Born in 1779, Schouten was the son of Hendrik Schouten, a Dutch administrator and littérateur, and Suzanna Hansen, a free woman of color who belonged to a prosperous and, at times, notorious family. His great-great-aunt, Elisabeth Samson, was a coffee plantation owner who, in 1767, became the first Black woman in Suriname to marry a white man. Schouten’s father, although born in Amsterdam, wrote the first known literary work in Surinamese creole: Een huishoudelijke twist, a short poem dramatizing a household quarrel which alternates, as many such arguments in colonial Suriname likely did, between Dutch and Sranantongo, a local language that mixed English, Dutch, and the Central and West African languages spoken by enslaved people.
