“No one guilty of slavery now, but it is good that they apologize”

“A great moment and a beautiful moment,” said Minister Franc Weerwind of Legal Protection. On Friday he confirmed that the government will apologize for the past of slavery. Millions would also be earmarked for past awareness of slavery.

In 2020, Prime Minister Rutte made it clear that there would still be no excuses. “It’s not a strange request. But the question is whether you can hold the people living today responsible for the past. Others may experience it as painful,” he said in a debate in the House of Representatives.

“No one today is guilty of slavery,” says writer and historian Cynthia McLeod. “But it’s good that the Netherlands apologizes.” You have written several books on the colonial and slavery past in Suriname. One of her books is How expensive was sugarin which he describes how enslaved people were dehumanized.

“Blacks weren’t people in the days of slavery,” says McLeod. “Human qualities were taken away from enslaved people. It was said that they had no intelligence or feelings. This is what makes slavery so bad. It was eventually abolished, but this way of thinking about blacks did not disappear immediately. And that is what makes slavery so bad. it is the effect of the past of slavery “.

According to Peggy Wijntuin, ignorance about slavery must be “fought”. In 2017, she filed a motion with the Rotterdam City Council calling for further research into that city’s colonial and slavery past. The motion was passed and two years Research done.

“This past hasn’t been that long. I’m only the third generation to be born into freedom. My great-grandmother was a slave woman. If I had a picture of four generations, she would be there too,” says Wijntuin.

“It is already in the word: done and it is. The story continues. I am here because the Netherlands was there. The Netherlands must know their history, because the ‘thinking of superiority’ is in the DNA of society. They are still in the society of today”.

That past also has an impact, according to Leiden historian Karwan Fatah-Black, an expert in the field of transatlantic slavery history. “The UN has found that in societies with a history of slavery, the descendants of enslaved people have less access to quality education, health care and political decision-making.”

He cites as an example the issue of allowances, in which the Caribbean Dutch have been most affected. According to the data of the CBS 1 in 136 Caribbean Dutch has been a victim of the allowance issue, compared to 1 in 4,386 Dutch without a migrant background.

How enslaved people became citizens after the abolition of slavery is a big blind spot, according to Fatah-Black. “Little research has been done on this.”

The debate over whether to apologize has been going on for a long time, says Fatah-Black. “It was already mentioned in the newspapers in the 1990s. But it was often treated in a derogatory way and sidelined by columnists and historians.”

According to Fatah-Black, this is due to the fact that the colonial mentality has long been part of the Dutch identity. “That the Netherlands was a good world power was a dominant thought. Especially when the Netherlands still had colonies, white superiority was cherished for a long time.”

The discussion changed: “For a long time only slavery in America was discussed instead of the past of Dutch slavery. A turning point came after the arrival of the National Slavery Monument in 2002. So the descendants were given more space. and the past impact of slavery has been taken seriously. ” , says Fatah-Black.