Unknown Father in Suriname, 1838 to 1873

Abstract

In this article, the author uses simulation techniques to discover what percentage of Surinamese slave women bore children by different fathers during the period 1838 to 1873. The matrifocal family, comprising wife and children, might well have predominated on the plantations. However, slave owners did not record fatherhood, and the debate is hampered by lack of data. Fortunately, Moravian missionaries recorded sexual relationships among slaves in Suriname, and by combining those sources with slave registers one can reconstruct detailed parts of the life course of female slaves. Due to the specific characteristics of the Moravian sources, however, the data suggest that some women conceived children during periods for which the Moravian sources make no description of the mother having had sexual relations. Three different simulation scenarios (full, constrained full, and constrained randomization) were developed to impute these missing fathers, each scenario consisting of 100 independent runs. Between and within the scenarios, the estimates of what percentage of slave women bore children by different fathers are robust. One may therefore conclude that in the two decades prior to 1863, about 45% of those women with at least two children had borne children fathered by different men.

Keywords:

• emancipation
• fatherhood
• simulation
• slavery
• Suriname

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Arie van Peet, Chris Gordon, and the anonymous referees for their valuable and constructive comments and suggestions.

Notes

1. During the final decade before slavery was abolished, the slaves on Lustrijk (1853) and Scheveningen (1856), both coffee plantations, were transferred to Cannewapibo. For those two plantations, I have used the slave registers from 1848 onward.

2. It had initially been thought that the Sprechbücher, kept by the Moravians to supplement the Specialien, had been lost or were untraceable (Everaert 1999, 34–50, 59–60). However, during a short visit I made to the Moravian archive in Paramaribo in November 2008, it transpired that an inventory was being compiled of the contents of several boxes which included the district Sprechbücher. For a detailed inventory of the archive, see Willy Deimveld (2007).