Vernacular names of traditional rice varieties reveal the unique history of Maroons in Suriname and French Guiana

Abstract

Rice is a keystone crop in all Maroon communities in Suriname and French Guyana today. Historically, rice can be considered an indicator crop for successful marronage in the Guianas. Maroons cultivate hundreds of traditional varieties, unraveling variety names revealed the history, farming systems, spiritual significance and probably the diversity of rice in Maroon communities. We interviewed 67 rice farmers (96% female), collected over 400 rice specimens and built a database with 284 unique rice names from our own fieldwork and previously collected names. The process of naming a rice variety is complex but there are recurrent patterns among the five Maroon groups we studied. We categorized names referring to morphology, agronomy, animals, humans, and rice brought from specific regions or by other ethnicities. Very few names are shared between Maroon groups. When we showed farmers six rice varieties from outside their village, all recognized African rice ( Oryza glaberrima ) and pende (spotted O. sativa ). When a variety was unknown, an initial name was given based on its morphology. Maroon rice names are truly unique as they reflect the varieties that were available, the history of plantations and marronage, climate aspects that influenced the selection of farmers, the many separate groups of runaways joining the Maroons, the adaptation to the Amazonian ecosystem, and their contacts with outsiders. Our results show that unravelling Maroon rice names leads to a better understanding of the close connection between the process of marronage, locally developed agricultural practices and connections to West Africa. These historical origins continue to exist and form a unique Maroon system of variety exchange, farm management and crop diversity.

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Vernacular names of traditional rice varieties reveal
the unique history of Maroons in Suriname and
French Guiana
Nicholaas Milliano Pinas (  nicholaas.pinas@naturalis.nl )
Naturalis Biodiversity Center https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9758-8709
Tinde van Andel
Naturalis Biodiversity Center
Marieke van de Loosdrecht
Wageningen University and Research
Harro Maat
Wageningen University and Research
Research Article
Keywords:
Posted Date: November 23rd, 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-2287962/v1
License:   This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 
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Abstract
Rice is a keystone crop in all Maroon communities in Suriname and French Guyana today. Historically,
rice can be considered an indicator crop for successful marronage in the Guianas. Maroons cultivate
hundreds of traditional varieties, unraveling variety names revealed the history, farming systems, spiritual
signicance and probably the diversity of rice in Maroon communities. We interviewed 67 rice farmers
(96% female), collected over 400 rice specimens and built a database with 284 unique rice names from
our own eldwork and previously collected names. The process of naming a rice variety is complex but
there are recurrent patterns among the ve Maroon groups we studied. We categorized names referring to
morphology, agronomy, animals, humans, and rice brought from specic regions or by other ethnicities.
Very few names are shared between Maroon groups. When we showed farmers six rice varieties from
outside their village, all recognized African rice
(
Oryza glaberrima
) and
pende
(spotted
O. sativa
). When a
variety was unknown, an initial name was given based on its morphology. Maroon rice names are truly
unique as they reect the varieties that were available, the history of plantations and marronage, climate
aspects that inuenced the selection of farmers, the many separate groups of runaways joining the
Maroons, the adaptation to the Amazonian ecosystem, and their contacts with outsiders. Our results
show that unravelling Maroon rice names leads to a better understanding of the close connection
between the process of marronage, locally developed agricultural practices and connections to West
Africa. These historical origins continue to exist and form a unique Maroon system of variety exchange,
farm management and crop diversity.
Introduction
Rice is the most consumed staple food in the world, and has two domesticated species: Asian rice (
Oryza
sativa
) and African rice (
Oryza glaberrima
). Apart from the many commercial cultivars, several thousands
of traditional rice landraces exist in Asia, Africa, and the Americas (Li et al. 2014: Stein et al. 2018).
Although widescale commercial rice farming increasingly replaces traditional varieties, small farmers
have been conserving their self-developed rice diversity for their potential tolerance against ood, drought,
salinity and for their nutritional, culinary and cultural values (Gopi and Manjula 2018). By using separate
names for rice varieties, farmers are effectively segregating phenotypes. Over time this segregation can
bring forth botanically signicance. Another important aspect is that cultural knowledge of varieties helps
to transmit crop knowledge both widely in a community and specialized within sub-sectors of the
community (Eyzaguirre 2003). Vernacular names in Gambia reects specic farm management practices
employed by farmers and, vice versa, analysis of names were helpful to explain on-farm genetic diversity
and locally-specic crop improvement strategies (Nuyten and Almekinders 2008). In Laos names often
indicated particular morphological features or other unique characteristics. Also their resistance to or
tolerance for commonly occurring stress factors like drought, oods, lodging, birds, weeds and adaptation
to soils were reected in names. This information helped to select germplasm for rice improvement (Rao
et al. 2002).

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In Suriname, rice is a major part of the dietary intake of every household (Kennedy et al. 2002). While the
coastal citizens consume rice grown on commercially exploited wetland polders, traditional rice varieties
(both
O. sativa
and
O. glaberrima
) are important crops for Maroons living in the forested interior (Price
1993; van Andel et al. 2019). Maroons, descendants of enslaved Africans who escaped the plantations in
the late 17th and 18th century and established independent communities in the remote interior, are found
in Suriname and French Guiana. Nowadays, six Maroon groups are distinguished in this region:
Saramaccans (estimated population size ~ 82,500), Aucans (or Ndjuka, ~ 82,500), Matawai (~ 6,800),
Paramaccans (~ 11,000), Aluku (~ 11,000) and Kwinti (~ 1,000). The majority still lives in the forested
interior of both countries, except for the Matawai and the Kwinti, who have largely migrated to
Paramaribo, the capital of Suriname (Price 2013).
The rst ocial accounts by the Dutch about rice in Suriname date from 1687 and talk about plantings
of rice destined for bulk food for the enslaved and soldiers (Oudschans Dentz, 1944; van Andel et al.
2022). Plantations records hardly mention rice but it is likely that rice was grown widely on food plots not
administered by plantation owners, even though quantities and other information is missing until
accounts of rice appear more frequently by the late eighteenth century. Once settled safely in the interior,
rice became the main staple crop of Maroon communities. Historical records of military expeditions, sent
out to capture Maroons, mention the rst Maroon provision elds with rice as early as 1712 (Dragtenstein
2002; van Andel et al. 2022).
Accounts of varietal diversity in the Maroon rice elds appeared from the second half of the twentieth
century. Anthropologist Sally Price (personal communication) recorded vernacular names in the
Saramaccan language for 74 varieties in the 1960s, Geijskes (1954) listed 21 local varieties among the
Paramaccans and Aucans along the Marowijne River, Hurault counted a dozen varieties in 1965 planted
by Aucans and Aluku in French Guiana, and Hoffman (personal communication) listed 29 varieties
farmed by the Saramaccans between 2003 and 2006. Unfortunately, none of these scholars collected
specimens or provided detailed (morphological) descriptions of the rice varieties. More systematic
studies of the Maroon knowledge and practices regarding wild and cultivated plants was done by
ethnobotanist, initially mostly on wild and medicinal plant species (Van Andel et al. 2014; (van ‘t Klooster
et al. 2022). Collection of names and samples of rice varieties among Marron communities are from
recent date (Van Andel et al., 2019) and our current study is the rst attempt to sample rice diversity
across all Maroon communities. to. The research questions addressed in the paper are Which rice variety
names exist and what do they refer to? Why does a variety have the name that it has? Do the Maroon
communities share rice names? Do Maroons recognize each other’s rice varieties? What is the process for
naming varieties? Is this naming pattern similar for all Maroons and is it comparable to other crops in
Suriname, Africa or elsewhere?
Marronage happened from different plantations over a timeframe of more than 100 years (Dragtenstein
2002). Since a substantial proportion of enslaved Africans in Suriname were rice farmers in Upper West
Africa (Carney 2005), elements of a rice naming pattern may already had been established in Africa.

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What we argue in this paper is that the Maroon rice naming pattern is based on a combination of cultural
and agro-ecological associations with distinguishing morphological features, and 2) that the cultural
associations in rice names refer to ancestral origins. A study on rice names in Gambia revealed a naming
system based on morphological, agronomic and culinary traits, known persons geographical origin of the
rice, and, in rare cases, animals (Nuijten and Almekinders, 2005). Moreover, the study suggests that
relatively recent varieties that are widely used initially get named after the person who is considered to
have introduced the seed rst and subsequently are renamed based on agro-ecolgical or botanical
features. ”Naming a variety after the person who introduced it can be perceived as giving credit to that
person. After a period of time, maybe 20 years or so, the variety gets a new name based on its distinctive
morphological, agronomic, or culinary traits. Possibly, when varieties get more widely diffused, the actual
origin loses its meaning and is forgotten” (Ibid.: 154). As our results make clear, the Maroon communities
in Suriname continue to name rice varieties with references to early introductions by women who escaped
from the plantations, historically more than two centuries ago. Stories about heroic escapes from
plantations and surviving persecution by plantation militias and armed forces the colonial government
employed to destruct Maroon villages are deeply engrained in Maroon culture. This, together with the key
role of women in food production, results in a wide presence of variety names referring to ancestral
women who rst escaped the plantation regime. Our results thus suggest a strong role for cultural
memory in the naming of Maroon rice varieties.
Material And Methods
We conducted semi-structured interviews in ve regions in March-April and July-August 2021 and March-
April and July-August 2022: the Tapanahoni River (Aucans), Marowijne River (Paramaccans and Aucans),
French Guiana (Aucans, Paramaccans and Saramaccans), Upper Suriname River (Saramaccans), Cottica
River (Aucans) and Upper Saramacca River (Matawai) and Lower Saramacca River (Matawai and
Saramaccans). see Fig.1.
We administered a questionnaire to infer the number of varieties grown, cultivated area, variety loss, seed
distribution, seed sources, eld selection and variety names and meaning. All interviews were held after
prior informed (oral) consent. In conjunction with this questionnaire, farmers were asked for seed
samples and/or whole rice plants to make herbarium vouchers. One duplicate was deposited at the
National Herbarium of Suriname (BBS) in Paramaribo, Suriname and the other in the herbarium of
Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands. When no living plants were available for specic
varieties, we collected seeds from rice stored in people’s outdoor granaries. Seed samples were stored in
paper envelopes: one living duplicate of each variety was deposited at the SNRI/ADRON germplasm bank
in Nickerie, Suriname for storage and phenotyping, while the other (dead sample) was stored at Naturalis
Biodiversity Center.
Furthermore, we interviewed paramount chiefs Albert Aboikoni of the Saramaccans, Lesley Valentijn of
the Matawai and Bono Velanti of the Aucans. All three permitted us to conduct research on rice,

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document traditional knowledge and collect specimens. We also interviewed ve Maroon intellectuals on
the meaning of rice names.
In our analysis, we also included rice names collected previously by other researchers: Ramdayal (2020)
among Saramaccans, van Andel et al. (2016, 2019) among Aucans, Vaillant (1948) among Aluku and
Aucans, Price (unpublished, 1960s) and Hoffman (unpublished, c. 2006) among Saramaccans, the
SNRI/ADRON seed bank (unspecied Maroon communities), Geijskes (1955) among Aucans and
Paramaccans and Fleury (2016) among Aluku. Additional Maroon rice names were collected from
specimens in the herbarium collections of Naturalis and the Herbier du Cayenne in French Guiana. No rice
names have yet been documented for the Kwinti Maroons, so this group was not included in our analysis.
Initially, we constructed a database with more than 800 names, after which we merged the different
spellings and misspelled names, following the dictionary of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL,
2013). We unravelled the meaning of the names with the help of the farmers we interviewed, the SIL
dictionary and our Maroon interpreters Edith Adjako, Vinije Haabo, John Jackson, Tolin Alexander,
Annastacia Prisiri- Samson and Kenrich Cairo.
We then scored the (meaning of the) rice names based on their morphological characteristics (color, size,
shape and presence of an awn), agronomic characteristics (treshing quality and preferred place of
growth), reference to animals, females (person’s names, female bodyparts, etc.) or males (names and
bodyparts), geographic origin, people or ethnicities from which rice was received, and other features.
Maroons often recognize more than one type of the same variety, and for these they use binary names.
For example, a red Rexora, white Rexora or spotted Rexora. In this case, we counted the variety name
(‘Rexora’) as one, but scored an additional morphological category (red, white or spotted.) An exception
was made for those varieties for which color is explicitly mentioned in the variety name and no other
types are recognized within that variety. One example is
baaka alisi
(‘black rice’), which is a single variety
of
O. glaberrima
, and therefore was assigned its own category. We then sorted names based on the
Maroon group where the sample was taken and calculated frequencies of all categories. An UpsetR
diagram (Conway 2017) was created to show unique and shared names among the ve Maroon groups,
using R studio. A map of Suriname and gures were created using the “get_stamenmap()” and “ggmap()”
functions of the ggplot2 package (Wickham 2016) in R-studio were created using Microsoft Excel.
To verify how well farmers knew rice from other communities and how names were invented in the eld,
we made a ‘rice quiz’: a paper with ve samples of local rice varieties secured under transparent tape. The
varieties we selected were:
baaka alisi
(the only
O. glaberrima
variety in Suriname to date),
pende si
(‘spotted sh’, with spotted husks),
masaa alisi
(‘master’s rice’, with red bran),
Ma Paanza alisi
(‘Mrs.
Paanza’s rice’, a rice named after a Saramaccan female ancestor),
puspusi
(‘cat’) and
Carolina gold
(a
recently developed, modern cultivar from Anson Mills, Columbia, US). We included the ‘new’ Carolina gold
cultivar (https://ansonmills.com/products/23), allegedly similar to historic Caroline Gold varieties that
were exported to Suriname in the late 18th century.

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Results
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 eld. We
constructed a database from our eldwork 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 le). 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 identied 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 identied 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 specic 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

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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 specic parrotlet had eaten a lot of rice in the eld,
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 rst 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).

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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 specic 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

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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 nished 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 t 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 nd 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 specic
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.

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Rice varieties carry names of women that allegedly were the rst 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 ed 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 specic 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 eld 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 eld, or names are forgotten and rice is renamed
after its farmer.
The naming pattern across Maroon groups
In the ve Maroon groups, the naming pattern seems to be the same. Figure7 shows the percentages of
names in the different categories for the specic 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
eldwork 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 signicance in Maroon communities (van Andel et al. 2010). The variety
pende si
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 rst 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

Page 11/25
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 ed 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.
Discussion
Mechanism of naming
From the 284 unique Maroon rice names, a naming pattern was noticed with categories referring to
morphology, agronomy, animals, male and female names, and rice brought from specic regions or by
other ethnicities. As the ve Maroon groups had only four to ve rice names in common, we can deduce
that most names were invented after the enslaved Africans escaped into the forest and formed tribal
groups that practiced agriculture in relative isolation. However, as the Maroon rice naming pattern is
similar between groups, it is likely that this was in place before marronage.

Page 12/25
The difference between our ndings and the rice naming systems described by Nuijten and Almekinders
(2005) for Gambia and by Rao et al. (2002) for Laos are the names referring to the length of the growth
season, extension ocers, resistance to drought, weeds, development organizations and production
ecosystems. These categories are absent in Suriname, as all Maroon rice varieties are ready to harvest
within four to ve months, production systems are all similar, there are no extension ocers or NGOs
handing out rice, and drought is not a problem. Common aspects of our results with Laos and Gambia
are the names referring to morphology, agronomy and resemblance to animals, which may be part of an
universal naming system for rice or crops in general. In Gambia, rice names also refer to female farmers
who introduced a variety into the community. Unfortunately, Nuijten and Almekinders (2005) translated
only 20 of the 129 rice names they collected, which makes comparison with our dataset dicult. In Laos
there is no mention of either female or male farmers’ rice names (Rao et al. 2002).
Due to the naming of rice after specic persons, the Maroon naming pattern has more similarities to the
system in Gambia than to the one in Laos probably because lots of enslaved Africans were transported
from west Africa to Suriname. Rice names were also recorded in many other West African countries, such
as Guinea Bissau, Guinea Conakry, Togo, Sierra Leone, Ghana and Senegal (Nuijten et al. 2009).
Unfortunately, most of these names have not yet been translated. If this had been done, we would be able
to compare the Maroon naming pattern more thoroughly with those of the countries from where enslaved
Africans were taken to Suriname. Of the few African rice names that were translated by Richards (1983),
we see some resemblance between the Maroon pattern and the west African systems. The Mende rice
name
helekpoi
(‘elephant’) in Sierra Leone was a variety that was found in the stomach of an elephant
that was killed after destroying a rice eld. A similarly constructed name,
apiikutu
in Suriname, refers to
rice found in the stomach of a parakeet that had eaten from the crop. In both cases, farmers continued to
grow the rice taken from the dead animals. The name
kalembaama
, large jaw bone in Mende, refers to a
variety with long outer glumes. A very similar-looking rice grown by Saramaccans is known as
hánza-a-
bandja
, meaning ‘wings on the sides’.
Ngolo-yombo
(‘chimpanzee hair’) in Mende has a long black awn
like the hair of this ape (Richards, 1983). The naming of awned rice after hairy animals was also found in
Suriname, where Amazonian mammals such as peccaries, otters, howler monkeys and jaguars have
taken over the role of their African counterparts.
As people from many different African ethnicities ended up on Surinamese plantations, any African
naming of rice varieties that ‘survived’ the Middle Passage was inuenced by the overall Creolization of
language and food producing practices on the plantations and, subsequently, in the Maroon villages. The
naming pattern is thus best characterized as a local adaptation of an Atlantic bowl of rice varieties and
names to the Surinamese situation. The selection, adaptation and naming process continued in the post-
abolition period.
Women as key agents in rice diversity
Maroon rice names are most unique in the reference to women. This category accounted for almost one
third of all names. Names refer to women in the more general sense, such as ‘red woman’, ‘white-‘ or

Page 13/25
‘black-haired woman’, ‘messy woman’, but also to individual people. What makes Maroon rice names truly
distinctive are varieties such as
Ma Paanza
,
alisi Seei
and
Ma Jaa
. These were well-known ancestors of
the Saramaccans who allegedly escaped with rice who are not known by other Maroon groups. The
general pattern that emerges is that every Maroon tribe seems to have rice names of specic women that
are considered as the rst to have escaped with rice and commemorated as fundamental to their own
survival. We did not yet collect such stories from Paramaccans and the Aluku. These rice names probably
have been passed on over many generations, potentially as far as the late seventeenth century. Paanza,
Seei and Yaya are said to have escaped their plantation between 1690 and 1739 (Price 1983). The strong
presence of female names for rice varieties represents the important role of female farmers in Maroon
rice cultivation. Different groups of runaways, such as Agbos, Baákapáus and Boterbalies were
mentioned in accounts of Maroon oral history (Price 1983), but merged into different Maroon clans and
lost their original names. Our research suggests that they all escaped with specic rice varieties that kept
the name of these people. This information is probably lost in oral history and the contemporary archives,
but the rice names indicate that they all contributed to the current crop diversity in the Maroon
communities.
Shared African heritage
African terms for rice, such as
pende
,
saka
, and
bongo
, known in different forms and spelling, reveal
traditional knowledge about this crop among enslaved Africans prior to marronage. The same goes for
the often-used rice name
alulu
in Aucan communities. The root of this word,
lunlun
, meaning ‘to fall apart’
or ‘crumble’ comes from the Ewe language spoken in Benin (Smith. 2015a). The fact that all Maroon
farmers recognized
baaka alisi
, the only
O. glaberrima
variety, and most knew the name
pende
for spotted
rice is probably because these names refer to old morphological traits that are easily recognized. When a
variety is not known, a name is given that is rst based on morphology and if it does not have striking
features such as an awn, it is connected to the woman who rst introduces it to others. The question still
is whether the many names also reect a huge genetic diversity. Not every name represents a single
variety, some names can include more than one rice type. Other varieties can have more than one name.
Future research on the DNA of our Maroon rice samples will reveal to what extent the names are
indicative for genetic diversity, and probably reveals the geographical origin of these crop varieties.
Names do change
Maroon rice cultivation probably is a dynamic system in which new varieties appear and old ones get
lost, and the same must be happening with names. The oldest documented name of a rice variety was
'joerka aleisi' (ancestor spirit rice) by Hostmann (1850), which we also reported in 2021. Of the 28 unique
rice names collected by Price in the 1960s, however, 40% was no longer heard during our surveys in the
same region. We also found names that were previously not recorded, but had the same meaning as
names recorded before, such as
amapapi
(1960s), meaning ‘with wings on the side’ probably refers to the
same outer long glumes as the rice that we collected with the name
jesi teke
(long ears) or
opolani
(airplane). Unfortunately, there is no picture or herbarium collection of
amapapi
for us to compare. We

Page 14/25
believe also that names such as
Aluku paansu
(Aluku seed) and
Ndyuka alulu
(Aucan roller) exist
because the original name is forgotten (or misunderstood) after it was exchanged with another Maroon
group. However, this pattern of changing names is not the same as in Gambia, were varieties that were
exchanged immediately got the name of the introducer, but lost this after c. 30 years (Nuijten and
Almekinders 2007). Rice names in Maroon communities often still reect historic introducers and
farmers, some as old as 300 years.
Conclusion
Maroon history is reected in the names of rice varieties currently grown by Maroon groups in Suriname.
A substantial portion of rice names refers to women who are commemorated through stories about
bringing food crops to the community during the struggle for freedom. Furthermore in the rice names we
found the separate groups of runaways that all brought rice with them, descendants of these groups do
not have the same name anymore. The other ethnicities the Maroon had contacts with in the past, and
the adaptation to the New World environment visible in the references to Amazonian animals. The
process of naming a variety is complex, but seems uniform in all ve Maroon groups studied so far and
have clear but unspecic reference to West-Africa.
Declarations
Acknowledgements
This research was nancially supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientic Research
(OCEW.Klein.419). The authors thank SNRI/ADRON, the National Herbarium Suriname (BBS), translator
Edith Adjako and all collaborating farmers for their support. We also thank Maroon intellectuals Andre
Mosis, John Jackson, Jermain Keizer and Tolin Alexander. Paramount chiefs Albert Aboikoni
(Saramaccans), Lesley Valentijn (Matawai) and Bono Velanti (Aucans), and Santigron village chief Dansi
Waterberg greatly facilitated our research.
Declaration: the authors declare no conict of interest.
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Figures

Page 18/25
Figure 1
Map of Suriname showing major sites for each of the Maroon groups were rice names were collected.

Page 19/25
Figure 2
UpsetR diagram showing the number of unique and shared vernacular rice names of the ve Maroon
groups

Page 20/25
Figure 3
Percentages of rice names in each naming category. Percentages add up to more than 100 % since we
scored 76 binary names in more than one category.

Page 21/25
Figure 4
A. The Saramaccan traditional rice variety
hánza-a-bandja
(‘wings on the side’, NP 220 ). The long outer
glumes are clearly visible. B. the Saramaccan variety jöööjööö (‘long hair’, NP137). Pictures: Nicholaas
Pinas.

Page 22/25
Figure 5
Percentage of rice names referring women (n=80), split in general female associations and referral to
specic female persons in all Maroon groups.

Page 23/25
Figure 6
Odina with her mother Sabel threshing her rice in Dangogo 2. Picture: Nicholaas Pinas.

Page 24/25
Figure 7
Percentages of names in the different categories for all ve Maroon tribes.

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Figure 8
Percentage of farmers (n = 20) who invented names with a morphology component of an unknown
variety.
Supplementary Files
This is a list of supplementary les associated with this preprint. Click to download.
supplementarylePinasetal.ricenames.xlsx