Mitchell Esajas
The Dutch were responsible for genocide, slavery, and colonial oppression in South America, South Africa, and many other places in the “Global South”, yet these histories often remain disconnected or erased from the collective memory in both areas and particularly in the Netherlands (Image 1).
1. Intervention at the Fort of Good Hope. Photograph by Zahira Asmal
I was born and raised in Amsterdam; my parents moved to the Netherlands from the former Dutch colony of Suriname in South America. My ancestors were given their surname on 1 July 1863 when they were “emancipated” on the Sarah plantation in the Coronie district. Coronie consists of former plantations named by their – mainly British – owners, such as Hamilton, Friendship, Burnside, and Maryshope. The place names reflect the competition between European powers for conquered land. In 1667, the Dutch forcibly took over the colony from English settlers. The Indigenous people, the Arawaks, Caribs, and others, were massacred and driven into the interior of the Amazon jungle. Enslaved Africans were shipped to the “New World”, stripped of their names and identities, and forced to work on the plantations. This story was largely untold when I was at school. However, I learnt about it from my family and was privileged to visit Suriname several times. My mother used to say: No afrontu yu culturu, which means “Do not disown your history”. I learnt about slavery and freedom fighters like Boni, Baron, Joli Coeur, and the prolific Surinamese anti-colonial writer Anton de Kom. In his book, We Slaves of Suriname, de Kom (2022) wrote about Suriname under British rule between 1792 and 1815:
Slaves are passed from master to master, and even a colony is no more than a passive object in the horse trades of Europe’s great powers (…) On November 20, 1815, the Treaty of Paris returned all colonies conquered by the British to the Netherlands except for Berbice, Demerara, Essequibo, and the Cape. Suriname thus became a Dutch possession again.
Over the past decade, there has been a movement in the Netherlands to recognise and memorialise slavery and its legacies. For decades, people from the Afro-Surinamese and, to a lesser extent, the Dutch Caribbean diaspora in the Netherlands have been organising public commemorations, marches, protests, petitions, etc. to unveil this history (Araujo & Nimako, 2022). In 2001, this led to the founding of an official commemoration and a National Slavery Monument in East Amsterdam. However, the history and legacy of Dutch slavery in the Cape have remained relatively underexposed – even among those involved in the movement. I must admit that I also overlooked this, showing that the Dutch have erased parts of their colonial history.
In November 2022, I explored the theme “Architectures of resistance: encountering justice through memory” during the See Studio in Cape Town. It provided a space to reflect on the relationship between architecture, the public space, and memory. The Fort of Good Hope – a symbol of Dutch colonialism in South Africa – was used as a case study and point of departure for exploring how the violent histories of slavery and colonialism can be traced back through the architectural structures built during colonial times (Image 2).
2. Entrance to the Fort of Good Hope. Photographs by Zahira Asmal
The Fort of Good Hope was built between 1666 and 1679 under the Dutch East India Company (VOC) commander Zacharias Wagenaer. It is the oldest surviving building in South Africa. Before the VOC – established in 1602 – conquered the land, civilisations had developed throughout Southern Africa for thousands of years, including in the Cape. In his groundbreaking book, The Lie of 1652, Patriq Tariq Mellet (2020) showed how different people, especially the Khoe and San, developed their own economic, spiritual, agricultural, and social structures before European colonisers arrived. He used “Khoe foundation people” or “Khoe” to refer to the Indigenous Cape Peninsula people.
After the Portuguese traveller Vasco da Gama found a route from Europe to India via the southern tip of Africa, the number of ships crossing the oceans via the Cape increased steadily. The local Khoe community traded with European travellers, and between 1600 and 1652, a “proto-port settlement” developed in which independent Khoe farmers and traders traded with Europeans who used Table Bay as a stopover on their journeys between Europe and Asia. Colonial conquest, trade, and slavery became an increasingly lucrative business as European nations competed for power and control over land and trade routes. Control of the strategically located Cape was essential to maintain its dominant position in the East. The VOC sought to set up a permanent supply and trading station at the foot of Table Mountain. Where there had been a history of trade with the independent Khoe people, the approach to the Indigenous Cape people gradually transformed into one of conquest, dishonesty, and violent oppression under the leadership of VOC administrator Jan van Riebeeck (Mellet, 2020:115).
van Riebeeck used trickery and deceit to force the Khoe people into servitude. One of the Khoe leaders, Autshumao, who had been a leading trader with the Dutch and English, was betrayed by the Dutch. All his wealth in livestock was taken and he was imprisoned for life on Robben Island. He escaped during the first Dutch-Khoe war and returned as a Khoe spokesperson. However, van Riebeeck (Image 3) claimed that the VOC had conquered the land where the Khoe had lived for generations by the sword and did not accept their protest. He had similarly tricked Autshumao’s niece, Krotoa. At the age of 10, Krotoa was taken from her community and put in service as a handmaid. She became proficient in Dutch and learnt from her uncle and the practices in the van Riebeeck household to become an interpreter. As tensions and conflicts arose between the VOC and the Cape Khoe, van Riebeeck grew to distrust her, believing she favoured her people. She was ostracised and imprisoned on Robben Island where she died in 1674. Hence, the statement: “Jan van Riebeeck was a racist coloniser” (Camissa Museum, 2021).
3. Coloniser van Riebeeck meets Khoe people. Credit: The Black Archives
van Riebeeck introduced a slavery system because he realised that more labour was needed to maintain the early settlement of the Dutch colonists. As the VOC did not allow the enslavement of Indigenous people, he was granted permission to import enslaved people in 1654. The first group from West Africa arrived in May 1658 on the de Amersfoort ship. In the following years, the VOC imported more than 30,000 enslaved people from Mozambique, Madagascar, India, Indonesia, and other parts of Asia and East Africa, as the West India Company (WIC) had a monopoly on the slave trade in the West Coast of Africa. Some of the enslaved lived in the Fort of Good Hope, and others lived in the Slave Lodge, both of which are now (partly) museums (Iziko Museums of South Africa, n.d.a).
How could a space with such a violent history, like the Fort of Good Hope, be “decolonised” and transformed into a space of healing? “The ‘castle’ is not a castle, it’s a military occupation of space”, said urban designer Khalied Jacobs during a memorable excursion on Table Mountain (Image 4). He explained how the fort was strategically located to assert the dominance of the VOC and control the land in Table Bay. With its construction, the subsequent displacement of Indigenous people, and the enslavement of other colonised people, the Dutch laid the foundations for apartheid (a Dutch word) and current inequalities in the city and country.
4. Reading the City with Khalied Jacobs. Photograph by Mitchell Esajas
During my research on the history and architecture of the fort, the similarity of the pentagonal design of the Fort of Good Hope and Fort Zeelandia in Paramaribo, Suriname struck me. Both were erected to establish European dominance over stolen land and facilitated genocide, slavery, and colonial violence (Images 5 & 6). The Dutch used the Fort of Good Hope to imprison rebellious leaders such as amaHlubi King Langalibalele‚ Zulu King Cetshwayo‚ Bapedi King Sekhukhune, and Khoikhoi freedom fighter Doman (Deklerk, 2016). Fort Zeelandia was used to punish enslaved people and anti-colonial fighter de Kom was detained there before he was deported to the Netherlands in 1933. In an introduction to the new edition of de Kom’s (2022) book, Tessa Leuwsha wrote:
“De Kom was held prisoner in Fort Zeelandia. By historical irony this was the very fort, built by the Dutch, where slaveholders could pay to have their so-called ‘disobedient slaves’ disciplined. The colonists outdid both the English and the French in corporal and capital punishment; their methods included whipping, the cruel torture known as the ‘Spanish billy goat’, the breaking wheel and death by burning.”
5. Map of the Fort Zeelandia in Paramaribo, Suriname. Credit: The Black Archives
6. Map of the Fort of Good Hope in Cape Town, South Africa. Credit: The Black Archives
It was an interesting experience to visit the Fort of Good Hope and learn about its history and current legacy, which was painfully evident from the many people experiencing homelessness camping outside its walls. Several local participants in the See Studio (2022) expressed that they never felt welcome or comfortable at the site because of its complex history. Today, it is used as an office for the South African Department of Defence. It also comprises several museums and exhibition spaces such as the Military Museum, the Cape Muslim & Slave Heritage Museum & Art Exhibition, and the William Fehr Collection, which consists of hundreds of artworks, woodwork, and artefacts dating back to the Dutch colonial period. Ironically, the collection was first displayed during a celebration of the tercentenary of the arrival of van Riebeeck in 1952 (Iziko Museums of South Africa, n.d.b). In 2021, the Camissa Museum (2021) was opened on the fort’s premises (Image 7):
“The Camissa Museum tells the stories of the people of the Cape. It reveals the rich and complex history of Camissa Africans, those classified as ‘Coloured,’ who have been portrayed by others for centuries but never by themselves. This history and these stories, that have been buried and hidden for centuries, are now told for the first time. The museum is a place of memory and restoration; it uncovers a hidden ancestral and cultural past, crucial for communities to understand themselves and for a common understanding among different communities.”
7. The Camissa Museum. Photograph by Mitchell Esajas
The Camissa Museum shares a history that was long underexposed from a decolonial viewpoint, in a place rooted in violence. One of the visitors during the See Studio festival (2022) explained how, during apartheid, they had to visit the fort every year with their school and all they learnt was the colonial narrative of how van Riebeeck founded Cape Town, without any mention of the history and culture of the Khoe people. In this context, establishing the Camissa Museum is a great step forward compared to other outdated exhibitions and presentations, in the fort and other cultural institutions in South Africa. Thus, the museum deserves more space to tell the complex and nuanced story and its legacy.
There are debates and movements worldwide calling for the “decolonisation of museums”, the development of “new narratives”, and the removal of colonial statues and symbols (Jouwe, 2019). In the Netherlands, a new wave of anti-racism around the national blackface tradition of Saint Nicolas and Black Pete has sparked change in the cultural sector and contributed to museums reflecting on their colonial past and the historical narratives that they reproduce. For example, the Amsterdam Museum decided to ban the term “Golden Age” to refer to the 17th century, the heyday of Dutch colonial conquest. “Golden Age”, a family game I found at a flea market on King’s Day, symbolises the link between the dominant colonial narrative in the Netherlands and South Africa. The game’s box cover includes the well-known painting of the imagined meeting between van Riebeeck and the “awestruck” local Khoe people meeting on the shores of Table Bay. Charles Bell painted it 200 years after it happened (Mellet, 2020:95). Gamifying the conquest of land for children and families shows how Eurocentric historical narratives, which erase the voices of Indigenous and colonised people, continue to be mythologised and popularised (Image 8).
8. “The Dutch Golden Age” family game. Credit: The Black Archives
At The Black Archives (n.d.) – a historical archive and cultural centre in Amsterdam – we use a combination of artistic interventions, public debate, and archival research to challenge these narratives because they continue to legitimise current legacies of slavery and colonialism such as institutional racism, economic inequality, and police violence. Challenging these narratives is not only about “broadening perspectives” or contributing to “diversity and inclusion”; it is part of a larger struggle for decolonisation and reparatory justice. During the Rhodes Must Fall movement, philosopher Achille Mbembe (2015) wrote:
“The decolonisation of buildings and of public spaces is therefore not a frivolous issue, especially in a country that, for many centuries, has defined itself as not of Africa, but as an outpost of European imperialism in the Dark Continent; and in which 70% of the land is still firmly in the hands of 13% of the population. The decolonisation of buildings and of public spaces is inseparable from the democratisation of access.”
Decolonisation is an ongoing process of undoing the wrongs of the past and present. In South Africa, apartheid was only abolished three decades ago, and its wounds have not been fully healed. With the Fort of Good Hope, what is the effect of having the VOC logo, the first multinational company in the world, looming over the entrance to a space that is supposed to tell the story of the Cape, and which should become a place of “healing, reconciliation, and nation building” (Gilfellan, Hendricks & Sipoyo, 2019)? What kind of decolonial artistic interventions can be developed to welcome people, especially Indigenous South Africans, into a space that was once built to exclude them? (Image 9)
9. Entrance to the Fort of Good Hope with the VOC logo. Photograph by Zahira Asmal
VOC
- Genocide
- Slavery
- Stolen Land
- Militarisation
- Exploitation
- Segregation
- White Supremacy
During the See Studio (2022), we had a short yet intense and inspiring amount of time and space to reflect on these questions and experiment with ways to decolonise this historically violent place. I printed and placed statements at the entrance and inside the fort’s grounds. They echoed the rich, inspiring, and thought-provoking conversations and the decades of critical thinking and work by activists and scholars questioning colonial narratives in the Netherlands and South Africa.
A week before I left for Cape Town, the Dutch government announced that they would apologise for their role in slavery. On 19 December 2022, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte “apologised” on behalf of the state. The apology was controversial because two years earlier – on Keti Koti, the day that commemorates the abolition of slavery in the former Dutch Caribbean colonies – he stated that the government was not planning to apologise because it would cause too much “polarisation” (Bhikhie, 2020). None of the organisations or individuals from communities of enslaved descendants had been consulted about the content and process of the “apology”, and reparations were not even mentioned. What struck me was that, logically, Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean islands were specifically mentioned in his speech, and slavery in the East Indies was also mentioned, but not South Africa. On 1 July 2023, on Keti Koti, the Netherlands King apologised on behalf of the state and his family. Again, South Africa was not mentioned. This reflects how this history is still being erased, even in the state’s attempt to atone for its history of slavery (Government of the Netherlands, 2022).
Who remembers the history of slavery across the Indian Ocean? How does this history affect South Africans today? And why is this history largely forgotten in the Netherlands? Decolonising historical narratives is essential and more work needs to be done to create more awareness of the connections between the histories and afterlives of Dutch slavery and colonialism. From 6 October to November 2023, The Black Archives and Nancy Jouwe co-organised the exhibition CAPE x UTRECHT at the AG in Utrecht. The exhibition focused on the relationship between the Cape Colony and Utrecht. It featured unique archival material and artwork by Jasper Albinus, Diana Ferrus, Neo Muyanga, Shishani Vranckx, Judith Westerveld, HKU photography alumna Farren van Wyk, and Carine Zaayman. On 25 October 2023, an online transatlantic conversation was organised with Diane Ferrus (poet), Panashe Chigumadzi (writer), Calvyn Gilfellan (CEO of the Fort of Good Hope), Nancy Jouwe (cultural historian), and Mitchell Esajas (co-founder of The Black Archives) about the erased history of VOC slavery in the Cape and its legacy. Sites such as the Fort of Good Hope can serve as places of remembrance, healing, and restorative justice. As Mellet (2020:14) wrote:
“All histories are versions, and this book, like all works is a version or interpretation of a lived reality and path of learning. (…) There is also a need articulated by many who cry out for belonging and reunion with ancestral roots lost in the sands of time as land and people were removed from each other. For memories to heal, the memory must be restored and shared. Bringing to light the history that has been hidden is the start of a process of restorative memory that is vital to restorative justice.”
Mitchell Esajas participated in the See Studio 2022. It was led by Zahira Asmal and produced by The City in partnership with Het Nieuwe Instituut and the Research Centre for Material Culture, with support from the Creative Industries Fund and DutchCulture.
References:
Araujo, M. & Nimako, K. 2022. Mobilising history: racism, enslavement and public debate in contemporary Europe. In The palgrave handbook of critical race and gender. Cham: Springer International Publishing. 449-466.
Bhikhie, A. 2020. Rutte: ‘excuses voor slavernij zorgt voor te veel polarisatie’. NU.nl. 1 July. Available: https://www.nu.nl/politiek/6061799/rutte-excuses-voor-slavernij-zorgt-voor-te-veel-polarisatie.html [2023, February 12].
Camissa Museum. 2021. 7 tributaries. Available: https://camissamuseum.co.za/index.php/7-tributaries/ [2023, February 12].
Deklerk, A. 2016. Statues of royal prisoners unveiled at Castle of Good Hope commemoration. BusinessDay. 11 December. Available: https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/life/2016-12-11-statues-of-royal-prisoners-unveiled-at-castle-of-good-hope-commemoration/ [2023, February 12].
de Kom, A. 2022. We slaves of Suriname. United Kingdom: Polity.
Gilfellan, C., Hendricks, D. & Sipoyo, G. 2019. The decolonisation of South Africa’s oldest surviving colonial building: Lessons from the Castle of Good Hope in Cape Town. South African Museums Association Bulletin. 41(1):10. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC-1ce752865f [2023, February 12].
Government of the Netherlands. 2022. Speech by Prime Minister Mark Rutte on the slavery past. Available: https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/documenten/toespraken/2022/12/19/toespraak-minister-president-rutte-over-het-slavernijverleden [2023, February 12].
I See You. 2022. See studio. Available: https://iseeyou.capetown/activities/see-studio/ [2024, August 21].
Iziko Museums of South Africa. n.d.a. Inhabitants of the lodge. Available: https://slavery.iziko.org.za/inhabitantsofthelodge [2023, February 12].
Iziko Museums of South Africa. n.d.b. William Fehr collection. Available: https://www.iziko.org.za/collection/william-fehr-collection/ [2023, February 12].
Jouwe, N. 2019. Sites for unlearning in the museum. Available: https://www.mistermotley.nl/sites-unlearning-museum/ [2023, February 12].
Mellet, P. 2020. The Lie of 1652. A decolonized history of land. Cape Town: Tafelberg.
Mbembe, A. 2015. Decolonizing knowledge and the question of the archive [Lecture]. Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), University of the Witwatersrand. 9 June.
The Black Archives. n.d. Facing blackness. Available: https://www.theblackarchives.nl/facingblackness.html [2023, February 12].
Top image:
Fort of Good Hope by Zahira Asmal
Note: The views expressed by individuals and organisations are their own and do not reflect the views of The City. If you find any errors or historical inaccuracies, please contact the editor.
