Afro-Surinamese are the inhabitants of Suriname of Sub-Saharan African ancestry. They are usually divided into two groups, the Creole people and the Maroons. The Surinamese Creoles are the mixed-race descendants of African slaves and Europeans. The Maroons were runaway slaves who formed independent settlements together. They maintained vestiges of African culture and language. Afro-Surinamese scholar, Gloria Wekker, argues, for example, that working-class Afro-Surinamese women retained pre-colonial African cultural understandings of gender, sexuality, and spirituality. She, and other theorists, argue that African cultural retentions are found most often in Afro-diasporic communities that either had irregular contact with dominant groups of the host community or that shielded their cultural