Mancala in Surinamese Maroon Communities: The Expedition of Melville J. Herskovits

This study examines three mancala game boards held by the American Museum of Natural History that originate from Suriname, formerly Dutch Guyana, and traces their connection to the anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits and a 1928 ethnological expedition. The authors draw on Herskovits's archives, the museum's records, and recent scholarship on Surinamese Maroon communities to establish that the boards are closely tied to his broader research program. One board, from the Saamaka, is on public display in the museum's African Peoples Hall, while the other two, attributed to the Djuka, were acquired separately in 1944.

The expedition, led in part by Morton C. Khan and including Herskovits and his spouse Francis, aimed to assess how European cultural elements had influenced Afro-Surinamese communities in both urban and rural settings, with particular focus on Maroon groups descended from people who had escaped slavery. Khan collected some 346 Saamaka and 10 Amerindian specimens, and the team produced a short 16 mm film of village life, which survives in the Smithsonian's film archives. Comparison of the footage with Herskovits's later descriptions shows that the Djuka board has six cups per row and four counters per cup, while the Saamaka board has five cups per row and ten counters per cup, with each group using distinct local terms for the game.

The authors evaluate Herskovits's interpretive framework, in which Maroon isolation served as a measure of African cultural survival, against later work that emphasizes the ongoing contact of plantation laborers with African cultures and the complex, non-syncretic character of Afro-Surinamese spiritual life. They also present a historical overview of Maroon societies, which trace their origins to resistance against plantation slavery in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and secured treaty recognition of their autonomy between 1760 and 1767. The paper concludes that Herskovits's accounts remain valuable for understanding the transatlantic and intra-Caribbean transmission of mancala, even though his interpretation of the game as evidence of Africanness is no longer accepted.