On the northeastern coast of South America, in the circum-Caribbean territories of Suriname and French Guiana, live six Maroon peoples -- the Saramaka, Ndyuka, Paramaka, Aluku, Matawai, and Kwinti. Descended from enslaved Africans who escaped from Dutch plantations during the 17th and 18th centuries, they have until recently remained relatively isolated in the interior rainforests.

The Surinamese Maroons have long served as powerful symbols of African cultural survival in the Americas. The profoundly African musics of the Maroons -- genres such as sêkêti, awasa, susa, papa, and kumanti – form an important part of this African cultural legacy. All of these traditional genres are still very much alive, and remain as indispensable as ever to the social contexts and events with which they are associated.

But much has changed in the last few decades, in music as in other spheres. In recent years, as increasing numbers of Ndjuka and Saramaka Maroons have migrated from the interior forest to coastal towns, Maroon musicians have entered the local recording industry in full force, thoroughly transforming the urban popular music of Suriname, known as kaseko. At the same time, a variety of coastal Creole and international musical forms have traveled to the interior and contributed to new developments there. (In Suriname, it should be mentioned, the term “Creole” has a very specific meaning, referring to coastal people of African descent whose ancestors, in contrast to the Maroons, remained on plantations until emancipation in 1863.) One of the most interesting recent developments is a neo-traditional style called aleke – a hybrid form that has risen to become the most popular Maroon music among the young. Aleke is an intriguing example of a music that cannot be neatly categorized as either "traditional" or "popular," but rather is situated at the intersection of the two.

Because aleke encompasses a great deal of stylistic variation, I argue, it is better understood as a musical continuum than as a discrete, self-contained musical style. The idea of a social or cultural "continuum" is a familiar one in the social sciences. In anthropology, for example, the "folk-urban continuum" model elaborated by Robert Redfield continues to reappear from time to time in various guises. More recently, sociolinguistics has given us the concept of the "post-creole continuum," used to describe the type of complex variation that characterizes everyday speech in a number of creole-speaking zones in the Caribbean. In this paper, I extend the continuum concept to the analysis of musical phenomena, using it to explore the relationship between recent musical developments and the changing social landscape of which Maroon peoples such as the Aluku, Ndyuka, and Saramaka form a part.

Only the briefest consideration can be given to the history of aleke here. This new hybrid grew out of an earlier form of music among the Ndyuka Maroons known as loonsei. Loonsei, though a neo-traditional, drum-based style, was itself a hybrid genre. It represented a fusion of older Ndyuka song and drumming styles with musical elements introduced by foreign workers who began to appear in the Maroons’ territories in the late 19th century, as part of the gold rush then sweeping through the Guianese interior. Many of these laborers migrated from various Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean islands, including St. Lucia, Martinique, Dominica, and Barbados; others came from coastal Suriname and French Guiana. Through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many Maroons also migrated to the coastal region as seasonal wage laborers, and intercultural musical encounters occurred here, away from home, as well. Some time in the late 1950s or early 1960s, under the influence of a Surinamese Creole drum and dance music known as kawina, loonsei mutated into a new form known as aleke.

Since its genesis in the mid-20th century, aleke has undergone many transformations. The trajectory of this new hybrid may be summarized as follows. Aleke began as the music of young Ndyuka Maroons, some of whom spent part of the year living and working outside their territory, but maintained close ties to their traditional villages. In the early days, it was often performed in traditional contexts alongside older Ndyuka styles such as awasa, songe, and susa, and like other borrowings or innovations before it, was eventually incorporated into these contexts. Thus "traditionalized," it retained its special association with the young, and continued to serve as a vehicle of generational identity.

Next it spread to the Paramaka and Aluku people, whose musical cultures overlap to a great extent with that of the Ndyuka. These neighboring Maroon peoples likewise "traditionalized" and indigenized aleke, incorporating it into similar social contexts, such as funeral dances, while maintaining its association with the young.

The next major development was spurred by younger Ndyuka Maroons living on the coast, who fashioned aleke into an expression of their identity as "modern" town dwellers. During the 1970s, they transformed the ensemble of instruments on which the style was played, creating a new type of drum known as the ‘aleke drum’ (aleke doon), and adding to this a bass drum and cymbal kit. The new aleke drum, modeled in part on the Cuban conga, was much longer than the traditional Ndyuka apinti drum, but used the same tuning mechanism as the latter. The bass-and-cymbal combination, known as the dyas, was inspired in part by traps. These young urban innovators also modified elements of the music, experimenting with various popular styles, such as kaseko, kawina, reggae, and zouk.

Next, this new form of aleke was brought back upriver to the traditional villages of the Ndyuka, Paramaka, and Aluku, where it was adopted and made to serve as yet another local expression of generational identity.

Finally, aleke in its newest version became a recorded music. Having entered the Paramaribo studios and the local market, aleke's claim to modernity is now sealed. Its transformation into a form of popular music sold on cassettes and CDs alongside other contrasting styles has heightened the potential for its use as an expression of the multiple identities to which Maroons today can lay claim. These include, for instance, specific ethnic identities like Ndyuka or Aluku versus broader identities such as pan-Maroon, Afro-Surinamese, Afro-French-Guianese, or Afro-Caribbean, not to mention the larger Black diasporic identity to which these Maroon peoples feel increasingly drawn; as well as other identities based on opposing sets of terms such as “forest” versus “coast,” “rural” versus “urban,” “traditional” versus “modern,” and “local” versus “international.”

It is important to recognize that these shifting linkages between musical style and social identity are not mutually exclusive; new developments in aleke have not canceled out the ones that preceded them. Rather, the succession of musical and social transitions aleke has passed through over the years has resulted in a series of overlapping potentials for identification that continue to be realized variously in different contexts.

I became aware of this variability while carrying out fieldwork in several different parts of French Guiana and Suriname during the 1980s and 90s. As I moved between different contexts, it quickly became apparent to me that newer forms of aleke co-existed with older ones, and that even the same forms could have varying significance for Maroons living in different places. In the upriver Aluku Maroon villages where I worked in the 1980s, aleke in the old style could still be heard at late-night funeral ceremonies, played on the traditional apinti drums, and danced in ring formation. But in some of the same villages, there also existed young aleke bands who played the modern long drums and the dyas, and who performed for recreational events at which couples danced Western-style in a close embrace. It is because of this kind of variation that aleke is better described as a stylistic continuum than as a style per se.

This broad continuum of stylistic possibilities, all subsumed under a single category called ‘aleke,’ makes this new music eminently adaptable to shifts in the social and political terrain. The existence of such a continuum means that, in making statements about identity, aleke performers are able to draw from a repertoire that includes both older and newer stylistic features, some of which are ethnically specific and others of which are shared by all three eastern Maroon peoples, the Ndyuka, Aluku, and Paramaka. The older and newer ends of the stylistic continuum, one considered "traditional" and the other "modern," represent potentials that can be called upon to express different levels of identification as the need or motivation arises. Emphasis on the older end of the continuum tends to complement an inward-looking perspective, while the selection of stylistic features from the newer end of the continuum is more compatible with an outward-looking stance.

Part of what is so interesting about this continuum is that features from opposite ends can be combined in such as way as to mediate very effectively between notions of "tradition" and "modernity." Interestingly, the stylistic continuum of aleke has continued to expand at both ends, on the traditional, ethnically-specific side incorporating influences from historically-deep Maroon styles such as awasa and kumanti, and on the modern, more general side borrowing from Surinamese kaseko and other recent forms of Caribbean and Afro-American popular music.
Let’s take a moment to consider a few specific examples of this socio-musical dynamic -- this creative manipulation of stylistic features along a continuum of possibilities.

The latest development has brought aleke across the Atlantic Ocean to the Netherlands. By the early 1990s, a number of Dutch cities already had aleke bands and associations of their own, formed by Ndyuka immigrants. Some of these Dutch-based bands have begun to market their music on compact discs (in addition to cassettes), and aleke is now being promoted and disseminated in the metropole in a variety of other ways as well. In the Dutch context, aleke, along with a number of other Ndyuka cultural diacritica, has been seized upon, not only as an ethnic marker, but as a focus for cultural revitalization, and a tool for resisting cultural assimilation.

Conclusion

The existence of a musical continuum such as we find in aleke raises interesting questions not only about such concepts as "traditional music" and "popular music" (often treated as separate, if not opposed, categories), but also a number of related dichotomies, such as rural/urban, folk/commercial, and local/international. The Guianese case suggests that the application of the continuum concept to other musical settings might lead to more subtle analyses that take into account the multidimensionality of the relationship between music and society in a world increasingly in political and economic flux. As we have seen, a given music may be neither "traditional" nor "popular" in the conventional sense, but rather may vary along a stylistic continuum, the points of which connect not only to one another, but to a variety of rural and urban, local and global, traditional and commercial contexts and fields. This way of conceptualizing distinctive but cognate musical forms -- as socially-situated points along stylistic continua rather than as separate, self-contained traditions -- is likely to prove equally useful in other parts of the Afro-Atlantic world where major political and economic confrontations and transformations have been eroding the boundaries between the old and the new. In particular, this notion of musical continua can help us better understand the processes through which regional musics of the African diaspora -- such as those of the Guianese Maroons (whose creole languages and musical cultures overlap in complex ways with those of the broader anglophone Caribbean) -- are gradually becoming linked with the larger world of Black music.