2. History on the Wild Coast
The Antilles and Guyane belong to a universe whose magical reflections invite endless vagabondage. Discovered and explored at the close of the fifteenth century, at the dawn of the Renaissance, they opened the gates of a New World to the daring European, landscapes of paradise. They regaled the adventurer with a legendary history, unfolding fabulous images before his eyes. To such beings, escaped from a rough and meager world, they revealed the sun of perpetual summer, abundant and novel foods, spaces to discover and enslave. But for this luxury the pioneers soon paid their tribute, in incurable sickness, in work rendered exhausting by the torrid climate, in solitude broken too rarely by a feminine presence.
Pierre Pluchon, Histoire des Antilles et de la Guyane, 1982
Myths are essential; French Guiana relies on them. Facts about the country do exist, but they are usually neglected; according to still another myth the facts are hard to obtain. When the French information officer in New York, N.Y. showed me her file on French Guiana, she apologized for its being so meager. “We have very few statistics from Cayenne,” she explained, “because it is too hot to make statistics there.”
David Lowenthal, “French Guiana: Myths and Realities,” 1960
COLUMBUS DAY 1992
October 12, 1992, on the Gregorian calendar marked the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus's arrival on that largest of islands, the New World. In Cayenne the occasion was commemorated with a general strike. Businesses closed and a protest march wound through the streets to the plaza before the prefecture and the old governor's palace. Although later the mood would turn uglier, with roadblocks and
Figure 3. French stamp, 1991
Only recently installed nearby, I observed the protest with bewildered amusement. Later in the week I would become acutely aware that I was white, that the vast majority of protesters were not, and that their anger was primarily directed against Metropolitan French bureaucrats and secondarily at Creole elected officials and Chinese merchants. On this first day, however, I was struck most by the smallness of the affair (like everything else in French Guiana relative to metropolitan norms) and the generality of its claims (the local economy is in poor shape, and the French state must fix it). After five centuries of European presence in the New World and the long painful history of colonial empire, this plea for French-directed development impressed me as an unlikely outcome.[1]
The strike lasted through the week, before negotiations produced the promise of a new aid package from Paris. In the protest's aftermath an air of bitterness lingered most strongly in neighboring Kourou, the space center town, where the barricades were last to come down and a prominent local official's car was burned. In Cayenne, people complained about the cancellation of the town's annual festival. But throughout Guyane, police lines and protest barricades vanished, and racial tensions that had openly flared subsided, as life resumed a more regular, languid pace. Despite the new initiatives, the local economy continued to stagnate and unemployment remained high. I returned to the archives to read about the past, yet the impression of this brief, tense present remained with me. How, I wondered, could a long colonial history, including periods of plantation slavery and penal colonization, lead to a demand of “the right to work for all”? As time passed and my research continued, I began to realize that an obsession with “development”—or rather its persistent absence—ran deeply through the soil of French Guiana, inseparable from the history of the colony beneath the department. Here I will sketch the background of that history, to better position the two projects that most concern us.
A PROMISE OF GOLD
The Empyre of Guiana is directly east from Peru towards the sea, and lieth under the Equinoctial line, and it hath more abundance of Golde than any part of Peru, and as many or more great Cities then euer Peru had when it florished most …. I have been assured by such of the Spanyardes as haue seen Manoa the emperiall Citie of Guiana, which the Spanyardes
― 30 ―call el Dorado, that for the greatnes, for the riches, for the excellent seate, it farre exceedeth any of the world.Sir Walter Ralegh, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana, 1596
We will begin our story not with Columbus but with another noted sailor and another small wooden ship bobbing off to sea. Though Spanish eyes may first have discerned the shape of Europe's new western edge, an English pen first set forth a central motif of its conquest. Composed over a century after Columbus's arrival in the Caribbean, Sir Walter Ralegh's The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana grandly proclaimed the great riches to be found in the northeast section of South America.[2] The area he described ran south from the mouth of the Orinoco River—not far from where Defoe would later place Robinson Crusoe's fictive island—down what was called the “Wild Coast” toward Brazil. Ralegh was sure that somewhere in the tangled forest away from the sea lay the great city of Manoa, a fountainhead of wealth that would put Peru to shame. Although he returned to England with a cargo composed largely of enthusiasm, and although a second voyage in 1617 ended in disaster, his account of the city of gold set the legend of El Dorado firmly in the history of the New World. Here was the driving dream: a hidden source of wealth—wealth found, not created—just over the horizon.[3]
Most popular renderings of French Guiana history begin with El Dorado, and the reference runs through the accounts of several centuries. For all that the French zone of the Guianas lay slightly to the side of Ralegh's adventuring and the legendary location of Manoa, the sense of richness in the land struck powerful chords. Gold, the metal of conquest, has repeatedly lured those seeking a future in Guyane and still beckons poor Brazilians and large international companies. However, we should remember that Ralegh was not only interested in discovery. He was also a pioneering figure (however unsuccessful) of North American settlement, standing at the beginning of the great phase of British and French expansion. While Manoa would remain hidden, new sources of wealth sprouted west of the Atlantic. As one of Ralegh's later editors wrote when introducing the adventurer to his reading public in 1928, Ralegh is “the link between the Elizabethan pioneer and the sober hewers of wood and drawers of water of the seventeenth century, who built where the others had led.”[4] Thus we come across a crucial hinge in colonial practice: that between exploratory conquest and practical settlement.
As plunder and mining came to the Wild Coast, so did agriculture and the productive reformation of nature—the other end of Ralegh's dreams. During the seventeenth century, a number of European powers vied for footholds on the Guiana coast, with the Dutch, English, and French taking advantage of Spanish and Portuguese neglect. The first French expedition to what would become “their” Guiana took place in 1604, but they did not establish effective control until many decades later. After trials at other locations, early efforts centered on the island of Cayenne (a section of land separated from the rest of the mainland by estuaries and rivers). In 1664 an expedition by a French company captured Cayenne from the Dutch, only to lose it again three years later to an English raid. The French regained control in 1676 and gradually settled into full possession of the surrounding section of coast.
Even when they had fended off rival claimants, the French were not alone. At the time of European settlement, Guyane may have been inhabited by slightly under ten thousand Amerindians, principally Kaliña (Galibi) and Palikur. Indeed, the name Guiana most likely stems from Amerindian roots.[5] In addition, slaves were soon imported from Africa; the Compagnie de la France Equinoxiale already had possession of some 420 in 1665. The primary model of settlement adopted was the plantation, which required massed manual labor. Despite a number of experiments, the slave system remained dominant into the nineteenth century, and slaves of African descent soon outnumbered all other segments of the population.[6] Prior to their expulsion from the colony in 1762 (part of a general banishment from the realm of France), members of the Jesuit order worked prominently to establish plantation settlements.
Yet in recounting the plantation history of French Guiana, one must stress that the region continually languished at the edge of France's first colonial empire. In relative terms few slaves were imported, little capital was invested, and little was generated. Unlike the Caribbean islands, French Guiana missed the sugar boom; in the words of Marie-José Jolivet, for the area around Cayenne the period between 1677 and 1763 constitutes “a century of stagnation.”[7] The contrast with other entities in the area becomes all the more striking given that the neighboring Dutch settlement grew to become one of the most important—and rich—plantation colonies of the eighteenth century. [8]
Two factors contributed to French Guiana's stagnation as a plantation colony. The first was a lack of labor; between 1715 and 1775 only 11 French slavers left Nantes for Cayenne, whereas 299 headed for
SETBACKS AND SLOW DEVELOPMENTS
At the conclusion of the Seven Years' War in 1763, France lost much of its overseas empire, including Canada. As the largest landmass left under French rule, French Guiana became the subject of renewed colonial interest.[10] In a bid to revive imperial growth, the French made a disastrous attempt to settle large numbers of European peasants in the region around Kourou. Some twelve thousand immigrants arrived between 1763 and 1765, hoping to build a tropical Quebec up the coast from the slave plantations.[11] Poorly prepared and terribly administered—the expedition was even at odds with its established neighbor Cayenne—the venture collapsed amid widespread epidemics. By most counts at least half the colonists died.
Here visions of El Dorado mixed with a fantasy of Canadian industry. Those involved in the scheme sought to create a settler colony in the tropics, while those who participated found themselves in a confused version of the New World dream. One apocryphal account has a cook informing her master that she has just married in order to emigrate. “Oh, Sir,” she gushes to him, “it's a new discovery, gold and silver mines have been found, diamonds, coffee, sugar, and cotton; one can make a fortune there in two years.” Because some members of the elite,
The effect of the Kourou expedition was to bolster suspicions that Europeans were incapable of colonizing Guyane and that the land and climate were deadly to them. Later documents related to decisions involving the settlement of Europeans in French Guiana refer to the Kourou disaster frequently, and the experience served as one of the basic elements in a new emerging myth to fit alongside that of El Dorado: the myth of French Guiana as a European tomb.[13] The expedition also left a local legacy, renaming a trio of islands off the coast of Kourou—a refuge during the epidemics—the Iles du Salut, or Islands of Salvation. In material terms, however, the experiment left little behind; a handful of settlers remained, but the focus of colonial efforts returned to the plantation model.
The upheaval of the revolutionary period in Metropolitan France also brought turmoil to the colonies. Most momentously, the slaves were freed in 1794, only to be reenslaved in 1802. Though Cayenne experienced minor insurrection, nothing on the scale of the uprisings in Guadeloupe or the future Haiti occurred. Instead, Guyane served as a site of deportation for several hundred enemies of the shifting regimes. As with the Kourou expedition, death rates among these exiles were high, further cementing the area's negative reputation as a land for European settlement, particularly when several accounts of their suffering became sufficiently disseminated. In 1809 the Portuguese, with English assistance, seized French Guiana. Five years later the territory was returned to France under the terms of the Treaty of Paris.[14]
THE MOMENT OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
As the revolutionary tides in France subsided, French Guiana experienced a moment of relative prosperity. Like the restoration of the Bourbons, it was to prove short-lived, but for a period around 1830 the slave population expanded to nineteen thousand, and production included spices, largely for local consumption, as well as export crops of cotton, sugar, and dye. However, in the face of growing cotton production in the southern United States and European sugar beet crops, French Guiana's moment of expansion came too little too late. Both plantation production and the slave population dwindled as the midcentury neared.[15]
In 1848 another surge of revolution finally swept slavery aside throughout the remaining French Empire. The effects in Guyane of this development were marked, as the former slaves left the plantations to practice subsistence agriculture (farming plots known as abattis). Unlike most other parts of the Caribbean, French or otherwise, here the population was so small and available land so vast that the plantation system disintegrated, leaving little economic structure in its wake. Thus no well-defined reinvented “peasantry” emerged. Inspired by the example of neighboring British Guiana, the remaining planter class and colonial officials sought to encourage immigration of contract laborers, recruiting Africans, Chinese, Indians, and even a few souls from the Madeira Islands. None of these experiments met with much success. Unlike Britain, France lacked an obvious source of colonial labor.[16] Instead of a renewed plantation system, two new forces came to define the local economy for much of the ensuing century—a penal colony and a gold rush. Established in 1852, the penal colony failed to live up to its initial billing as a substitute source of agricultural labor; however, in fits and starts, its lingering presence deeply influenced the flow of goods and services as well as the reputation of the colony. For its part, the gold rush gathered steam in the decades after finds in the 1850s and 1860s and brought thousands of free immigrants to Guyane, largely from the neighboring areas, especially the French and British West Indies.[17] It also became the focus of much of the export activity on the part of the civil population, who were lured by the promise of quick wealth, and it remains a significant part of the cultural mythology of Guyanais society. The image of the small-time maraudeur or bricoleur, pan in hand, finding his fortune in the face of mining companies, took an honored place in the Creole pantheon.[18] Although arbitration severed the French territory from grandiose claims south and east to the Amazon (Switzerland awarding the area to Brazil), as the twentieth century dawned this particular colony remained on its erratic course. Between a nonproductive criminal analog of the plantation and a revitalized quest for El Dorado, French Guiana's economy continued a peculiar, hollow evolution.
THE LONG CRISIS: COLONIALISM
TO DEPARTMENTALIZATION
During the decades preceding World War II, the colony remained a remote appendage to the French body politic. A number of other ventures
The world depression of the 1930s did little to aid French Guiana's economy. Gold production declined and the fragility of the colonial economy was left bare for all to see. Despite the tons of gold extracted since the nineteenth century, little significant industry or agriculture existed, and the gap between imports and exports failed to close. For all its lack of production and endemic corruption, the penal colony served as a source of revenue as well as cheap labor, a fact that led some locals to oppose its closure, even as others called for its suppression. In 1938 the French Assembly finally made the decision to phase out the operation, setting the stage for a new political and economic era. However, World War II intervened. Along with the rest of France's Atlantic colonies, Guyane was left stranded by the fall of France in 1940.[20] Under an administration sympathetic to the Vichy regime it faltered economically, cut off from supply routes and incapable of producing adequate supplies of food. The suffering in the penal colony during this period was particularly intense. In 1943, under continuing pressure from the United States and shifts in public opinion, the Vichy regime finally collapsed, and pro–Free French forces and sentiment took over. While this political shift failed to rekindle economic production, American subventions, partly in the form of the construction of two airfields, eased the crisis.[21]
The aftermath of the war brought French Guiana to an administrative watershed: the transition of its status from that of a colony to that of an “overseas department” (département d'outre-mer, or DOM) politically integrated into the French state. In March 1946 the special relationship of the significant remnants of France's first empire—Guyane, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Réunion—with the Metropole was written into law. This shift, long sought by the political representatives of
A BUREAUCRATIC LULL
“Bricolage must give way to technique.”
French colonial report, 1945[23]
A shift of some sort was clearly needed to integrate the region into greater France. In the 1946 census, French Guiana could only muster a population of 29,506, recording one of the lowest population densities on the planet. Cayenne was the only settlement of any significance, boasting 10,961 inhabitants. The rest of the population lived largely in small pockets along the coast, while the interior officially held only 6,509 persons. The population figures were down almost a quarter from prewar levels, and birthand death rates were discouraging. The closure of the penal colony eliminated one source of new arrivals, and the gold fields no longer attracted the flood of fortune seekers of the glory days. Calls were made for a new wave of immigrants, echoing an earlier plea for Jewish refugees. However, no large-scale immigration ensued, and the pattern of population decline did not reverse until 1954.[24]
The economy faced other challenges besides the lack of adequate labor supply: infrastructure was scanty and disease endemic. Communication and transportation links between Cayenne and the other communities left much to be desired, and public health measures were minimal. The new administration identified these problems and sought to ameliorate both, attempting to improve the conditions of life while creating a model French society on the South American continent. In general, the public health campaign met with great success. The establishment of a network of clinics and radio telephones allowed widespread medical coverage, and a crusade to improve mother and infant care helped decrease infant mortality (although a moral campaign to reduce illegitimate births among the Creole population failed to achieve equivalent results). The local branch of the Institut Pasteur—established during the war in 1940—actively led a campaign against malaria, and DDT spraying began in 1949. This program soon claimed spectacular
The search for an elusive “economic takeoff,” in contrast, largely failed. The most significant growth in the local economy occurred in the public sector, which accounted for almost two-thirds of salaries in 1959. This dramatic increase stemmed directly from departmentalization, as administrative models derived from Metropolitan norms were applied overseas and bureaucratic positions, in the absence of alternatives, acquired a mark of social distinction. Because there were difficulties in luring trained personnel to remote locations, in 1957 the Metropolitan salary scale was augmented by a 40 percent bonus for those serving in overseas departments. This both exacerbated the gap between those on and off the public payroll and increased the attraction of administrative posts. At the same time this influx of surplus income encouraged the growth of consumer spending, and new commodities and services (including automobiles and electrical power) made their appearance. Although departmentalization improved the standard of living and general quality of life of the citizens of French Guiana, it only furthered dependence on France.[26] The economic hollow stretching between gold exploitation and the bagne in the prewar colony gaped only wider beneath the frame of the postwar welfare state.
POLITICAL HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT PLANS
It never occurred to anyone that any large-scale enterprise could be put through successfully without the intervention of the State.
Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution, 1856
At the end of the 1950s local enthusiasm for the departmental experiment in French Guiana began to wane. As the Algerian War precipitated a constitutional crisis in France, a number of leftist political parties favoring greater autonomy emerged onto the local scene. The decade of the 1960s also witnessed several significant transformations of the social and economic landscapes, including the growing significance of migration issues and the establishment of the Guiana Space Center
The early 1970s ushered in a small burst of independence movements and political unrest, the peaks coming in 1971 and 1974. After the arrest of a number of militants the protests eventually fizzled, though underlying tensions remained. Despite efforts to revitalize the economy and modernize agricultural practice, production continued to sag. France's entry into the European Economic Community and treaties signed with Caribbean, African, and Pacific nations complicated the economic position of Guyanais agriculture, while shifting consumption patterns favored European staples of bread and potatoes over local manioc. In a lull of space activity in the middle of the decade, the government unveiled a new development initiative, the Plan Vert (Green Plan), which envisioned a new wave of industrious French colonists to serve, in the words of Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, as the “principal motor of development.”[28] The document outlining the initiative includes a sequence about a young Metropolitan named “Henri” who arrives in French Guiana to seek his fortune. Learning to shoot a bow and arrow, cutting a tree, and inspecting a gold mine, Henri becomes aware of the range of possibilities awaiting in this yet-unconquered New World. Two centuries after the disastrous Kourou expedition, a ghost of the settler dream reemerges in these pages; on the cover of the document we see Henri paddling a canoe into the future, while a nameless, dark-skinned man toils dourly behind him.[29]
The Green Plan encountered strenuous local opposition and failed to achieve its envisioned goals. Independence groups denounced it as a form of potential “genocide,” and at the same time the value of paper products (a planned focus of investment) fell sharply on the world market.[30] Out of over fifteen thousand application dossiers processed, fewer than a thousand found their way through the appropriate French ministries, and little new agriculture took root in Guyane.[31] Immigration, however, continued apace throughout the latter part of the decade and into the 1980s. Haitians arrived in large numbers, and, in the wake of the long conflict in the former Indochina, a group of Hmong were resettled in these distant tropics and encouraged to play the role of model horticultural minority.
Meanwhile, the space program rebounded with the newly designed Ariane rocket, which proved to be both a technical and a commercial success. As confidence grew and satellite contracts rolled in, the space complex and the neighboring community of Kourou expanded quickly, displacing the former penal colony hub of St. Laurent as French Guiana's second-largest town. Administratively, the Socialist Party victory in 1982 and the subsequent policy of “decentralization” led to increased local political authority and a new layer of bureaucratic offices. Economic production, however, continued to limp unhurriedly along. Wood, shrimp, and gold each showed signs of promise as an export product, but none posed much of a challenge to the public sector. Direct air links to Paris helped to generate modest European tourism, but nothing on the scale of Caribbean islands. In 1986 the outbreak of civil war in neighboring Suriname brought a new flood of refugees, largely Maroons, while the number of Brazilians crossing the other border began to soar. By the time of the 1990 census, the official population was over one hundred thousand. Coupled with endemic unemployment and an economy split between those enjoying a professional income and spending freely, those living at a more modest level of French welfare allowances, and those working unofficially and scraping along at a subsistence level, this demographic explosion threatened to drastically alter the shape of Guyanais society.
Thus by 1992 the stage was set: a standard of living and patterns of consumption geared to French norms went hand in hand with a dearth of agricultural or industrial production. Only bureaucratic agencies, the space center, and a black market centered on the labor of illegal aliens showed clear signs of vitality. After three centuries of European presence, gold, the plantation, the prison, the bureau, and the rocket
NATURAL FACTS
Since this work concerns itself with “nature,” a brief litany of relevant facts is in order. The geographic region known on current maps as French Guiana (or la Guyane française lies between 51°30’ and 54°30’ West in longitude, and 2° and 6° North in latitude, encompassing somewhat under ninety thousand square kilometers (roughly thirty-five thousand square miles) of surface area. In human political terms it is located on the northeast coast of South America, above Brazil and beside Suriname, and is about the size of the state of Maine, or about a sixth the size of Metropolitan France.[32] The average annual temperature varies little, usually resting between 22° and 30°C (71.6° and 86°F), with a mean just under 27°C (80.6° F). Humidity remains persistently high (usually between 80 and 90 percent). Rainfall is heavy, totaling some 200 to 400 centimeters (79 to 157 inches) per year depending on locale, and falling most frequently during the periods between December and February and between May and July. The “dry season,” which denotes the longest break in precipitation and the highest set of temperatures, usually occurs between August and December. The sun is bright and shines for an average of six hours a day. Because of Guyane's position relative to the shifting zone of intertropical convergence, it does not experience the cycle of hurricanes that afflict the Caribbean, and the ground is seismically stable. Indeed, the area constitutes an epitome of natural regularity: the measurable climate is methodically tropical, and the experience of it calm, warm, and sticky. [33]
While the coastal region includes savannas, mangroves, and marshlands, rich rain forest mantles the interior, composing some 90 percent of the surface area. Stretches around the coast settlements include thick secondary growth, but most of the forest is primary, dark, and strikingly open beneath high trees. Although hills rise amid the trees, from the air the topography appears relatively flat. An impressive number of rivers and streams wind through the forest to meet the calm and often muddy sea. The two largest of these, the River Maroni to the northwest and the River Oyapock to the southeast, mark the present-day boundaries with Suriname and Brazil respectively; both sport stretches of
Figure 4. Governor's palace, Cayenne, 1990
POLITICAL ECONOMY
As an economic entity, French Guiana is truly an outpost of France, officially importing and exporting most goods to and from that source. Imports easily outstrip exports, by a factor of about seven in 1992.[36] The productive sector of the economy includes exploitation of wood, fishing, agriculture, and mining, but no enterprise is significantly large. Unlike in the neighboring French islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, tourism remains a minor factor, and the space center accounts for up to half of all economic activity. Almost a quarter of the workforce is unemployed, yet French Guiana contains about sixty thousand
Figure 5. Creole house, Mana, 1993
As a political entity, French Guiana remains first and foremost a département, a unit established at the end of the eighteenth century in revolutionary France and perfected under Napoleon. Although the overseas departments retain certain distinct features, for most intents and purposes they live up to the legal claim of constituting an extension of France. As in Metropolitan departments, the French state is represented by a préfet (prefect). Not coincidentally, this official occupies the former colonial governor's palace on ceremonial occasions, serving for many practical purposes much the same role in the postcolonial department. The local political apparatus is complex and multiheaded, with numerous and occasionally overlapping spheres of authority.[38] One significant divide, however, frames Guyanais political disputes, that separating the local elected officials (les élus) from the professional administrators representing the French state in the prefect's office. Not only is this distinction frequently invoked in political rhetoric, but the
HUMAN PATTERNS
Three demographic facts distinguish the human geography of French Guiana. First, the population is very small, barely enough to fill a modest city in many parts of the world. Second, the population is nevertheless quite diverse, a result of centuries of colonial migration. And third, recent demographic growth, much of it coming from immigration, has significantly altered the ethnic landscape. Here I will enumerate only the major groups, and echo Ken Bilby's proviso that if one were to count all the finer distinctions made, the list could easily pass a hundred.[39] The Amerindian population found within the territory includes six groups: the Arawak, Emerillon, Kaliña (Galibi), Palikur, Wayana, and Wayampi. The ancestors of the Arawak and Kaliña, who today live on the coast and are the most integrated of the Amerindian communities, and possibly those of the Emerillon and Palikur, were present in Guyane when the French arrived. The forebears of the Wayana and Wayampi most likely entered French Guiana from Brazil at some point in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. The total population for all groups is something in the range of four thousand to five thousand persons, over half of whom are Kaliña. The Wayana, Wayampi, and Emerillon, all of whom live in the interior, remain the most distinct in terms of dress and cultural behavior.[40] The Europeans who arrived in the seventeenth through nineteenth century left few descendants, and the “Metropolitans” who currently live in French Guiana are more recent immigrants, mostly centered around Cayenne, the administrative center, and Kourou, the space town. That segment of the population known as “Creoles,” the descendants of former African slaves,
An imperfect ethnic breakdown in 1985, prior to the major influx of Brazilians and Maroon refugees, ran as follows: Guyanais Creoles 43 percent, Haitians 22 percent, Metropolitans 8 percent, Maroons 6 percent, Brazilians 6 percent, French Antillian Creoles 5 percent, Amerindians 4 percent, Anglophone Caribbeans 3 percent, Chinese 1 percent, Hmong 1 percent, and Suriname Creoles 1 percent. Since that time the population has grown considerably, with a 1992 estimate of 131,000 and a 1994 figure of 150,000.[42] Taken as a whole the population is very young; more than half the inhabitants are under twenty-five years of age. The birthrate is almost seven times higher than the death rate, and if growth matches predictions, the total population will near 200,000 in the year 2000 census.[43]
Because my main focus is on actors arriving in the tropics from Europe, internal tensions surrounding identity in French Guiana remain muted in this work. However, it is important to note that a crucial social divide runs between the coast (where the vast majority of the population lives) and the interior (rarely visited by those who live on the coast). The status of “native” identity remains in question across this very divide: it is most often claimed by Guyanais Creoles in opposition to Metropolitan norms, but it is always hedged by the existence of “more natural” Amerindians and Maroons in the interior. In the face of continued immigration, the position of Guyanais Creoles—the dominant non-European segment of the population—has only grown more symbolically embattled.[44]
FRENCH GUIANA IN CONTEXT
The despair of classifiers, area studies programs, kremlinologists in ill-fitting sombreros, North American race relations experts, ambulant East European commissars and the CIA, the Caribbean region goes its own way, richly researched but poorly understood.
Sidney Mintz, “The Caribbean Region,” 1974
No Industrial Revolution, no revolution of any kind, no Age of Anything, no world wars, no decades of turbulence balanced by decades of calm.
Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place, 1988
Now let us return to a broader geographic and conceptual frame. For all that French Guiana represents an anomaly (as most writers who seek to describe it suggest), it is at the same time a microcosm of larger trends and forces. In Guyane—so long a colony, so little developed—the loose ends of the New World dangle free. The most immediate geographic context into which to place French Guiana is that of two neighboring political entities to the northwest, Suriname (former Dutch Guiana) and Guyana (former British Guiana). While the physical region that they represent may extend further into Brazil and Venezuela, in human terms the Guiana trio represents an exception to most generalizations about the continent of South America, and as such can be treated as a separate block. All three share a legacy of non-Iberian European colonization and remained colonies long after the rest of the continent became politically independent. All three remain relatively marginal in both political and academic terms. In traditions of area studies in social science they are usually classified— inasmuch as they are classified at all—as part of an expanded Caribbean, a tradition that I follow here. However, for all the similarity among the three, each of the Guianas has a particular history and contemporary profile. A full comparison between them lies outside the scope of this project, but two points should be made. First, the Guiana colonies built under the rule of the Dutch and English greatly outweighed the French in wealth and standing throughout most of their history; and second, this imbalance has reversed since the departmentalization of French Guiana in 1946 and the later independence of Guyana (1966) and Suriname (1975). Whereas in the past the French outpost was a poor cousin to the other two—the
Another step back leads us to a more general frame of reference for French Guiana: the long, tense seam between Old and New worlds that runs through the Caribbean Sea. The Caribbean has had an uneasy career as a culture area in social science. The questions of anthropology in particular fall too close to home, lacking the comfortable veil of timeless purity. Even if the descendants of the pre-Columbian era have largely vanished, the effects of colonization are impossible to ignore.[46] Effects of history, in naked, painful form, lie around every corner. The traditions of the present can—with unnerving certainty, if not precision—be dated. Born amid conquest and slavery, at the intersection between Europe, Africa, and America, the defining features of the Caribbean are unquestionably modern. This modernity disabuses simple orders of space as well as time: even in its prenational origin the Caribbean is obviously transnational, the result of several migrations and intercontinental ties.
As Michel-Rolph Trouillot points out, the Caribbean has long served as an academic crossroads, lacking “gates on the frontier.”[47] Disciplinary fences are loose, and large sections of the fence running between anthropology and history lie fallen. Questions cross back and forth, linking subjects even on their surface. From this perspective it is no accident that figures within the anthropology of the expanded Caribbean region have produced work beyond immediate ethnography, work that navigates between domains of present and past and falls outside simple geographic classifications.[48] Certainly it would be no overstatement to say that interest in political economy and the study of the Caribbean have led to each other, and the marriage of the two has produced much of the important work in the region. One of the central concepts in the analysis of the systems that brought the New World into being—the plantation—encourages a broader redefinition of the Caribbean area back into the New World, moving beyond the islands at its center to include the surrounding shore, Brazil, and the southern United States. Efforts to better define postplantation Caribbean “peasantries” in turn feed back into reconsiderations of European peasantries. In this modern tropics, between bright light and heavy rain, circular movements of theory, region, and discipline grow bold and thick.
Given the conditions of this regional map, it is only appropriate to include French Guiana within the Caribbean. Although Guyane is not a literal island, it exhibits many of the historical characteristics of one,
Thus in beginning our analysis of a historical penal colony, an extant satellite center, and the common ground they share, we have before us fragments of familiar stories, shadows of elsewhere, and an open horizon of dreams. The longevity of this space—the social potential of an empty tropics—constitutes the crux of French Guiana's importance as a case, because “nature,” the pure realm of open possibility, here comes directly into view across from “culture,” the contending human and material technologies seeking to effect its transformation. The edge of modern development rises to the surface from under sediments of language and historical experience. Despite three centuries of active French presence, Guyane retains the aura of an unconquered realm, a land open to possibility. For those who discuss its future—particularly those susceptible to metaphors of virginity—the words of Ralegh ring ever fresh and true:
To conclude, Guiana is a Countrey that hath yet her Maydenhead, neuer sackt, turned, nor wrought, the face of the earth hath not been torne, nor the vertue and salt of the soyle been spent by manurance, the graues haue not beene opened for gold, the mines not broken with sledges, nor their Images puld down out of their temples.[49]
