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Suriname Creole migrant culture in the Netherlands is a culture under siege. Not only because the lower-class Creoles who keep a deviant religious tradition alive in a modern Western society hold a minority position but also because they have to defend their practices to a skeptical outside world. In the home country, Winti, Afko-drey, or Wi Kulturu — the names current to refer to the African American heritage in coastal Suriname — was similarly contested.1 The road to upward mobility for a growing middle class was open to well-educated Christians who left all that smacked of animism and backwardness behind. The prevalent attitude among Creoles is one of ambivalence: connotations of a past, rejected now as shameful, are partly offset by the attraction to “roots.” As a newly independent state, Suriname anchors its identity in “typical,” popular traditions, which, as far as Creoles are concerned, are closely linked to Winti. This “synthetic Creole culture” (Patterson, 1975, p. 318)2 has historic roots, first, in a cultural system of plantation slaves and later in the resistance of their emancipated descendants against a dominant colonial regime. Moreover, like many other popular belief systems (Schneider, 1990; Pina-Cabral, 1992), it bears the imprint of a periphery's reaction to exploitation (Van Wetering, 1995b). There has been the aggression of oppressors to cope with, and one's own counter-aggression. The dangers of openly expressing such emotions,