PVV’s badge speaks to us of the social etiquette of bygone days. The torch obviously represents Truth (torches in iconography can represent three things – Truth, Freedom and No Vehicles Beyond This Point), while the flintlocks represent the old-fashioned way of settling a dispute between gentlemen. At the height of the duelling season in the mid-19th century, there could be as many as ten duels a day, sometimes with duelling parties queuing in the early hours in light woodland to take their turn. It got to the point that participants were being asked to take only three paces back, to speed up the process, but this seemed to take the sport out of the thing and there was also a marked increase in cases of double fatalities.
The last duel known to take place in Suriname was provoked when a man accused his milliner of discussing his head size in public. When the reason for the duel was made public, the government very quickly passed a law forbidding males to debate controversial subjects. This led to pistol duels drying up altogether and contemporaneously, as a by-product, the formation of a national football league. Cameron Carter