Leprosy and Forced Labour: Fears and Responses of the Colonial Regime in Suriname

Abstract

The proximity of European plantation owners to the slaves of African descent prompted inquiries into the health and disease of the non-white population in the Caribbean to a greater extent than in Asia 1 (Worboys 1993, Arnold 1996). To European doctors and surgeons in the Caribbean, the African represented an important source of pollution for the European (Quinian 1996: 112–13). In Suriname, leprosy came to be seen especially as a symbol of the African threat to Europeans and was transformed into a ‘colonial disease’. At the same time, there was a fear of return of leprosy by carriers from the colony to Europe, brought back by colonial subjects (compare Bewell 1999). Leprosy thus served to remind the Dutch colonizers of the presumed importance of creating and upholding clear boundaries with the enslaved along racial lines. The fear of leprosy led to compulsory segregation policies to uphold these boundaries. It is important to note that these policies originated in the colony of Suriname itself rather than being imported from 180a metropolitan ‘centre’ in Europe to the ‘periphery’ of a colonial empire. 2 Thus, it can be said that segregation policies in Suriname were developed not by Dutch medicine in the Netherlands but by colonial medicine in the colony. They were developed from the perspective of a ‘slaveholder’s knowledge’, with ‘slaveholders’ not just referring to actual owners of enslaved in Suriname, but also to ‘many more [in the colony] with a direct or indirect interest in slaveholding through family connections or professional and business arrangements’ (Fox-Genovese and Genovese 2005: 1).