Gerrit Schoutens Dioramas of Suriname (1810–30) – The Public Domain Review

Born in 1779, Schouten was the son of Hendrik Schouten, a Dutch administrator and littérateur, and Suzanna Hansen, a free woman of color who belonged to a prosperous and sometimes infamous family. His great-great-aunt, Elizabeth Samsonwas a coffee plantation owner who in 1767 became the first black woman in Suriname to marry a white man. Schouten’s father, although born in Amsterdam, wrote the first known literary work in Surinamese Creole: A simple twista short poem dramatizing a domestic argument that, as many such arguments probably did in colonial Suriname, alternates between Dutch and Sranantongo, a local language that mixed English, Dutch, and the Central and West African languages ​​of enslaved people.