“Slavery history is Amsterdam history”, Brandon concludes. “Where wealth and power were concentrated in Amsterdam, there was almost always a connection with slavery. And it is not about incidental involvement, but a real political role of the Amsterdam city council,” said the researcher.
For example, Amsterdam was co-owner of the colony of Suriname, but much less is known that Amsterdam also had its own small colony on the Delaware River in North America, for example. “The city officials decided to set up a slave trade with this and equipped a ship for it.”
‘Healing effect’
Whether Amsterdam will apologize for this black chapter in the city’s history is not yet certain. “I don’t want to anticipate that,” says alderman Rutger Groot Wassink. “We have said, we are going to have this research done first and then we are going to examine it as a college. But I think this research shows that there was really a lot going on and that you cannot just brush this away.”
The Ninsee (National Institute of Dutch Slavery Past and Heritage) hopes for an apology from Amsterdam because it would have a ‘healing effect’. “Apologies express the intention of directors to do better than their predecessors”, chairman Linda Nooitmeer wrote at the beginning of this year. Afro Magazine.
2023 anniversary year
If there are apologies, she assumes that they will also be followed at national level. But they will not be there yet, said Minister Rutte. “The question is whether you can hold people who live today responsible for the past. Others may experience that as painful,” he said in a July. House of Representatives debate about racism and discrimination.
There will be a commemoration year in 2023. In that year it will be 150 years ago that slaves really became free, after slavery in the Netherlands had been formally abolished ten years earlier, in 1863.
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