Suriname National Anthem

Key Facts

• 1. The anthem has two stanzas, one in Dutch and one in Sranantongo, the local creole language; the government asked Trefossa for the Sranan stanza in 1959 with a single condition: it had to stress the unity of the Surinamese people and their bond with the land.
• 2. The melody dates from 1876 and is by Johannes Corstianus de Puy, a schoolteacher from Friesland; Cornelis Atses Hoekstra, a Lutheran minister in Paramaribo, wrote Dutch words for it in 1893.
• 3. Trefossa also rewrote five of the eight lines of Hoekstra's Dutch stanza, which he found too negative; the line 'however we came together here' is his, and the government changed his word 'strijdend' (fighting) to 'werkend' (working).
• 4. The Sranan stanza ends 'Eri libi te na dede, / Wi sa feti gi Sranan' ('All our life, until death, we will fight for Suriname'), adapted from a 1943 text that the Sranan advocate J. G. A. Koenders wrote to the same melody, where the line read 'we will sing for Suriname'.