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From the first until the last day of slavery, enslaved people liberated themselves by escaping from the plantation colony and setting up new, independent communities. These escapees, who came to be called Maroons, settled in the tropical rain forest of Suriname’s interior, far away from the seat of colonial power in Paramaribo. Yet they stayed tied to the colonial economy in several ways. The general impression people have is that Maroons lived in total isolation in Suriname’s interior until quite recently, about one or two generations ago, but this must now be largely discounted as a myth. This is certainly true in the case of Maroon men.1 Women, on the other hand, remained comparatively isolated until quite recently as gender-based labour division and traditional notions of womanhood mostly linked women to the domestic sphere and the village context. This chapter examines the extent to which contact with the outside world formed part of the Maroons’ existence, and how contact has influenced Maroon lifestyles throughout history.2 Crucially, I explore how Maroons’ adoption of new communication technologies is impacting patterns of communication with the wider world and among the Maroons themselves. This contribution does not simply deal with how objects are being adopted by subjects, rather it focuses on what happens to people and their context when they use new technologies and also how new technologies are transformed due to their use in specific social contexts. In their study of the impact of the cell phone in Jamaica, Horst and Miller (2007) call this the “communicative ecology”, that is, the wider sphere which is influenced by new technologies. They emphasise the fact that a cell phone can save one’s life because it is possible to call immediately for a car or ambulance to bring a sick person to the hospital.

7 Maroons and the Communications Revolution in Suriname’s Interior