Aluku

The Aluku are a Bushinengue ethnic group living mainly on the riverbank in Maripasoula in southwest French Guiana. The group are sometimes called Boni, referring to a notorious 19th-century leader, Bokilifu Boni (a former slave).

Aluku
Regions with significant populations
Maripasoula, French Guiana
Languages
Aluku
Religion
Aluku religion
Related ethnic groups
Ndyuka, Matawai, Paramaka, Kwinti, Saramaka

History

The Aluku are an ethnic group in French Guiana whose people are descended in part from African slaves who escaped in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries from the Dutch plantations in what is now known as Suriname. Intermarrying with Native Americans, toward the end of the eighteenth century, they settled along the Lawa Maroni, a river that now forms the border between French Guiana and Suriname. Two earlier groups of escaped Africans had also formed maroon communities in the area: they were known as the Ndyuka and the Paramaccan peoples. The Aluku eventually developed from these two groups.

In the late eighteenth century, the Aluku had settlements in the region of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, Apatou, and Grand-Santi. The largest piece of the territory they still occupy is called Fochi-ké (First Cry).

It is better known as Aluku, and is located primarily in the county of Maripasoula, consisting of:

  • the municipalities and city of Maripasoula and the capital city of Papaïchton, and the traditional villages of Kormontibo, Assissi, Loca, Tabiki, and Agoodé, in French Guiana; and
  • Cottica, in Suriname.

A very large Aluku population also resides in Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, Cayenne, Matoury, and Kourou in French Guiana.

Culture

Traditionally, the Aluku people lived by hunting and gathering and fishing. They have adapted in part to modernity, taking part in the market economy, and a society of consumption. Some are hired by the Army as river boat drivers. According to Bernard Delpech (in Les Cahiers d’Outre-Mer, nº 182), the Aluku have undergone "destabilization of the basic traditional material, cultural transformation, altering the rules of collective life".

Language
Aluku
Aluku or Boni
Native toFrench Guiana, Suriname
Native speakers
(33 cited 1980 census)[1]
English Creole
Language codes
ISO 639-3–
Glottologaluk1239[2]

Aluku is the eponymous term for their language. It may have more than 5,000 speakers, according to the 1980 census in French Guiana. Many of its speakers are also bilingual in French.

The Aluku language is a creole of English (inherited from the British colonies that took over from the Dutch in Suriname) as well as Dutch, a variety of African languages and, more recently, French. It was influenced by the languages spoken by the Pamaka and Ndjuka peoples. It is similar to the creole languages spoken by the Paramaccan and Kwinti, and to Jamaican Patois.

See also

Notes
  1. Aukan at Ethnologue (19th ed., 2016)
  2. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Aluku". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
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