Wikipedia
Afro-Surinamese are the inhabitants of Suriname of Sub-Saharan African ancestry. They are usually divided into two groups, the Creole people and the Maroons. The Surinamese Creoles are the mixed-race descendants of African slaves and Europeans. The Maroons were runaway slaves who formed independent settlements together. They maintained vestiges of African culture and language. Afro-Surinamese scholar, Gloria Wekker, argues, for example, that working-class Afro-Surinamese women retained pre-colonial African cultural understandings of gender, sexuality, and spirituality. She, and other theorists, argue that African cultural retentions are found most often in Afro-diasporic communities that either had irregular contact with dominant groups of the host community or that shielded their cultural retentions from their colonizers. As Wekker observes, Surinamese slaves socialized, communicated, and communed with little white cultural, social, or linguistic interference.