the far end and is gone.

[00:02:43]Here within a few hundred meters stand a synagogue and a mosque, a cathedral and a Hindu temple. Four congregations sharing the same short stretch of covered ground. The two closest buildings, the synagogue and the mosque, share a single wall, one lot pressed against the next, so that the prayers of one rise through the same timber the other leans against.

[00:03:17]Nowhere is this arrangement marked or explained. [music] It is simply the address.

[00:03:23]Through a low door, the synagogue opens onto something no photograph quite prepares for. A floor of fine white sand laid ankle deep across the whole sanctuary. Cool [music] beneath the wooden benches and the brass fittings.

[00:03:47]This [music] is ne shalom and the sand is old practice. A memory of the desert the book of Exodus crossed carried to [music] the tropics and kept. Jews have lived in Surinam since the 17th century among the oldest continuous [music] Jewish communities anywhere in the Americas.

[00:04:14]In the hush before the morning service, a caretaker moves along the row of lamps [music] and his hands find a match, touch it to the wick of a brass candle, and hold [music] steady as the flame takes and the wax at the rim begins to soften and lean. The room holds still around him.

[00:04:43]Then from the next lot [music] through the shared wall, the sound arrives. The call to prayer lifting from a minouette against a pale sky. The candle flame holds.

[00:04:57]The two congregations have kept the peace for generations, lending one another their yards for parking on the days the other fills the street. On this block, neighborliness is the whole of the miracle.

[00:05:19]and it is treated as ordinary. The sound widens over the rooftops toward a great pale [music] spire. A few streets on stands St. Peter and Paul, its twin towers rising above the low wooden city.

[00:05:34][music] And inside the columns climb into one of the largest wooden [music] cathedrals in the Americas. The vault is raised from the same rainforest timber as the houses on Kaiser Strat. Every beam a felled tree.

[00:05:58]Faith [music] here is built at full height in wood and left to the humidity to keep or to claim.

[00:06:07]A short walk further, the sweep completes itself at Arya Dwaka, a Hindu temple whose ornamented cornises [music] catch the first full sun, its symbols worked into the plaster.

[00:06:29]Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, all within one unhurried walk. And on this street they argue, bargain and greet one another. Not in Dutch but in Sranan Tongo. The creel every faith here shares even as each prays in a tongue of its own. The call to prayer fades along the street. The shutters begin to open, one hinge at a time, and the ordinary morning takes the block back.

[00:07:12]The wall between them was never a border. It was a lease. And everyone on this street signed [music] it.

[00:07:27]The inner city of Paramarabo wakes along a single row of timber houses, white and ochre, their louvered shutters folded flat against the boards, the morning light moving slowly up a planking as the heat begins to gather. These houses are Dutch by design, cut and [music] joined more than two centuries ago, and they have outlived the empire that raised them. The hands that live behind their doors now belong to the descendants of four separate crossings. And the people who were here before any ship, Creole, [music] Hindustani, Javanese, Chinese, and the indigenous nations the others found already living on the land.

[00:08:16]The houses are the constant, the people are the variable.

[00:08:21]On the corner, a shopkeeper works his shutters loose one board at a time, the wood swollen with a wet season and reluctant. And when the last is folded back, he takes a stub of chalk and writes the day's price of rice on a slate propped against the sill.

[00:08:45]The street runs down to the water where it stops at the water count and the brown river beyond. The old warehouses standing along the embankment, their backs to the town. This is the doorway every arrival passed through. On the 5th of [music] June 1873, a ship called the Laala Rook came up this river from Kolkata [music] and set ashore the first Hindustani indentured laborers brought to cup the cane the newly freed had just been released from.

[00:09:16]Arriving in the same year, one bondage [music] was declared paid and another quietly began.

[00:09:31]A few hundred meters up river, the timber gives way to brick and stone at Fort Zealandia. [music] Its five-pointed walls set low against the water, the old cannon [music] still pointing across the rivermouth. This is where the colony began, the administrative and military route from which the whole arrangement of plantation and labor was first written down and enforced.

[00:10:03]The walls catch the morning light, the grass kept short, the river easy beyond them, and it would be simple to let the prettiness of the timber city stand in for the whole story. It cannot. Beneath the polished brass, there is an account still open. Inland from the fort, the streets open onto Onafanka's plane.

[00:10:26]Independence [music] Square, a broad plaza of pale government buildings and tall palms, where on the 25th of November 1975, amid the postwar deolonization that had already loosened European empires across the world, the Netherlands granted independence to its oldest South American colony, and five peoples became one flag.

[00:10:53]>> [music] >> Across the square, a woman crosses in a wide Afroamese creole dress. Its folded cloth pinned to a full architecture. A garment carried out of slavery and kept whole. The flag raised here never asked her dress to disappear into it. Behind the square stands the white facade of the presidential palace. And behind [music] the palace in ordered rows, the royal palms of the Palmanuan rise in a garden the enslaved were made to plant, [music] kept now as the nation's front lawn.

[00:11:42]The beauty of the place is real, and so is the debt beneath it. The two set into the same ground and not yet reconciled.

[00:11:50][music] Four crossings and a people already here. One postcode and not one of them in 200 years ever fully dissolved into the others.

[00:12:05][music] A few streets back from the palace garden, beneath a long roof of corrugated iron, the central marked has been trading since before the churches emptied. The aisles narrow between tables of cassava and green bananas, bitter melon and hot peppers, the brass scales swinging and settling as a vendor slides a weight along the bar.

[00:12:38]This is where the week is provisioned and where once a week the argument the whole country has been having for two centuries is laid out on plates instead [music] of settled.

[00:12:54]>> [music] >> It is Sunday and Sunday in Paramarabo is when the kitchens declare themselves.

[00:13:06]In a kitchen off the market, a pair of flowered hands works a round of dough across a wooden board, pressing it flat, turning it, pressing again. The flower dusting the wrist and the seam of the sleeve before the disc goes down onto a flat iron griddle and lifts [music] at its edge in the heat.

[00:13:37]This is roti carried out of northern India in the tin trunks of the indentured after 1873 and never once surrendered.

[00:13:48]The same flat bread [music] that was rolled in the villages above the Ganges before the first ship ever left for the [music] canefields of the Caribbean.

[00:13:58]Two doors along, an oven door swings open and a heavy dish comes out under a sheet of foil. And when the [music] foil is peeled back, the steam lifts in a single sheet of a brown crust.

[00:14:13]This is palm [music] >> grated from the root of a tuber said to have first been baked into a [music] Sunday dish in the old Jewish households. Folded now into the Creole kitchen [music] and claimed as its own.

[00:14:36]Chicken and citrus set beneath a top baked hard in the heat. No two families weigh the salt the same way, and each [music] is quietly certain the others have it slightly wrong. [music] [music] out along the road east of the center where the Javanese were settled on the land after 1890. Following their own long crossing from the far side of the world, the small kitchens set their tables in the open air. The roadside eeries fed a whole nation a plate at a time. And from the walk comes [music] bari, the fried noodle brought from Java and salted to [music] a local taste.

[00:15:26]Handed across the counter in a paper wrap, [music] still too hot to hold.

[00:15:33][music] By afternoon, the three tables [music] sit within a few streets of one another.

[00:15:45]The flatbread and the baked casserole and the fried noodles, each cooked [music] to a recipe that crossed an ocean and refused to change.

[00:15:56]Each household sure of its own and content to let the others be.

[00:16:02]Nothing on these plates has merged. And that is the point.

[00:16:15]A country that will not agree on how to season its Sunday is a country still made of the places it came from.

[00:16:23]The dishes are cleared, the griddles scraped [music] and set to cool. And by first light on Monday, the market roof is ringing again with the sound of the scales.

[00:16:37][music] The food has a birthplace and it lies down river east of the city. The Kavana River runs slow and brown between low [music] banks, and along it, half swallowed by the green, stand the plantations that grew the sugar and the coffee that provisioned the market and paid for the timber town upstream.

[00:17:15]The great houses face [music] the water still, their shutters gone, their [clears throat] brick kitchens open to the rain, and the cane that made a handful of men rich grows wild now across the fields it was planted in.

[00:17:31]This is where the account first came due.

[00:17:36]On the 1st of July 1863, in the name of the Dutch King Villim III, slavery was abolished across the colony [music] and some 34,000 people across its plantations were declared free.

[00:17:59]The paper freedom came with a condition.

[00:18:03]Emancipation freed no one to leave for 10 more years under what the law called state supervision. [music] The newly freed stayed on and worked the estates that had owned them for wages that existed mostly on paper until 1873 when the debt to their former masters was ruled settled.

[00:18:33]>> [music] >> Compensation was paid that year, 300 gilders ahead, not to the freed for their stolen years, but to the slaveholders [music] for their lost property. The Surinamese historian Cynthia Mloud, whose life's work rests on these plantation records, keeps the arithmetic of that year in plain [music] view. The money moved toward the owners, never toward the people who had done the work.

[00:19:05][music] A little further down the river, the tall brick chimney of Marionberg still stands above the trees. The largest sugar estate [music] the colony ever ran. Worked after emancipation by Javanese and Hindustani. brought in to replace the labor that had walked away.

[00:19:28]The machinery rusts in the sheds where it stopped.

[00:19:40]In 1902, the workers [music] here rose against a manager over unpaid wages, and the colonial soldiers sent to [music] end it opened fire, killing, by most accounts around 24 of them among the cane. The chimney marks the place the way a headstone marks a grave.

[00:20:01][music] Every year on the morning of the 1st of July, the country returns to that date by its own name. Ketty [music] cotty.

[00:20:17]The words mean the chain cut and the streets of Paramarabo fill [music] with white cloth and drums and the old songs sung in Sanan Tongo.

[00:20:38]In a yard off the market, an elderly woman kneels at a low table, presses the [music] creases from a white dress with the flat of her hand, and lays a single sprig [music] of green beside a bowl of water. The small rights of a household remembering the chain was cut in law in 1863.

[00:21:07]The people counted themselves free only in 1873 and they have kept both dates ever since.

[00:21:16]Not everyone had waited for the paper.

[00:21:19]Generations before the king ever signed, whole families had already broken from the estates and walked south into [music] the forest beyond the reach of the colony's power and made themselves free [music] by distance where the law would not.

[00:21:43]The plantations end where the road ends.

[00:21:47]Past them lies the one place the whole account could never fully reach.

[00:22:00]Beyond the last plantation, the road thins, then ends, and the country becomes what it mostly is, rainforest, unbroken, covering merely the entire land mass, running south for hundreds of kilome to the Brazilian border.

[00:22:17]From the air, it reads as wealth of a particular kind, the kind not yet spent.

[00:22:25]Everything the coast has counted sits on a thin bright rim along the Atlantic.

[00:22:31]The faiths, the migrations, the tables, the plantations.

[00:22:44]Behind it, the forest [music] waits, holding the timber, the water, the gold, and whatever the country decides [music] it is worth.

[00:22:55]One large wound is already cut into that green.

[00:23:00]In the early 1960s, the Aphobaka Dam closed across the Surinam River to power a bulkite smelter and the water [music] rose behind it until it had drowned an area larger than some nations. [music] A reservoir, a flooded forest where the dead trees still stand gray above the surface.

[00:23:28]Beneath it lie the villages of the Saramaka, one of the maroon peoples whose ancestors escaped the plantations generations earlier and carved free settlements deeper in the forest than the slavers would follow.

[00:23:43]Freedom taken by their own hand. And then the homeland taken [music] again, this time by a dam.

[00:23:52]Some 6,000 people were moved.

[00:24:02][music] The reservoir keeps its name.

[00:24:05]The villages under it are harder to find on any map.

[00:24:10]Where the forest is opened now, it is most often opened for gold.

[00:24:15]Along the interior rivers, the small-cale miners work the gravel with hoses and pumps, and the water they leave behind runs the color of milky coffee [music] for kilome. The mercury they use to gather the dust, settling into the fish and the people who eat them.

[00:24:41]At a pit cut raw into the red earth, a minor crouches over a pan, tilts it, and lets the water sheet off the rim in slow arcs until only the heavy grit remains.

[00:24:55]And in the crease [music] of it, a few grains of gold catch the light. A day's work weighed against a forest that does not grow back.

[00:25:13]>> [music] >> Out past the coast beneath the seabed sits the larger bed. In 2020, the drills confirmed what the surveys had promised.

[00:25:25]A major oil field more than 100 km off the [music] Atlantic shore. Billions of barrels. Foreign majors signing on.

[00:25:35]President Chan Santoki has called [music] it the country's chance to clear its debts and build the roads and schools the coast has long gone without.

[00:25:53]Whether the forest is protected by that wealth or spent faster because of it is the question no one can yet answer.

[00:26:02]For now, the forest keeps its own pace.

[00:26:06]On a river far from any pit, a dugout canoe cut from a single trunk slides upstream against the brown current. One figure standing at the stern with a paddle. The wake folding out behind it [music] in a long, clean line across water the color of strong tea.

[00:26:34]There are no roads here. What comes in comes by river or by the small planes [music] that drop onto grass strips cut from the trees. The country is still deciding which arrivals are supplies and which are withdrawals.

[00:26:58]At dusk, the Surinam River takes the city lights one by one, carrying them past the water in broken yellow lines, while the wooden houses behind it loosen their heat into the evening.

[00:27:15][music] The day does not circle back [music] to where it began. It moves outward through the accounts it has opened [music] on Kaiser Strat. [music] The candle has burned down to the brass and the shutters stand open. In the central market, the last hot peppers are weighed and bagged.

[00:27:58][music] Down river, the sugar chimney at Maranberg stands cold above the cane.

[00:28:05]Behind all of it, beyond the roads, [music] the plantations, the mines, and the new maps drawn offshore, the forest [music] keeps its dark edge against the sky.

[00:28:23][music] 93% of the country is still [music] forest.

[00:28:37]>> [music]