NYC lawyer went native in Suriname — but wasn’t fully embraced by tribe

A drastic flip of occasions lead John Lenoir to dwell within the Amazon amongst African natives. He tells his story in "Brother Mambo."
NY Submit picture composite

In 1970, John Lenoir’s post-graduate analysis right into a colony of escaped African slaves in Suriname bought off to an inauspicious star. His beloved spouse, Katie, arrived from New York Metropolis, pet cat Daisy in tow, to dwell with him in a distant river island village for the subsequent three years.

However Katie, an aspiring filmmaker, left Langatabiki nearly as quickly as she noticed the rudimentary residing situations: a thatched A-frame lean-to with no furnishings besides a hammock and a cluster of vampire bats that preyed on uncovered human limbs at night time.

Daisy stayed, however a couple of months later, she was lifeless — probably killed by a jungle virus for which she had no immunity.

“I succumbed to a crushing loneliness that was scary,” Lenoir writes in his memoir, “Brother Mambo: Discovering Africa within the Amazon” (Black Rose Writing), out now. “I used to be alone in a wierd land, and now, alone in life! Was this journey all a colossal mistake? Possibly a flight of male hubris?”

However he would find yourself marrying a local and making a brand new household — earlier than ultimately returning to New York Metropolis and dealing on a number of the DA’s most high-profile crimes of the Eighties.

John Lenoir was a New York Metropolis graduate scholar — initially from Oklahoma — when he moved to Suriname to review the tradition.

Lenoir, a broke, 27-year-old graduate scholar was struggling to finish a PhD in anthropology at Manhattan’s The New Faculty on the time. He initially needed to do his discipline work among the many Igbo in Nigeria. However when the Biafra struggle bought in the way in which, Lenoir headed to South America — first to a newly unbiased Guyana “the place nothing labored out as anticipated,” partly as a result of officers suspected the lanky American scholar was a CIA agent.

Lenoir had spent a yr in Vietnam within the mid-Nineteen Sixties on a US authorities contract, researching the impression of the struggle on civilians in South Vietnam and “sometimes rode together with a CIA man on his ‘rural improvement’ visits,'” he writes.

“I carried a small, arduous case with a Smith-Corona transportable typewriter, the laptop computer of the day,” writes Lenoir, who grew up on a farm in Oklahoma. “I additionally introduced alongside a tiny glass jar with a cork stopper full of dust. This was my private talisman I had ready as a strategy to join with household roots. I had taken a brief break from anthropology lessons in New York to journey again to the long-abandoned farm in Oklahoma to gather some soil from beneath the large mulberry tree the place I had spent numerous hours as a boy.”

KutuKutu, now referred to as Phil Ceder, was a youngster when he befriended Lenoir.

As Lenoir tells it, he adopted a collection of mystical signposts to Suriname. The primary concerned a persistent hummingbird that appeared to level him within the path of the nation as he sat thinking about his failures on a porch in Guyana.

“My mind kicked into one other gear,” he writes. “One thing was occurring right here, I used to be aware of oracles and spirits animating animals from my graduate lessons. Had one thing possessed this hummingbird? Was it attempting to warn me of one thing, or inform me one thing?”

The following morning, he headed within the hummingbird’s path, all the way in which to Suriname. There, he turned immersed within the Pamaka, a neighborhood of the descendants of African slaves who had escaped their Dutch plantation overlords to dwell in freedom deep within the Amazon within the seventeenth century.

Villagers have been initially so suspicious of Lenoir they tore up his discipline notes.

“I ended up on the muddy doorstep of Pamaka, a unprecedented neighborhood of Africans residing on islands on the Maroni River, between Suriname and French Guiana,” he writes. “What I discovered was a individuals stolen some 200 years in the past from their villages in what's now the area of Ghana Nigeria, and the Congo; then offered to Dutch plantation house owners to work their South American colony. That they had escaped the plantations and fled from troops and bounty hunters to kind free settlements deep within the Amazon rain forest.”

For Lenoir, who's white, it was robust going at first. The coed wore T-shirts and khakis to keep away from sunburn amongst bare-breasted ladies and men in loincloths, and was merely not trusted, at the same time as he struggled to study their language. When he first tried to map out the houses in the neighborhood, villagers tore up his notes, fearful that he would ship them to the US army to conduct bombing raids.

Lenoir started to take notes at night time in his hut after interviewing members of the neighborhood. Not solely did he study the Pamaka language, he made an in depth pal in KutuKutu, a teenage boy who introduced him a heat meal on his first night time within the distant village and who's co-author of his memoir.

Though Lenoir “married” a neighborhood girl and had three kids together with her, not all locals have been glad to him contributing to the gene pool.

KutuKutu was Lenoir’s information as he was ultimately invited to participate in sacred purification rituals and funerals, the place elders poured copious libations of rum to honor the lifeless. (Also called Phil Ceder, KutuKutu later moved to Holland the place he now drives a truck for the Dutch postal authority.)

And after greater than a yr within the village, Lenoir was given the identify “TiMambo” or Brother Mambo. He additionally “married” a neighborhood girl and had three kids.

“I wasn’t alleged to contribute to the gene pool,” Lenoir, now 80, instructed The Submit. “It was a sensitive topic and never readily accepted.” After his scholar visa ran out within the nation, Lenoir returned to New York to finish his dissertation and labored as a taxi driver to help his new household.

Lenoir went to Suriname to review the Pamaka, a neighborhood of the descendants of African slaves who had escaped their Dutch plantation overlords to dwell in freedom deep within the Amazon within the seventeenth century.

At first, kinfolk in Suriname refused to permit Lenoir’s spouse and youngsters to journey with him as a result of they have been afraid they might by no means see them once more. He accepted a educating place at John Jay Faculty, and visited Suriname twice a yr to see his two daughters and son. In New York, he recorded himself studying books on cassettes and mailed them to his kids. He additionally registered them as Americans.

Again in New York Metropolis, Lenoir needed to mix his work in anthropology with a level in regulation, however after accepting an internship with Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau in 1979, he turned “fascinated” and launched right into a profession as a prosecutor. He labored on a number of the metropolis’s largest circumstances within the Eighties, together with the “Crimson Ferrari” homicide during which a Manhattan funding dealer shot to demise a New Jersey driver who dented his sports activities automotive in 1984.

Later, as a federal prosecutor in Houston, Lenoir tried drug circumstances involving the Colombian cocaine cartels.

KutuKutu and Lenoir in 2019.

Lenoir (left) along with his ex-wife and three kids, in 2018.

Lenoir ultimately moved his household from Suriname to the US. His daughters dwell in Connecticut and Washington, DC, and his son lives in Houston, he instructed The Submit. His spouse lived within the US for six years earlier than they broke up, though she continued to journey forwards and backwards between Suriname and the US to go to her kids.

In November 2021, she died of a mind tumor whereas visiting her daughter in Washington. Her stays have been shipped again to Suriname for a Pamako funeral. Lenoir defined that Pamakans “consider that if you happen to dwell your life in a manner that respects the individuals round you, you come again as an ancestor.”

“I’m tuned in spiritually,” Lenoir mentioned about his personal life, including that, in his coronary heart, he by no means left the Pamakans. “I’ve realized that the Pamako idea of life and demise is a phenomenal and really viable system. I'm wanting ahead to coming again via considered one of my kinsmen.”

As he notes in his e book, “If all goes nicely, I can be round for generations. as a well-remembered, if ersatz, ancestor worthy of a libation at times.”