Drained by the dam

Descendants of runaway slaves find themselves battling for freedom, electricity

AFOBAKA ROAD, Suriname — In the shadow of power lines that run from Alcoa’s dam to this nation’s capital, Nelson Adose Martines is praying that a blackboard will be enough to propel his son from peanut farming to modernity.

Not that there’s anything wrong with living in a shack and subsisting on nuts, cassava, watermelon and jungle game, Mr. Martines, 59, said as he sat on the porch where his son does times tables in chalk. He’s better off than many other Saamaka — descendants of runaway slaves who governed themselves for 200 years until the Afobaka Dam swamped much of their South American land.

“Where I am now, it’s easy for me to hunt and to find wild meat,” he said. But population relocations, he added, have made that difficult in many areas.

“That’s why I’m doing my utmost,” he said, with 11-year-old Adipi Revanildo nearby. “I bought a blackboard, I constructed a table and a chair so that he can do his homework.”

The advantage of the blackboard: You never have to plug it in. There are no outlets here.

In 1964, Alcoa’s dam energized factories that the iconic Pittsburgh company built to turn bauxite into aluminum. Where forests had flanked the Suriname River, a 618square-mile reservoir formed. Thousands of Saamaka fled, aided by a penurious government resettlement effort.

The dam electrified other parts of Suriname. But in the Saamaka clans’ tough-and-dusty gold mining towns and roadless jungle villages, power still flows irregularly, weakly or not at all.

The Saamaka lost hunting ground, while most villages didn’t even gain the power necessary to run a grocery store, clan leaders