For centuries, the Marowijne-Lawa-Litanier River that cuts across the border between French Guiana and Suriname has been far more than a cartographic boundary or administrative dividing line. It is a lifeline, a sacred cultural and spiritual touchstone for Indigenous peoples and Maroon communities that have made its banks their home since long before modern nation-states drew their lines across the region.\n\nIndigenous groups including the Kali’na, Arawak, Teko, and Wayana-Apalaï were the first inhabitants of the river basin. Beginning in the 18th century, Maroon communities—descendants of formerly enslaved people who escaped colonial plantations in Suriname—settled along the river’s reaches, including the Aluku-Boni (from 1776), the Pamaka (from 1877), and the Ndyuka (also called Okanisi), who first settled along the Tapanahoni River in 1766 before expanding to the Lawa River banks in the 1880s.\n\nFor these communities, the river border has a meaning fundamentally different from the one imposed by national governments. While citizenship is formally defined by which side of the river a person is born or resides on—French for those on the French Guiana side, Surinamese for those on the Surinamese side—local worldviews do not recognize a rigid dividing line. As André Pakosie, a Maroon writer and community leader born in the region, noted in a 2018 essay: “In my youth, I grew up with the idea that for us Maroons there was no border between Suriname and French Guiana. People on the other side of the Marowijne just spoke a different dialect, same as us. The land on both sides belonged to everyone, not to France or the Netherlands—it was our shared home.”\n\nThat centuries-old fragile balance between communities and the river ecosystem has come under growing threat since the end of the 20th century. Large-scale resource exploitation, unchecked pollution, and inflexible cross-border border management that ignores local traditions and needs have eroded the sustainable stewardship that traditional authorities maintained for generations. Accelerating ecosystem decline, combined with the shrinking influence of traditional governance, has pushed the region to a breaking point, according to Jean Moomou, a professor of history at the University of French Guiana who authored this analysis of the river crisis.\n\nToday, the single greatest threat facing the basin is unregulated, illegal gold mining. The activity has carved up riverbeds, cleared old-growth forests, and eroded river banks across the region. Worse, mercury runoff from mining, mixed with plastic, metal, and battery waste, has poisoned the river’s water. This contamination has put both public health for local communities and the basin’s unique biodiversity at severe risk.\n\nFor local people, the damage is not only environmental but cultural and spiritual. As one traditional healer (obiauman) put it: “All the water spirits have left and hidden themselves.” With the loss of the river’s traditional purity, long-held cultural practices that structure community life are also fading. The arrival of unregulated mining has also brought a surge in violent conflict, most notably the deadly clashes in gold mining areas around Maripasoula in the late 1990s and early 2000s.\n\nThese interconnected challenges are not isolated incidents: they expose a deep structural crisis that demands coordinated action from political leaders, civil society, and scientific experts across both borders. Inaction would put both the long-term and short-term socioeconomic well-being of local communities and the ecological integrity of the transboundary basin at irreversible risk.\n\nMoomou notes that the 2021 protocol for border redefinition jointly proposed by the governments of France and Suriname offers a promising path forward. The updated border framework creates a clearer, more effective regulatory structure to crack down on illegal activities like unregulated gold mining, while opening the door to cooperative management that honors the river’s role as a shared resource for the communities that have depended on it for centuries. The core demand from researchers and community leaders remains clear: the river must be managed as a shared resource, with full respect for both ecological health and the long-standing use rights of the Indigenous and Maroon peoples who call it home.
Hoogleraar Moomou: Een gedeelde rivier vraagt om gedeelde verantwoordelijkheid
