Fact and fiction mixed: performance about ‘human gardens’ occupies (briefly) the Dutch senate

Just over five years ago there was a special meeting in the Belgian Senate. Then there was the performance The truth commission (originally made in 2013): a production by the Ghent theater company Action Zoo Humain. The project took the form of a hearing, as the name suggests: a committee consisting of judges, professors, artists and activists heard several witnesses about the history of the human zoos, exhibitions that showcased people from colonized areas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The degrading practice was analyzed in the performance with relatives of the victims, and then the question was asked how we should deal with that past.

A few years later, director Chokri Ben Chikha and dramaturge Sietske de Vries decided to stage the performance in the Netherlands, after versions in Ghent, Antwerp, Cape Town and Brussels. This required a remake, focused on the colonial past of the Netherlands. So from 2020 onwards, Ben Chikha and De Vries delved into the matter, made contacts with Dutch experts and theater partners and organized meetings with young people, theater workers and policy makers about how the racism of colonial times still continues to affect our society today.

The final performance premiered in the autumn of 2023 and was shown in Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Arnhem. But just as the performance was staged in the center of political power in Belgium, the makers also wanted to do the same in the Netherlands: and so the region The truth commission last Thursday in the Dutch Senate: the Senate of the States General in The Hague.

As in most other work by Action Zoo Humain, fact and fiction are closely intertwined in the performance. The session is chaired sternly but fairly by former politician Kathleen Ferrier, who is flanked by committee members representing different sides of the debate about the colonial past. A left-wing social scientist (Iris Tjoa) is often at odds with a right-wing municipal councilor (Mareille Labohm), who finds all these excuses for a ‘distant past’ ridiculous. The third committee member, a taciturn Moluccan ex-military (Anis de Jong), occasionally contributes something, especially about the scandalous treatment meted out to the Moluccans who fled to the Netherlands after the war of independence in the former colony of Indonesia.

In the confrontation with the witnesses (a historian who gives a lecture, relatives who honor their ancestors in song and dance), this creates a fascinating field of political tension, in which all sides of the current social debate are discussed. In the Netherlands, the performance takes place in the context of the recent apology that King Willem-Alexander offered last year about the national history of slavery, the victory of the far right in the most recent elections and the culture battle raging between anti-racist emancipation movements and conservative, anti-woke opposing forces.

The makers bring the discussion to a head with a Moroccan-Dutch witness (Fouad Mourigh), who once played a film role with the infamous, Islamophobic director Theo van Gogh. The murder of Van Gogh, in 2004, by an Islamic fundamentalist is a national trauma, so it is provocative when Mourigh compares his casting in the role of a criminal Moroccan with the practice of the human zoos: Isn’t that kind of stereotypical casting just the modern form of ‘monkey watching’ that visitors to the human gardens were guilty of?

The piece becomes even more topical when Mourigh presents the Dutch disregard for the genocide in Gaza as evidence for systemic racism. Another ‘witness’, a Jewish activist, then uses the end of the performance to call on the audience to The truth commission to remain in the Senate and demand a call for an immediate ceasefire from senators. Then fact and fiction really start to intertwine: eventually the (real) police have to be involved to remove the last three people from the room.

The confusion that The truth commission is particularly productive: where does art end and activism begin? By ultimately asking the audience to actually resist the dehumanization of ‘the other’, the performance underlines everyone’s own responsibility towards the toxic legacy of the human gardens.