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Although we still do not know what we mean exactly by creolization, until recently we at least agreed that it was related, one way or another, to slavery and to the Caribbean or the New World. Today we do not even share that tiny piece of common ground any more. Now the term is increasingly used - and contested - by social scientists who study processes of globalization and/or multicultural complexity.1 And although these globalists never conceal that they have borrowed the idea of creolization from Caribbeanists, they seem to have given it a different, or wider, meaning. To them creolization seems to refer particularly to quite recent struggles and their cultural outcome in societies all over the world: i.e. struggles between tradition and modernity, between westernized global culture and local cultures.
In this essay I argue that, despite major contextual differences in time and geography, both groups still refer to the same phenomenon and that a comparison of their outcomes could be fruitful for both. This will be illustrated by taking a look at the histoiy of a water goddess or water spirit called "Watramama" in Suriname and Guyana and "Marni Wata" in a number of West- and Central- African societies.
Both in West- African and in Afro-Caribbean religions, water spirits, which are more often than not female, have played or still play a prominent role. The importance of water is evident. Rivers, lakes and seas formed the main infrastructure for communication, transport and trade and they provided fish for day-to-day subsistence. At the same time, these waters were threatening and unpredictable. People drowned in them, lands were flooded, and rivers also formed easy avenues of entry for intruders from abroad. Water was also important in the lives of African slaves, who had experienced the traumatic transatlantic voyage. And on the plantations, particularly in the Guyanas, where most plantations actually were polders laid out in swampy grounds, the heaviest part of slave labour was directly related to water - the never-ending struggle to keep those polders from being flooded, by digging trenches and canals and erecting dikes and dams. Meanwhile, rivers and the sea provided veiy important additions to the meagre slave rations, and often these waters were the best escape route from the...