Massacooraman

Also Known As: also Massacooramaan, Massacuraman, Massacurra Man; in speech usually the Massacura Man
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: Guyanese Mythology, Caribbean Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: He is a river-dwelling giant of enormous strength who overturns small boats on the interior waterways of Guyana and eats the people in them.
Role in Mythos: He is one of the jumbies of Guyanese folk belief, the resident terror of the gold country’s rivers and of the hour when the light goes off the water.
Relation to Humans: Pork knockers working the interior, Amerindian rivermen and coastal Guyanese alike speak of him, and children are still called in off the riverbank at dusk in his name. Nothing in the tradition suggests he can be bargained with or bought off; the whole of the advice is to be out of the water before the sun sets.

The Demerara goes the colour of strong tea after rain, and by six in the evening the far bank has stopped being green. Boys fishing from the landing get called in around then. Not for the current, and not for snakes. They are called in because of what the older people say is waiting once the light comes off the water: something taller than a man, covered in hair, with teeth.

He does not lure, and he does not haunt. He takes hold of the boat.

That is the whole of the massacooraman’s method, and it is the reason his name is spoken most often by the men who have the most to do with rivers. The pork knockers, the small independent prospectors who have been walking into Guyana’s interior after gold and diamonds for well over a century, carry his stories out of the bush the way they carry everything else, in talk. Their world is a world of narrow boats on brown water, of rapids that have to be run because there is no road, of camps pitched on a bank at nightfall. Into that world the massacooraman fits like a key into a lock. He waits where the current turns deep and black. He rises under a corial or a bateau, tips it, and takes whoever spills out.

The descriptions are consistent and they are not flattering. He is a man-like thing, enormous, hairy from head to foot, considerably bigger and taller than any man, and equipped with sharp teeth. Whether he lives in the water or merely hunts in it is one of the things nobody has settled; what is agreed is that he swims very well and that no small boat that meets him is going to stay upright. In the Upper Demerara they tell it a little differently: he comes out as the sun sets, takes hold of you from the riverbank rather than from midstream, drowns you and breaks your neck. Children fishing at Old England were told for years that he would have them if they stayed out.

Where he came from is genuinely disputed, and the honest answer is that we do not know. One account traced through Upper Demerara families holds that his name is a fossil of slavery. Under it, massa is the planter, and curaban was the name given to African trackers set on the trail of people who had run from the estates. The waterways were the only way into the deep bush, and so the only way out of a plantation; the terror that came behind you on the river was massa’s curaban, and Guyanese Creole did the rest, sliding the ending from man into the word we have now. It is a folk etymology rather than a documented one, and it is offered here as what people say, not as fact. But it explains something that the creature’s shape does not explain by itself: why he lives on the river, why he is always behind you, and why the fear attached to him is so much older and heavier than a boat accident.

The other question is whose monster he is in the first place, and the answer is uncomfortable. Amerindians in the interior speak of him, and he is often filed as a river spirit of theirs, one of the beings who resent trespass and take payment in bodies. Yet the literature on Amerindian belief in the Guianas, the material gathered by Roth, by Brown and by im Thurn, does not provide much evidence for him at all. He is absent from the ethnographic record that ought to be his home ground. Al Creighton, reviewing the culture the mining frontier produced, notes that the physical features of the massacuraman are African, and that the tales are usually attributed to the pork knockers, while the possibility that the belief itself is Amerindian remains only that, a possibility. A monster nobody can place is a monster everyone can use, and this one has been used by everybody who has ever had to sleep beside a Guyanese river.

His powers are exactly as narrow and as sufficient as his job requires. Great physical strength, enough to flip a loaded boat in the run of a rapid. Speed and confidence in water where a man has neither. A preference for the last of the light, when the surface goes flat and lead-coloured and a person on the bank is a silhouette. Nothing in the stories gives him magic, cunning, or a bargain to strike, and he is the poorer and more frightening for it. He is hunger with arms.

The limits are just as plain, and they are the limits of water itself. He belongs to the river and to the strip of mud and root along its edge. He does not follow you to the coast, he does not come indoors, and he has no interest in anyone who has the sense to be off the water when the sun goes. That is why the entire body of practical advice about him consists of a single instruction, repeated to every child on every riverbank in the country, which is to come in now.

He has not stayed still. In 2014 the Guyanese playwright and University of Guyana academic Paloma Mohamed put him at the centre of a folk play for young people, Massacuraman, which schools have since performed for their Caribbean examinations and taken to the Caribbean Schools Drama Festival. In her hands the dreaded thing in the water becomes something closer to a guardian of the forest, a Guyanese cousin of Trinidad’s Papa Bois, punishing the greedy and the careless rather than the merely unlucky. That reading is Mohamed’s, and it is recent, and it is not what the old warnings meant. But it is how a monster survives a century: he stops being an explanation for drowned men and becomes an argument about what the river is owed.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Massacooraman?

The Massacooraman is a monster of Guyanese folklore, a huge, hairy, man-shaped creature said to live in the rivers of Guyana’s interior. It capsizes small boats and devours the people aboard, and it is counted among the jumbies, the general Guyanese Creolese class of malevolent spirits.

What does the Massacooraman look like?

Accounts describe it as man-like but far larger than any man, covered in hair, and armed with sharp teeth. It is a powerful swimmer and strong enough to overturn a loaded boat. Whether it lives in the water permanently or only hunts there has never been settled in the tradition.

Where does the Massacooraman live?

It lives in the rivers, creeks and rapids of Guyana’s interior, the same waterways used by pork knockers, the small-scale gold and diamond prospectors who have worked the bush for more than a century. In the Upper Demerara it is said to be most active as the sun goes down, when it seizes people from the riverbank itself.

Is the Massacooraman an African or an Amerindian monster?

Both traditions claim him and neither can prove it. Amerindians and miners in the interior both tell of the Massacooraman, but the standard collections of Guianese Amerindian belief, including the work of Walter Roth, Charles Barrington Brown and Everard im Thurn, offer little evidence of him, while the creature’s described features and the porkknocker channel through which his stories travel point to an African-derived origin. One Guyanese account derives the name from massa, the planter, and curaban, the trackers sent after people escaping the plantations by river.

How do you escape the Massacooraman?

There is no charm, no offering and no bargain in the tradition. The only protection is to stay off the water and away from the riverbank once the light begins to go, which is precisely the warning Guyanese children have been given for generations.