Alabi's World

Alabi's World relates the history of a nation founded by escaped slaves deep in the Latin American rain forest outside of the Dutch colony of Suriname. It tells of the black men and women's bloody battles for independence, their uneasy truce with the colonial government, and the attempt of their great leader, Alabi, to reconcile his people with white law and a white God. In a unique historical experiment, Richard Price presents this history by weaving together four voices: the vivid historical accounts related by the slaves' descendants, largely those of Alabi's own villagers, the Saramaka; the reports of the often exasperated colonial officials sent to control the slave communities; the otherworldly diaries of the German Moravian missionaries determined to convert the heathen masses; and the historian's own, mediating voice. From the confluence of these voices―set throughout the book in four different typefaces―Price creates a fully nuanced portrait of the collision of cultures.