Shared Names
Overall, we interviewed 67 rice farmers (96% female): 26 Aucans, seven Matawai, four Paramaccans and 30 Saramaccans, and collected over 400 rice samples. The number of rice varieties grown per farmer varied from 1 to 21. Some rice variety names mentioned by farmers were not encountered in the field. We constructed a database from our fieldwork data and written documents with 284 unique names for rice varieties: 143 from the Saramaccans, 66 from the Aucans, 16 from the Matawai, 13 collected from the Aluku and eight from the Paramaccans (see Supplementary file). Of the 284 unique names, a total of 38 names were shared among two or more groups and only four names were found in all groups (Fig. 2).
The majority of the unique rice names are found among the Saramaccans and Aucans, the two largest Maroon groups with the most villages. These groups have more unique names than names shared with other groups. The Paramaccans have fewer unique names than names shared with other groups, most prominently the Aucans and Aluku.. The Paramaccans are small in number and live along the same river as the Aucans and Auluku.. The Matawai share more than half of their rice names with the Saramaccans. The two groups started as one and split around the 1740s (Price 1983).
Of all the rice variety names, just four were found in all the Maroon groups: alekisoola (‘Rexora’), baaka alisi (‘black rice’), pende (‘spotted’) and alulu (‘it rolls’). Alekisoola is identified as locally adapted version of Rexora. This glabrous-hulled cultivar was developed in 1926 in Louisiana (Rutger and Mackill, 2001), introduced to Guyana in 1932 (Codd and Peterkin, 1933), and widely grown in coastal Suriname by 1938. According to Stahel (1944), a bale of Rexora rice was sent to the Saramaccan village Ganzee in 1936. The name baaka alisi is the only variety of black or African rice, and known by all Maroons as a spiritual rice (van Andel et al. 2019). The name alulu (a bon) means ‘it rolls (from the tree)’ as it is a shattering type. Aucan farmers see shattering as a positive trait, since it facilitates the threshing process. The name ‘pende’ refers to varieties with spotted husks.
Naming categories
Based on the information obtained from rice farmers and documentation, we identified six naming categories. Names were given based on the rice morphology, agronomy, resemblance to animals, associations to males or females, geographic locations or other ethnicities. Figure 3 shows that rice names referring to morphology account for almost 40%, which is the highest for all categories and the binary naming pattern accounts for this. If we look only at the non-binary (simple) names, the morphology category drops to 24%, making the female category (28,6%) the category with the most rice names.
Morphological characteristics
Most Maroon rice names refer to the morphology of a specific plant part, such as grain shape and color, husk color, plant shape and size, panicle structure, awn color and shape. Names such as lebi alisi in Aucan and bë alisi in Saramaccan both mean ‘red rice’ and described the husk color of this variety. The Saramaccan name hánza-a-bandja means ‘wings on the side’, and refers to long outer glume on each side of the grain that is a typical morphological character of this variety (Fig. 4A). The Saramaccan name jöööjööö (long hair) is given to a variety with very long awns (Fig. 4B).
Agronomic characteristics
Approximately nine % of all rice names were connected to agronomic characteristics, such as a preference for swampy soil, a tendency to lodge, etc. Names such as awéi máun (Saramaccan and Matawai for ‘making the hands tired’) refer to the heavy panicles that cause exhaustion during harvesting time. Kaasihánsi (Saramaccan for ‘itching hands’) refers to the irritating hairs on the leaves or grains and alulu (a bon).
Reference to Animals
Almost 13% of all Maroon rice names refer to animals, most of them are native to the Amazonian rainforest. The names pingo puuma (bush pig hair), refers to the collared peccary or skunk pig (Dicotyles tajacu), while djampö and pakia both refer to the white-lipped peccary (Tayassu pecari), both wild pig species living in the Suriname forests. Rice varieties associated with these peccary species all have a long awn that looks similar to peccaries’ hair. The variety named watadagu (‘river otter’) has stiff awns and referred to the whiskers of the river otter, while the variety puspusi (‘cat’) has softer awns and referred to cat.
Apiikutu (futu), translated as ‘green-rumped parrotlet (feet)’, is a rice variety thas is often destroyed by this bird (Forpus passerinus), as it descends on the rice to feed on it and squeezes the panicles with its feet. Aucan chief Bono Velanti explained that one time this specific parrotlet had eaten a lot of rice in the field, and farmers had caught and killed it. When gutting the bird, the farmers found that its stomach was full of rice. They had taken the seeds to be sown again and named the variety after the parrotlet.
Lastly, one rice variety refers to a bird species from West-Africa. The name toke for a variety with dark brown patches on the husk refers to the Guinea fowl (Numida meleagris), a West African bird that was introduced to Suriname on slave ships (Benjamins and Snelleman 1917).
Male associations
A small number of names are connected to men. The variety Adongote konde, meaning ‘Adongote’s place’, is one of them. A farmer said he loved this rice so much that it used to be the only variety he farmed. When he passed away, the villagers decided to name this variety after him. Ston taka is a name referring to male pubic hair, as it has a curly black awn that falls off easily. The Aucan rice variety mesti (‘teacher’) is named after a teacher of the first boarding school established in the Marowijne River, shortly after World War II. He had handed out rice to the mothers of the pupils, who appreciate the variety until today (van Andel et al. 2019).
Reference to places and other ethnic groups
A limited number of rice names refers to places, such as for example Abenaston, a Saramaccan village. We think that the researcher who collected this name either invented it without discussing it with the farmer, or it arose from a misunderstanding between the two, or the farmer preferred to mention a village rather than a specific name. Names in this category also refer to ethnic groups, such as Aluku paansu (Aluku seeds), bë djugá (red Aucan), and Ndyuka alulu (Aucan roller), which suggests an exchange between two Maroon groups. Naomi Eva, a Matawai farmer living in Comsarsikondre (Saramacca river) from whom we collected Ndyuka alulu, said she received this rice from Aucan people. Notably, Aucans themselves never labelled their own rice as Ndyuka. It seems that exchange of varieties among the groups rarely happens.
In the post-emancipation period, the Maroon groups also exchanged rice with non-Maroon groups, such as indentured laborers from India (Hindustani), who were brought to Suriname from the late 1870s onwards. A variety that named kuli kuli,, for example, has a clear reference to coolies, the derogatory term used for indentured labourers from India. The Dutch colonial government also arranged recruitment from Java and we encountered a glutinous (sticky) rice variety named katam strongly resembling ketan, the Indonesian word for stickiness.. More recently, Hmong refugees, an diasporic ethnic group from the northern mountains of Laos and Vietnam, arrived in French Guyana after 1975 and Maroons hold a variety they named either Hmong or anambu. The latter refers to a water bird with long legs, as the Aucans said the Hmong people lived on stilt houses above the swamp.
Traces of early runaways
The category ‘ethnic groups’ also contains rice names that refer directly to the time of marronage. Names, such as Baákápáu tjaka, Agbosótjaka, Mbotombolia, and Afanti sacca, refer to groups of runaways that joined the Maroons in different time periods. The Baákápáu were a group of people who escaped from the Tout Lui Faut plantation in the 1690s (Price 1983). The term Agbosó probably refers to Fon-speaking people, from A(g)bomey, the capital city of the former Kingdom of Dahomey, currently Benin (Smith. 2015a). The Agbo ran away and joined the Saramaccans around 1750s (Price. 1983). The term Mbotombolia probably refers to a Maroon group that settled along the Boterbalie creek in the Para district, and taken along by the Matawai leader Musinga (Price 1990). The (A)fanti or Fante are a subgroup of the Akan people in southern Ghana of whom many were transported to Suriname (Wooding 1979). According to the traditional healer Kenrich Cairo, the Afante people escaped from the Tempati region and joined the Aucan Maroons. Our data suggest that all these groups of escaped people had rice with them.
African words in Maroon rice names
Several Maroon rice names contain terms that can be linked to African words, of which the meaning was mostly forgotten or changed over time. The name pende, meaning ‘dark’ or ‘dusk’ was reported for an O. glaberrima variety found in Sierra Leone that was ready to harvest between 80 and 90 days (Richards 1983). We found the name pende associated with several O. sativa varieties with dark spotted husks, but with a growth season of 4 months, similar to most other Maroon varieties.
The words saka is a general word for rice in Mende (Sierra Leone), Gban (Ivory Coast) and several other unrelated African languages, and only occurs near old Portuguese and Spanish trading posts. The root of the word is probably the Portuguese word sacudir, meaning ‘to shake up’ or ‘winnowing rice’, used as contact word by slave traders buying rice as bulk food for the trans-Atlantic voyage (Wiener 1920). We found that only few farmers knew what saka meant, although the term was shared by the Aluku, Aucans and Paramaccans. However, Saramaccan names, such Agbosotjaka, Afantisaka, tjaka Ma Jaa and the Matawai name atjakati, also seemed to carry this same word (saka).
The name böngö is also another general name for rice, particular in the Saramaccan community. The best translation is probably ‘seeds’ or ‘seedling’, but also ‘children’ or ‘offspring’. Among the Aucans, we heard the term bongo only in a rice song that was sung when farmers were finished with sowing. They hoped that by singing it the harvest would be plenty. Bongo probably comes from the Central African word m-boóngo in the Kintandu language, meaning ‘descendants’, ‘planting material’, ‘seeds’, and ‘offspring’ (Smith. 2015b).
Non-translated and other names
Almost 15% of the Maroon rice names we could not translate, or none of our interviewees could explain or remember their meaning. Names also referred to other objects or things that did not fit in a category. Names such as kamu, topi-topi and adjekwaman were collected by other researchers, but they did not ask the farmers for the meaning of these names. The name kamasondu was collected by us, but the farmer who grew it could not recall what the name meant, and we could not find another person that knew its meaning. The name adjádja (rice crust), was the only variety referring to culinary use.
Rice is a woman
Finally, the names referring to women make up almost 30% of all names. Rice is in a symbolic sense considered to be a woman, and the reasons for this are diverse. Saramaccan farmer Mariona Tiapoe explained to us: ’It is women who plant the rice, and [like a woman] one rice seed can bring forth a lot of children’. The great majority of the Maroon farmers are women. It seems that when they invent rice names they refer to their own gender, such as the Saramaccan names gaán bóbi (big breast), longi longi mujëë (very tall woman), koto mujëë (cold woman), limbo mujëë (clean woman) and Aucan names such as moi uma (beautiful woman) and tjantjan poena (old ladies’ pubic hair, after its thin white awn). These names refer to women in general, but the majority of rice named associated with females refer to specific female individuals (Fig. 5).
In Maroon oral history, there is a claim that women escaped from the plantations with rice braided in their hair (Carney 2004). Although the early Maroon history is complex and contains reiterant exchanges between plantation slaves and Maroons, the women had a crucial role in the cultivation of food crops. Rice varieties carry names of women that allegedly were the first to bring rice to the Marron villages (van Andel et al. submitted). Rice names such as Ma Paanza refer to Mrs. Paanza. Saramaccan paramount chief Albert Aboikoni explained that she escaped with rice from a plantation named Stenenberg. She took the rice to Baakawata, a village that does not exist anymore along the Pikin Lio. A similar story documented by Price (1983) is attributed to the variety lisi Seei, meaning Mrs. Seei’s rice, named after an enslaved Ghanaian woman who escaped in 1690 from the plantation Waterland. She fled together with her daughter Yaya, after which the rice variety tjaka Ma Jaa was named. Rice names such as Anoussa, Amessina and Alena refer to women whose history is probably forgotten, as the farmers could not recall anymore who they were, probably because they had only limited impact in small communities.
Varieties named after specific women do not only refer to the time of marronage, but also persons that recently died or are still alive. M’kono alisi (M’kono’s rice) was collected from her neighbor, shortly after M’kono passed away. Odina konde (Odina’s place) was encountered on the field of Odina Aboikoni in Dangogo 2,the uppermost village on the Pikin Lio (Fig. 6). She had not seen this variety before, and her mother decided to name it after her. New women’s names have been invented over the centuries, because new varieties are continuously appearing on farmers field, or names are forgotten and rice is renamed after its farmer.
The naming pattern across Maroon groups
In the five Maroon groups, the naming pattern seems to be the same. Figure 7 shows the percentages of names in the different categories for the specific groups. Similar percentages are found for all Maroon groups, including for the two most frequent categories: morphology (between 31% and 35% for all groups) and female (between 15% and 22%). For the Aluku, the percentage in the category 'other’ are relatively high, because most names collected by Fleury (2016) were not translated, and we did not do fieldwork among Aluku farmers. The Matawai have a relatively high score in the male category, because their awned rice was called bia bia (‘young man’ or ‘beard’) and we scored this as an association to males
Recognizing each other’s rice
The six rice varieties that we selected to see how farmers would identify each other’s rice were not equally familiar. Black or African rice (Oryza glaberrima) was recognized by all 20 farmers who participated in the exercise as baaka alisi (black rice) or matu alisi (forest rice), because of its dark brown husk and its spiritual significance in Maroon communities (van Andel et al. 2010). The variety pende fisi was also well recognized by 85% of farmers as pende or ahunjön. These spotted rice probably are old varieties: the name West African name pende was first documented by Valliant (1948) along the Marowijne River for rice varieties with striped husks. The origin of the Saramaccan term ahunjön, which means ‘ugly’, due to the dark brown spots on the husk, remains unknown.
Masaa alisi (‘master’s rice’) was only farmed by Aucans living along the Cottica River, probably because the variety needs to grow in swampy areas. The variety had a mix of purple and white grains, and was not recognized by farmers from outside the Cottica. According to Aucan artist Tolin Alexander, the term masaa (‘plantation owner’) was used by Aucans returning from the Tapanahoni River to the Cottica region for the descendants of enslaved Africans who remained on the former plantations. After emancipation, the Maroons met their former family members on the plantations they had fled from a century ago. As a token of respect, they addressed these people with masaa (‘master’). These people were farming rice on the abandoned plantations and they shared their swampland varieties with the Maroons. As masaa alisi had red seeds, 20% of the farmers named it kamasondu, which is a Saramaccan upland variety with red seeds. The other Maroons did not recognize it.
Puspusi was only collected in Semoisi, a Saramaccan village along the upper Suriname river. The variety was not recognized by any of the 20 farmers, probably because its name is limited to Semoisi. In the other villages, 85% of the farmers named it after its long awn, so either tjantjanpuna (‘old women pubic hair’), jöööjööö (‘long hair’) or weti hedi mma (‘white headed woman’).
The variety MaPaanza with smooth orange husks, collected in the Saramaccan village Jawjaw, was not recognized by any of the farmers. However, women from the same tribe have another type of Ma Paanza with hairy husks and red seeds.
The modern US cultivar Carolina gold was not recognized by any farmer as a foreign cultivar. All 20 farmers considered it a Maroon rice variety and called it names such lebi alisi and bë alisi (red rice), because of it orange husk.
Inventing names for unknown rice
Farmers looked at the rice varieties we selected for the exercise and came up with names for those they thought they recognized, but also invented names for those they did not know. Figure 6 shows that when an unknown variety had a white husk, farmers incorporated this trait as part of the suggested name only in 20% of the cases. When the husk color was orange, this was incorporated in more than half of the suggested names. Farmers who guessed a name for varieties with an awn used this trait in the majority of the names they invented. When the variety had a red seed 30% of the farmers incorporated this trait as part of the name they invented. So there seems to be a hierarchy in name giving, the awn is seen as a major motivation for inventing a name.