French Guiana

By: Richard Watts

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

French Guiana

Former French colony and present-day overseas department of France on the northeastern coast of South America, with the Atlantic Ocean to the north, Suriname to the west, and Brazil to the south and east.

French Guiana's original inhabitants were Indians known as Carib and Arawaks, whose numbers probably did not exceed 25,000. Their first contact with Europeans occurred when Christopher Columbus landed there in 1498 during the course of his third voyage to the New World. Columbus was moved by the region's beauty; in his travelogue he compared the Oyapock River to the river that flows out of the Garden of Eden, described in the Bible. As a result of this account, subsequent explorers assumed that hidden in Guiana's interior was the legendary lost city of gold, Eldorado (referred to in Genesis 2:10 as lying at the end of a branch of the same river). The search for this city and its treasure was foremost in the minds of Spanish and Portuguese explorers from the sixteenth century. Their lack of success did not dissuade the French—who made their first appearance in Guiana in 1604—from undertaking the same quest. However, France's search for gold in Guiana was accompanied by colonial ambitions.

Although France did not officially possess Guiana until 1667 and only consolidated control of the territory in 1817, the French brought slaves from Africa to Guiana as early as 1652. Unlike in the Caribbean islands, the slave population in Guiana grew very slowly, mostly as a result of the small number of colonizers. Slave ships preferred to avoid this less lucrative trading spot, stopping there solely when circumstances forced them to do so. The slave population was only 5,728 in 1765 and reached a high point of just 19,261 in 1830. Furthermore, many of these African slaves, like a number of their colonial masters, were felled by tropical diseases shortly after their arrival in Guiana. Other slaves fled to the interior of the country, reproducing in certain instances the hunter-gatherer existence they had known in Africa. As a result of these factors, and the sheer difficulty of engaging in agriculture in such a heavily wooded land, the plantation colonialism that was so successful for the French in Martinique and Guadeloupe was a failure in Guiana.

French Guiana (France)

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Still, the French persisted in their efforts to develop Guiana. When the colony's principal industries, Sugar and timber, virtually collapsed following the abolition of slavery in 1848, France decided to transform Guiana into a penal colony. The colonial administrators defended the idea in these terms: France would be rid of its worst element, and the prisoners—who, according to the system of doublage (doubling), had to remain in the colony following their initial sentence for an equal amount of time—would eventually form a stable colonizing population. Seventy thousand convicted criminals were sent to Guiana from 1852 to 1939, including Alfred Dreyfus and Henri Charrière, whose attempt to escape Devil's Island was celebrated in Charrièrre's novel Papillon (1969). However, 90 percent of these prisoners died of Malaria or yellow fever, and those who survived rarely lasted long after their release. The prisons were shut down in 1946, the same year Guiana became a French overseas department. A more successful venture for developing Guiana was the European Space Agency's establishment of a satellite launching pad in Kourou in 1968. This space center accounted for 25 percent of French Guiana's GDP in 2002.

A woman sorts stalks of sesame plants in French Guiana.

Egan/Hutchinson

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Today, French Guiana is still perceived as a land of unfulfilled potential. Plans for developing the interior of Guiana have largely been abandoned, with most of the population living along the coast (one-third live in the capital, Cayenne). Forestry and fishing are now the largest industries. There is also a small amount of agriculture (rice, cassava, bananas, and sugarcane) and logging activity, but not enough to sustain the population. Unemployment is quite high, particularly among the young, and many in French Guiana survive on unemployment benefits from France. For this reason, there is no independence movement to speak of. What political agitation exists in French Guiana is the result of border disputes with Suriname.

Culturally, French Guiana has not been able to compete with the French Caribbean islands to its north. Few Guianese writers other than the Négritude poet Léon-Gontran Damas are known outside of their department. The most significant figure to emerge from French Guiana is Félix Éboué (1884–1944), a descendant of African slaves who went on to become a reformer of the French colonial administration and one of General Charles de Gaulle's most trusted advisers during World War II. Still, the descendants of runaway slaves, known as maroons, along with other elements of the population, are presently attempting to forge a cultural renewal in French Guiana through their ties with the Créolité movement in Martinique.

See also Colonial Rule; Latin America and the Caribbean, Blacks in; Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean; Transatlantic Slave Trade.

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