The Reinvention of Household Medicine by Enslaved Africans in Suriname Tinde van Andel* Summary. Enslaved Africans in Suriname faced not only a harsh environment and brutal conditions, but the challenge of sourcing therapeutically useful plants in an unfamiliar land. How did they discover me- dicinal herbs in the New World? Literature suggests that slave medicine was already well developed in eighteenth-century Suriname, while herbaria prove that Old World plants were present since 1687. Current vernacular plant names reveal European, Amerindian and African influence. Ethnobotanical re- search among present-day Afro-Surinamers and related West African groups demonstrates that al- though most plants used by Afro-Surinamers are Neotropical, preparation methods and applications are still very African. This illustrates the durability and persistence of household medicine despite the dis- ruption during the Middle Passage. Afro-Surinamers have reinvented their household medicine by using familiar Old World plants, selecting New World plants that were related to African ones, incorporating knowledge of other ethnic groups and deploying trial and error. Keywords: ethnobotany; botanical collections; Maroons; medicinal plants; trans-Atlantic slavery Between 10 and 12 million Africans were shipped to the Americas during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In the period between 1651 and 1850 some 300,000 Africans ended up in the Dutch colony of Suriname. 1 Slaves in this country came from many different regions along the West and Central African coasts, but most were bought from the Dutch strong- holds near the Kingdoms of Dahomey (present-day Benin and Togo), Loango (Gabon, Angola and Congo-Brazzaville) and the former Gold Coast (now Ghana). 2 Due to their dif- ferent backgrounds, culture and language, Surinamese slaves formed a very heterogeneous group. 3 They were put to work on the sugar and coffee plantations, enduring severe priva- tions: hard work, little food, brutal punishments and almost no medical care. Slavery has often been described as a major disruptor of African families, households and cultural *Naturalis Biodiversity Center / Leiden University, PO Box 9517, 2300 RA Leiden, the Netherlands. Email: tinde. vanandel@naturalis.nl Tinde van Andel is a NWO-Vidi Research fellow in Ethnobotany at Naturalis Biodiversity Center. She and her PhD stu- dents have carried out fieldwork in Suriname, Ghana, Benin and Gabon to study the link between Afro-Caribbean and Western African medicinal and ritual plant use. Ongoing research focuses on the sustainability of the herbal medicine trade in Western Africa and trans-Atlantic types of household medicine and cultural-bound health syndromes. © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Social History of Medicine. doi:10.1093/shm/hkv014 1 David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transat- lantic Slave Trade (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Rudolf A. J. Van Lier, Frontier Society: A Social Analysis of the History of Surinam (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971); Richard Price, Guiana Maroons: a Historical and Bibliographic Introduction (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 2 Johannes Postma, The Dutch Participation in the African Slave Trade: Slaving on the Guinea Coast, 1675–1795 (East Lansing, Michigan State University, 1970); Richard Price, ‘Kikoongo and Saramaccan: a Re- appraisal’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volken- kunde, 1975, 131, 461–78; Eltis and Richardson, Atlas Transatlantic Slave Trade. 3 Sydney W. Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Per- spective (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976). Social History of Medicine page 1 of 19 Social History of Medicine Advance Access published March 12, 2015 by guest on March 13, 2015 http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from