In 1970, John Lenoir’s post-graduate research into a colony of escaped African slaves in Suriname got off to an inauspicious star. His beloved wife, Katie, arrived from New York City, pet cat Daisy in tow, to live with him in a remote river island village for the next three years.
But Katie, an aspiring filmmaker, left Langatabiki almost as soon as she saw the rudimentary living conditions: a thatched A-frame lean-to with no furniture except a hammock and a cluster of vampire bats that preyed on exposed human limbs at night.
Daisy stayed, but a few months later, she was dead — likely killed by a jungle virus for which she had no immunity.
“I succumbed to a crushing loneliness that was frightening,” Lenoir writes in his memoir, “Brother Mambo: Finding Africa in the Amazon” (Black Rose Writing), out now. “I was alone in a strange land, and now, alone in life! Was this adventure all a colossal mistake? Maybe a flight of male hubris?”
But he would end up marrying a native and making a new family — before eventually returning to New York City and working on some of the DA’s most high-profile crimes of the 1980s.
John Lenoir was a New York City graduate student — originally from Oklahoma — when he moved to Suriname to study the culture.
Lenoir, a broke, 27-year-old graduate student was struggling to complete a PhD in anthropology at Manhattan’s The New School at the time. He originally wanted to do his field work among the Igbo in Nigeria. But when the Biafra war got in the way, Lenoir headed to South America — first to a newly independent Guyana “where nothing worked out as expected,” in part because officials suspected the lanky American student was a CIA agent.
Lenoir had spent a year in Vietnam in the mid-1960s on a US government contract, researching the impact of the war on civilians in South Vietnam and “occasionally rode along with a CIA guy on his ‘rural development’ visits,'” he writes.
“I carried a small, hard case with a Smith-Corona portable typewriter, the laptop of the day,” writes Lenoir, who grew up on a farm in Oklahoma. “I also brought along a tiny glass jar with a cork stopper filled with dirt. This was my personal talisman I had prepared as a way to connect with family roots. I had taken a short break from anthropology classes in New York to travel back to the long-abandoned farm in Oklahoma to collect some soil from underneath the big mulberry tree where I had spent countless hours as a boy.”
KutuKutu, now known as Phil Ceder, was a teenager when he befriended Lenoir.
As Lenoir tells it, he followed a series of mystical signposts to Suriname. The first involved a persistent hummingbird that seemed to point him in the direction of the country as he sat brooding about his failures on a porch in Guyana.
“My brain kicked into another gear,” he writes. “Something was going on here, I was familiar with oracles and spirits animating animals from my graduate classes. Had something possessed this hummingbird? Was it trying to warn me of something, or tell me something?”
The next morning, he headed in the hummingbird’s direction, all the way to Suriname. There, he became immersed in the Pamaka, a community of the descendants of African slaves who had escaped their Dutch plantation overlords to live in freedom deep in the Amazon in the 17th century.
Villagers were originally so suspicious of Lenoir they tore up his field notes.
“I ended up on the muddy doorstep of Pamaka, an extraordinary community of Africans living on islands on the Maroni River, between Suriname and French Guiana,” he writes. “What I found was a people stolen some two hundred years ago from their villages in what is now the region of Ghana Nigeria, and the Congo; then sold to Dutch plantation owners to work their South American colony. They had escaped the plantations and fled from troops and bounty hunters to form free settlements deep in the Amazon rain forest.”
For Lenoir, who is white, it was tough going at first. The student wore T-shirts and khakis to avoid sunburn among bare-breasted women and men in loincloths, and was simply not trusted, even as he struggled to learn their language. When he first tried to map out the homes in the community, villagers tore up his notes, worried that he would send them to the US military to conduct bombing raids.
Lenoir began to take notes at night in his hut after interviewing members of the community. Not only did he learn the Pamaka language, he made a close friend in KutuKutu, a teenage boy who brought him a warm meal on his first night in the remote village and who is co-author of his memoir.
Although Lenoir “married” a local woman and had three children with her, not all locals were happy to him contributing to the gene pool.
KutuKutu was Lenoir’s guide as he was eventually invited to take part in sacred purification rituals and funerals, where elders poured copious libations of rum to honor the dead. (Also known as Phil Ceder, KutuKutu later moved to Holland where he now drives a truck for the Dutch postal authority.)
And after more than a year in the village, Lenoir was given the name “TiMambo” or Brother Mambo. He also “married” a local woman and had three children.
“I wasn’t supposed to contribute to the gene pool,” Lenoir, now 80, told The Post. “It was a touchy subject and not readily accepted.” After his student visa ran out in the country, Lenoir returned to New York to complete his dissertation and worked as a taxi driver to support his new family.
Lenoir went to Suriname to study the Pamaka, a community of the descendants of African slaves who had escaped their Dutch plantation overlords to live in freedom deep in the Amazon in the 17th century.
At first, relatives in Suriname refused to allow Lenoir’s wife and children to travel with him because they were afraid they would never see them again. He accepted a teaching position at John Jay College, and visited Suriname twice a year to see his two daughters and son. In New York, he recorded himself reading books on cassettes and mailed them to his children. He also registered them as American citizens.
Back in New York City, Lenoir wanted to combine his work in anthropology with a degree in law, but after accepting an internship with Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau in 1979, he became “fascinated” and launched into a career as a prosecutor. He worked on some of the city’s biggest cases in the 1980s, including the “Red Ferrari” murder in which a Manhattan investment broker shot to death a New Jersey driver who dented his sports car in 1984.
Later, as a federal prosecutor in Houston, Lenoir tried drug cases involving the Colombian cocaine cartels.
KutuKutu and Lenoir in 2019.
Lenoir (left) with his ex-wife and three children, in 2018.
Lenoir eventually moved his family from Suriname to the US. His daughters live in Connecticut and Washington, DC, and his son lives in Houston, he told The Post. His wife lived in the US for six years before they broke up, although she continued to travel back and forth between Suriname and the US to visit her children.
In November 2021, she died of a brain tumor while visiting her daughter in Washington. Her remains were shipped back to Suriname for a Pamako funeral. Lenoir explained that Pamakans “believe that if you live your life in a way that respects the people around you, you come back as an ancestor.”
“I’m tuned in spiritually,” Lenoir said about his own life, adding that, in his heart, he never left the Pamakans. “I’ve learned that the Pamako concept of life and death is a beautiful and very viable system. I am looking forward to coming back through one of my kinsmen.”
As he notes in his book, “If all goes well, I will be around for generations. as a well-remembered, if ersatz, ancestor worthy of a libation now and then.”
