Tracing Slavery: The Politics of Atlantic Memory in The Netherlands 9781800731615

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TRACING SLAVERY

EASA Series

Published in Association with the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) Series Editors: Jelena Tošic´, University of St. Gallen, Sabine Strasser, University of Bern, Annika Lems, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle Social anthropology in Europe is growing, and the variety of work being done is expanding. This series is intended to present the best of the work produced by members of the EASA, both in monographs and in edited collections. The studies in this series describe societies, processes and institutions around the world and are intended for both scholarly and student readership. Recent volumes: 43. TRACING SLAVERY The Politics of Atlantic Memory in The Netherlands Markus Balkenhol 42. ETHNOGRAPHIES OF POWER A Political Anthropology of Energy Edited by Tristan Loloum, Simone Abram and Nathalie Ortar 41. EMBODYING BORDERS A Migrant’s Right to Health, Universal Rights and Local Policies Edited by Laura Ferrero, Chiara Quagliariello and Ana Cristina Vargas 40. THE SEA COMMANDS Community and Perception of the Environment in a Portuguese Fishing Village Paulo Mendes 39. CAN ACADEMICS CHANGE THE WORLD? An Israeli Anthropologist’s Testimony on the Rise and Fall of a Protest Movement on Campus Moshe Shokeid

38. INSTITUTIONALISED DREAMS The Art of Managing Foreign Aid Elz˙bieta Dra˛z˙kiewicz 37. NON-HUMANS IN AMERINDIAN SOUTH AMERICA Ethnographies of Indigenous Cosmologies, Rituals and Songs Edited by Juan Javier Rivera Andía 36. ECONOMY, CRIME AND WRONG IN A NEOLIBERAL ERA Edited by James G. Carrier 35. BEING-HERE Placemaking in a World of Movement Annika Lems 34. EXPERIMENTAL COLLABORATIONS Ethnography through Fieldwork Devices Edited by Adolfo Estalella and Tomás Sánchez Criado

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TRACING SLAVERY The Politics of Atlantic Memory in The Netherlands

Markus Balkenhol

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2021 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2021 Markus Balkenhol All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Balkenhol, Markus, author. Title: Tracing slavery : the politics of Atlantic memory in the Netherlands / Markus Balkenhol. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2021. | Series: EASA series ; 43 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021005946 (print) | LCCN 2021005947 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800731608 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800731615 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Slavery--Netherlands--History. | Slave trade-Netherlands--History. | Collective memory--Netherlands--History. | Slaves--Monuments--Netherlands--History. Classification: LCC HT1203 .B354 2021 (print) | LCC HT1203 (ebook) | DDC 306.3/6209492--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005946 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005947 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80073-160-8 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-161-5 ebook

For my parents Jörg Balkenhol Marion Balkenhol

Contents

List of Figures viii Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 Chapter 1. The Politics of Autochthony 39 Chapter 2. Negotiating Colonial Geographies 71 Chapter 3. Practices of Diaspora 87 Chapter 4. Kaskawina – Politics of a Lower Frequency 113 Chapter 5. Doing Cultural Heritage: Race, Gender and the Politics of Authentication 141 Conclusion 173 References 183 Index 197

Figures

0.1. Statue of Anton de Kom, Jikke van Loon, 2006. xii 1.1. Farmhouse ‘Het Muisje’ at Abcouderstraatweg, De Lage Bijlmer (Bijlmerringsloot), Jacob Olie, November 1896. 43 1.2. Farmhouse ‘Nooit gedacht’, Oost Bijlmer 27. 45 1.3. Apartment buildings Kruitberg and Groeneveen, July 1972. 46 1.4. Monument van Besef, Henry Renfurm, 2003. 59 1.5. Roy Ristie just before the ceremony at Surinameplein, 2009. 61 2.1. View from my fieldwork home, 2009. 70 2.2. Amsterdam Zuidoost, 2009. 78 2.3. Aerial photograph of Bijlmer East, 26 September 1986. Geerdinkhof is in the foreground, separated from the high-rise buildings by an elevated road. 83 4.1. Bigi Ten performing at a birthday party, 2009. 112 5.1. Angisa headdresses at a birthday party, 2009. 140

Acknowledgements

The debts I have incurred during the course of this project are without doubt too large to acknowledge here in any adequate or comprehensive way. First and foremost, I want to thank those people who agreed to share their knowledge and feelings with me, both in Suriname and in the Netherlands. Most of these people must remain anonymous in this book, but without them, quite simply there would have been no project. I want to thank one person in particular, who has given shape to this project like no other, and who is present throughout this text in ways that are at times apparent not even to me. Thank you Roy Ristie for your wisdom, humour and friendship. I am honoured to know you. I also want to thank in particular Edouard and Yvette, whose real names will not be disclosed but who have welcomed me in their homes to do research in Amsterdam Zuidoost. In the Netherlands, I want to thank explicitly Amy Abdou, Barryl Biekman, Aspha Bijnaar, Angelo Bromet, Maureen Caupain, Glenn Codfried, Jessy De Abreu, Frank Dragtenstein, Lia Feller and the women (and men) of Afi Yuru (formerly Mama Yuru), Quinsy Gario, Hedy Jane Guds, Bigi Ten, Glenn Helberg, Heloise Holband, Joseph Jordan, Nancy Jouwe, Kaikusi, Maria Karg-Reinders, Romeo Kotzebue, Peres Jong Loy, Marian Markelo (Nana Efua Mensah), Jetty Mathurin, Nana Mbroh, Jules Rijssen, Lotta Ruskamp, Valika Smeulders, Alex van Stipriaan, Zuster Vianen and Annemarie de Wildt. I thank Gisèle Roos La Diosa Misteriosa for her help, her company and for sharing her network. Thank you Virginia Sussenbach, may you rest in peace. In Suriname, I want to thank Trusnelda Blackson, Eartha Boerleider, Hillary de Bruin at Cultuurstudies, Ka’tje, Winston Kout, Cynthia McLeod and the staff of Sweet Merodia, Henny Panka and NAKS, Glenn Polimé, Celestine Raalte, Kortensia Sumter-Griffith,

x  ◆ Acknowledgements

Claudette Toney, Erwin de Vries, Iwan Wijngaarde and Armand Zunder. I also want to thank my supervisors Herman Roodenburg, Irene Stengs and Francio Guadeloupe for their support, which began long before this project. Thank you for believing in me and my ideas. Thank you also for the incredibly meticulous, tireless and extensive reading of my text, for being there in late-night moments of panic and for your friendship during challenging times. I also wish to thank my colleagues and friends of the heritage dynamics research group and the seminar on ‘religion, media, and the body’ at Meertens Institute, in particular Maria Paula Adinolfi, André Bakker, Duane Jethro, Maja Lovrenovich, Birgit Meyer, Mattijs van de Port, Jojada Verrips and Marleen de Witte for commenting on various versions of the manuscript. Daan Beekers and Paul Mepschen, I am deeply grateful for our reading club, where we discussed many versions of the text. I thank you for your friendship and support. I thank Gloria Wekker for giving so much of her time to give the manuscript an amazingly close reading and discuss the text extensively with me. Thank you Ernst van den Hemel, for your friendship and your help. You have saved me twice! Peter Geschiere, you have been the best reviewer anyone could wish for. Thanks to all of you, the text has improved immeasurably. Any remaining errors and inconsistencies are entirely my own. I have institutional debts, as well. This research project was financed by the NWO as part of the Heritage Dynamics research project, for which I am grateful. I also want to thank VU University and the Department for Social and Cultural Anthropology for their support, as well as the Meertens Institute for their support financially and in kind. Lieke Michiels van Kessenich, this project would not have materialized if it was not for your love and patience. Thank you. I dedicate this book to our daughters Nola Emilie and Elyn Ann, who had to endure the writing of this book twice.

Figure 0.1.  Statue of Anton de Kom, Jikke van Loon, 2006. Photograph by Markus Balkenhol.

Introduction

Whose Heritage? Our regular route to the groceries led my fieldwork host Yvette and me past the statue of Anton de Kom, one of the most heatedly debated objects of cultural heritage1 in Amsterdam Zuidoost (see Figure 0.1). De Kom (1898–1945), author of the influential 1934 history of Suriname entitled We Slaves of Suriname, is one of the greatest Afro-Surinamese heroes, who ‘called on all Surinamese for unity and equality, turned against colonial rule, and was active in the Dutch resistance 1940–1945’.2 ‘It does not look like him,’ Yvette declared curtly when I asked her about the statue, and that was all she had to say about the matter. As we drove on, Yvette swiftly turned her attention back to the task at hand – grocery shopping. Would they have all we needed at the shop, and would we be able to carry the heavy shopping trolley back up to the apartment? Yvette’s comment had touched upon the main controversy regarding the statue of Anton de Kom. A group of local residents calling itself Een waardig standbeeld voor Anton De Kom (A dignified statue for Anton de Kom) had argued that De Kom was cultural heritage: ‘Suriname and the Netherlands have a shared history. In recent years, a growing awareness seems to develop among both scientists and politicians that this shared history can no longer be stashed away, but that it ought to have a prominent place within

2  ◆  Tracing Slavery

Dutch Culture. . . . In view of this process, this seems to us a timely moment for the rehabilitation of Anton de Kom.’3 The dramatic turn of events when the statue was unveiled in 2006 was headline news, and like everybody else in Amsterdam Zuidoost, Yvette had seen the shocking media images. Video footage showed an enraged group of protesters desperately trying to prevent the ceremony from taking place. The speeches of the dignitaries, held in a tone of reconciliation, were no longer deemed newsworthy in the face of protesters crying and yelling, deeply hurt by what they perceived as an insult to black people in the Netherlands. ‘This is a racist image!’ they yelled, ‘We want a dignified statue. We are no longer slaves!’ Newspapers printed photos showing a sign hanging around the neck of the statue that read: ‘The genes of the slave masters are clearly still alive.’ Years after the unveiling, this sense of disappointment and anger was still palpable. As one of my interlocutors, an opponent of the statue, told me in 2011, the statue had been intended to bring AfroSurinamese together to contemplate and make plans for the future: ‘But we did not get what we went for. . . . It’s not our thing. [The protesters] say that the statue does not speak to what we need, in terms of that Afro-Surinamese culture, in terms of that heritage, in terms of that spirituality, in terms of that identification.’4 Though Yvette seemed to reiterate concerns about the statue, she was definitely not enraged. Did she even care, I wondered? Why wasn’t this statue more important to her? Did she not care about her heritage? Was it not her history that was at stake here? Did she not see herself as Afro-Surinamese, a descendant of the enslaved, a black Surinamese-Dutch woman? Did she not feel the pain and trauma of slavery that has formed the basis for many of the memorial projects? Is she somehow immune to the racism black people experience on a daily basis? Yvette was my second host during my fieldwork in Amsterdam Zuidoost. She had moved from Suriname to the Netherlands a little over ten years ago. Since her husband had passed away several years earlier, she had shared a spacious apartment with two of her sons on the sixth floor of an apartment building in Amsterdam Zuidoost. This part of Amsterdam is famous for its huge modernist architecture and is known as blaka foto, the Sranantongo term for ‘black city’. Yvette had found success in life and owned a house in Suriname that included a fish pond (‘With twenty thousand Tilapias!’) and an orchard. At home in Amsterdam Zuidoost, Yvette was street wise. She knew her way around the bustling markets, which sold everything from

Introduction  ◆  3

Chinese-made Gucci bags and African roots CDs to Surinamese fruit and vegetables such as antroea, sopropo and of course the devilishly hot adjoema and Madame Jeanette peppers that I was frequently warned against, to African fufu flour, Dutch kibbeling and tropical fish. Yvette had always hired a stall at the yearly Kwakoe summer festival, where she sold her delicious Surinamese food, but now the fees for these stalls had shrunk her profit margin too much for her to find it worth the effort. Yvette bought her meat exclusively at the butcher’s around the corner. Not only was the meat there the freshest, she said, but the butcher, a white Dutch man, also owned the house adjacent to hers in Suriname. With Yvette, you could drop any name and she would list every single skeleton in their closet. She passed the statue of Anton de Kom almost every day. Of course, Yvette knew the protesters’ arguments: that the statue did not look like Anton de Kom but rather like a slave; that the nakedness of the statue was an insult to Anton de Kom in particular and Afro-Surinamese in general; that the placement of this ‘ogre’ affirmed the arrogance of the continuing white Dutch colonial mindset. She could enumerate them all. Yet when I tried to inquire more about Yvette’s take on De Kom’s statue on our short drive to the toko,5 my inquisitiveness did not turn up much more than some obligatory answers. ‘Mi n’e bemoei’ (‘I don’t get involved’), she would say. Yvette made it abundantly clear that she had made up her mind about the statue of Anton de Kom and that there was nothing left to discuss. She seemed to feel the same about the issue of slavery in general. She had never been to the national commemoration of slavery and its victims in the centre of Amsterdam and could not think of anyone who could talk to me about slavery (thinking I was looking to find ‘experts’) and was personally unconvinced that she had anything of importance to add to that discussion. Besides, she had more important things to worry about: hunting down a good bargain at the toko, feeding a hundred people for tomorrow’s big catering job, picking up the koto (Afro-Surinamese traditional dress) she had ordered from her Thai dressmaker, or worrying about her son’s job. Yvette’s stance on slavery is one that I encountered often during my research and one that took me by surprise. The slavery memorials with their emphasis on violence, suffering and heroism and the general idea that they represent ‘the’ experience of descendants of the enslaved had not prepared me for this seeming indifference about slavery and its afterlives.

4  ◆  Tracing Slavery

In this book, my central concern is what people in Amsterdam Zuidoost make of the cultural heritage of slavery that is being produced across the Atlantic world by museums, heritage institutions, grassroots organizations and many other players in the heritage industry. How does the public memory and cultural heritage of slavery resonate in the everyday lives of those they are intended to address, for instance on their way to the groceries? Yvette’s stance and that of others like her have serious implications for wider formations of cultural heritage in the Atlantic world, in which the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery have increasingly found a place in the official heritage canons (Araujo 2013; Smeulders 2012). UNESCO, for example, initiated their immense Slave Route Project in Benin in 1994 to ‘contribute to a better understanding of the causes, forms of operation, issues and consequences of slavery in the world . . . ; highlight the global transformations and cultural interactions that have resulted from this history; and contribute to a culture of peace by promoting reflection on cultural pluralism, intercultural dialogue and the construction of new identities and citizenships.’6 These calls have been taken up in local politics of citizenship and belonging across the Atlantic world. Grassroots organizations have been able to mount political pressure on governments to recognize slavery as part of their history, epitomized in the opening of the National Museum of African American History in Washington in 2016. Across the Atlantic world, slavery and the slave trade are becoming part of historical canons (Araujo 2010; Fleming 2011; Horton and Kardux 2004; Rice 2010). US President Bill Clinton’s famous 1998 visit to the former slave fortress of Goree in Senegal and his expression of remorse was followed by his successor, George W. Bush. On his visit to Goree Island in 2003, Bush called slavery ‘one of the greatest crimes in history’. In 2009, Barack Obama even caused a minor scandal both in Ghana as well as among African Americans in the US for visiting Kenya, his father’s country. As an ‘African American’, he had been expected to travel to West Africa to acknowledge the suffering caused by slavery. In 2008, the US. passed a law formally apologizing for slavery and Jim Crow (Blaagaard 2011: 62). In Great Britain, the history of slavery, or rather abolition, has been displayed at the Wilberforce House in Hull since 1906 (Hamilton 2010), while museums began exhibiting this history in new ways from the 1980s (Kaplan and Oldfield 2010). An exhibition on the slave trade opened in the British National Maritime Museum in 1999, and public interest for slavery peaked in 2007 with the bicentenary

Introduction  ◆  5

celebrations of the abolition of the slave trade (Kaplan and Oldfield 2010), during which then Prime Minister Tony Blair formally apologized for transatlantic slavery (Blaagaard 2011). France has several monuments and museums to commemorate slavery; in 1998, it was the first nation to formally recognize transatlantic slavery as a crime against humanity (Beriss 2004). In 2006, President Jacques Chirac made a formal apology for slavery and made 10 May a national day to commemorate victims. In 2002, Queen Beatrix’s unveiling of the National Slavery Memorial in Amsterdam attracted widespread media attention. The grassroots organizations who had pushed for the memorial framed the unveiling as a revolutionary end to the silence over slavery (Oostindie 2001; Van Stipriaan 2005). They saw it as a way of giving voice to the ‘descendants of the enslaved’, who, they argued, continued to suffer from the mental, social and economic consequences of enslavement. In the wake of this project, the highest representatives of the state expressed their remorse about the Dutch involvement in transatlantic slavery. During the United Nations conference against racism in Durban in 2001, the Dutch Minister of Urban Policy and Integration, Roger van Boxtel, a proponent of the Dutch slavery memorial, expressed ‘deep remorse’ about the ‘grave injustice in the past’ (Schoten 2009: 24); in 2002, then Crown Prince Willem Alexander said on a visit to the former slave fortress Elmina on the Ghanaian coast: ‘We look back with remorse to that dark age of human relations. We pay tribute to the victims of this inhuman trade’ (Oostindie 2005: 66); and every year since 2002, high state dignitaries have given speeches at the slavery memorial in Amsterdam,7 and memorials have also been placed in Middelburg, Rotterdam and Abcoude, with more initiatives on the way. Yvette’s curtness, then, raises the question of the appeal of these grand narratives of belonging and citizenship in the everyday lives of those they are meant to represent. If these forms of cultural heritage are meant to offer persuasive narratives of binding, belonging and political subjectivity, Yvette’s stance raises the question of how, whom and under what circumstances these narratives manage to persuade. My investigation therefore focuses on the local resonances of this in people’s concrete everyday lives.

6  ◆  Tracing Slavery

Negotiating the Politics of Autochthony In the Netherlands, the push by grassroots organizations over the past three decades to commemorate and include the topic of slavery in the national historical canon has taken place in the broader context of the increasingly dominant twin processes of heritage formation and the culturalization of many areas of social life. In this conjuncture, ‘“cultural identities” and concomitant “sentiments of belonging” are prominently brought into play in the political arena’ (Van de Port and Meyer 2018: 1). Cultural heritage has become a central ingredient in the making of collectivities and as such has become an important marker of social in- and exclusion (Hall 1999). The idea that cultural heritage should be safeguarded for the benefit of humankind – embodied most prominently by the UNESCO – is increasingly translated by some heritage players into nationalist projects of cultural protectionism. These cultural protectionists no longer understand cultural heritage as a common good but as the property of a particular nation or people. In their understanding, ‘culture’ and ‘people’ become homogeneous, static entities that are linked by birthright to a specific place. Here the idea of autochthony emerges, which merges ‘culture’, ‘people’ and ‘country’ to become a quasi-natural organism. Autochthonous literally means ‘to be born from the soil’, from the classical Greek autos (self) and chtonos (soil) (Geschiere 2009: 2). In the English language, the term also figures in a geological or botanical sense, as in autochthonous rock formations or plants (Geschiere 2009: 225). It is a primordial, seemingly incontestable claim to belonging: ‘“born from the Earth itself” – how could one belong more?’ (Geschiere 2009: 2). And yet, cultural protectionists perceive their culture and heritage as constantly under threat and go to great lengths to defend and entrench it. Identities are hardened and exclusionary in this climate. The cry to ‘protect our culture’, as Jan Willem Duyvendak and others (e.g. Mepschen 2017; Modest and De Koning 2016) have argued, ‘has become common code in Western Europe to deny immigrants full citizenship’ (Duyvendak, Geschiere and Tonkens 2016: 1), as they are not seen as being ‘of the soil’. In this context, as I will show in Chapters 1 and 2, slavery has become an important means for political mobilization and for building leverage in claims to citizenship. This mobilization is not without its perils. In the Netherlands and elsewhere, the history of slavery is told through narratives of victimhood, heroism, redemption and overcoming: the victims

Introduction  ◆  7

demand recognition from the perpetrators, societies are called out to break historical silences and thus heal the trauma of slavery in order to finally ‘close’ the ‘slavery dossier’.8 Such narratives face the dilemma of having to break with a colonial past precisely by invoking it, and thus entrenching the position of the victim. In the process, identities often become, to stay with the metaphor of autochthony, sedimented and static. Moreover, perhaps because of the important role of museums and other heritage institutions, the focus has often been on representation. On the one hand, this has been a question of aesthetics, or the form in which slavery is adequately represented. Should one focus on victimhood or resilience (Hamilton 2010)? On heroism or ordinary people trying to survive (Fatah-Black 2018)? What place should violence have in these displays (Wood 2002)? On the other, this has been a political question. What displays of slavery can adequately represent black communities in the Atlantic world? What, in other words, is the ‘authentic’ black experience? In the Netherlands, for example, grassroots organizations mobilized the figure of the descendant of the enslaved as a unifying political symbol, a figure that, it was hoped, could speak with one voice and create political leverage. The government, too, wanted to deal with one partner who represented the black community as a whole, forcing the grassroots organizations who petitioned for a memorial to prove their legitimacy as representatives of ‘the’ black community in the Netherlands. Such an impossible task led to inevitable conflicts, most prominently during the unveiling ceremony of the national slavery memorial in Amsterdam, when the black elite attended the ceremony while ‘ordinary people’ were not admitted to the ceremonial grounds for security reasons. After all, the Queen was present, and the unveiling took place only weeks after a political murder had shocked the Netherlands (Stengs 2009). Several spokespersons of the black community took this as further evidence that the monument did not represent the right kind of descendants. They argued that the memorial project was an elite affair that was detached from the everyday concerns of regular people. It is telling, then, that there is not one but several monuments to commemorate slavery in Amsterdam alone. The comité 30 juni/1 juli, the organizers of the earliest memorial project on Surinameplein (see Chapter 1), articulated their concerns about the involvement of the state in the national memorial project. They were aiming for a grassroots approach, addressing a different audience. Their project had already begun in the early 1990s, and they saw the national

8  ◆  Tracing Slavery

memorial as an appropriation of their own project. They argued that the memory of slavery ought to remain at the grassroots level and that the state was not yet ready for this kind of gesture. They felt that the national memorial betrayed a more thorough engagement with the question of what slavery means in people’s everyday lives today. The logic of authenticity in the commemoration of slavery is also operative on a larger scale in controversies about black culture and heritage in the Atlantic world. As Paul Gilroy has argued, the pressures of economic recession (and, I would add, the dismantling of the welfare state) and populist racism has led to a ‘retreat into pure ethnicity’ among some black Europeans. Whereas the older generations yearn for a return to their places of birth in the Caribbean, the younger generations who are often born in Europe have ‘moved towards an overarching Africentrism which can be read as inventing its own totalizing conception of black culture’ (Gilroy 1993: 86–87). This new ethnicity is all the more powerful because it corresponds to no actually existing black communities. Its radical utopianism, often anchored in the ethical bedrock provided by the history of the Nile Valley civilisations, transcends the parochialism of Caribbean memories in favour of a heavily mythologised Africanity that is itself stamped by its origins not in Africa but in a variety of pan-African ideology produced most recently by black America. (Gilroy 1993: 87)

Such a perspective runs the risk of repeating the ethnic absolutism of the cultural protectionists and their logic of autochthony by retreating into a primordialism that defines blackness in ever narrower and exclusive terms. Stuart Hall has argued that this position is problematic because it understands identity as one shared culture, an authentic core, a true self common to those with shared ancestry, one stable and unchanging people. This identity is understood to be hidden, buried under layers of colonial disfigurement, and as something to be discovered, excavated and brought to light. Though problematic, it played a critical role in struggles from Pan-Africanism and the poets of Négritude to feminist, anti-colonial and anti-racist movements of our time. In all of these, Hall argues, this identity is often the object of what Frantz Fanon once called a passionate research . . . directed by the secret hope of discovering beyond the misery of today, beyond self-contempt, resignation and abjuration, some very beautiful and splendid era whose existence rehabilitates us both in regard to ourselves and in regard to others. (Fanon 1963: 170, as quoted in Hall 1989: 223)

Introduction  ◆  9

As Paul Gilroy has argued, this position cannot simply be dismissed as a wild goose chase. Constructivists who confront ethnic absolutism with anti-essentialist arguments often move ‘towards a casual and arrogant deconstruction of blackness while ignoring the appeal of the first position’s powerful, populist affirmation of black culture’ and abandoning the ‘ground of the black vernacular entirely’ (Gilroy 1993: 100). This perspective amounts to ignoring ‘the undiminished power of racism itself’ (Gilroy 1993: 101) and the ways in which black people make sense, politically and culturally, of the conditions under which they live. Gilroy therefore proposes a third position he calls ‘anti-antiessentialism’, in which he approaches, in his case, music as a changing, instead of unchanging, same, which involves ‘the difficult task of striving to comprehend the reproduction of cultural traditions not in the unproblematic transmission of a fixed essence through time but in the breaks and interruptions’ that are part and parcel of cultural transmission and translation (ibid.: 101). Since Gilroy’s and Hall’s seminal intervention, headway has been made by anthropologists researching the complex production of black Atlantic heritage. Anthropologists working in Africa have shown how notions of ‘mythologised Africanity’ play out in the context of heritage and roots tourism, especially in West Africa (Hartman 2007; Holsey 2008; Jong and Rowlands 2007; Schramm 2010; Shaw 2002). These authors describe, often in highly self-reflexive ways, how the roots tourists’ notions of Africanness regularly clash with local political-economic interests, cultural frames and ethical considerations but also how they can, in some instances, create common ground. As Katharina Schramm has argued, the encounter between US American and European roots tourists and West Africans she found in Ghana was not a structure of clear-cut positions, but a diffuse conglomeration of views and opinions that were floating around diverse discursive lines and that had different practical and political implications. Sometimes these views clashed or were contradictory, at other times they overlapped and were even at peace with one another. (Schramm 2010: 15)

Similar work has been done in Amsterdam Zuidoost, where selfidentified ‘descendants of the enslaved’ live in close proximity to people from West Africa. In particular, Ghanaians, many of them members of Pentecostal churches (Van Dijk 2000), have a very different relation to transatlantic slavery and ‘African’ culture than the ‘descendants’ (De Witte 2017; see Chapter 3). In her research on

10  ◆  Tracing Slavery

the renewed interest in African roots among ‘descendants’, Marleen de Witte has shown that for many, especially young ‘descendants’, Africanness is a matter of self-making, self-expression, self-styling and self-definition that is a response to a ‘dominant culture of identity and selfhood that touts the value of authenticity and “becoming who you really are” ’. On the other hand, through critiques of stereotypes of Africa, Eurocentric beauty ideals and an emphasis on empowerment, ‘Africanness’ must also be read as a critical engagement with the cultural protectionists’ logic of autochthony. By looking at people’s everyday lives, I take an approach that investigates how slavery is mobilized in these politics of autochthony. I ask if and how people in Amsterdam South East both live and live by the narratives produced in this emerging public sphere. What models of political subjectivity offered by narratives of cultural heritage do they adopt, adapt or abolish in their everyday lives? The question, thus, is not only what people make of the narratives circulating in the public sphere but, in the process, also how they make these narratives as they encounter, discuss or ignore them on their way to the groceries, work and in the general to and fro of their busy lives. If the emerging domain of cultural heritage produces new narratives of binding and belonging, how do people adopt, reject or negotiate these narratives in everyday life? What kinds of subjectivity do people articulate with reference to slavery and its cultural heritage? I argue that the larger appeal of planetary narratives about slavery needs to be understood in the ways they relate to local particularities in the Atlantic world. This entails a grassroots view of how larger narratives about slavery are expressed locally. As I will show, it takes considerable, complex and complicated political work to give it a place in the dominant canons of history and cultural heritage, and the forms in which it is represented do not speak to all in the same way everywhere. The presence of slavery, then, needs to be authenticated locally, from specific cultural, social and physical locations. That is, it needs to be made credible for a very diverse public with very different stakes in the various memorial projects. Rather than restricting my analysis to the memorial projects themselves, the different stakes and ­stakeholders involved, and the politics of representation through which they emerge, I also look at the ways in which they are embedded locally in people’s everyday lives. How the memory of slavery matters, in what moments, and to whom, cannot be discussed in general terms. It needs to be pieced together, and, as I will argue in this book, it needs to be traced.

Introduction  ◆  11

Tracing Slavery The notion of the trace allows me to move beyond the purely constructivist accounts of history that are dominant in memory studies, particularly in the Durkheimian tradition established by Maurice Halbwachs (1992). According to these accounts, the past is a social construction that is the outcome of political contestations and moral values in the present, and a central part of how social collectives represent themselves to themselves (Halbwachs 1992). Fostering shared memories of a collective past helps to ensure the continuity of collectivities (Vromen 1993: 511) as well as set the boundaries for such collectives. In other words, this view draws attention to the power relations involved in writing history. George Orwell famously wrote in 1984 that ‘who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past’ (Orwell 1949: 19). Long before Orwell, Walter Benjamin understood historiography as an emancipatory struggle: ‘In jeder Epoche muß versucht werden, die Überlieferung von neuem dem Konformismus abzugewinnen, der im Begriff steht, sie zu überwältigen’ (‘In every epoch an attempt must be made to reclaim the tradition anew from the conformism which is about to overwhelm it’) (Benjamin 2010: 18). In particular, the current obsession with the past has often been understood as a struggle over symbolic and material resources – as a politics of memory (Ashplant 2000; Hodgkin 2006; Hodgkin and Radstone 2003). Especially in the present post-truth era of ‘alternative facts’ and ‘deep state’ conspiracies, the ‘fact checking’ work of deconstruction is crucial. It is important to deconstruct historical narratives as operations of power, especially in the context of slavery (Trouillot 1995a). Nonetheless, I share the growing dissatisfaction expressed recently by Mattijs van de Port and Birgit Meyer with constructivist writings that present ‘as a conclusion its finding that the history is “assembled”, the community is “imagined”, the tradition is “invented” or the identity is “staged” ’ (Van de Port and Meyer 2018: 2). Such conclusions, Van de Port and Meyer argue, ‘stop at the point where research should begin’ (ibid.). They want to ask how if histories, communities, traditions and identities are fabricated do people ‘manage to convince themselves and others that this is not the case’. In fact, I want to go a step further and argue that the past is not only a fabrication but something that in a certain, perhaps ontological sense also exists in and of itself.

12  ◆  Tracing Slavery

The notion of the trace helps me to reconcile ontology and constructivism because a trace has an indexical and a symbolic dimension. In the form of, for instance, footsteps, traces are an index of a past event. Traces, as Jacques Derrida has argued, are simultaneously past and present like spectres – not entirely there, nor entirely here. After all, spectres are in the twilight zone between past and present: coming from the past they haunt the present but are not entirely of the present. Spectres are thus not self-identical; they have ‘no being in itself’ but mark ‘a relation to what is no longer or not yet’ (Hägglund 2008: 82). The spectre thus has its own, hybrid being, its own ontology: a ‘hauntology’. The past comes to us in mediated form, but the medium carries something of the past itself. At the same time, these footsteps need to be actively identified as traces by someone with the ability to recognize and interpret them. Traces are connected in an indexical way to a past event, in a sense even caused by it, but that temporal connection is perceivable only for those with the ability to follow the trace in particular places. An example from my fieldwork in Suriname may illustrate this idea of the trace. In October 2009, I went on a trip to the Surinamese rainforest. We, four European tourists, were following our guide, Mr Asudano, through the misty forest, and without him we would surely have been lost instantly. Mr Asudano had grown up in the area and had been working as a conservationist there for many years. He had been sharing with us his deep knowledge about the most unlikely creatures and the little-known medicinal properties of many plants in the forest when we entered a small sandy clearing with a little creek running through it. Mr Asudano stopped and pointed to the ground: ‘There! Do you see it?’ We saw sand, water and some dry leaves. At a loss, we gave him a blank look. ‘There,’ he pointed again, ‘a tapir walked here, you can clearly see the traces he left.’ ‘This is where he came from,’ he said, pointing to the right, then pointing to the left: ‘he went in that direction.’ The trace of the tapir invites us to appreciate the trace as a relation to a real event and as a material object in processes of meaningmaking. An event occurred: the tapir had walked there, and it left footprints in the sand as a matter of fact – it really happened – and now it was somewhere in the bushes or, with some bad luck, in the belly of a jaguar. At the same time, one needs a particular mode of perception to recognize the trace as a trace, and as the trace of a tapir. One needs to know about the tapir, the shape of its hooves, its food habits, its habitat, and so on. Moreover, one needs to know what it means to have encountered its trace. Did we encounter the trace of a

Introduction  ◆  13

very rare and shy animal? Or are there thousands of them trampling the creek night and day? Is the animal perhaps even sacred? In a chemical sense, traces can be present as residues, as ‘trace elements’ that require specific technologies like atomic absorption spectrometry to be detected. They easily escape attention but can have very serious consequences – for example, for the allergic, even in very small amounts. Traces are thus assemblages of bits of knowledge that always remain partial and depend on someone with the kind of knowledge or physical sensitivity to make them present. To give one more example from my research in the Netherlands, one interlocutor pointed out the postmodern-looking gabion walls enclosing a newly built parking lot in Amsterdam Southeast. ‘They always remind me of the slave walls in Curacao. I find them painful to look at.’ The Curacaoan stone walls, which were built by enslaved Africans, are a tourist attraction in Curacao (they are even shown on a postage stamp), but not everyone would link gabions to slave walls. The history is there, it is real, but it needs to be traced to become meaningful. Examples such as this show that the trace cannot be understood outside the modes of perception established in the present; in the case of the tapir, the appreciation of ‘nature’ and the rise of conservationism, the touristic gaze, perhaps even religious systems; in the case of the slave wall, the public memory of slavery. This does not change the material factuality of the trace: it is really there, in a material sense. My notion of the trace is meant as a way of discussing what people do with what the past has left them with – bodies, emotions, other matter and modes of social and cultural relationality. I see this as practices of piecing together, of recombination and reassembly. Traditions certainly need to be invented (Hobsbawm and Ranger 2012), but inventors depend on the raw materials they have.

Tracing as Cultural Memory Ruben says that all other groups stand up for themselves, but only AfroSurinamese don’t. ‘It’s as though they don’t dare to be [as in: exist] in the district council.’ According to Ruben, this is because black people have been ‘alienated from their being’ (ze zijn van hun wezen ontvreemd). They were never allowed to be, and their very being has been put into question continuously. ‘They have been infringed upon in their being (Ze zijn in hun zijn aangetast). This is why they are afraid to speak for themselves, now.’ ‘If you look at the district council, then you see that Afro-Surinamese always speak for the entire community, whereas

14  ◆  Tracing Slavery

Hindostani Surinamese speak for themselves, just like all the others. Only the Afro-Surinamese don’t.’ This is reflected in art, John adds. He points out the poet Rudy Bedacht, and also Eddy Pinas, who writes in one of his poems: ‘I am copyright 1863.’ We then talk about the statue of Anton de Kom. John says: ‘It’s exactly the same with the statue of Anton de Kom.’ According to John, the whole issue shows the lack of political representation for Afro-Surinamese. He finds the naked rendition of Anton de Kom unacceptable. He tells a story of an old woman whom he overheard talking to someone at the bus stop. She was shocked by the statue, and felt deeply hurt, but not only because of the statue’s nakedness, but also the fact that the statue was made out of a piece of wood. Apparently, this was quite terrible for many Afro-Surinamese. John and Ruben tell me about a Surinamese odo (proverb): A no bon prit’ mi (I am not born from a tree). I think this can be understood as a claim for humanity – I am not some kind of jungle plant; I am a human being. From this perspective, the fact that the statue is made from a tree trunk is basically a slap in the face. John, too, finds the tree unacceptable; after all, De Kom was a leriman, an intellectual, who always wore a suit and a hat. Ruben is also angry about the fact that the artist, Jikke van Loon, recited a poem De Kom had written to his mother. This was entirely inappropriate. De Kom stands for putting slavery on the agenda, not for some pretty poems to his mother. ‘This is really the essence of this man. He has provided insight into slavery.’9 (Field notes, 7 June 2010)

John and Ruben’s narrative has two dimensions, namely the dynamic between history and memory, and the cultural registers through which people relate to the past. The first dimension – the relationship between the monumental and the bus stop, or history and memory – has been a vexed question in memory studies. It evokes the much discussed tension between history, or the formalized, institutionalized and canonical knowledge of the past, and memory, or the embodied, everyday and unstructured recollections of individuals (Nora 1989; see also Olick and Robbins 1998).10 John and Ruben’s narrative, of course, shows that the distinction between memory and history proposed by Nora, in which history is aligned with modernity and memory with the pre-modern, is untenable. Ruben and John refer to the racialized history of modernity, evoking the grand narratives of humanism and the infra-human and what it means to locate black subjectivity in these narratives. He feels that Afro-Surinamese have been deprived of their individual rights and have adopted a way of referring to themselves only in typologies. In looking for a particular past, he is looking for a different sense of self, thus raising

Introduction  ◆  15

fundamental questions about the liberal individual of the modern humanist tradition. When it comes to the statue of Anton de Kom, from John’s point of view nothing less is at stake than humanity itself. The discussions about the adequacy of the material forms in which to cast the memory of slavery are thus about belonging in the most fundamental sense – belonging to humanity. Their narrative, then, demonstrates a kind of memory that moves back and forth between the monumental and the bus stop (there is a literal bus stop right next to the statue of De Kom). It is a meandering mode of memory that goes beyond dichotomous notions of history and memory or public and private memory (see Gable and Handler 2000). Instead of adhering to a neatly delineated milieux de mémoire and lieux de mémoire as famously suggested by Pierre Nora, my aim is to convey a sense of how people move between those domains. As I will show in Chapter 5, cultural heritage resonates on different frequencies that range from the high pitch of public performances to the infrasound of clandestine rehearsal studios. Ruben and John are engaged in a practice of tracing. They regard the present as a historical present that can reveal the traces of the past to those apt to find them. These practices of tracing – that is, the explorative movements of uncovering the past – entail a particular notion of memory that understands collective memory as embodied practice. Paul Connerton (1989), for example, who writes in Pierre Bourdieu’s paradigm of practice, proposed a three-partite model of personal, cognitive and habitual memory in order to move beyond a Cartesian distinction between body and mind. Connerton critiques Halbwachs for failing to understand memory as it is practised. He therefore proposes to focus precisely on the performativity of memory; in the performance of ritual, he argues, it becomes clear how the distinction between personal (biographic), cognitive (experiential, ‘I was there’) and habitual (the capacity of reproducing an action) memory becomes blurred. As I have argued above, bodies and their histories have played a central role in the unveiling ceremony of Anton de Kom’s statue. Similarly, with their corresponding notions of the communicative and the cultural memory, Jan and Aleida Assmann have looked at the relatedness of the domains of public and personal memory. Communicative memory includes: those varieties of collective memory that are based exclusively on everyday communications. . . . Everyday communication is characterized by a high degree of non-specialization, reciprocity of roles, thematic

16  ◆  Tracing Slavery

i­ nstability, and disorganization. Typically, it takes place between partners who can change roles. Whoever relates a joke, a memory, a bit of gossip, or an experience becomes the listener in the next moment. (J. Assmann 1995: 126–27)

This contrasts with the institutionalized and highly structured domain of cultural memory, which is stored in museums or heritage institutions and which follows a significantly different set of rules and conventions compared to communicative memory. Cultural memory, in Assmann’s understanding: comprises that body of reusable texts, images, and rituals specific to each society in each epoch, whose ‘cultivation’ serves to stabilize and convey that society’s self-image. Upon such collective knowledge, for the most part (but not exclusively) of the past, each group bases its awareness of unity and particularity. (J. Assmann 1995: 132)

Whereas in Assmann’s understanding the transition between communicative and cultural memory ‘is so fundamental that one must ask whether the metaphor of memory remains in any way applicable’ (J. Assmann 1995: 128), my aim is precisely to examine this transition more closely. I am interested in how the boundaries between the public and the private are maintained, negotiated or eroded as people engage with objects such as the statue of Anton de Kom. Aleida Assmann distinguishes between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ memory, a distinction comparable to that of the storage (the backstage) and the exhibition (the front stage) of a museum (A. Assmann 2008: 98). In the case of slavery, however, it was precisely the hiddenness of slavery, the fact that particular items have been stashed away in the storerooms, that activated the push to include slavery in the heritage canons. Hence the institutionalization of slavery as an item of cultural heritage derived from a sense among black communities that the established canons did not resonate with the lived realities of everyday life. Jan Assmann has pointed out that despite its high degree of disorganization communicative memory is also structured in certain ways: ‘There are occasions which more or less predetermine such communications, for example train rides, waiting rooms, or the common table; and there are rules – “laws of the market” – that regulate this exchange. There is a “household” within the confines of which this communication takes place’ (J. Assmann 1995: 127). In other words, the communicative memory, too, is structured according to conventions. It would be misleading to conceptualize the everyday as inchoate and beyond social and cultural conventions. I therefore take cultural memory to include the everyday.

Introduction  ◆  17

This brings me to the second dimension Ruben and John touch upon, the role of culture in relation to the past. Tracing, that is moving between formal and informal, past and present domains, is a practice, and as such it is culturally coded. Ruben, for example, always kept an eye out for clues such as songs, proverbs, gestures, or the smallest mannerisms that would reveal the past in the present. Similarly, people’s experiences with and of the De Kom statue are mediated through cultural forms and practices, like odo, or the particular history De Kom embodies. I therefore argue that we ought not talk about ‘the’ memory of slavery in a generic way, because this memory, like any memory, is informed by culturally and historically mediated ways of perception and experience. These are not academic debates but issues negotiated at the bus stop. As people discuss these large issues in small places, they do so in particular cultural registers. In Afro-Surinamese cultural idiom, the wooden material of the statue carries the traces of a history of dehumanization. To the women at the bus stop, the wood of the tree speaks of bodies that were marked as infra-human. Ironically, this history of dehumanization was involved in the creation of a statue that aimed to address and transcend it. This is what I refer to as the cultural memory of slavery – the cultural idioms, practices, rituals and meanings through which slavery becomes perceptible. Aby Warburg, in his work on the art of the Renaissance, has understood the past as a kind of energy preserved in and accessible through cultural form. With his notion of energeia, Warburg ‘set out to investigate in detail the precise mechanisms that produce what we so nonchalantly call the “life” of a work of art’ (A. Assmann 1996: 123). To Warburg, the central concept through which this life of a work of art could be understood was through its symbolism, in the widest sense of the term, in which ‘we find preserved those energies of which it is, itself, the result’ (Gombrich 1986: 243). In my terminology of the trace, Warburg’s notion of energeia, the energy of the pathos as preserved in the symbolism, can be understood as an indexical relation to past emotions. Importantly, for Warburg such a relation is structured in the cultural forms in which it is expressed. Such a notion of culture, and thus cultural memory, emphasizes the culturally informed interactions between people and objects. Such an idea of cultural memory understands people’s relation to the past as mediated, and thus focuses on the culturally informed practices of recherche in Andreas Huyssen’s sense or ‘passionate research’ in Fanon’s – an active search for the past, through which the past itself takes shape, rather than an act of retrieval:

18  ◆  Tracing Slavery

The mode of memory is recherche rather than recuperation. The temporal status of any act of memory is always the present and not, as some naive epistemology might have it, the past itself, even though all memory in some ineradicable sense is dependent on some past event or experience. It is this tenuous fissure between past and present that constitutes memory, making it powerfully alive and distinct from the archive or any other mere system of storage and retrieval. (Huyssen 1995: 3)

The past, in other words, needs to be pieced together, and this practice of piecing together is culturally informed. Ruben, for example, was constantly looking for clues that point to the presence of slavery in everyday life: in the district council, in Afro-Surinamese art or the representation of blackness in ‘Western’ art, even among his West African neighbours. This practice of piecing together is precisely what interests me here as a culturally informed practice in everyday life. For Ruben’s concern is not merely to piece together the past but in doing so piece together a sense of self in the present that is different from the typologies offered in dominant paradigms of blackness and whiteness. Ruben’s practice of piecing together relates to a broader modality of modernity that is captured by the notion of the trace. Carlo Ginzburg (1979), for example, has viewed the trace as a broader scientific paradigm that took shape in the nineteenth century. Freud’s notion of the symptom, Sherlock Holmes’ criminological search for clues and Morelli’s investigation of pictorial traces are all expressions of the same idea that propositions that broader phenomena can be inferred from small details. Tracing the past is as much about piecing together what one was as it is about piecing together who one is now, or aspires to be, a political subjectivity. As Ginzburg argues, the kind of subjectivation implied in the fingerprint merged a biographical past and a present persona: the fingerprint made it possible to address the increasing problem of recidivism in the late nineteenth century. Ginzburg sees this as the inauguration of the modern secular individual: This example [of the fingerprint] shows the deep connection between the problem of individuality and the problem of social control. In fact, it can be said that the individual, born in a religious context (persona), acquired its modern, secularized meaning only in relation with the State. Concern with an individual’s uniqueness – as taxpayer, soldier, criminal, political subversive and so on – is a typical feature of developed bureaucracies. Most aptly, in the nineteenth century, traditional figures of those who control everyday life in society, such as priests, were increasingly superseded by new ones: physicians, policemen, psychiatrists, later on

Introduction  ◆  19

psychoanalysts and social scientists. It is in this context that we can understand the pervasive influence of the model based on clues – the semiotic paradigm. (Ginzburg 1979: 284)

Ruben’s and others’ investments in the grand narratives of public memorials can thus be seen as piecing together a sense of self and political subjectivity by way of piecing together the past. Here, I take as a point of departure the idea that history (i.e. the formalized and sanctioned forms of relating to the past, including monuments, historical canons, museums, etc.) is deeply implicated in the formation of communities, whether supranational, national or within the nation state. This means that the power of these representations reaches into the everyday, but this is not a self-evident and automatic process. Rather, it is a process of negotiation in which officially sanctioned narratives are constantly re-evaluated, adopted or dismissed and continuously have to struggle for recognition. This is not to say that such master narratives are not powerful – quite the opposite. In order to understand how they unfold their power, we need to examine how they manage or fail to appeal to and persuade the people they address. This link between tracing and subjectivity is crucial because slavery in particular is felt by the descendants to have deprived them of ‘who they are’. In order to find themselves, they need to connect the fingerprints their ancestors have left throughout history to their bodies and selves in the present. This tracing holds the promise of reconstituting the person.11 In this forensic paradigm, the trace has a distinctively ethical dimension. Not only is the integrity of the person an ethical imperative and a fundamental human right in democratic societies; Sherlock Holmes follows clues not only to establish the identity of a suspect but to bring them to justice. Tracing, therefore, also establishes guilt and punishment, a dimension that is crucial for many descendants of the enslaved. In that sense, it is not surprising that the work of historians, despite an insistence on factual ‘evidence’, is more often than not enmeshed in questions of ethics.

Diaspora and/as Tracing Tracing, then, implies a dynamic of active (re)search and historical conditions. In Jazz, Toni Morrison engaged poetically with this dynamic between past and present. The past might haunt us, she writes in the preface to the 2004 edition, but it does not entrap us

20  ◆  Tracing Slavery

(2004: xvi). The narrator’s epiphany in the final chapter, then, is not so much an act of liberation, of closure, but empirical evidence: the facts have simply proven wrong the assumption that the past dictates the future: So I missed it altogether. I was sure one would kill the other. I waited for it so I could describe it. I was so sure it would happen. That the past was an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself at the crack and no power on earth could lift the arm that held the needle. I was so sure, and they danced and walked all over me. Busy, they were, busy being original, complicated, changeable – human, I guess you’d say, while I was the predictable one, confused in my solitude into arrogance, thinking my space, my view was the only one that was or that mattered. I got so aroused while meddling, while finger-shaping, I overreached and missed the obvious. (Morrison 2005: 220)

People may be haunted by the past, but they are also people: dancing, walking, busy being original, complicated, changeable. Who they are emerges out of this doubleness of an imposed direction and piecing together one’s own perspective. This is expressed in diaspora scholarship as a dynamic between roots and routes. As Katharina Schramm has argued, this is ‘a critical pairing that . . . has retained its analytical value despite its being excessively used’ (Schramm 2010: 23), which implies that the analytical value of it lies in the dynamic between the two terms, rather than in either one by themselves. As Stuart Hall has argued, cultural identity is ‘a matter of “becoming” as well as of “being”. It belongs to the future as much as the past.’ He continues: Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power. Far from being grounded in a mere ‘recovery’ of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which, when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past. (Hall 1989: 225)

Cultural identity, in this understanding, is fundamentally shaped by, even disfigured or ‘ruined’ (Stoler 2013) by, colonial experience, but there is no fixed origin to which one can make a definite return. Cultural identity is not a ‘fixed essence’ but a ‘positioning’ (Hall 1989: 226). The notion of the trace I develop here picks up precisely this dynamic of a present that is haunted as well as becoming. Traces, in this understanding, are not linear, connecting an origin with a destination

Introduction  ◆  21

in a straightforward, determined way. Traces can meander (the tapir may have changed direction, walked in circles, or encountered other tapirs). Perhaps in the way of a rhizome12 they have multiple entry points and are not encountered necessarily at their beginning or end. As one begins to trace them, they can disappear and reappear, go backward, forward or in circles. Traces are not beaten tracks; they need to be pieced together rather than followed like one would do with a signposted trail. Traces are thus not monodirectional and singular: tracking one set of footsteps one discovers other footsteps – the tracks do not run in a straight line but may go back and forth, in circles, etc. It is what Édouard Glissant (1997) called a form of ‘errantry’, literally the quality, condition or fact of wandering. Glissant’s errantry is a form of nomadism that is non-invasive and does not strive to establish a ‘totalitarian root’, ‘a stock taking all upon itself and killing all around it’. He likens the ‘wanderlust’ of errantry to the idea of the rhizome, developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (Deleuze and Guattari 1987): an enmeshed root system, a network spreading either in the ground or in the air, with no predatory rootstock taking over permanently. The notion of the rhizome maintains, therefore, the idea of rootedness but challenges that of a totalitarian root. Rhizomatic thought is the principle behind what I call the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other. (Glissant 1997: 11)

As Rosi Braidotti has argued, Glissant’s ‘becoming nomadic’ marks ‘the process of positive transformation of the pain of loss into the active production of multiple forms of belonging and complex allegiances’ (Braidotti 2011: 288). This means that the practice of tracing simultaneously moves backward and forward in time: the footsteps were left in the past, but they also lie ahead of me. Especially in the present context in which earlier notions of racial difference are increasingly expressed through an essentialist view of cultural difference (Balkenhol et al. 2016; Gilroy 2019a), it seems crucial to me to insist on a relational understanding of identity. The notion of the trace, for example, helps me to reframe a popular misconception according to which advocates of the commemoration of slavery are stuck in the past and should rather ‘move on’. Tracing slavery, as Saidiya Hartman has argued, is not ‘an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory’ but a critique of its afterlife: ‘skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment’

22  ◆  Tracing Slavery

(Hartman 2007: 6).13 In that sense, tracing a past that includes but is not limited to slavery is ultimately concerned with a better future in which this ‘racial calculus’ and ‘political arithmetic’ will have been overcome. In a broader sense, then, racial formations are something people do, not something people are (Balkenhol and Schramm 2019). As the debates surrounding the statue of Anton de Kom show, phenotype is a highly unreliable indicator of how someone experiences the past. What I found with regard to what slavery meant to people, then, cannot be reduced to the experience of racism alone. Indeed, looking at the ways in which people deal with the histories of determination they embody, I have found, next to racism, also forms of solidarity and conviviality that may go beyond reified and clearly delineated racial formations. Hence I see ‘racial formations’ as the specific, dynamic and intersubjective modes by which people relate to one another in reference to the past, which includes, but is not restricted to, racist relations. For what is put at stake in the statue of Anton De Kom, and as I will show in the cultural memory of slavery in general, is not only the uneven and skewed colonial imagination of racial difference and its afterlife but also forms of solidarity and conviviality. Ethnography has an important part to play in teasing out the traces by which people link up with the past. Looking in more – ethnographic – detail at the ways in which race emerges in everyday practice, to evoke once more Toni Morrison’s metaphor, can draw attention not only to the groove of the record of race but also to the moments in which the needle refuses to follow the groove and begins to jump and scratch, thus leaving new traces. I therefore argue in this book that if we aim for an understanding of racism we need to give full weight to the ethnographic complexity of the situation.

On Ethnographers and Experience At the end of the event, a woman who has been sitting in front of me turns around. She asks me: ‘So? How do you feel when you hear all this?’ I ask her what she means, and remark that I thought the lecture was interesting. ‘Well, what do you feel when you hear about everything your people did?’ I reply that they were not ‘my people’ and that it wasn’t me who did this. She retorts that these people were white, after all, and that they did it to black people. I try to explain that I am not convinced about these stories of black and white, and that to me, it is much more important to talk about these things together, instead of about one another. I tell her that I don’t believe in such separations. I ask her how to explain the phenomenon of the Redi Musu14 if one insists on distinctions of

Introduction  ◆  23

black and white. She insists that the Redi Musu were forced into service under the threat of death, otherwise they would not have done this. At some point in the conversation, I realize that the front lines are softening somewhat. She tells me how she had always admired white people, and that she got along with them just fine. One day, however, she wanted to have 1 July off work.15 That wasn’t a problem, but her colleague gave her a ‘slave book’ for the occasion. Only at that point did she begin to be interested in her own history. Although she got along well with her colleagues, she began to think: ‘How can I continue to work or live with these people?’ A colleague, she tells me, married a German. Her other colleagues were shocked, especially a Jewish colleague. The Jewish colleague said, ‘maybe your husband killed my father or my grandfather!’ With slavery, it’s just like that, she tells me. Maybe one of my ancestors tortured and enslaved one of her ancestors. She wonders why the Dutch still celebrate 4 and 5 May [the national day of liberation], whereas the abolition of slavery is not being celebrated. (Field notes, 3 June 2010)

Ethnography is personal, and as my short exchange with Jane shows, this was more often than not made explicit during my fieldwork in Amsterdam Zuidoost. I quickly learned that my presence, indeed my body itself, was often read as a trace of the very history I was researching. Yet what I learned just as quickly was that the way people (including myself) feel about slavery is not self-evident but informed by positionalities and allegiances that are durable but can also shift at particular moments. The tracing I undertook with my interlocutors included not only historical or vertical depth but also political or horizontal width. The field notes quoted above, jotted down right after I came home from the event, are as raw as they come. They document not only Jane’s particular mode of addressing me but at least as strongly they convey my reading of Jane’s question at the time, and the annoyance with which I reacted. I was annoyed because I felt both wrongly accused and as though she had left me no room to be anything except a criminal. Rereading my field notes from that stage of the fieldwork, it seems that I was fed up with a sense of having to apologize, and with a feeling of being coerced into admitting guilt. This sense was only in part due to a sense of discomfort at being confronted with slavery in this way; my discomfort, indeed my annoyance, also derived from a growing confidence I felt doing this research. Whereas at the beginning of my fieldwork I was almost afraid to even approach people, issuing pre-emptive apologies for my presence, which, I felt, reproduced the uneven structures of the white hegemonic gaze, as the project progressed I began to appreciate the complex structures

24  ◆  Tracing Slavery

of feeling that I and my interlocutors were enmeshed in. I began to see exchanges such as the one with Jane as ritualized, and the more I acquired proficiency in these rituals, the more I was able to navigate positions other than that of apologetic and defensive whiteness. My growing knowledge of these ritual exchanges sometimes allowed a degree of playfulness in which positions could be switched, caricatured and subverted. How feelings and emotions can be experienced but also mobilized demonstrates a core concern of this book, namely the emotional, political and social proximity of slavery and the ways in which it informs social relationality in the Netherlands today. I think that with this question, people addressed what is at the heart of the remembrance of slavery in the Netherlands today: Bij wie leeft de slavernij? (For whom is slavery ‘alive’?), which for me begs the question of what that means, to be ‘alive’? At least since Writing Culture (Clifford 1999; Clifford and Marcus 1986), it has become common in anthropology to reflect the position of the researcher-self within the research, and I would say correctly so. As Mustafa Emirbayer and Matthew Desmond have argued: ‘our understanding of the racial order will forever remain unsatisfactory so long as we fail to turn our analytic gaze back upon ourselves, the analysts of racial domination, and inquire critically into the hidden presuppositions that shape our thought’ (Emirbayer and Desmond 2012: 574). In other words, the partiality and situatedness of all knowledge, and in particular ethnographic knowledge, must always be part of the object of research. As Donna Haraway has argued, scientific ‘objectivity’ only goes as far as the reflection of its partiality: I am arguing for politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make relational knowledge claims. These are claims on people’s lives. I am arguing for the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity. Only the god trick is forbidden. (Haraway 1988: 589)

The field notes about my first meeting with Jane certainly represent a ‘view from a body’ – my body, my emotions. Such a view is a particular scientific practice, which, according to Henrietta L. Moore, requires ‘a clear sense of position and of the politics of location’, or the ‘necessity of speaking out, declaring one’s politics’: ‘Who and what do we represent when we speak out, and how do we negotiate the inevitable problem in the social sciences of having to speak about

Introduction  ◆  25

people whilst trying not to speak for them?’ (Moore 1994: 8–9). This book is not first and foremost about me, but it is also unthinkable without me, as I am incorporated in structures of power through a position of relative whiteness/privilege/masculinity/nationality. Hence this book is unthinkable without a rigorous thinking through of my own positionality in relation to interlocutors. The challenge, however, is to do so without relapsing into a kind of identity politics that as Emirbayer and Desmond (2012) argue has run its course. For what exactly does it add to my analysis if I declare that I am white, a German, heterosexual, middle-class, an academic, a critical scholar, a man, good with languages, or whatever else I find important to mention?16 What exactly does this say about my privilege? Which et ceteras do I mention, which do I leave out? Such confessions, Sara Ahmed reminds us, can easily lead to ‘declarations of whiteness’ – a blanket claim that one’s position is tainted by definition – that in the end ‘do not do what they say’, namely address racism (Ahmed 2004a). An overemphasis of subjective experience, as Henrietta L. Moore points out, can result in further depoliticization: ‘Positionality is too often reduced to individual experience and/or to representation: “I know because I’ve been there” and “I know because I am one” ’ (Moore 1994: 2). These ‘slippages’, Moore continues, ‘are particularly troublesome when linked to grounds for authority’ (ibid.), in particular because their introversion ultimately makes impossible what they demand – a critical analysis of social, as opposed to psychologicalpathological, processes of subjectivation. In my understanding, this means taking emotions seriously as social phenomena, as they emerge through intersubjective transactions. Jane’s emotions and my own are relational; they emerge in and through our particular transaction. I see emotions as traces, a notion akin to Sara Ahmed’s relational concept of affective economies, which examines a dual movement of emotions: they reach backwards in time – they have histories – and they ‘slide’ sideways in affective economies (Ahmed 2004b). My interaction with Jane is embedded in histories of determination and relatively durable social hierarchies, but the durability of these histories can be understood only by looking at the particular situation through which Jane and I relate. Whiteness and blackness emerged in this situation as a practice and as interpellation, and I propose to look at the frameworks and formations that make such practices and interpellations possible. For an anthropological analysis, this ought to be seen as an opportunity rather than something to be overcome. Since ethnography is

26  ◆  Tracing Slavery

always about degrees of immersion (Schramm 2005; Wekker 2006), out of necessity ethnographers themselves must become one of their own most important assets: our presence and our degree of immersion and immersability prompt responses and change the situation but also force us to reflect on relationality and the ways in which we are implicated in our own research. In a similar vein, Moore therefore proposes a notion of the ‘lived anatomy’ and of bodily praxis as a mode of knowledge that draws on an understanding of experience as a form of ‘embodied intersubjectivity’: ‘The very fact of being present as an embodied subject gives a particular character to the ontology of experience, which emphasizes the degree to which social interactions are embodied ones taking place in concrete space and time’ (Moore 1994: 3–4). This is how I propose to understand my interaction with Jane. She was the author of the situation just as I was; it was an act of interpellation in which we both situated ourselves vis-a-vis one another and vis-à-vis the histories of determination already in place. I, for example, opted for a particular reading of Jane’s question by the response I gave. I refused to be addressed in terms of guilt, and I articulated this refusal by mobilizing a particular argument of liberal individualism that is well known in this context. That is, I chose to read Jane’s question as a personal indictment (‘You and your people are guilty’), which is easily disavowed within a paradigm of individual rights (‘I was not there, I did not commit the crime personally’). As Saidiya Hartman has argued, such an emphasis on the individual locates claims in the realm of judicial redress, which then ‘must satisfy the demand for identifiable victims and perpetrators, unambiguous causation, limited and certain damage, and the acceptance that the agreed remuneration shall be final. This [is a] reduction of collective appeal to the forms of grievance common to the paradigm of individual rights’ (Best and Hartman 2005: 8). As such, it is easily disavowed because ‘the victims and perpetrators have been long dead’ (ibid.). Arguments such as this relegate slavery to the pre-modern; in this kind of argument, slavery appears as a sign of barbarism, as not a part of modernity, and therefore irrelevant to the present. Of course, even at the time I would not have claimed that slavery had no relevance today. Yet, at least to a certain extent, in my response to Jane I unwittingly accepted a history of disavowal by locating my argument inside a paradigm of liberal individualism that makes slavery appear as a kind of anachronism not of our time. Thus I performed a position of privilege, informed by a hegemonic kind of knowledge or conviction about modernity’s moral righteousness,

Introduction  ◆  27

in which it is really quite easy to undo claims about slavery and accountability. At the same time, this has been prompted at least to a certain extent by Jane’s interpellation. By referring to ‘your people’ on the one hand and ‘us’ on the other, she performed what Michel-Rolph Trouillot has called ‘genealogical construction’: her statement requires not only the existence of a clear-cut collective that can operate as a historical agent but also the impossible assumption that this historical agent is both the same and different (i.e. both unrepentant perpetrator and repenting defendant). Trouillot argues that this is highly problematic because it transfers to collectivities the ‘attributes that a dominant North Atlantic discourse had hitherto assigned to the liberal subject’ (Trouillot 2000: 173). In other words, Jane’s interpellation of ‘your people’ can be read as a substantialist claim that treats collectivities as if they were persons with individual affects such as remorse, guilt or embarrassment. Understood this way, Jane’s interpellation paradoxically engages in the same discourse of liberal individualism my disavowal engaged in.17 Yet what if Jane was not looking for an apology, or an admission of guilt? What if she was genuinely interested in my feelings? What if she was looking for solidarity, a common ground? Could I not read Jane’s claim in these terms? Not in terms of guilt and victimhood but in terms of responsibility and, indeed, solidarity? Having grown up in Germany, I am of course familiar with such a distinction. While I am not guilty of the Nazi crimes in a legal sense, as a German national I am – in my view correctly – expected to take responsibility and ‘never forget’. In fact, this expectation is particularly relevant in a country such as the Netherlands, where I continue to be addressed as a German (e.g. recently, one of my students said that: ‘If I was my grandfather, well, I would probably refuse to talk to you’). Thinking about the scene with some more distance, then, I now choose a different reading of Jane’s claim, as responsibility rather than guilt. As Trouillot has argued, ‘… historical responsibility cannot hark back to an original sin that the collective-individual supposedly committed. Rather, it needs to take into account the structures of privilege unleashed by a history of power and domination and to evaluate the current losses induced by the reproduction of these structures’ (Trouillot 2000: 183). Evidenced by the ensuing conversation in which she candidly described her own struggle both with this past and how to relate to her white colleagues and friends, she was interested in dialogue, not a match of moral or legal wrestling.

28  ◆  Tracing Slavery

Jane and I became acquainted, and I met her frequently during my research. The question of guilt began to recede quickly, making room for the more complex but also more interesting question of what it means in everyday practice to take responsibility for the past, and, more importantly, to ‘take into account the structures of privilege unleashed by a history of power and domination’ is a matter of ongoing negotiation. For example, if Jane problematized my involvement in history, many others were concerned with the fact that I was insufficiently involved in this history. Having been trained as an anthropologist in New Zealand, where I became fascinated with the negotiations of the colonial past, I took this fascination to the Netherlands aiming to do ‘something on colonialism’. The intellectual interest that developed out of this eventually led me to apply for the position in the NWO research project Heritage Dynamics.18 The subproject I applied for had been entitled in the proposal: The Trauma of Slavery: The Aesthetics of Blackness in the Netherlands. It proposed to analyse how ‘carrier groups’ have been ‘striving to have the “traumatic” history of slavery recognized as part of the country’s national and colonial heritage’ and to: … show how these particular articulations of cultural heritage are authenticated by the emotions and sentiments evoked in an aesthetics of persuasion that highlights suffering, thus inviting the Caribbean Dutch (numbering a modest two percent of the Dutch population) to signify and explain happenings in their everyday lives in terms of the traumas suffered under slavery.

Hence this project was not initially ‘my own’. And while I owned up to it soon enough, many thought that a clearly perceptible link between me and the topic was lacking. During my research, with quite some perplexity and wonderment, the question most people asked me time and again, sometimes curiously, sometimes suspiciously, and sometimes even in a hostile way: What made you choose this topic? One might say that this should come as no surprise. When I moved to the Netherlands in September 2006, I knew next to nothing about the Dutch colonial past in general, or the Dutch involvement in racial slavery in particular. I had never been to or heard of the monument van besef on Surinameplein in Amsterdam, and I was even unaware of the more widely known national slavery memorial in Oosterpark (Amsterdam). So why would a white German man who has no clue about the Dutch and their past be interested in Dutch colonialism and slavery? What, to paraphrase a similar argument made on my

Introduction  ◆  29

Facebook timeline, could white people contribute to an understanding of the presence of slavery? Others again found my insufficient involvement an advantage rather than a problem. They welcomed the fact that I was not as ‘emotionally involved’ and could thus provide a critical contribution to an ongoing debate many experienced as gridlocked. My involvement as a critical intellectual for many held (and still holds) the promise to bring in fresh perspectives into a debate many feel is already exhausted.19 Hence, while a question such as this had sometimes brought me close to throwing in the towel, there was always also a sense that giving up would be even ‘worse’. In fact, this play with intimacy and distance in which I was so enmeshed began to interest me as a focus of the investigation. I began to wonder about what it was precisely people were asking me with this question. If it was this unnatural for me to do this research, could somebody have been found for whom it would have been natural, self-evident and unquestionable to do it? Who would that person have been? So sometimes when people asked me why I was doing this research, I would answer with the question: Why not? To gently point out my background, my skin colour or my privilege seemed increasingly less satisfactory to me as a reply. In fact, this question of why I chose this topic in fact demonstrates the urgency for this study, which seeks to understand the afterlife of slavery in people’s practices of everyday life. This question gives insight into the fundamental role of slavery in processes of social positioning and subjectivation. As my juxtaposition of Jane’s question and that of many others shows, whether I am addressed as a white man, a German or a critical intellectual matters in crucial ways. If I am certainly speaking from a social position of privilege that needs to be acknowledged, this does not automatically mean that my analysis is tainted by definition. Indeed, privilege may be seen as a practice rather than a position alone – it is always also something we do, not only something we are. Making my privileged position explicit is a necessity, but more important still is to examine what I do with it and how I apply myself to the issue at hand. If this project was an academic enterprise at the beginning, over the years it became quite personal. I met people I came to care about, and I felt hurt (like in the scene with Jane), and thus a purely abstract and hypothetical engagement in the issue became less and less possible. At the same time, it became clear to me that slavery and the colonial past affected me in more fundamental ways. For posing the

30  ◆  Tracing Slavery

question of the presence of slavery in the Netherlands also n ­ ecessarily implies a critical reflection of the ideals I was raised to embrace – the possibility of antiracist democracy, the meaning of freedom and of equality. It is now clear to me that these values, which I grew up with and that touch on the very process of my own becoming, cannot be thought and lived without a rigorous understanding of the historical situation in which they emerged. The history of colonialism is not ‘black’ history; it affects the way I am positioned and position myself in the world, and this includes, but is not limited to, race. What we share is the obligation to work out a sense of responsibility for these different positionalities and their histories. While this has often been understood as a historical and philosophical undertaking, I now know that it must also be an ethnographic one. In order to understand these core human values that we maintain, we need to understand the presence of those historical legacies through which they continue to emerge. I firmly believe that this is a project that can only be achieved collectively.

An Ethnography of Past Matters The statue of Anton de Kom, one of the greatest Afro-Surinamese heroes, has settled firmly into the urban landscape. It overlooks the large and open square bearing De Kom’s name in the heart of Amsterdam Zuidoost. Several days a week, there is a colourful and bustling market that sells everything from clothing and bicycle locks to meat and tropical produce, including botervis, antroea vegetables and spiritual winti necessities imported from Suriname, to Ghanaian fufu flour and kibbeling from the North Sea. The diversity of products reflects the diversity of Zuidoost’s residents, who hail from Suriname, the former Dutch Antilles, West Africa and the Netherlands. (Field notes, summer 2010)

Colonialism in general, and transatlantic slavery in particular, has been such a fundamental element in the formation of the Dutch nation that its legacies can be found virtually everywhere: grachtenpanden have been built with money earned in the slave trade and from the plantations, as have the buitenhuizen along the river Vecht between Utrecht and Amsterdam, and many of their façades still speak of this past (Blakely 1993).20 Dutch modes of being-in-the-world cannot be seen in isolation of maritime imperial expansion, the ships, the dykes and the very idea of cultivation and ‘making land’, and many families’ genealogies and biographies are entwined with the colonial past. Last but not least, former colonial subjects and masters live in

Introduction  ◆  31

close physical proximity in the Netherlands. As many have argued, slavery and colonialism have been a constitutive element of the very concept of modernity on which Europe has been built (Gilroy 1993; Isin 2012), and the Netherlands are no exception. Traces of colonialism and slavery are, as it were, everywhere in the Netherlands (Van Stipriaan et al. 2007). Yet this pervasive presence also makes for its ordinariness; it has become part of normality to such an extent that it does not strike as unusual. Hence the history of slavery may be hidden, but like Dickens’ purloined letter, it is hidden in plain sight. The fact that traces of slavery are everywhere implies that they are nowhere in particular: the memory of slavery, it seems, does not have a particular place in which it can be found and researched. My research could have been conducted in the Jordaan, as well as, say, in a bowling alley in Purmerend; in a museum, an archive, around the monuments, or a grachtenpand. So how to approach the memory of slavery methodologically? The ethnography I employ here is one of tracing – that is, I follow the traces of slavery as they are made perceptible in particular places by particular people. Yet my notion of the trace implies that traces cannot simply be followed; they need to be recognized as such in order to be followed. In other words, if I wanted to understand how to trace slavery, I had to learn that skill myself. During my seven-month apprenticeship in 2010, I had many teachers, among them Yvette and Edouard, whom we will meet frequently throughout the book, both explicitly and implicitly. They invited me to weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, funerals and all kinds of other occasions, both ordinary and extraordinary. We spent countless hours ‘hanging out’ (Geertz 1998) in what has been called folk seminars (Gwaltney 1980; Wekker 1998a): informal gatherings that differ from more structured focus group interviews because they are spontaneous – conducted on the fly and in spaces people are familiar with. These folk seminars took place in Edouard’s and Yvette’s living rooms or on their balconies, with their families and friends. There were folk seminars in bars, cafés and restaurants, or even while driving. Many of these seminars also took place in the rehearsal studio with Edouard’s band, or in the car on our way to gigs. Folk seminars and ethnographic interviews (Spradley 1979) also took place at the Kwakoe Podium cultural centre, one of the oldest cultural centres in Amsterdam Zuidoost. Kwakoe Podium was founded in the 1970s by Surinamese Dutch moving to the Netherlands as a place to meet and greet, party, but also to organize politically. The

32  ◆  Tracing Slavery

name Kwakoe signals some of the pervasive and self-evident mnemonic presence of slavery. The name Kwakoe is inspired by the West African name given to boys born on a Wednesday, and here serves as a reference to the day of abolition on Wednesday, 1 July 1863. At Kwakoe Podium, I spent countless hours hanging out with the centre’s staff and frequent customers. We sat in the office upstairs or in the bar downstairs, talking endlessly about Afro-Surinamese proverbs, music, history and what it means to be black in the Netherlands. I also went to meetings and commemorations and on excursions. I participated in a political campaign and helped in the organization of a film festival (which did not materialize in the end, for various reasons). Last but not least, I participated in the multitude of commemorative ceremonies on Surinameplein, in Oosterpark, on Kastanjeplein, in Middelburg, in Abcoude and in several neighbourhood centres. Ethnography as a scientific method itself, of course, carries traces of colonial modes of knowledge production; the fact that many of my interlocutors were acutely aware of these traces warrants some clarification on this point. As a discipline, anthropology has emerged in an ambiguous relationship to colonial regimes of governance, and an ethnography of slavery has to take this history into account. At the same time, anthropology has certainly been among the disciplines where the entanglements of scientific knowledge and power have been critiqued most thoroughly (Fabian 2002; Said 1978), not least by anthropologists themselves (Asad 1973; Clifford 1999; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Fabian 2000, 2002; Harrison 1997; Pels 1997; Pels and Salemink 1994). It is perhaps not necessary to rehearse an entire subfield of scholarly critique in which anthropology as a whole and ethnography in particular has been reappraised since the publication of these classics.21 The value of these debates, to me, is less that they can be invoked as disclaimers but that they call for and put at stake a particular ethnographic practice. The issue here is, therefore, no longer to critique or defend ethnography but to reflect on the kind of knowledge it produces. If anthropology is indeed the science of ‘othering’ and othering is a mode of power, the goal must be to develop this tool as a powerful mode of critical knowledge – of making ‘the strange familiar and the familiar strange’ (Malinowski 1922; O’Reilly 2009: 140). Hence if there is any declaration I could make at the beginning of this book, it is a pledge to understand the practical logic of slavery’s afterlife in the Netherlands today – it is one for ethnography. The memory of slavery in the Netherlands has so far been historians’ business (Brandon and Bosma 2019; Fatah-Black 2018; Oostindie

Introduction  ◆  33

1989, 2001; Van Stipriaan 1993). Although some anthropologists have engaged with the memory of slavery (Lamur 2001), ethnographic approaches to the memory of slavery have not established a field of scholarship comparable to the historiographic study of slavery and its afterlives. This is unfortunate because this way the considerable body of ethnographic work on Afro-Surinamese culture, both in Suriname and in the Netherlands, is bypassed in the understanding of commemorations of slavery. With this book, I want to show that we are missing important dimensions of the memory of slavery if we do not pay attention to the rich cultural frameworks of which the memory of slavery is part and through which the articulation of political subjectivity takes shape. Building on both classical ethnography (Herskovits 1990; Herskovits and Herskovits 1936; Price 2002; Thoden van Velzen and Wetering 2004; Wooding 1972) as well as more recent work (Hoogbergen 2009; van der Pijl 2007; Wekker 2006), I want to show how the articulation of political subjectivity through cultural heritage is enmeshed in cultural systems of gender (Janssens and van Wetering 1985; Wekker 1998a, 1998b, 2009), religion (Gelder and Wetering 1991; Sansone, Soumonni and Barry 2008; Wetering 2012; Van Wetering 1997), music (Bilby 1999; Sansone 1993, 1994) and street culture (Sansone 1992, 1993). Precisely because the memory of slavery is so deeply ingrained in Afro-Surinamese cultural systems and practices, I find ethnography an indispensable tool to understand how diasporic identity is articulated by tracing slavery.

Structure of the Book The first chapter is an analysis of the earliest public commemoration of slavery in the Netherlands on Surinameplein. Taking as a point of departure the idea implied in the notion of the trace that identities are pieced together and articulated not static, I follow Roy Ristie, one of my most important interlocutors, to Amsterdam Zuidoost, his home for more than forty years. The marginalization of this place as a ‘black ghetto’ but also the struggle by Surinamese settlers to make this place home must be seen as the motivation behind commemorating slavery on Surinameplein in the early 1990s. I unpack how identities of the ‘descendants’ emerge through an engagement with racialized colonial geographies that define them as ‘not belonging to the soil’. Roy and the people behind the Surinameplein project critically engage with the politics of autochthony in the Netherlands in their claim

34  ◆  Tracing Slavery

to Dutch soil, but significantly they do not reject them. Rather, they claim autochthony for themselves. This implies a broader argument about the politics of autochthony in the Netherlands that has so far remained implicit in anthropological analyses. In the Netherlands, autochthony – being born from the soil – implies whiteness, which becomes manifest in the marginalization of Surinamese in the Netherlands, and which is contested through the commemoration of slavery. The second chapter zooms in further, showing how racial geographies play out between different ‘white’ and ‘black’ neighbourhoods in Amsterdam Zuidoost. Although at first glance it looks as though these geographies have been translated more or less unchanged to the level of the neighbourhood, a closer look shows that they also result from very specific local histories. While race relations in Amsterdam Zuidoost cannot be explained without taking into account the Dutch colonial past and slavery, that past alone does not explain how, why and under which specific circumstances these histories are mobilized. In this chapter, I show that the political mobilization of slavery and the colonial past took place in the context of very specific politicaleconomic interests that surfaced in a large-scale project of urban renewal. Here the political-economic position of Surinamese in the Netherlands was traced to slavery and colonialism. This tracing, whether understood as a success or not, permanently changed the political landscape in Amsterdam. In Chapter 3, I investigate yet another racial dynamic in which slavery was mobilized politically. Amsterdam Zuidoost can be seen as the Atlantic world in a nutshell because it is home not only to Surinamese and Antilleans but, next to white Dutch, also to a significant number of West African migrants and postmigrants, mainly from Ghana and Nigeria. In this chapter, I show how the Surinamese self-identification as ‘descendants’ can sometimes lead to conflict because West Africans and Surinamese of African descent are positioned differently in the history of slavery. At the same time, notions of shared Africanness also lead to new forms of conviviality. Here the notion of tracing is crucial because it allows me to unpack the diverse ways in which people actively and creatively search for and decide about their own relation to oppressive historical conditions. Chapter 4 deals with slavery as a form of memory that is transmitted through the cultural forms of music and proverbs containing, for instance, messages about trust and honesty. These messages constitute a kind of implicit knowledge about the past and inform

Introduction  ◆  35

how people see themselves and the world. The paradox of these cultural forms, however, is that they place a high value on secrecy: cultural knowledge that should not be shared. This contrasts with the very public nature of cultural heritage, which by definition entails some kind of publicity. The obligation for secrecy, then, creates a different kind of silence than the Orwellian silences produced by historiography. These cultural forms require a specific kind of knowledge to articulate or trace them to the terror of slavery. Finally, Chapter 5 looks at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and nation in the dynamics of cultural heritage and the cultural registers through which they are negotiated. For example, an understanding of the strong position of women as culture bearers in the realm of Afro-Surinamese culture needs to take into account the ways in which women’s social position is informed by the status of the female in the Afro-Surinamese Winti religion. Once more, the trace helps me to see the historical conditions that have shaped African-Surinamese gender and sexuality while at the same time pay attention to the rich cultural practices and cosmologies that have had and continue to have an equally important influence on sexuality and sexual relations. While these cultural forms were shaped in fundamental ways during slavery, reducing them to the experience of slavery would also reduce a very complex dynamic to social pathologies. If the formation of cultural heritage can be understood as a trace, or better as an activity of tracing, such an activity, I show in this chapter, cannot be entirely controlled. While following a trace, one chances upon things, one crosses other traces. Collecting evidence for one case frequently turns up evidence for subsidiary or even unrelated cases that may nevertheless influence the original case.

Notes   1. The title of this section is inspired by Stuart Hall’s (1999) article.  2. ‘Anton de Kom riep alle Surinamers op / tot eenheid en gelijkwaardigheid / keerde zich tegen het koloniaal bewind / en was actief in het Nederlandse verzet 1940–1945.’ Inscription on a plaque that was replaced by the statue.   3. Letter to the District Council, 29 July 1999, personal archive Markus Balkenhol.   4. ‘We hebben niet gehad waar we voor gingen. . . . Het is niet óns ding. Zij zeggen, dat wat we nodig hebben, vanuit díe Afro-Surinaamse cultuur,

36  ◆  Tracing Slavery

vanuit dát erfgoed, vanuit díe spiritualiteit, vanuit díe identiteit, vanuit díe identificatie, dat inspireert ons niet.’ Interview 4 June 2011.   5. Toko is an Indonesian term for a small grocery store selling produce from Asia and the Caribbean. In Suriname (and the Netherlands) they are often run by Chinese people. The toko is a well-known institution in the Netherlands.   6. http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/dialogue/the-slaveroute/, emphasis MB, accessed 19 March 2013.   7. International year of the struggle against slavery, Oostindie 2005.   8. The following argument is strongly informed by David Scott’s critique of narratives of redemption. In Conscripts of Modernity, Scott argues that romantic narratives of overcoming and redemption are ill suited for an understanding of slavery and colonialism and its legacies. He proposes instead the register of the tragedy in order to point out the agonistic and ongoing – rather than redemptive – legacy of slavery (D. Scott 2004).  9. ‘Dat is echt de essentie van die man. Hij heeft slavernij inzichtelijk gemaakt.’ 10. Although memory has been an intellectual concern since antiquity, a distinction between personal and collective memory only emerged in the late nineteenth century (Olick and Robbins 1998: 106). Hugo von Hofmannsthal was perhaps the first to explicitly use the term ‘collective memory’ in 1902 when he spoke of ‘the dammed up force of our mysterious ancestors within us’ and of ‘piled up layers of accumulated collective memory’ (Schieder 1978: 2; Olick and Robbins 1998: 106). Although the protean ideas of collective memory existed in the nineteenth century, today Maurice Halbwachs is usually credited with the introduction of memory into sociological inquiry (Olick and Robbins 1998). Halbwachs’s contemporaries also used variations of the term (Olick und Robbins 1998); for example, Marc Bloch (1925) and Charles Blondel (1926), the art historian Aby Warburg (Warburg 1999; Warburg 2008) and Walter Benjamin (Benjamin 2010; see also BuckMorss 1991). 11. The flip side of this, in a Foucauldian sense, is that one becomes a subject precisely by being subjected to modern regimes of governance and control. 12. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have developed this term most prominently. They oppose the rhizome to ‘the tracing’, which they see as part of the ‘tree logic’ – as always returning to an origin in a linear way: the rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing (‘Make a map, not a tracing’) (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 12). My understanding of the trace as relating to a past event as well as a present frame of reference, however, differs somewhat from the image of the trace than Deleuze and Guattari seem to suggest. The trace, to me, emerges through the practice of tracing, and therefore becomes a thing only through such a practice or practices. It should be kept in mind that the trace is both a temporal and a spatial relation at the same time. With my notion of the trace as a practice

Introduction  ◆  37

of tracing, I want to emphasize the active engagement of finding clues and making connections that is not exclusively a property of the trace but involves those people who are doing the tracing. 13. See also Wacquant (2002), who traces the institutionalization of racial discrimination in the US from slavery through Jim Crow and the ghetto to the system of prisonfare institutionalized today. In the Netherlands, nothing comparable to Jim Crow existed, and the ‘ghetto’ was an ideology that masked structural discrimination (see Chapter 1) more than a social reality. Today, although blacks are represented disproportionately in Dutch prisons, this is nowhere near the kind of prisonfare institutionalized in the US (Wacquant 2008). 14. Literally ‘red berets’; black soldiers who were recruited in the war against the Maroons. They were often lured into service with the promise of manumission, which was often not realized either because the soldiers were killed or the promise was not honoured. 15. 1 July is the big celebration of Keti Koti, the breaking of the chains, the day that slavery was abolished in the Dutch colonies in 1863. 16. See Butler (1990) on the ‘etc.’ as a pre-emptive container or an ‘embarrassed admission of a sign of exhaustion as well as of the illimitable process of signification itself’ (Butler 1990: 143 as cited in Yuval-Davis 2006: 202). 17. Conversely, my reaction demonstrated how risky it is to invoke slavery in (political) articulations of blackness, precisely because it is so easily disavowed in white normativity. 18. See https://www.nwo.nl/en/projects/312-99-104, accessed 8 March 2021. 19. Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer have called such a position the scholastic position: ‘The disposition of skholè, that is, of scholastic freedom from constraint is shared by all those who, regardless of the disciplinary or other particularities that divide them, have in common the capacity and privilege “to withdraw from the world so as to think it”, a freedom to engage in cultural production under conditions well insulated from practical urgencies and concerns’ (Emirbayer and Desmond 2012: 585). As Emirbayer and Desmond insist, this is an ideal-typical position, but it seems impossible to ignore people’s appreciation of my relative distance as an intellectual from, for example, processes of socialization into modes of communication between black and white Dutch. It is interesting, then, to observe how different social, disciplinary and scholastic positions intersect. 20. Since 2013 there have been a number of publications listing ‘traces of slavery’ in several Dutch cities. See for instance https://sporenvanslav​ ernijutrecht.nl/, the first in this series, and the project Mapping Slavery: https://mappingslavery.nl/en/. 21. The body of work critiquing anthropology’s entanglements with colonialism is by now large enough to have produced an entire subfield with its own scholarly debates and genealogies. Whereas Said (1978) ­prominently

38  ◆  Tracing Slavery

critiqued anthropology as an agent of colonial power, others have emphasized more the complexities of anthropology’s involvement in the reproduction of colonial power (Asad 1973; Fabian 2002), or indeed their mutual constitution (Pels and Salemink 1994).

1 The Politics of Autochthony

The concept of the trace I laid out in the introduction is a conceptual tool to understand how people creatively deal with the position history has placed them in. I wanted to know how, in Toni Morrison’s (2005: 220) words, people were ‘busy being original, complicated, changeable’. So, when designing the project, encouraged by the late Gerd Baumann, who taught me research methodology (see also Baumann and Sunier 1995), I wanted to avoid ‘groupism’– that is, ‘the tendency to take bounded groups as fundamental units of analysis (and basic constituents of the social world)’ (Brubaker 2004: 3). Treating ‘groups’ as if they exist quasi- naturally in the world is not just bad science, it is also performative: notions of groups confirm, give direction to, and change how people think and act’ (Krebbekx et al. 2013: 346). Ian Hacking even speaks of ‘making up people’ (Hacking 1986), which leads to the reification and naturalization of the very categories one aims to research. But stating that groupism is bad is one thing; putting it into a working research design is quite another because, as Gerd Baumann and Thijl Sunier have argued, ‘our informants, too, use their own ideas about ethnicity to construct radical alterities about their own collective “others” and for themselves’ (Baumann and Sunier 1995: 3). When the issue of slavery began to enter the stage of public memory in the 1990s in the Netherlands, it brought with it a new identification that appealed to a growing number of people in the Netherlands: that of the descendants of the enslaved. This category became a political symbol capable of rallying people behind, for

40  ◆  Tracing Slavery

example, claims to citizenship, reparations and large-scale commemorations, but it also became a topic whose boundaries are now being heavily policed by descendants themselves and their adversaries. The dominance of social media has only intensified these developments (Aouragh 2019; Haider 2018). In other words, I had to take seriously a form of ‘groupism’ I was trying to avoid. Was I not introducing groupism through the back door? What is more, in scholarly circles as well as in conversation with, for instance, the media it proved difficult to talk about my research without being perceived as vague and imprecise: what exactly was the object of my research? Surely it must have been ‘Surinamese’ in ‘De Bijlmer’? ‘Tell us what they think and do!’ was the demand. And why did I not look at ‘Antilleans’? In this chapter, I will show how social-political identities such as that of the ‘descendants’ emerge through processes of emplacement (Balkenhol 2011). The trace allows me to show how people relate to the past through particular places: the trace points to a past event, but it is also a movement through space, the mapping of a geography, a positioning, and therefore an active process through which people are positioned but also through which they position themselves. The correlation between physical and social position has long been analysed (De Certeau 1998; Lefebvre 1991) and most poignantly expressed in terms like ‘the global South’, ‘the West’, or ‘Africa’ (Ferguson 2006). In such terms, physical and social positions become entangled: ‘Africa’ is both a geographical location as well as a symbolic or social position in the world order (Mbembe 2017; Mudimbe 1988). The city produces similar positionings. As Wouter van Gent and Rivke Jaffe (2017: 555) have argued, Urban inequalities are rendered normal by spatial imaginaries that depict ‘natural’ associations between space, race, class and gender, with dysfunctional family life, sexual immorality and danger projected onto ‘nonWhite’ neighbourhoods.

Similarly, David Theo Goldberg has argued that ‘racisms become institutionally normalized in and through spatial configuration, just as social space is made to seem natural, a given, by being conceived and defined in racial terms’ (Goldberg 1993: 185). The validity of these analyses is undeniable in an era when racialized spatial configurations have become ever more violently fortified in many forms of border policing across the world. It is important to note here that the notion of autochthony, central to the politics of belonging in the Netherlands (see introduction), was introduced by a geographer, Hans van Amersfoort (Geschiere

The Politics of Autochthony  ◆  41

2009: 149). He had adapted it from physical geography, where it denotes sediments originating in a place other than where they are found. The term was first used in a volume edited by sociologist Hilda Verwey-Jonker in 1971 (ibid. 148). Although there was no discussion on the choice of this term in the volume, Van Amersfoort, who contributed to the volume, remembers that it was chosen for its ‘neutral scientific flavor’ (Geschiere 2009: 149). This presumed neutrality, however, is precisely what makes the term problematic when applied to people because it presumes a kind of natural bond between certain people and a particular place, implying that other people do not naturally belong. Belonging is thus, to stay with the geological metaphor, petrified: social dynamics are turned into an unchanging stony substance. There is, of course, an irony at the heart of these processes of naturalization because people do not naturally accept such naturalized spatial configurations. Indeed, the more one claims that something is ‘natural’, the stronger the resistance against it, in turn creating the urge to constantly maintain, modify and intensify what is supposed to be ‘natural’. The question that interests me in this chapter, then, is how people who identify as ‘descendants of the enslaved’ negotiate the historical positions they find themselves in. Indeed, the fortification of belonging in the Netherlands and elsewhere makes such an approach particularly urgent. So instead of starting with the assumption of already established groups, I decided to start with the monuments and follow the networks or root systems that grow around them. In fact, this approach more or less imposed itself on me before I even started my research in September 2008. In July of that year, I had been working as a barista in a café in the centre of Amsterdam. Having just signed the Ph.D. contract, I enthusiastically told one of the café’s frequent customers about the research I was about to begin. A true networker, she replied: ‘You have to talk to Roy Ristie; he is the one who started the whole thing.’ I discovered that Roy had been a driving force behind the slavery commemoration on Surinameplein in Amsterdam. Starting in 1993, almost ten years before the unveiling of the national slavery memorial, this commemoration was an initiative of the Comité 30 juni/1 juli. Next to Roy Ristie, the Comité included Winston Kout, chairman of Kwakoe Events, who organized the famous Kwakoe Festival in Amsterdam Zuidoost (Reus 2012). For the first time, the Comité reframed slavery as an explicit claim to citizenship, emphasizing the centuries-old connection between Suriname, the Dutch Antilles

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and the Netherlands. Most prominently, this is articulated in their ‘Manifest van Besef’ (Awareness Manifesto), issued in 2003. In the manifesto, the Comité argued that ‘Suriname and the Antilles with their population in its current state are a creation of the Netherlands.’ The manifesto accused the Netherlands of mistreatment, mutilation, murder and oppression over centuries, which had led to ‘complete dependence’ and all kinds of problems persisting today. Based on this, the group demanded more attention to slavery in school curricula and that the Queen ask for forgiveness. The committee also formulated very specific demands about Surinamese-Dutch pensions, visas, resident permits, television and radio airtime, a Winti temple, as well as ‘the incorporation of Winti medicine and other forms of traditional medicine into the general health insurance’. These demands are based on the idea of a historical connection (verbondenheid) between the Netherlands and its colonies, thus echoing John Solomos’ famous phrase ‘we are here because you were there’. Roy quickly became one of my most important informants, and he also encouraged me to join him in Amsterdam Zuidoost, suggesting that if I really wanted to understand what the monuments were all about, I had to be in Zuidoost. The members of the Comité 30 juni/1 juli all lived here, and I wanted to understand, literally and figuratively, ‘where they come from’.

Approaching Amsterdam Zuidoost Looking out the window on the train from Utrecht, where I live, to my fieldwork home in Amsterdam Zuidoost, I saw the wide irrigated polderlandschap, a symbol of Dutchness. Beyond the seemingly endless green, Amsterdam Arena, home stadium of Ajax, appeared in the misty distance, sitting there on the horizon like a flying saucer. As the train passed Abcoude, a small village amid open fields, the highrise apartment buildings of Amsterdam Zuidoost took shape. I had tuned the radio on my mobile phone to RaZO, one of Amsterdam Zuidoost’s several local radio stations, and as we approached Amsterdam Bijlmer Arena, the drums of an Afro-Surinamese song began to win the struggle over the static. Later, there would be a discussion on this channel about reparations and new research on slavery, racism and the American civil rights movement. Continuing to listen to music, I began cycling to my fieldwork home at the other end of the suburb. The trip took me past several places of history: there was the mall with its bustling shops and

The Politics of Autochthony  ◆  43

Figure 1.1.  Farmhouse ‘Het Muisje’ at Abcouderstraatweg, De Lage Bijlmer (Bijlmerringsloot), Jacob Olie, November 1896. Courtesy of Stadsarchief Amsterdam.

markets, which had been fought for for such a long time (Heijboer 2006); there was Kwakoe Podium, the famous cultural centre founded by the first Afro-Surinamese settlers in Zuidoost in the 1970s (Reus 2012); and there were the newly built low-rise buildings, which were rapidly replacing the old nine-story apartment buildings with their characteristic honeycomb shape. My apartment building was one of the few that had been refurbished but kept in the typical modernist style. My approach to Amsterdam Zuidoost, both in a physical and conceptual sense, took me through layers of spatial, racial and cultural arrangements that situate Amsterdam Zuidoost both within and visà-vis the Netherlands as a whole. Amsterdam Zuidoost is an extension of the city of Amsterdam that was constructed in the 1960s in response to the increasing housing shortage in the urban regions in the west of the Netherlands. Like other projects of urban expansion in the Netherlands, it was of more than mere practical value for urban development; the project was framed as one of modernization, and Amsterdam Zuidoost became an allegory for modern society (see Mepschen 2016). The construction of Amsterdam Zuidoost constituted not only a leap in terms

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of engineering and urban planning but represented an increasing desire to break with ‘tradition’. This desire took material shape in the radical transformation of a type of landscape considered typically Dutch. The idea of a ‘national landscape’ emerged in the nineteenth century (Van Berkel 2006). Particularly the polderlandschap came to be seen as typically ‘Dutch’: a landscape of green pastures with grazing cows, neatly separated by canals, scattered windmills and farmhouses (Davids 2006; Ensel 2003; Krul 2006). After the Second World War, a long-standing tradition of the musealization of this landscape gained momentum (De Jong 2001; Rooijakkers et al. 2002), and it figured prominently as a symbol of Dutchness. There is hardly a better expression of this than Hendrik Marsman’s 1936 poem Herinnering aan Holland (Memory of Holland), which evokes the landscape poignantly. The poem was elected ‘poem of the century’ by Radio Netherlands World Service in 1999: Denkend aan Holland zie ik brede rivieren traag door oneindig laagland gaan,

Thinking of Holland I picture broad rivers meandering through unending lowland,

rijen ondenkbaar ijle populieren als hoge pluimen aan de einder staan;

rows of incredibly lanky poplars, huge plumes that linger at the edge of the world;

en in de geweldige ruimte verzonken de boerderijen verspreid door het land,

in the astounding distance small-holdings that recede into space throughout the country,

boomgroepen, dorpen, geknotte torens, kerken en olmen in een groots verband.

clumps of trees, town-lands, stumpy towers, churches and elms that contribute to the grand design;

De lucht hangt er laag en de zon wordt er langzaam in grijze veelkleurige dampen gesmoord,

a low sky, and the sun smothering slowly in mists, pearl-gray, mother-of-pearl;

en in alle gewesten wordt de stem van het water met zijn eeuwige rampen gevreesd en gehoord.1

and in every county the water’s warning of more catastrophes heard and heeded.

The Politics of Autochthony  ◆  45

Figure 1.2.  Farmhouse ‘Nooit gedacht’, Oost Bijlmer 27. Courtesy of Stadsarchief Amsterdam.

The poem, of course, is not only a description of the typically Dutch polder landscape; it also introduces a nostalgic register through which this landscape is often perceived: a bygone era, a wistful memory of the olden days.2 In that sense, the construction of the new suburb epitomizes modernity’s two hearts: belief in progress and nostalgia for the olden days. The area in which modernity was to arise, De Bijlmermeerpolder, had been a textbook example of the polderlandschap: a wet marshland situated between Amsterdam and Abcoude. It looked like a classic Dutch painting – green pastures scattered with windmills and farmhouses (see Figures 1.1 and 1.2). All of this was about to be replaced by modernist high-rise buildings, roads and garages. After the Second World War, there was an acute housing shortage in the Netherlands, and especially the big cities looked for ways to expand. De Bijlmermeer was to become a new suburb built from scratch. The area was filled with millions of cubic meters of sand in order to create a solid foundation. The polderlandschap was literally buried in sand to make room for concrete structures and roads (see Figure 1.3).

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Figure 1.3.  Apartment buildings Kruitberg and Groeneveen, July 1972. Courtesy of Stadsarchief Amsterdam.

The sand and concrete did not sit well with familiar representations of Dutchness, and a sense of nostalgia about the loss of the national landscape had to compete with an enthusiastic embrace of futurism and a strong belief in progress. Indeed, the urban planners explicitly aimed to move away from what they saw as backward traditions. This ‘city of the year 2000’ (Helleman 2004: 5), as it was marketed in brochures, contrasted radically with the old city centres and their grachtenpanden (canal houses) and crammed tiny streets and streetlets. It was advertised as ‘a modern city where people of today can find the residential environment of tomorrow’ (ibid.). The design was thought to be in opposition with the ‘old’ style of living the urban planners found in Amsterdam’s city centre. An alternative to what they saw as an unhealthy, backward and socially undesirable environment, the architects grasped the construction of Amsterdam Zuidoost as a chance to literally and figuratively rebuild Dutch society through urban design. This enthusiasm is embodied in the architectural design itself, which is based on the ideas of Swiss architect Le Corbusier and the maxims of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM). The CIAM architects were informed by a new vision of

The Politics of Autochthony  ◆  47

society they sought to materialize through the built environment – a project of social engineering. Le Corbusier was full of contempt for what he perceived as the traditional, overcrowded, chaotic and debilitating urban city centres, which produced a kind of society he thought was becoming obsolete. Their remedy for what they thought of as wild and boundless growth was order, planning and control, represented by straight lines, functionality and open spaces. In the vision of the planners, this new environment would produce a modern urban dweller that had shed the decrepit social structures embodied by the old city centre. In other words, the new suburb was not directed at the population as it was but as it ought to be. The new society was imagined as a collective in which the boundaries of the old nuclear family would be broken down in favour of a communal ideal. Hierarchies would cease to exist, and the individual would achieve fulfilment in merging with the collective. The team of architects who designed De Bijlmer was strongly influenced by these ideas. Keeping within Le Corbusier’s parameters, they designed an enormous concrete colossus made up of thirty apartment towers of ten floors each. Three principal elements governed the design: housing on traffic-free green field sites, functionally separated activities and high-rise building (Blair and Hulsbergen 1993: 283). The apartment blocks were arranged in a honeycomb pattern to create a sense of spaciousness that was further increased by an ‘extensive landscaped park area’ between the buildings (ibid.: 284). The roads were elevated, thus separating the bicycle and pedestrian paths from the roads and creating a desired order and functionality. The elevated streets also formed a barrier between the different building blocks; they could be crossed only where underpasses had been constructed. Ambitiously, the planners claimed that in De Bijlmer it would be impossible for a child to be run over by a car. The apartment buildings were equipped with communal spaces and the so-called binnenstraatjes (galleries) that ran along the first floor of the buildings as a sort of covered terrace. They were intended to function as a mall, with shops and cafés creating social cohesion within the apartment block. The individual apartment blocks were meant to function as a social microcosm in which the inhabitants of one block would develop a sense of belonging to ‘their’ building. The city of the future, however, failed to materialize. Instead, the stylistic contrast of Amsterdam Zuidoost with the rest of the Netherlands translated into social and physical disenfranchisement. The architecture ambitiously framed as ‘the future’ failed to appeal to

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the white middle class for which the suburb was intended, and only very few residents of the city centre actually moved to De Bijlmer. Those who could afford it moved to the emerging towns such as Almere or Amstelveen on the urban periphery. Here, they found a kind of architecture that appealed more to their ideals of living than the high-rise futurism of De Bijlmer – that is, single family homes with a garden and more space (Smets and Den Uyl 2008). Style was not the only factor in this disenfranchisement. The most basic infrastructure was missing from De Bijlmer, and it remained missing for decades. The ‘satellite’ suburb continued to be physically disconnected to the city centre until the metro line finally opened in 1977, almost ten years after the first residents had moved in. Also, a shopping centre that had been promised did not open until 1988, partly because the population was too small to sustain it and partly because of erroneous planning procedures. Investors turned their back on it. For a long time, the whole area remained a building site – an adventurous place for children (Heijboer 2006) but a nuisance for their parents. As a consequence, many apartments in De Bijlmer remained vacant in the 1970s, amounting to a considerable loss for building corporations. In other words, de Bijlmer was not only symbolically excluded as being ‘un-Dutch’, it was also physically disconnected to the urban centre of Amsterdam.

Blackness and Danger – The Politics of Place in the Netherlands Today, the modernist architecture is not the first thing that generally springs to mind when De Bijlmer is mentioned. For most, the place evokes mixed feelings – a sense of chaos and danger as well as fascination. This was poignantly captured in a TV show that was being filmed in 2010 while I was doing my fieldwork. The show was produced by BNN, a very hip Dutch TV and radio network that is widely watched by young people. The network has become notorious for explicit content; for example, a reality show featuring self-experiments with hard drugs and live sex. In its fondness for thrills, the show advertised Amsterdam Zuidoost as a place that is both exciting and dangerous. The network sent Patrick Lodiers, then CEO and presenter at BNN, to check out if it really was as bad as people say. As the announcement read, he would ‘live and work for two months in one of the most discussed neighbourhoods in the Netherlands: De Bijlmer’.3

The Politics of Autochthony  ◆  49

Patrick will swap his residence in the Gooi4 for a small apartment in Amsterdam Zuidoost. The neighbourhood is developing; it has 130 nationalities, joyful festivals and yummy food. But it also had 22 shooting incidents with a death toll of 3 in the past year. Everybody is tearing their hair out, but what is really going on in notorious ‘Zuid-Oost’? In order to find out, Patrick will move to De Bijlmer. He will explore the neighbourhood, meet the residents and dive into the many activities that are being organized in the neighbourhood.5

The announcement evoked a racial geography that was immediately recognizable to people in the Netherlands. The richness, whiteness and security of the Gooi contrasts with the image of the exotic and dangerous Bijlmer, which has a particular place in the cultural imagination of the Netherlands. The show was meant to unsettle stereotypical views of De Bijlmer that made the show so exciting (for a young audience) to watch in the first place. This racial geography is spelled out in explicit terms when in one of the episodes Lodiers invites right-wing politician Rita Verdonk to visit.6 The pair are shown immersing themselves in the exotic environment; they take a stroll around the local market and prepare nasi, an Indonesian dish that has become part of Dutch cuisine. In defence of De Bijlmer, Lodiers somewhat triumphantly claims that moving to the area has proven the stereotypes to be false. Verdonk retorts that she has never held any prejudices: I have my information from what I read in the papers, and I also looked up some information about De Bijlmer before I came here. On the surface, it is all very gezellig (cosy). It is quite peculiar (‘het is apart’), this Surinamese street; it looks like Paramaribo [the capital of Suriname]. But if there would be no police, if these people would look after their own affairs, well. This is not the kind of Netherlands I am proud of.7

In unbridled right-wing populist fashion, Verdonk’s classically colonial logic attaches exotic attraction, chaos and potential danger to ‘these people’, who are pitted against a kind of Netherlands to be proud of. However, all Lodiers’s stay in De Bijlmer has taught him is that residents here are ‘good’, not ‘bad’ others. The racialization of De Bijlmer in both the right-wing and progressive imaginations began in the 1970s, in the wake of Surinamese independence. Following decades of anti-colonial struggle by Suri­ namese nationalists (Jones 2007; Marshall 2003; Schuster 1999) and domestic and international pressure (Buddingh’ 1999), independence was declared on 25 November 1975. The more independence was becoming a certainty in the 1970s, the more people decided to

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leave Suriname. Within the space of a few years, more than 120,000 Surinamese Dutch settled in the Netherlands, wishing to retain their Dutch nationality and fearing an uncertain future in Suriname. People born in Suriname were legally Dutch, but that did not mean that they were perceived as such. Guno Jones, for example, has shown that some politicians soon adopted a language that portrayed Surinamese as ‘tropical’ bodies that did not belong in the Netherlands: Politicians in the Netherlands translated the idea of ‘respect for other cultures’ into an ascribed idea of national belonging in which people from the West-Indies (Suriname and the Dutch Antilles) who relocated to the Netherlands (often Dutch citizens) were represented as alienated from their ‘own’ socio-cultural habitat in the Caribbean. (2014: 320)

Already in the 1950s, the arrival of overseas nationals from the newly founded Republic of Indonesia had sparked political discussions about their physical fitness to live in the Dutch climate (Jones 2014). Their ‘tropical’ bodies, which were moreover imagined to be linked to a specific tropical mentality and culture, ought to be left in a tropical area, and not relocated to the Netherlands, lest they inevitably become uprooted both culturally and physically, ‘like a tropical plant that cannot grow roots in cold regions’ (Jones 2007: 167).8 When the overseas nationals from Suriname arrived in great numbers in the 1970s, a similar argument came to bear. Many politicians, as Jones (2014: 329) documents, ‘represented the Netherlands as an unnatural social and cultural habitat for Surinamese Dutch’. They argued that the move of Surinamese Dutch to the Netherlands would result in their ‘uprootedness’, in ‘cultural isolation’ and a lack of contact with their ‘own’ country (ibid.). Member of Parliament Arend de Goede of the liberal-conservative party said in a parliamentary debate in 1971: Suriname and also the Dutch Antilles will need to find their place in that part of the world where they happen to be placed, on the edge of the Caribbean and the northern part of South America. (Ibid.)

The word ‘happen’ is important here, because it reduces the forced displacement and enslavement of people from Africa to Suriname and the Antilles to ‘happenstance’ – a historical coincidence rather than the result of conscious and systematic decisions and actions by the Dutch trading companies, political bodies in the Low Countries and citizen-entrepreneurs (Brandon et al. 2020). This way the presence of people of African, Indonesian, Indian and Chinese descent in

The Politics of Autochthony  ◆  51

Suriname is naturalized and appears as their quasi-natural place in the world. ‘Their own’ country and the Netherlands can thus be clearly distinguished in De Goede’s mind. The Surinamese belonged in a tropical place; they were simply not made for the cold and inhospitable climate in the Netherlands. These politicians articulated a racial geography in which blackness, intrinsically linked to tropical heat, had no place in the cold climate of the Netherlands. For example, Piet Jongeling, chairman of the Reformed Protestant Party, GPV, was worried about the departure of a large proportion of the Surinamese and Antillean elite to the Netherlands. He states that ‘the inhabitants of Suriname and the Antilles, the lifeblood of these regions, are increasingly flowing off to the Netherlands’.9 He argues that this has adverse consequences for Suriname because the people who are moving to the Netherlands are needed there. And, he adds worriedly, they hardly ever return once they are in the Netherlands.10 The assertion that ‘warm bodies’ are incompatible with the ‘cold climate’ then smoothly paves the way for an argument about social and cultural incompatibility and the problems this allegedly entails. Nor is this development very good for the Netherlands, generally speaking. These people generally end up in the already scarce space of the overpopulated Randstad [the urban conglomeration along the coast, M.B.]. Here and there all sorts of social-cultural problems of integration are arising, which nobody is happy with. The question is, moreover, whether this [move to the Netherlands] is an improvement for the people themselves. They often imagine a kind of paradise on earth, but they end up, literally and figuratively, in the cold. It often happens that they become uprooted. This is the problem.11

An argument about a lack of physical space is here easily turned into an argument about a lack of social space. To Jongeling, the inhospitable social climate is a natural consequence of the inhospitable meteorological climate. The perceived ‘maladaptation’ of overseas nationals in the Netherlands becomes naturalized, an incontestable truth that, in this perception, is based on an implicit conflation of whiteness and Dutchness. In this statement, Jongeling thus merges ideas of race, culture and place. Problems of social and cultural integration of overseas nationals, to Jongeling’s mind, are inextricably linked with notions of physical unfitness to live in a place such as the Netherlands. Although this position is perhaps somewhat extreme, it should be understood in a larger framework of immigration discourse. At

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the time, the official line was that the Netherlands was an emigration country, not an immigration country. Policy stimulated ­emigration – and discouraged immigration – because it was thought that the war-torn economy would not be able to sustain large numbers of immigrants. With this in mind, it is no coincidence that Hans van Amersfoort and Hilda Verwey-Jonker introduced a terminology of autochthony around the same time. Verwey-Jonker, a progressive social democrat, is unlikely to have subscribed to the liberal-­conservative rhetoric of aggressive exclusion. Indeed, they were looking for a neutral terminology that would not offend any of the groups in question or get in the way of the Dutch policy at the time stimulating emigration (Geschiere 2009: 148–49). Nonetheless, they contributed to the naturalization of racialized difference, albeit unwittingly. In this light, it should not be surprising that the places where these overseas nationals settled in the Netherlands became immediately charged with racial connotations. Effortlessly, the racial geography of empire was shifted and reapplied within national boundaries to the places where black overseas nationals settled. Amsterdam Zuidoost became iconic in this sense, standing for the movement of black overseas nationals to the Netherlands in general – the transatlantic world in a nutshell.

Racializing De Bijlmer The symbolic exclusion of Surinamese settlers in the Netherlands also meant that political struggle and self-organization was a necessity from the start, beginning with such basic needs as a place to live. The national government had shown little interest in organizing accommodation and work in an already scarce housing market (Vermeulen and Van Heelsum 2012). Property sharks seized upon the situation, and many new arrivals were housed in unsafe, unhygienic and overcrowded city apartments.12 Unlike the national government, ‘Amsterdam initiated its own programme targeting the Surinamese community in 1974’ (Vermeulen and Van Heelsum 2009: 152). The programme inaugurated the ‘Golden Age’ (ibid.) of Surinamese welfare organizations, who were given the task of managing housing, work and social services. With this responsibility came funding: in the period between 1975 and 1984, organizations like Welsuria, BEST and Stichting Interim Beheer received more than five million guilders of municipal funding per year (ibid.: 153). These welfare organizations were political organizations, as one of my interlocutors, a white

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woman who worked for Welsuria at the time, recalled. She told me that many of the people who started out as welfare workers in one of these organizations later pursued a political career. Just Maatrijk, by some referred to as ‘the saviour of De Bijlmer’, was one of them. As a welfare worker at Stichting Interim Beheer, he was closely involved with housing. At that time, middle-class residents of the city centre had failed to move into the newly built apartment blocks, and De Bijlmer was largely empty. Nonetheless, the housing corporations managing the buildings refused to rent out more than 10 to 15 per cent of the apartments to people from Suriname.13 This coincided with the heyday of the Dutch squatter scene. The short-lived Provo movement (1965–1967) had begun to challenge social norms (Kadir 2016: 11), thus paving the way for a small number of groups to begin developing new forms of sociality in squatted houses. The fledgling movement, though not initially widespread, gained significant support from a 1971 ruling of the Court of Higher Appeals in which squatters were granted certain rights and protection from eviction, as well as through the Kabouter party, who had won five seats in the Amsterdam city council in 1970. After 1969, squatting became a ‘visible part of Amsterdam life’ (ibid.). This set the scene for Maatrijk and others to take matters into their own hands. Inspired by the squatters in the city centre, in June 1974, a group of Surinamese activists including Maatrijk squatted almost one hundred apartments in the apartment building Gliphoeve.14 Guilly Koster, also part of this group and now a well-known media personality, remembers thinking: We can do that, too! We waited until it was dark, then we went upstairs into the buildings. One on the outlook, the rest of us up the stairs. Force open the little window above the door, unlock the kitchen window, enter and put down a chair. This way you showed that you lived there, and a huge legal trajectory had to be started to get you out.15

The squatters were evicted time and again but re-squatted the building for an entire year. Maatrijk said, looking back: ‘We learned squatting in the Netherlands, it didn’t exist in Suriname.’16 Although the Surinamese squatters did not exactly collaborate with the Dutch squatters’ movement, they were certainly inspired by it and able to utilize existing structures that had already been put in place. Eventually, the housing corporation offered them a rental contract, and the welfare organizations were tasked with the maintenance of the buildings and the integration of their residents. From this moment on, Koster says, ‘De Bijlmer was definitely black.’17

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Immediately, the registers of othering switched. Whereas De Bijlmer had been an ‘un-Dutch’ place evoking first and foremost a nostalgia for the olden days, now the popular imagination saw it as ‘the ghetto’. For example, on 16 August 1974, the conservative weekly magazine Elsevier published an article by Prof. Dr J.J.A. Van Doorn, in which he argued that the policy concerning the Surinamese in the Netherlands is ‘a guarantee for a race problem’. In an affirmative reaction to this article, editor-in-chief Dr F.A. Hoogendijk18 claimed that: ‘Every Dutch person knows that the approximately 45,000 Surinamese who are already living in Amsterdam at the moment do not smoothly integrate into Dutch society. To put it more strongly: De Bijlmermeer is in danger of becoming a ghetto of Surinamese in the Dutch capital.’19 Hoogendijk here appeals to a common-sense perception that black people will never integrate into Dutch society. He explicates an implicit local knowledge of racial geography that resonates in this unwelcoming public discourse. In this framing, the concentration of black Dutch in De Bijlmer cannot be seen as anything but a ghetto, a place in the Netherlands that is not the Netherlands, and that is somehow, as Verdonk put it with a Dutch word better known from South African history, ‘apart’. People from Suriname remain the perpetual other. This also meant that overseas nationals from Suriname relocated from the margins of empire to the margins of the metropole. They occupied a place that had already been marginalized in both a social and a physical sense; the racial geographies of colonialism resurfaced in Amsterdam Zuidoost. The fact that they ended up in De Bijlmer was perhaps a historical coincidence; their marginalization in an already marginalized place, however, was not. Of course, this was nothing new. As scholars like Alison Blakely (1993) or Dienke Hondius (2009) have shown, the very idea of modern Europe must be seen as a racialized idea from the beginning (Gilroy 1993). Race (and racism, or racialism) has thus not been something that happened in the colonies without affecting a Dutch sense of self (Goldberg 2006; Wekker 2016). Nevertheless, there is a general feeling in the Netherlands that history was ‘brought home’ only with the arrival of overseas nationals in the Netherlands (see Legêne 2011). It implies that a ‘clean’ history somehow became polluted. But the smoothness with which this idea of pollution was literally translated into the urban space in Amsterdam Zuidoost suggests that racialized modes of world-making predate the arrival of overseas nationals. Somewhat tragically they squatted, as it were, an already existing stereotype.

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All of this was epitomized in a popular metaphor reproduced by Hoogendijk in the title of an opinion piece: ‘Stop de Bijlmer-Express!’ (Oostindie 2010: 34), which was widely used at the time to describe the arrival at Schiphol airport of people from Suriname who then boarded trains to De Bijlmer. The ‘Bijlmer-Express’ evokes a fastriding train that, once set in motion, is difficult to stop, akin perhaps to today’s xenophobic hydrology of tsunamis and deluges. The railroad metaphor is apt, of course, because it evokes precisely the symbolic linkages between nationalism and empire. The American transcontinental railroad, the German Staatsbahn in Namibia, or the Burma Railway all in their own way combined national grandeur and imperialistic tendencies. What this metaphor and the semantic field it points to makes clear is not that with the arrival of black overseas nationals race all of a sudden mattered but that these people were incorporated into racial geographies that had been in place for a much longer period. There is a kind of plantation logic expressed in the concern to oversee and manage chaotic bodies (Mirzoeff 2011), and Katherine McKittrick suggests that in the city the plantation ‘stands as a meaningful conceptual palimpsest to contemporary cityscapes that continue to harbour the lives of the most marginalized’ (McKittrick 2013: 5). These ideas of mass enclosure and threat were thus much older than the new neighbourhood of Amsterdam Zuidoost. The ‘ghetto’ functioned as a figure of discourse in relation to the white normativity already in place. ‘Race’ was not something the overseas nationals brought with them but something that was already there that they brought into relief. By the end of the 1980s, subsidies for ‘ethnic’ organizations were severely cut as a consequence of a changing integration policy. Whereas up until the mid-1980s Surinamese welfare organizations had profited from the so-called ‘categoraal beleid’ in which subsidies were granted according to ethnicity, the new ‘integraal beleid’ did not proportionally grant subsidies to ethnic groups. The former was a policy of managing different ‘cultures’ who coexisted alongside each other, with the idea that people would ‘keep’ their own culture. The latter put more pressure on minorities to assimilate and embrace the Dutch way of life. This increasing trend of ‘culturalization’ (see introduction) also meant that Surinamese organizations could no longer count on financial support from the government the way they had done. This was the situation when Roy Ristie and others initiated the commemoration of slavery on Surinameplein.

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The Surinameplein Memorial and the Politics of Autochthony Roy was born in 1950 in Paramaribo, Suriname. Having finished school, he worked for the radio, and, setting up his own network, he became one of Suriname’s best known radio DJs, running ‘the largest radio station in Suriname’. As a DJ, he built up a reputation he took with him when he moved in 1977 to what he calls ‘the part of the Netherlands by the North Sea’. After his arrival in the Netherlands, Roy worked a number of jobs he ultimately found unsatisfactory.20 But Roy is a radio man, and soon he returned to his passion. The radio became a medium for community-building in Amsterdam Zuidoost,21 and claiming the air waves became a means for him to claim a place. He even goes so far as to claim that he invented local radio in the Netherlands. For Surinamese, he explained, local radio was a lifeline that connected them to each other as well as to Suriname. Experiments with local broadcasting had existed before Roy’s arrival. In 1971, a group of residents had squatted a common room22 called Binnenpret in the Hofgeest complex and set up an experimental TV broadcast using the pre-installed cable TV in the building. Against the resistance of the Ministry for Culture, Recreation and Social Welfare, the experiment was incorporated as the Lokale Omroep Bijlmermeer (LOB, Local Network Bijlmermeer) in 1972. The Minister only gave formal permission in 1975. LOB produced weekly broadcasts that were strongly supported by residents, but disagreements about the subsidy between the Ministry and the city of Amsterdam ended the project in 1977 (Verhagen 1987: 41). Roy resumed the tradition of local broadcasting in De Bijlmer. During his employment as audio-visual assistant at the Surinamese welfare organization Stichting Interim Beheer (the one Just Maatrijk worked for), he and a group of technicians began to expand the technical range of the station by laying cables from block to block. After a while, he had connected several of De Bijlmer’s apartment blocks in this way. Not without some pride, he recounted putting the G-, Hand F-neighbourhoods of De Bijlmer on the air with his illegal cable network. He recalled that the broadcasts contained mostly practical items. They provided information about waste disposal, or how to deal with Dutch bureaucracy. They also promoted artists from De Bijlmer. Surinamese local radio stations such as RAZO (Radio Amsterdam Zuidoost) and Mart Radio are still on the airwaves today.

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To Roy, local radio has been instrumental for Surinamese to foster a sense of home in Amsterdam Zuidoost. As I learned during my fieldwork, the radio is an essential part of Afro-Surinamese households. In many of the homes I was invited to visit, the radio was on all day, keeping people informed about the latest local developments both in Zuidoost and Suriname. Yvette, for example, used to listen especially to the obituaries, both from Suriname and the Netherlands (see also Van der Pijl 2007). Especially in the era before the internet, the radio was a way to bridge the geographic distance between Suriname and the Netherlands. Around the same time, Roy took up a job at the progressive network VPRO. Here, he worked with Dave van Dijk, who is well known on the Latin American music scene. Van Dijk was making a radio show titled ‘Black Star Liner’, which was an expert programme for Caribbean and Latin American music and current affairs. For example, it covered topics such as the coup in Suriname and the first right-wing party in the Netherlands, led by Hans Janmaat. Slavery and colonialism formed the general background, even around 1980, and they broadcast from the Ganzenhoef neighbourhood. In the 1980s, a number of developments led many Surinamese in the Netherlands to become concerned about citizenship and belonging. The decade saw the rise of Hans Janmaat’s right-wing extremist party, the Centrum Democraten (Centre Democrats). In this climate, people experienced racism on a daily basis (Essed 1984). Furthermore, government funding for welfare organizations dried up as a consequence of policy change. Where previously a future return to Suriname had been an option for many, the 1980 military coup in Suriname, the ensuing political murders by the regime and a civil war that dragged on until 1992 made a return more or less impossible. In addition, the transitional period ended in which people born in Suriname and who also held Dutch nationality were free to settle in the Netherlands. Essentially, while building a future in the Netherlands had become an imperative, social and political marginalization was increasing. Taken together, these developments led people of Surinamese descent, and in particular those of African descent, to rethink their position in the Netherlands. The commemoration of slavery on Surinameplein in 1993 was an articulation of these concerns. It was an intervention in the rising politics of autochthony. The monument on Surinameplein (see Figure 1.4.) is not a slavery memorial in the strict sense. It is called Monument van Besef (Bon Fu Gron Prakseri in Sranantongo, the ‘tree of awareness’ or ‘thorough reflection’), drawing attention not only to slavery but to the shared

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history of the Netherlands with its West Indian colonies. It is the work of Henry Renfurm, a Surinamese artist, and it was unveiled in 2003. The monument has the shape of a tree. The tree’s crown is made of the silhouettes of the maps Suriname, the Netherlands and the Antilles. Its strong, five-meter bronze trunk features five people representing the five largest ethnic groups in Suriname: Afro-Surinamese, Hindostani, Javanese, Chinese and Boeroe. The Bon Fu Gron Prakseri embodies the claims to citizenship articulated in the Manifest van Besef. A plaque on the monument reads: ‘Pause and reflect. This is the monument of reflection, Bon Fu Gron Prakseri, for the shared history of Suriname, the Netherlands and the Antilles, on behalf of the Comité 30 juni/1 juli. W. Kout, P. Wong, R. Ristie.’23 The tree not only signifies the idea of shared roots of the Netherlands, Suriname and the Dutch Antilles (significantly disregarding other postcolonial ties); it also matters that the tree is ‘rooted’ in Dutch soil. The monument thereby makes an intervention in the Dutch politics of autochthony. The tree embodies the claim of being ‘autoch­thonous’, of being of Dutch soil. Roy emphasized this countless times, sometimes even claiming that ‘we are the real autochthones, we are more Dutch than the Dutch themselves.’ The claims of both the manifesto and the monument are boosted by the commemoration that takes place every year on 30 June. The ceremony on that day is an explicit intervention in Dutch memory politics. It takes place in the middle of the traffic roundabout on Surinameplein. Led by a group of Surinamese Amerindians (whom the committee describes as ‘the original inhabitants of Suriname’ – the real autochthones of Suriname), the ceremonial crowd of several hundred crosses the street shortly before 8pm in what is known as de oversteek (the crossing). At 8pm, there are two minutes of silence, which is broken by the Dutch, Surinamese and Antillean national anthems. On the roundabout, three flag poles placed in the grass in the centre of the roundabout the previous night fly the Dutch, the Surinamese and the Antillean flags at half-mast. After the singing of the anthems, the flags are taken down, folded up and given to children as a gesture towards the future.24 The ceremony is quite a claim indeed. It is a literal citation of the single most important national commemoration, dodenherdenking (Remembrance of the Dead) on Dam Square. That ceremony is organized by the Nationaal Comité 4 en 5 mei, and it always follows a very precise pattern. In the morning of the 4th of May, flags are hoisted to half-mast throughout the country. At 6:55pm on the evening of 4 May, the King and the Queen, other State dignitaries and

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Figure 1.4.  Monument van Besef, Henry Renfurm, 2003. Photograph by Markus Balkenhol.

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distinguished guests gather at Nieuwe Kerk near Dam Square, where the yearly speeches are given. At 7:50pm, the Head of State, followed by the royal entourage, walks to the National Monument. Here, the chairperson of the Nationaal Comité 4 en 5 mei reads a standard text that is the same every year, and the Head of State lays a wreath. At exactly eight o’ clock, there are two minutes of silence. This silence is complete and nation-wide, and everybody is expected to respect it, wherever they are, and whether they are attending a ceremony or not. Public life comes to a full standstill everywhere; radio stations interrupt their broadcasts (only the live TV broadcast from Dam Square continues, in silence); public transport in cities as well as all trains are halted, and even the airports, including Schiphol, one of the largest and busiest European airports, interrupt operations; cars pull over (except on the highway, where this is prohibited). After two minutes, the silence is broken by the singing of the national anthem, the Wilhelmus. Then, a student from a secondary school reads a selfwritten poem.The Surinameplein ceremony is meant to be a mirror image of the ceremony on Dam square. Hoisting the flags, halting the traffic, the oversteek, the silence, the breaking of the silence by the national anthems, and the Comité 30 juni/1 juli25 are immediately recognizable to everyone in the Netherlands. Not only the monument itself and the annual ceremony but its location, too, underlines the Comité’s claim to autochthony. Surinameplein is in a neighbourhood that used to be known as the ‘West Indian’ neighbourhood because of the street names referring to (former) colonial territories; for instance, Antillenstraat, Curaçaostraat, Bonairestraat, Paramariboplein. The square is located to the West of the city centre, just inside the A10 circular, on one of the major arterial roads of Amsterdam, and about a five-minute bike ride from the tourist hubs of Leidseplein, Rijksmuseum and Stedelijk Museum. This means that when the streets are closed and the traffic is halted, traffic jams form immediately and soon extending all the way from the city centre. Roy told me that with the commemoration, ‘we were looking for something that would speak to the imagination, something visible and something palpable’. Roy wanted ‘Surinameplein’ to matter: the traffic jam is meant to aid the commemoration in physically jolting the arterial flows of the city. Roy wanted the city itself to be quiet, the hustle and bustle to pause – at least for a moment. With the tree-shaped monument, the symbolic intervention in the urban memoryscape and the literal interruption of the flow of the city, the memorial project put a remarkable emphasis on soil, roots,

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Figure 1.5.  Roy Ristie just before the ceremony at Surinameplein, 2009. Photograph by Markus Balkenhol.

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groundedness, territory and place. Such an emphasis on territory and place ought to be seen as a critical rearticulation of the territorial claims of Dutch colonialism.26 Winston Kout, born in 1950 in Suriname and an early member of the comité, made this quite explicit in an interview with me, by referring to the colonial system of education he was brought up with. Like many others I talked to of his generation, he remembers well his geography lessons in Suriname in which they learned that ‘The Rhine enters our country near Lobith.’ At the time, it seemed self-evident to him, in accordance with the colonial logic he grew up with, that the Netherlands and Suriname were, after all, one and the same country and that he was a subject of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. In the Surinameplein memorial project, this phantasmagoria of colonial geography is not rejected but taken literally. Many times, former members of the Comité emphasized to me that Suriname remains a province of the Netherlands, whether it is formally independent or not. In other words, they would argue that the Rhine did in fact enter their country near Lobith. Roy reminded me repeatedly how for years after the catastrophic 1953 flood in the Netherlands (watersnoodramp) they collected money for the victims. Teachers (often from the Netherlands) conveyed to them a feeling that this had not happened thousands of miles away but in their own country. This is what Winston and Roy know about the world, but they do not find this knowledge among their fellow Dutchmen. Whether in an openly racist xenophobia or in the subtler idiom of autochthony, in the Netherlands Suriname is generally not understood as Dutch soil. In this logic, those born in Suriname do not have the same rights as ‘autochthonous’ Dutch. With their central emphasis on the notion of besef, the organizers of the memorial project emphatically demand a thorough reflection on how exactly colonial modes of belonging reach into the present. The meaning of the term besef is layered, translating roughly as appreciation, awareness, understanding, realization, or consciousness. Zelfbesef can also imply a sense of pride (Geschiere 2009: 141). In the context of Surinameplein, besef articulates an open question about the very terms on which colonial history and its implications for the present are to be understood and lived today. Or, as Roy paraphrased the great Dutch soccer player Johan Cruyff: ‘Het besef bestaat er in te beseffen dat besef nodig is’ (‘Awareness consists in the awareness that awareness is necessary’).27 Although the term is quite encompassing, Winston Kout and Roy Ristie use the term besef to draw attention, in particular, to the racial formations engendered by colonial geography. As Kout explained,

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besef starts at school, as knowledge about territory: ‘the [white] kids never learned that there are black Dutch, too. They have no clue that the Netherlands is bigger than its current boundaries.’ If they did learn about their black fellow citizens, they would be able to ‘develop a feeling of responsibility about what they have destroyed in the colonies’. Ristie and Kout’s tracing is a project of emplacement: they retrace their own steps in the space of the Dutch empire. They understand their own movement between places – that is, their move from Suriname to the Netherlands but also their being and moving within the Netherlands – as a geographic mapping of historical space, a spatio-temporal relation that they sometimes express in the phrase ‘we are here because you were there’. With these stories about his life, Roy wanted to demonstrate how inextricably the Netherlands and Surinameplein are linked. The memorial project on Surinameplein is meant as an expression of this. ‘Surinameplein staat niet op zichzelf’ (‘Surinameplein does not stand on its own’), Roy explained. It is part of the Netherlands and as such related to other places and times. The more Roy told me about himself, the more it became clear to me how his life story is entwined with the history of Suriname, the Netherlands and Amsterdam Zuidoost. He insisted that ‘it’s not about me what I’m telling you here, it’s about the bigger picture’. It became clear to me that Roy is emplacing his biography, indeed his body, in these larger histories. Articulating his own biography and that of the places he has lived, he created a local subjectivity, to use Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) term. Roy taught me how to look at Zuidoost through his eyes: a place of history that began long before the Surinamese came to the Netherlands in the 1970s. To Roy, Amsterdam Zuidoost is the result of a shared history that reaches back centuries. He insisted on the fact that Zuidoost is not a ‘multicultural’ neighbourhood but just as ‘Dutch’ as the Jordaan neighbourhood in the centre of Amsterdam. Listening to him talk about his life was like listening to a biography of Amsterdam Zuidoost, the Netherlands and Suriname.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have analysed the commemoration of slavery on Surinameplein as an intervention in the politics of autochthony in the Netherlands. The emphasis on soil and rootedness underlines the claim to autochthony made by Roy and Winston. As they see it, their

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place of birth, Suriname, is literally Dutch soil because it has been part of the Dutch empire. With this claim, they embrace the colonial geography they grew up with and address the disenfranchisement they experienced when they moved to the Netherlands in the wake of Surinamese independence. All of a sudden, they were seen as outsiders, as out of place, as a kind of Fremdkörper. They made De Bijlmer their home, a place that had already been marginalized and that came to be seen as a black and dangerous ghetto. The initiative to commemorate slavery on Surinameplein symbolically reincorporates people from Suriname and the Antilles into the body politic of the nation. Their claim implies that Winston and Roy are not necessarily critical of the politics of autochthony as such. They do not reject the nativist logic that bestows special rights to those who are ‘born from the soil’. It is not surprising, then, that Roy and Winston, like many others I spoke to during my fieldwork, argued that ‘we are not Turkish or Moroccan’, referring to other minorities excluded in the politics of autochthony (Mepschen et al. 2010). Whereas Surinamese and Antilleans, thus their argument goes, have rights to the nation that are centuries old, and are ‘of the soil’, Dutch people of Turkish and Moroccan descent only arrived recently. This has important implications for an anthropological understanding of the politics of autochthony. Theories of autochthony, nativism and the politics of home in the Netherlands have thus far not engaged extensively with the question of how the politics of autochthony are entangled with processes of racialization (Duyvendak 2011; Duyvendak, Geschiere and Tonkens 2016; Geschiere 2009). My analysis of the Surinameplein project has shown that at least in the experience of people from the former colonies autochthony in the Netherlands is entangled with the racial geographies of empire. They inform how people from Suriname have been positioned in the margins of the Netherlands but also how some of them contest this positioning. The memorial thus engenders a particular notion of diaspora. Diaspora is often understood as characterized precisely by the lack of a proper territory, and indeed the term diaspora derives its critical thrust from the absence of such a territorial discourse (Weheliye 2009; see also Glissant 1997). In contrast, the memorial project articulates diaspora precisely by reference to the soil and offers a selfunderstanding that partakes in the arborescent culture of the nation (Malkki 1992). In the Surinameplein project, the racial geographies of the Dutch empire are not so much disavowed as reappropriated.

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Notes   1. Translated by Michael Longley, 1939, see http://4umi.com/marsman/ herinnering, accessed 9 March 2021.   2. This nostalgic mood about the loss of the Dutch landscape is also iconically rendered in Wim Sonneveld’s famous song ‘Het Dorp’ (The Village).   3. ‘BNN-voorzitter Patrick Lodiers gaat twee maanden wonen en werken in een van de meest besproken wijken van Nederland: de Bijlmer.’ (https:// www.npostart.nl/patrick-in-de-bijlmer/02-06-2010/POW_00308216, accessed 9 March 2021).   4. A region in the province of Noord Holland that is known to be a place both rich and white. The elitism of this place has been celebrated in the not quite funny comedy Gooische Vrouwen (Women of the Gooi).   5. ‘Patrick verruilt zijn woning in het Gooi voor een flatje in Amsterdam Zuidoost. De wijk is in ontwikkeling, met 130 nationaliteiten, vrolijke festivals en lekker eten. Maar ook met 22 schietpartijen in het afgelopen jaar, waarbij 3 doden vielen. Iedereen schreeuwt moord en brand, maar wat is er nou werkelijk aan de hand in het beruchte ‘Zuid-Oost’. Om daar achter te komen verhuist Patrick naar de Bijlmer. Hij verkent de buurt, ontmoet de bewoners en stort zich in de vele activiteiten die in de wijk worden georganiseerd.’ (http://www.publiekeomroep.nl/artikelen/ patrick-in-de-bijlmer, accessed 22 November 2011).   6. Rita Verdonk is a former politician of the Dutch liberal conservative party VVD and former Minister of Immigration and Integration. After splitting with the party in September 2007, she established her own right-wing populist movement called Trots op Nederland (Proud of the Netherlands). Verdonk is known for a restrictive immigration policy that arguably led to the catastrophic fire at the Schiphol detention center killing 11 undocumented migrants on October 27, 2005, see ‘Advocaten twijfelden al aan veiligheid cellencomplex Schiphol.’ NRC Handelsblad, 27 October 2005, p. 3.   7. What I perceive as Verdonk’s racism is part of a wider political formation in the Netherlands that has been emerging since the early 1990s. This rise of this form of political populism has made possible what I feel are such candid expressions of racism under the banner of what Boukje Prins has called ‘new realism’ (Prins 2002). Statements such as Verdonk’s are no longer read as racist, as was still the case with the racist political discourse of Hans Janmaat in the 1980s, but as mere factual assessments of ‘how things really are’ (see Van der Veer 2006). Verdonk’s political movement was already marginalized when she visited De Bijilmer in 2010, but her statement still articulates a broader social and political discourse. Here I am interested not so much in Dutch populism but in the popular imagery it draws on. It will perhaps suffice to point out the semantic link made by her use of the word ‘apart’ with the racial geographies elsewhere. It will be remembered that the Dutch word for apart can be used to express,

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next to specialness, one of the most totalitarian systems of racial segregation in history.   8. This racial emplacement is even more prevalent in some politicians’ idea that, in contrast to ‘tropical’ bodies, white bodies had no difficulty adapting to the tropical countries they had colonized. As Jones (2013: 1) argues, ‘while the Dutch presence in the overseas territories had long been seen as natural, the inclusion of people from these territories into the Netherlands was far from self-evident to many politicians in the Netherlands.’ Indeed, white Dutch nationals could unproblematically settle in places as diverse as Canada, Suriname, South Africa, Australia or Indonesia. ‘Tropical’ people, on the other hand, were seen as fundamentally unfit to live and thrive in adverse climatic conditions such as in the Netherlands. This, it seems, could only be done by the real (i.e. white) Dutch. As the Minister for Union Matters, Thiel, explained in 1953: ‘One realizes insufficiently that the social difficulties, caused by the completely different living conditions in which they find themselves in this country, are often much greater than those our [sic] emigrants have to overcome, who settle wellprepared and following good selection in other countries.’   9. ‘Op het ogenblik, mijnheer de Voorzitter, is steeds meer sprake van een soort hevelstaat, in deze zin, dat bewoners van Suriname en de Nederlandse Antillen, het levensbloed van deze gebieden, naar Nederland afvloeien in toenemende mate’ (Handelingen II 1971/72: 1195, see https://zoek. officielebekendmakingen.nl/0000216848, last accessed 11 May 2021). 10. ‘Dit heeft kwade kanten, want er gaan heel wat mensen weg die men daar bijzonder goed zou kunnen gebruiken. Men ziet zelden dat zij terugkeren, ook niet na in ons land een opleiding of iets dergelijks te hebben gevolgd. Dat is niet goed voor de West. Met name is het niet goed voor Suriname, dat demografisch gezien onderbevolkt is, hoewel het op het ogenblik sociaaleconomisch gezien overbevolkt is’ (Handelingen II, 1971/72:1195). 11. ‘Ook voor Nederland is deze ontwikkeling in het algemeen niet zo goed. Deze mensen komen dikwijls terecht in de toch al zo schaarse ruimte van de overbevolkte randstad. Hier en daar rijzen ook allerlei sociaalculturele integratieproblemen, waarmee niemand gelukkig is. Het is bovendien de vraag, of de mensen er zelf zoveel beter van worden. Zij stellen zich vaak een soort van aards paradijs voor, maar letterlijk en figuurlijk komen zij hier in de kilte terecht. Het komt veel voor, dat zij ontworteld raken. Dit is de problematiek’ (Handelingen II, 1971/72: 1195). 12. Images from this period are shown in André Reeder’s (1982) film ‘Onderneming onderdak’ (Operation Shelter). 13. https://www.volkskrant.nl/kijkverder/2017/gliphoeve/?referrer=https %3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F, last accessed 30 September 2020. 14. https://www.vpro.nl/programmas/gliphoeve/documentaire-intro.html, last accessed 1 October 2020. 15. https://dekanttekening.nl/samenleving/bijlmer-bewoners-blikkenterug-op-vijftig-jaar-bijlmer-we-waren-hevig-op-zoek-naar-helden/, last accessed 30 September 2020.

The Politics of Autochthony  ◆  67

16. https://www.volkskrant.nl/kijkverder/2017/gliphoeve/?referrer=https %3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F, last accessed 30 September 2020. 17. https://www.volkskrant.nl/kijkverder/2017/gliphoeve/?referrer=https %3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F, last accessed 30 September 2020. 18. Hoogendijk became a member of the Lijst Pim Fortuyn (LPF), the party of right-wing populist Pim Fortuyn, whose murder in 2002 had the Netherlands in shock and the repercussions of which are still strongly felt today (see Stengs 2009; Colombijn 2007). 19. ‘Iedere Nederlander weet dat de plm. 45.000 Surinamers die nu reeds in Amsterdam wonen, niet gemakkelijk in de Nederlandse samenleving integreren. Sterker gezegd: de Bijlmermeer dreigt een getto van Surinamers in de Nederlandse hoofdstad te worden.’ (Elsevier 30(34), 24 August 1974) 20. He first worked for a recycling company called Hollandia as an ‘assistent schrootbrander’ (assistent scrap metal burner), where he was disassembling fridges with a blowpipe. At the time, he was forced to accept this kind of work, alien to him, in order to get a work permit (tewerkstellingsvergunning). He remembers cutting open fridges without any idea of how to do it correctly, and without any form of protection. He tells me how he cut open the fridge doors in order to tear out the insulation, and how with the blowpipe burning the insulation material he produced the most awesome colours, ‘kleuren die ik nog nooit eerder had gezien’ (colours I had never seen before). Without protection, he just inhaled the fumes, until some colleagues noticed his amateurism and gave him advice. Roy took this as an example of the way overseas nationals such as himself were treated as second class citizens upon arrival. 21. Benedict Anderson has argued that the ‘radio made it possible to bypass print and summon into being an aural representation of the imagined community where the printed page scarcely penetrated’ (Anderson 2006: 56). 22. These common rooms had been intended to be open for residents, but in the early period of De Bijlmer they were locked. 23. Sta stil en besef. Dit is het Monument van Besef, Bon Fu Gron Prakseri, voor de gemeenschappelijke geschiedenis van Suriname, Nederland en [sic] Nederlandse Antillen, namens het Comité 30 juni/1 juli. W. Kout, P. Wong, R. Ristie. 24. The location of Surinameplein is important to Roy. According to him, it is ‘historically the place where one enters the city – you can’t get around it’. To him, the historical ties between the Netherlands and its colonies are expressed in this urban geography. Earlier, he had told me disapprovingly about the brevity of the moment the road is closed. In the early years of the event, the road had been blocked for the entire ceremony; a bridge was opened to block in- and outbound traffic; the trams were halted. There was complete silence, he told me, and the only sound came from the drum of the Surinamese Indians, who led the procession across the square. ‘You could hear the [Amerindian Surinamese] samboera dron

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from several blocks away: Boem. Boem. Boem.’ Now, the police only close the road for the crossing, and the roar of the traffic largely drowns the proceeds of the ceremony. 25. July 1, 1863 was the day of abolition. 26. Building on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Liisa Malkki has called this Western preoccupation with roots and rootedness ‘arborescent culture’ (Malkki 1992), which refers to the idea that those ‘without roots’ are deemed inferior to those who are ‘rooted’. Deleuze and Guattari pointed out that: ‘It is odd how the tree has dominated Western reality and all of Western thought, from botany to biology and anatomy, but also gnosiology, theology, ontology, all of philosophy . . . : the rootfoundation, Grund, racine, fondement. The West has a special relation to the forest, and deforestation’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 18). 27. Cruyff is not only known for his world-class soccer talent but also for his aphorisms. One of the best know is: ‘Je snapt hem pas als je hem doorhebt’ (You understand it once you figure it out).

Figure 2.1.  View from my fieldwork home, 2009. Photograph by Markus Balkenhol.

2 Negotiating Colonial Geographies

So far, an image has emerged of De Bijlmer as marginalized within a racial geography of empire. Now I want to zoom in some more and look at how these dynamics play out on the ground. As I will show, racial positioning plays an important and complex role in Amsterdam Zuidoost. In the previous section, I have demonstrated how the racial geographies that have been mapped out by empire find their local expressions in small places such as Amsterdam Zuidoost. However, as I will show in the following, there is not necessarily a straight line between empire, its racial geographies and the level of the neighbourhood. There is what might be called a segmentary dynamic at play in which solidarity depends on the particular relation that is foregrounded. A woman identifying as white, for example, told me: When you are outside of Amsterdam on a visit, and people ask me where I live, I always intentionally say Bijlmer. ’Cause you can also say Zuidoost. But I always say: Bijlmer. Well, then you watch the reactions! Hear them! They immediately commiserate! . . . I went on an excursion recently, and all these people were standing on Dam Square, saying: “Oh, where do you live?” And I said: “De Bijlmer.” Well, you could almost hear their jaws drop! [Wel, de monden vielen bijna open]. Even my own brother said last Saturday: “There was another shooting in your neighbourhood, right?” And he lives in Zeeland!

There is a sense of solidarity living in a place that is as stigmatized as Amsterdam Zuidoost, and people have developed a spirit

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of resistance of sorts. Pierre Heijboer was one of the first residents of Amsterdam Zuidoost and among the few from the white middle class who followed the calls of the future city in the 1970s. In his emic history of Amsterdam Zuidoost, Heijboer (2006) celebrates this spirit of resistance, which flies in the face of overwhelming administrative powers. It resonates in his continuous references to ‘the plan makers’, portrayed in an almost Kafkaesque way as out of reach in the belly of the bureaucratic apparatus. It was ‘us’ residents against ‘them’ up there. Yet he concludes with a sigh that immediately undermines this solidarity: From the moment the first pole was put in the ground for the new suburb, De Bijlmer has been the object of events and developments that originated not in De Bijlmer but outside of it. In The Hague, in Suriname, in Eastern Europe, in Ghana. In the drug scene of Amsterdam, in the boards of the building cooperatives, in the offices of the Ministries and in the minds of project developers.1

From Heijboer’s perspective, a split emerged over the course of the following decades, one that was increasingly expressed in racial terms of blackness and whiteness. Heijboer remembers this as a gradual process from the absence of race to racial antagonism. Take SV Bijlmer, the first soccer club of the suburb. When it was established in the early 1970s, it was self-evidently a mixed team: In one of my old albums there is a photograph of the first SV Bijlmer team that went into the field (de wei in ging) in September 1970. It is one of those pictures that forever looks the same: eleven men; one half kneeling or squatting in the front row and the other half standing behind it. Apparently I still had my Che beard then. And what I also see is that already there were a few Surinamese boys among them. That was – in our eyes, back then – as normal as it could be. Because by then they, too, belonged: in Amsterdam, with our Bijlmer and our SV. (Heijboer 2006: 42)

Heijboer claims that skin colour was not an issue at the time; what mattered was people’s soccer skills. It turned out that these players were skilled indeed, and they became a permanent part of the team. Nonetheless, Heijboer soon identified a rift in the team. Black players had a ‘different style’ than white players: the latter ‘stiff, strategic, result-oriented’, the former mainly interested in fun. He still dreamed about combining the two styles, but it was not to be. Racial tectonics had been set in motion:

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Slowly but surely two separate communities arose in these years in the Bijlmermeer. On the one hand the Dutch and the white foreigners, on the other hand the Surinamese and the Antilleans. They did their groceries in the same shops and in the same markets, walking through the same parks and the same sand on their way, and they – initially – sent their children to the same schools. But the split dichotomy took hold; unstoppable and irrevocable. A white and a black Bijlmer emerged. And that black-andwhite settled in the minds of everyone who lived there. Not that it was an ‘issue’ all the time, but it was playing in the background – always. (Heijboer 2006: 79)

Divisions emerged as a consequence: clubs, church communities, cafés, political associations and finally also schools became slowly segregated. Heijboer describes a pillarized suburb in which people avoided each other for fear of problems. While the traditional pillars in the Netherlands as a whole eroded, new pillars emerged in De Bijlmer. These rifts were palpable during my fieldwork. I learned about them when Roy took me on his (often automobile) peregrinations through Zuidoost he called wandelingen (strolls).2 On these journeys, typically extending into the small hours of the night, he taught me about the radical changes the place had undergone in recent years. He pointed out the places where the dealers were hanging out; there was the African ward; here is Gliphoeve, the apartment building that was squatted by Koster, Maatrijk and others in the seventies. I also learned that there are ‘black’ neighbourhoods and ‘white’ neighbourhoods. One night, Roy and I visited a panel discussion in De Smeltkroes, one of the largest and most popular Javanese-Surinamese restaurants in Zuidoost. Roy was putting together his own political career in De Bijlmer as a candidate for the local branch of the liberal democrat party (D66). There were about fifty people in the room, most of them Afro-Surinamese men over the age of forty. The event was organized by the Surinamese welfare organization Surinaams Inspraak Orgaan (SIO). In the opening speech, the SIO representative explained that the event aimed to mobilize the Surinamese grassroots to participate in the elections. She argued that participation is important because the Surinamese need to have a stronger voice in the current debates about cultural integration in the Netherlands. She explained that nowadays the political discussion is focused too much on the integration of Turkish and Moroccan Dutch and felt that the Surinamese were being left behind by what she called the ‘Islamization’ of the discussion.

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However, the most heated topic in the discussion was not ‘Islamization’. What really got people engaged was the issue of the coffee shop. All too familiar with stories about drug epidemics in De Bijlmer, I was somewhat surprised to learn that there is no legal place to buy weed in Amsterdam Zuidoost. Unlike almost all other places in the Netherlands (perhaps with the exception of the Dutch Bible Belt), Amsterdam Zuidoost does not have a place that sells weed legally. Instead, it has to be bought in the centre of Amsterdam, which can be quite a hassle, especially when the last metro train has passed. Thus, people buy it illegally from private sellers under the table, leading to criminalization. The political parties in Amsterdam Zuidoost have entered a kind of stalemate on the issue. Henk de Boer, leader of the local Christian Democratic party (CDA), is perhaps the most fervent opponent of the coffee shop. That night, he vehemently argued that the coffee shop would cause a further deterioration of public safety, and that it would cause verloedering (lit. bastardization, the degeneration of order). His statements about the coffee shop enraged the public. There was a feeling that De Boer refused to take seriously the issues of the youth, who were getting their weed elsewhere and not infrequently driven into crime. A woman in the audience shouted out her frustration: ‘Do you even live in Zuidoost?!’ Feeling offended, De Boer answered haughtily: ‘I do! I live in [the neighbourhood of] Geerdinkhof!’ Immediately, the entire room exploded with cynical laughter and angry shouting. Leaning over to me, Roy explained: ‘Geerdinkhof, the white neighbourhood.’ De Boer had, to many in the audience, exposed his whiteness – a composite of locality, political colour and a particular body. To them, this confirmed once more the unbridgeable gap between black and white. Whites, people often told me, simply cannot seem to muster the empathy needed to understand the problems of black people. De Boer, the reaction suggested, lived in a well-to-do part of Zuidoost, not in the high-rise part, where people struggled. The implication was that he was looking from a privileged perspective where he had no grasp of what was really going on. I learned time and again during my fieldwork that there is a micropolitics of place through which blackness and whiteness emerge in Amsterdam Zuidoost. Within this relatively small area, there are highly contested physical boundaries that are produced and maintained through everyday practice and which inform the way people draw social and cultural boundaries. The whiteness or blackness of a

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person is determined in these dynamics according to location, which, next to physical location, implies ethical and political location, as well as one’s knowledgeability of location itself. This is evident, for instance, in the social boundary constituted by the train line that cuts through Amsterdam Zuidoost. On the southwestern side of it is a business park with a big IKEA store, a Cisco Systems office and several banks including ABN AMRO and ING. On the north-eastern side of the train line is a shopping mall and the residential area, which stretches out over roughly twenty-two square kilometres (the banks also have buildings on this side of the train line but that seems beside the point). These architectural distinctions correspond with social distinctions. ‘Over het spoor’ (beyond the tracks) is considered the rich part, whereas ‘this’ side of the train line is struggling with unemployment and all sorts of socio-economic problems.3 This distinction is expressed iconically in the phenomenon of the pakkenmannetjes (lit. little men in suits), a common term in Amsterdam Zuidoost. It refers to the employees of big companies who crowd the area around the train station in the mornings, at lunch time and in the afternoon. These pakkenmannetjes do not live in Amsterdam Zuidoost; they only come here for work and never venture into the shopping mall or even further, except when they are looking for an adventure. Hence there is a lot of frustration as to why the big companies seem to hire almost exclusively people from elsewhere, when there are so many talented and motivated young people living right around the corner. During the political discussion at Smeltkroes, this issue was also brought up. Iwan Leeuwin, then chairman of the local Green Party and an associate of Barryl Biekman, the initiator of the national slavery memorial, stated that ‘there is employment across the train line, so I think it must be possible to create employment on this side, as well.’ As urban geographer Thea Dukes has argued, ‘a visible spatial divide had developed between a highly problematic residential area to the east of the railroad and a successful business area to the west of the railroad’ (2007: 205). As these examples show, place plays a central role in the dynamics of racialization in Amsterdam Zuidoost. It should come as no surprise, then, that the issue of race came to the forefront when Amsterdam Zuidoost started a radical programme of restructuring that continues to this day.

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Race and Urban Restructuring Many of my interlocutors told me that the racial divide is most evident at metro station Ganzenhoef, close to the apartment building Geldershoofd (formerly Gliphoeve, the apartment building squatted by Maatrijk, Koster and others in the 1970s), my first home in Zuidoost. ‘Pay attention,’ people said to me, ‘to who turns left and who turns right after exiting the metro station. White people turn left; black people turn right.’ I learned that to the left of the metro station was Geerdinkhof: Henk de Boer’s home. Characterized by mainly low-rise buildings, a high percentage of home ownership and predominantly middle-class inhabitants, this neighbourhood was considered ‘white’. From the car, Roy once pointed out the two or three high-rise towers called Gouden Leeuw and Groenhoven in this neighbourhood. ‘Look at them; it’s like a fortress. These people never get out on the street. They have everything in there, from day care to sporting facilities. They never have to leave their fortress.’ To the right of the metro station were the high-rise complexes of Geldershoofd and Gravestein. Here were mostly rental apartments and a comparatively high percentage of social welfare recipients, like my first host, Edouard (see Chapter 4). Celia, my host’s girlfriend, explained to me: ‘Black people live in the high-rise.’ And looking out over the neighbouring apartment blocks, she added: ‘In all of these nine floors, there are maybe one or two apartments in which people are earning their own money. Yes, they can buy their own bread, but there are only a couple who can buy something to put on it!’ This idea of ‘black’ and ‘white’ neighbourhoods has a longer history. Identifications of blackness and whiteness were not pre-­existing but produced and reproduced through political processes. By the end of the 1980s, certain areas of Amsterdam Zuidoost, in particular Gliphoeve, had deteriorated considerably and become ‘squalid’ (Den Uyl 2008), with drug dealers and addicts populating the underpasses. Some of the apartment buildings were overcrowded, and the housing corporations seemed to have abandoned them and stopped maintenance work. Many people of the emerging middle class were leaving Zuidoost. Crime rates had increased, although it was not until 2004 that these rates actually surpassed those of the centre of Amsterdam. Much of the real estate was vacant, and the housing corporations slid into the red for several consecutive years (ibid.). The general sense among politicians and housing corporations was that ‘something had to be done’ (Den Uyl 2008). In 1991, a large-scale programme of

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urban renewal was initiated, led by representatives of the city of Amsterdam, the district council and the housing corporations that were organized as the Stuurgroep Vernieuwing Bijlmermeer (SVB) (Blair and Hulsbergen 1993: 289). Their solution to the problem was to attract middle-class residents, and this in turn meant the demolition of the high-rise buildings and replacing them with low-rise, single-family homes. Hence, the remedy for what was framed as ‘social problems’ was seen in the physical restructuring of urban space, and thus once more the solution for social issues was sought in engineering. It was the start of a gigantic renewal offensive that by 2003 had cost an estimated 2.5 billion euros (Dukes 2007: 240) and that has still not entirely finished today. Although the notion of urban renewal was proposed as a more or less neutral project aimed purely at the improvement of everybody’s lives, these projects implied a racial logic. Despite upward social mobility among people of Surinamese descent, housing corporations, city planners and civil servants implicitly associated ‘middle class’ with ‘white’, whereas ‘poor’ was seen as ‘black’. Indeed, Smets and Den Uyl (2008: 1443) suggest that this may have been born out of a diffuse fear of ‘ghetto formation’ among project developers and policymakers. In 1995 Amsterdam was granted 4.8 million euros in subsidies from the European Regional Development Fund and the European Social Fund, the so-called URBAN community initiative. This was matched by the Ministry of Big City Policy. Including contributions from local and regional government, public institutions and private individuals, the total sum to be spent in De Bijlmer in this particular period amounted to 66 million euros (Dukes 2016). Although the renewal operation had been underway since 1990, these funds in particular caught the eye of some residents. Specifically, they were dissatisfied with the organizational structure behind the distribution of the funding. The City of Amsterdam was responsible for distributing the funds, and the district council of Amsterdam Zuidoost was in charge of the development of projects and programmes. Proposals for projects could be submitted to a Steering Committee, which assessed the proposals, and a Supervisory Committee was in charge of implementing the programme. Despite the URBAN programme’s condition to include locals and residents, no ‘ethnic, religious, or neighbourhood organizations’ were consulted (Dukes 2016: 378). On 2 February 1996, a press release by the district council announcing the URBAN programme and its organizational structure led to

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Figure 2.2.  Amsterdam Zuidoost, 2009. Photograph by Markus Balkenhol.

unrest. On the same day, a meeting was held at Kwakoe Podium (see Chapter 4). On 6 February, a group of four ‘concerned Bijlmer residents’ (Verontruste Bijlmerbewoners), later consolidated as the Allochtonen Breed Overleg (ABO), organized a protest meeting at

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the district council that was attended by virtually the entire district administration. The group rejected not so much the lack of local representation but the lack of ‘black’ representation, not only in the particular case of the URBAN fund but more broadly in policymaking generally. [T]here was criticism of the lack of any participatory structure for ethnic groups in decision-making processes in the Southeast district, of the under-representation of the black population in all important positions within the district administration, and of the inadequate communication between the district administration and migrant groups. In addition, many felt that the socio-economic problems that Bijlmer residents were struggling with, such as unemployment, debt (including rent arrears), crime, drug abuse and the deterioration of the neighbourhood, were being insufficiently addressed. (Dukes 2016: 379)

The ‘concerned residents’ particularly accused the ‘black’ members of the district council of having failed their constituencies. The council members thus took this quite seriously. Immediately after the meeting, they came together to form Zwart Beraad (black council). The URBAN programme was put on hold, and the Verwey-Jonker Institute, an institute for research and policy advice (see Chapter 1), was given the task to conduct a survey regarding the new structure for the implementation of the URBAN programme. In this new structure, residents were to be represented in the Steering Committee, the workforce for construction work was to be recruited locally, and grassroots panels were to participate in and monitor the renewal process (Dukes 2007: 253). However, this did not put an end to the conflict that had erupted within the district council. Indeed, the conflicts at the town hall meeting at restaurant De Smeltkroes must be understood as reverberations of events in the 1990s, which I will turn to now.

The Significance of Zwart Beraad The squatting of apartment buildings in De Bijlmer discussed in the previous chapter demonstrates that Surinamese political organizations were not a new phenomenon in the Netherlands (Balkenhol and Coenders 2020; Bosma 2009; Vermeulen and Van Heelsum 2009). The case of Zwart Beraad, however, received particular attention far beyond De Bijlmer and Amsterdam. Hugo Fernandes Mendes, co-ordinator with the minority directorate of the Interior Ministry,

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explained that Zwart Beraad had to be ‘taken seriously’: ‘What is happening in Zuidoost is very important. The entire country is following it closely. For the first time, black people take their own responsibility and determine their own position. This is what was lacking in past years’ (Het Parool, 16 December 1996).4 Zwart Beraad expressed themselves in no uncertain terms. Renate Hunsel, for instance, saw ‘white colonialism’ in the way the restructuring was being carried out, which to her was patronizing blacks: ‘I don’t want this white supremacy, nowhere, but certainly not in this neighbourhood. Particularly if you consider that De Bijlmer was built for the white middle class who did not want to come here, you could say: the blacks have maintained the neighbourhood, with all its problems, yes, but [they maintained it] nonetheless.’5 This sense of alienation from one’s home was also expressed by another member of Zwart Beraad: ‘Perhaps it seems like an exaggerated metaphor, but we live on a plantation. We have the same situation as in a colony: a black majority with a white administration, without multicultural vision on the neighbourhood.’ Hunsel agreed: ‘I left Suriname thirty years ago; I’m from a colony. But sometimes here I think: damn (verrek), here I am again.’6 Krish Kanhai, member of the district council and Zwart Beraad, was quoted in the national weekly magazine De Groene Amsterdammer as saying that: ‘we tried to combine forces so as to prevent [De Bijlmer] becoming a Los Angeles.’7 Other members of Zwart Beraad said, echoing the rhetoric of the Black Panther Party: ‘We are past the moment of protest. We are now aiming for black power’, and ‘Zwart Beraad has started a social war in Zuidoost – and only Zwart Beraad can stop it.’8 This militant rhetoric and references to radical black organizations in the US caused somewhat of a moral panic. The entire country followed these developments amid fears of a black revolution and race riots. The fact that Het Parool conceded that ‘an uprising or race riots like in the American city of Los Angelos [sic.] seems unlikely’ (Het Parool, 23 March 1996)9 nonetheless expressed in no uncertain terms that things were spiralling out of control: The district council of Zuidoost is sinking ever deeper into the swamps of the ‘black-white’ opposition. The virus has already torn apart D66 [the liberal democrat party] and is increasing its grip on the PvdA [social democrat party], traditionally the largest party in De Bijlmer. The black coalition is pushing forward unmistakably in De Bijlmer, [a place] which, by the way, is also three quarters black in terms of the composition of the population. . . . The typically Dutch policy of consensus has made room

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in De Bijlmer for a sharp politics of confrontation along divisive ethnic lines. (Het Parool, 13 April 1996, emphasis MB)10

The developments in De Bijlmer even alerted the Dutch intelligence agency (BVD) (Dukes 2006). Thea Dukes (2007) has shown that despite the rhetoric a united ‘black front’ never existed in this form. Fears about an impending black revolution were therefore unfounded and perhaps owed more to the already existing stereotypes about De Bijlmer. Moving past such stereotypical depictions of De Bijlmer is crucial for a better understanding of how race matters in this part of Amsterdam. The racial dynamics developing in the black community at that time formed the basis of the situation I found during my fieldwork, so it is necessary at this point to unpack them some more. Although Zwart Beraad received the most attention, there were actually three organizations. The first group to emerge, Allochtonen Breed Overleg (ABO), consisted of Roel Luqman (of HinduSurinamese descent), Harald Axwijk, Emile Esajas and Just Maatrijk. We have already met Just Maatrijk in the first chapter; like Maatrijk, the other three had also been welfare workers and politically active since the 1970s and so were equally well known in De Bijlmer. This group was a loose association, and the goals of these men diverged greatly. Zwart Beraad was created after ABO and initially included all non-white members of the district council but also civil servants who defined themselves as black (Dukes 2007: 254). The antagonism between these groups was pronounced as they competed for influence. ABO felt that Zwart Beraad had stabbed them in the back and called them Zwart Verraad (black betrayal), only interested in personal gain. The members of Zwart Beraad, on the other hand, thought of ABO as old-fashioned and ‘folkloristic’ (Dukes 2007: 255). A year after ABO and Zwart Beraad were established, Wouter Gortzak, the local chair of the Labour Party whom Zwart Beraad had called a ‘colonial Boer’, installed Platform Bijlmer. The Platform was ‘strongly connected to the Labour Party’ and consisted of ‘divergent ethnic groups’ that included both white and black members (Dukes 2007: 255). The aim of the group was to transcend the tensions between black and white Bijlmer residents and co-operate across racial lines. The group included six women and three men of different backgrounds, among them Hannah Belliot and Elvira Sweet, who would later become consecutive chairwomen of the district council (see below).

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The establishment of this group confirmed the predictions of Zwart Beraad, who a year earlier had presaged such a development. As they saw it, the establishment of the Platform was a form of tokenism in which a black person was used to accomplish ‘white’ goals: ‘There will always be a token,’ Krish Kanhai had said in De Groene Amsterdammer, and others agreed: ‘Bounties, black outside, white inside,’ and ‘Head slaves. They were allowed to work in the kitchen [i.e. do the easy work].’ Kanhai had predicted that surely white politicians would ‘conduct all kinds of manoeuvres to deploy tokens. That’s the weapon they hold in their hands. But we will strike that weapon out of their hands. By throwing overboard our tokens. A token is much more dangerous than fighting a real white person’.11 Zwart Beraad was ultimately short-lived; on 27 May 1997, an article in the national newspaper NRC Handelsblad reported that during a meeting of Zwart Beraad only eight persons were present. The tone, however, had been set. Like the commemoration on Surinameplein three years earlier, slavery and the colonial past played a central role in political mobilization. Although someone like Roy was not part of Zwart Beraad, its emergence should be understood in the broader context of a political culture and rhetoric that first emerged with the commemoration on Surinameplein. Zwart Beraad showed that this kind of politics did provide considerable leverage within the established political system; after all, in De Bijlmer, it led political parties to hurriedly put black candidates on their lists (Den Uyl 2008).

Racialized Boundaries Although Zwart Beraad essentially disappeared with the installation of the Platform, its impact continued after 1997. Hannah Belliot had become Wouter Gortzak’s protégé (she was followed by Elvira Sweet, also a member of the Platform). He persuaded her to run for the office of district chair, and Belliot was elected in 1998, becoming the first black chair of the suburb. With her message of reconciliation, she managed to gain a significant part of the white vote, too. Initially, she was seen as someone who could bridge the racial divides in the suburb: the black constituency was happy about a black chairwoman, critics of the white establishment no longer had a case, and white people were happy the discussion of racism seemed settled. These hopes were shattered a few years later when plans were announced to lower the dreven. These elevated roads had once been

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Figure 2.3.  Aerial photograph of Bijlmer East, 26 September 1986. Geerdinkhof is in the foreground, separated from the high-rise buildings by an elevated road. Courtesy of Stadsarchief Amsterdam.

an icon of De Bijlmer. They were part of Le Corbusier’s idea of the functional city, in which order was one of the central tenets. Pedestrians and bicycles could safely cross underneath them using underpasses. In the 1990s, the dreven had fallen from grace because they had become shelter to all kinds of shady business. The Ganzenpoort shopping mall, which borders the ‘white neighbourhood’ Geerdinkhof, had become a haven for drugs and crime after dealers had been driven out of the city centre.12 Hannah Belliot was one of the driving forces behind lowering the dreven. In her opinion, the dreven formed an obstacle to making the G-neighbourhood (including high-rise and low-rise, ‘white’ and ‘black’ neighbourhoods) an orderly and socially safe whole. This would be the infrastructure necessary to keep the emerging black middle class, who now tended to move to other areas, in De Bijlmer. On the other hand, the mostly white residents of the 3G neighbourhood (Geerdinkhof, Gouden Leeuw and Groenhoven, see Figure 2.3), including Christian Democrat Henk de Boer, strongly opposed these plans. They argued that removing the dreven would cause a loss of green space, one of the most

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important reasons why people chose to live there. This would also decrease property value. The conflict dragged on for months in a series of ten committee meetings of the district council. Some of these meetings escalated into angry tirades between council members, supported vociferously by the public tribune, who at one point even shouted insults at each other. Belliot was later accused of failing to intervene and of having mobilized her constituency (among them Harald Axwijk, previously a member of ABO) to derail meetings. In June 2001, the district council voted in favour of lowering the dreven. Immediately, a group of residents went to court, but they lost their case in September 2002. Residents of De Bijlmer, as well as the press, now describe the conflict surrounding the huge urban restructuring process as the ‘flaring up’ of a slumbering tension that had been initiated by Zwart Beraad. During the meetings, slavery and colonialism had been mobilized once again, and even in 2010, long after the dreven had been lowered, people still talked about it. As many black people told me, it was not about the green or the little pond they said they were so fond of; it was because they thought that without the dreven all the black people would just pour into their ward. For them, talk about the green was a mere pretext for race issues. The residents of the ‘better neighbourhoods’ wanted to keep the ‘natural barrier’ intact to keep the blacks out. Many white people told me that ‘Hannah Belliot has made everything about race’. Belliot, although she had followed a hard line with regards to the dreven, was upset by the course of events. She had lost the confidence of white residents far beyond the 3G neighbourhood. Nonetheless, she was placed second on the Labour Party’s electoral list and won the seat of councillor (wethouder) for welfare and culture in Amsterdam city council in 2002. The legacy of these events was palpable during the meeting at Smeltkroes. The debate about a seemingly unrelated topic, political participation, soon slid into the same trenches that had been dug long before. The racial geographies that disenfranchised De Bijlmer as a whole were the same racial boundaries found between neighbourhoods within De Bijlmer.

Conclusion When I did my fieldwork in De Bijlmer, I saw that racialized positions had been entrenched. I was often taken aback by the explicitly

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racialized vocabulary with which people referred to each other or talked about each other. In Dutch society at large, such terminology is not common; indeed, people take care to avoid it (Wekker 2016). It was clear that social relations in De Bijlmer ‘had a history’; people who knew each other personally had often stood on opposing sides of political conflicts. On the surface, it seemed as though colonial hierarchies, racial prejudices and boundaries fitted neatly into the racial geographies of empire. However, historical determinism does not explain why and how the issues of slavery and colonialism are mobilized politically. There was nothing inevitable about the emergence of Zwart Beraad in the nineties, and the emergence of a rhetoric of slavery, colonialism and race was not so much a historical necessity. In fact, it is the other way around: political actors recognized the political value of this rhetoric and knew how to deploy it in a political field. This is not to say, as some commentators did, that framing the situation in De Bijlmer in racial terms was wrong or a political stunt. Like the commemoration of slavery on Surinameplein, the establishment of Zwart Beraad, ABO and later Belliot’s politics of urban renewal were acts of tracing. The past had become a kind of raw material that was connected to or articulated within a particular political situation.

Notes   1. ‘Sinds in 1966 de eerste paal werd geslagen voor de nieuwe woonwijk was de Bijlmer het ‘lijdend’ voorwerp geweest van gebeurtenissen en ontwikkelingen die hun oorsprong niet vonden in de Bijlmer, maar daarbuiten. In Den Haag, in Suriname, in Oost-Europa, in Ghana. In de Amsterdamse drusscene, in de betsuren vvan de wonignbouwcorporaties, op de burelen van minsiteries en in de hoofden van project-ontwikkelaars’ (Heijboer 1996: 285).   2. ‘Wandel’ is a verb in Sranantongo denoting strolling; for example, in the leisurely manner of a flaneur. ‘A e wandel’ means ‘everything is running smoothly’ or ‘everything is just fine’.   3. Stephen Gregory found similar spatial boundaries during his fieldwork in the neighbourhood of Corona in Queens, New York (Gregory 1999).  4. ‘Het Zwart Beraad kan niet langer worden afgedaan als een groepje demagogen, vindt drs. Hugo Fernandes Mendes, coordinator van het directoraat minderhedenbeleid van het ministerie van binnenlandse zaken. “Wat in Zuidoost gebeurt, is heel belangrijk. Het hele land kijkt ernaar. Voor het eerst nemen zwarte mensen hun eigen verantwoordelijkheid en bepalen ze hun eigen positie. Daar heeft het de laatste jaren aan ontbroken.” ’

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  5. ‘Ik wil niet die blanke suprematie, nergens, maar zeker niet in deze wijk. Vooral als je bedenkt dat de Bijlmer werd opgezet voor de blanke middenklasse die er niet wilde wonen. Je zou kunnen zeggen: de zwarten hebben de Bijlmer wel in stand gehouden. Met alle problemen. Oke. Maar toch!’ (Trouw, 21 June 1996)   6. ‘Zwart-zijn is ons wapen’, De Groene Amsterdammer. Retrieved 5 October 2020 from https://www.groene.nl/artikel/zwart-zijn-is-ons-wapen.   7. Ibid.   8. Ibid.   9. ‘Tot een opstand of rassenrellen, zoals in het Amerikaanse Los Angelos, zal het wel niet komen.’ See also (Blokland 2003: 4) on Europeans’ fear about the emergence of American-style ghettos and race riots. This fear was pervasive, though research findings suggested that there were no ghetto formations occurring in the Netherlands. 10. ‘De deelraad Zuidoost zakt steeds verder weg in het moeras van de tegenstelling “blank-zwart”. Het virus heeft D66 al verscheurd en krijgt ook steeds meer vat op de PvdA, vanouds de grootste partij in de Bijlmer. De zwarte coalitie rukt onmiskenbaar op in de Bijlmer, die wat bewonerssamenstelling betreft trouwens ook voor driekwart “zwart” is. ... De oerhollandse consensuspolitiek heeft in Zuidoost plaatsgemaakt voor een scherpe confrontatiepolitiek langs etnische scheidslijnen’ (Het Parool, 13 April 1996). 11. ‘Zwart-zijn is ons wapen’, De Groene Amsterdammer. Retrieved 5 October 2020 from https://www.groene.nl/artikel/zwart-zijn-is-ons-wapen. 12. Het Parool, 8 July 2000.

3 Practices of Diaspora

In June 2002, the month before the unveiling of the national slavery memorial, Amsterdam Zuidoost was in the news once more with an event that soon became known as the ‘handshake incident’. This incident involved the Ashanti king Osei II from Ghana and Hannah Belliot, then still chairwoman of the District Council of Amsterdam Zuidoost. The King was on an official visit to the Netherlands, intended to ‘celebrate 300 years of relations between Ghana and the Netherlands’.1 King Osei II’s visit was a state affair, and he was received in Amsterdam by Queen Beatrix and Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen. As part of his visit, the King was to make a stop in Amsterdam Zuidoost to greet the large number of Ghanaian residents there. However, the visit did not unfold as planned. On the eve of the King’s visit, Belliot announced that she would not shake the King’s hand, stating that to receive the King would be an insult to the ‘descendants of the enslaved’. At the very least, he should offer apologies for the fact that his ancestors ‘enslaved’ hers. Leaving this issue undiscussed, she argued, would amount to yet another attempt to sanitize history. [t]his entire mission should not have taken place. The descendants of African slave traders, too, have to offer their excuses, as a symbolic gesture. In the Netherlands, many of the descendants of slaves have only just become aware of their history. The relations [between Ghana and the Netherlands, MB] are based on the slave trade. You can’t simply sanitize that?!2

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Belliot’s refusal should have come as no surprise. The King’s visit took place a mere two weeks before the official unveiling of the national slavery memorial in Amsterdam Oosterpark. The memorial, of course, was meant to draw attention precisely to the fact that the slave trade was not a minor detail but constituted a central part of Dutch history that included trade relations with West African kingdoms. Accordingly, many black Dutch saw the celebratory mood about welcoming the King as a blatant disregard for that part of the relations between Ghana and the Netherlands. The welcoming embrace of the King was thus bound to provoke critical responses. Indeed, even though Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen was not an advocate of apologies for slavery himself he said that ‘Belliot has a point. I will broach the slave trade’. He did so in his speech at the RAI, in front of an audience of two thousand. The King himself regretted Belliot’s act. He wanted to maintain a good relationship with his ‘Surinamese brothers’, a spokesperson said. He also pointed out that in 1975 King Opoku Ware II had already sent diplomat Donkor-Fort Jour to Suriname to convey formal apologies. Belliot responded that she did not know this, and that in fact she knew nobody who did. It did not change her stance on the matter. Ghanaians in Amsterdam Zuidoost were disappointed about Belliot’s refusal. ‘His visit is of tremendous importance for Ashanti. It’s a recognition of our culture,’ said Amma Asante, who like Belliot was a social democrat and member of the district council.3 ‘I understand the emotions. But I think it is a pity that his visit is being seized to settle something that has never been settled in the past because it was kept silent.’4 Ernest Owusu Sekyere, vice-chairman of the Ghanaian foundation Recogin and former district council member of the Green Party, was angry and disappointed: ‘The slave trade took place along the entire West coast of Africa. If the first minister of Nigeria would visit, or the head of state of Togo or Senegal, would she say the same? Who is Hannah Belliot anyway? Not even the King [Osei Tutu] knows her. If it had been the [Dutch] Queen who wouldn’t shake his hand, yes, that would have hurt. But Hannah Belliot?’5 Elvira Sweet, who had been a member of the Platform together with Belliot, and who had already been elected as her successor at the district council, did address slavery in a speech, but she supported the King. The image that the Ashanti had sold their brothers and sisters was too simple, she said. It also unnecessarily divided Surinamese and Ghanaians in De Bijlmer. ‘It’s just a very sensitive issue here,’ she said.6

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The handshake incident indicated the complexity of relations surrounding the memory of slavery, especially in Amsterdam Zuidoost. This chapter will unpack the complicated ways slavery informs how two different African diasporas live together in one place. As these diasporas are situated differently in the history of slavery and colonialism, I explore how notions of ‘Africa’, ‘blackness’ and ‘descent’ are negotiated in this setting. What is at stake conceptually here is an understanding of diaspora and the ways in which slavery does or does not figure in it. I find Stuart Hall’s idea of articulation helpful in analysing these dynamics because it points to people’s active and conscious attempts to assemble, piece together and trace their identity. Articulation, in Stuart Hall’s sense, refers to a practice of both naming and making a connection. Articulation ‘means to utter, to speak forth, to be articulate. It carries that sense of language-ing, of expressing, etc.’ (Morley and Chen 1996: 141). It also refers to a process of coupling in a very material sense; a lorry can be ‘articulated’ – that is, its cab can be connected to the trailer (ibid.). Hall emphasizes that such a connection is possible but not necessary. Articulation, both in the material and in the symbolic sense, thus refers to the ‘form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. You have to ask, under what circumstances can a connection be forged or made?’ (ibid.). My ethnographic investigation looks at some of the ways West African and Afro-Surinamese residents of Amsterdam Zuidoost relate to one another and how a sense of diaspora is negotiated or, speaking with Stuart Hall, ‘articulated’. Like Hall, I am interested in the specifically local ways in which a sense of diaspora is ‘produced’ (Hall 1989: 224). My ethnographic understanding of diaspora as a practice of everyday life offers some understanding of how slavery matters, in what precise moments and for whom exactly. In Chapter 1 and 2, I have shown how the Surinameplein memorial project embraces an idea of rootedness in the Dutch nation. As I have argued, diasporic identity is articulated in the Surinameplein project through an engagement with the broader politics of autochthony in the Netherlands. The handshake incident brings into focus a different kind of rootedness through which diaspora is articulated. Rather than an engagement with the territory of the nation, what is at stake here is the classic notion of ‘African’ roots through which the black diaspora is generally understood. In other words, the notion of ‘Africa’ follows a trace that locates the origin of diaspora not within the nation but in a mythical place of origin that has been lost. It will

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become clear that while the memory of slavery constitutes an important factor in these negotiations, identifications resulting from them are less fixed and more shifting than they can appear in the grand narratives of public memory.

Conflict and Ambiguity On one of my strolls around the neighbourhood, I met Paul, a middle-aged Nigerian man who had been living in the Netherlands for six years and was desperately trying to obtain Dutch citizenship. ‘The procedure with the IND [Immigration and Naturalization Service] is taking forever,’ he sighed, and he could see how people became really frustrated by this procedure. Paul’s opinion about Afro-Surinamese was not flattering. After Paul and I had exchanged some of our experiences of arriving in the Netherlands and the difficulty of getting to know people here, I asked him how he got along with his Surinamese neighbours. He said: ‘That is a problem. They have been colonized by the Dutch, and now they don’t want to work. They are lazy.’ According to Paul, colonialism has made Afro-Surinamese unwilling to achieve anything because of the unemployment benefits they, he says, receive indefinitely. In his view, their citizenship status, acquired as a consequence of colonization, makes it easy for Afro-Surinamese to take advantage of the Dutch welfare state. Paul is not alone in his assessment; several other West African residents I spoke to held similar views. Paul’s and other West African migrants’ views should be understood in the context of their socio-economic position in the Netherlands. In the late 1970s, and notably in the mid- 1980s, West Africans, and especially Ghanaians, migrated to the Netherlands and settled in the cities (Van Dijk 2012), in particular in Amsterdam Zuidoost (Lotringen and Jorissen 2001; Nimako 1993, 1998). They were moving away from the economic downturn many West African economies were experiencing in the 1980s. Hoping to improve their lives, however, they were faced with a changing immigration policy in the Netherlands. In the face of worldwide economic recession, the Dutch economy was no longer in need of foreign labour. Instead of attracting international migration to address labour shortages, immigration policy now began to focus on keeping people out (Mazzucato 2008). As a consequence, many West Africans in the Netherlands were unable to obtain residence permits and remained in the Netherlands as undocumented migrants (ibid.).

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The migration of West Africans to the Netherlands differed in fundamental ways from the migration of Dutch citizens from the former colonies to the Netherlands, who, up until 1980, were free to settle in the Netherlands as Dutch citizens, as discussed in Chapters 1 and 2. Despite their complex marginalization in the Netherlands, they do possess the most basic civil rights such as residence, suffrage and social welfare. These quite different positions of West Africans and Surinamese complicate the idea of blackness or Africanness as an encompassing diasporic identification. Although Ghanaians are categorized as ‘black’ in the Netherlands, they prefer to think of themselves as Africans (De Witte 2019a: 618). This is, however, not the ‘heavily mythologized Africanity’ (Gilroy 1993: 87, see introduction) embraced by many ‘descendants of the enslaved’ in the Netherlands and elsewhere. Such an identification clearly did not appeal to Paul. In fact, he perceives Surinamese of African descent not first and foremost as ‘black’ or ‘African’ but as ‘European’, and therefore privileged in terms of citizenship and civil rights. Similarly, one of Marleen de Witte’s interlocutors said: ‘to Ghanaians there is very little difference between white Europeans and black Europeans’ (De Witte 2019a: 618). Even second-generation West African Dutch, who are often born in the Netherlands and thus Dutch citizens, are sometimes ambiguous about notions of shared Africanness or blackness. As De Witte has shown, second-generation West African Dutch, while embracing a ‘black’ racial identity, also ‘tend to be critical of subsuming their Africanness to what they perceive as a dominant (transatlantic) framework of blackness’ (De Witte 2019a: 611). Another of her interlocutors, a middle-aged mother, was quite specific about this difference: Blacks don’t know where they are coming from – it is sad – so they have all these identity issues. They don’t know who they are, where they belong. Africans know where they are coming from, and then I am not talking about ‘I am from Ghana’, ‘I am from Nigeria’, no, and I am not even talking about which tribe, no. Africans know their village, their hometown. If you don’t know your village, you are not an African. (De Witte 2019a: 618)

West Africans in Amsterdam, in other words, do not recognize their actual places of birth in the utopian image of an African motherland, and thus find it difficult to join an imagined African kinship. They do not show much interest in initiatives showcasing ‘African heritage’ and discovering the ‘real’ (African) self (De Witte 2019a: 616).

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On the other hand, not all Afro-Surinamese adhere to an image of shared African origin. A common opinion among Afro-Surinamese in Amsterdam Zuidoost is that West Africans are ‘backward’ and ‘dirty’. Many times I heard my Afro-Surinamese interlocutors make jokes about ‘African’ food: ‘On the market, you have beef, then you have chicken, then pork and then, stashed away in the back, you have scraps [bloater – cured herring]. That’s for the Africans. They love it.’ The word for bloater – bokoe – is also used in the Surinamese Creole language as an offensive term for Africans (De Witte 2019b). There were endless jokes about the blauwkoppen (blue heads), people who were ‘so black their skin looks blue’. Edouard, too, held quite strong stereotypes about his African neighbours. He was my first host during fieldwork. We shared an apartment in one of the high-rise buildings in Amsterdam Zuidoost, and one of our neighbours was an African woman. Edouard frequently complained about the smell emanating from her kitchen. He was convinced of her uncleanliness and that that was why our apartment was plagued by mice. The stereotypes many of my Afro-Surinamese interlocutors employed are part of what Achille Mbembe has called ‘black reason’, summarized perhaps as the condition of racial modernity. Black reason has produced the idea of the ‘black man’, a monstrous and bestial other that can be commodified in the racial economy of capitalist production. Importantly, although black reason should be seen as a European project, it functioned through the internalization of the figure of the black person as an object of hate. ‘Blacks of the plantation were socialized into the hatred of others, particularly of other Blacks’ (Mbembe 2017: 18). Colonial education in Suriname reproduced the same black reason. Many who had grown up in Suriname could remember the negative image of Africa they were taught at school. As one of my interlocutors explained, at school he learned that: ‘In Africa they live in trees.’ In Suriname, Africanness was also associated with the Maroon tribes in the Surinamese rainforest. Their blackness equalled their ‘Africanness’, which in turn was associated with their marginal socio-economic position and perceived backwardness. Even today, Maroons are regarded as backward and dangerous in Suriname.7 In short, there seems to be little common ground between West Africans and Surinamese in Amsterdam Zuidoost. Their starkly different socio-economic and legal positions seem to pre-empt any attempt to combine forces politically or to articulate a shared diasporic identity. This, too, is part of the afterlives of slavery, a ‘racial

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calculus and political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago’ (Hartman 2007: 6). However, as I will show next, these contrarian positions are not inevitable, and the memory of slavery can also lead to new forms of conviviality. Sexual relations are one example of this conviviality. Paul, for example, was looking for ‘a good woman’, one that did not ‘stress him out’ all the time: ‘she should be a woman with a good character’. He was finding it difficult to meet such a woman because in his experience, most women are lying: ‘I think they have taken something; they act all crazy!’ Many Nigerian women, he told me, have married Afro-Surinamese men. He finds that clever because they will receive a residence permit or even a Dutch passport much more easily. He added: ‘As soon as you are born in Suriname, you get the Dutch citizenship.’ These marriages are part of a broader phenomenon referred to in scholarship as ‘contract marriages’ (Van Dijk 2004). For often stiff fees of up to ten thousand US Dollars, some Dutch citizens will marry a West African spouse in order to give them permanent residence in the Netherlands. West Africans have been subject to state measures such as controlled mobility across borders and limited access to the labour market and citizenship (Andrikopoulos 2017). The increase of contract marriages in the 1980s prompted the passage of a law called Wet Schijnhuwelijken (feigned marriages bill). The bill allows the state access to the most intimate spheres of marital life in order to judge a marriage’s lawfulness (Van Dijk 2004). Faced with these restrictive measures, West Africans have developed creative ways to circumvent state control. Spouses are incorporated into a transnational network in which demands, both financial and otherwise, are put on them by the kin in West Africa, as well as brokers and church communities. This is of course a different kind of kinship than the pan-African utopia of the ‘African family’ (Schramm 2010), but in a quite practical way it does open up new opportunities for conviviality that had been unthinkable before the encounter of the two diasporas in Amsterdam Zuidoost. Of course, economic interests are not the only desirable thing in a relationship. For Edouard and his mates, the art of flirting could involve a flirt with Africanness. His repulsion towards African food and the smell coming from his African neighbour’s kitchen, for instance, did not stand in the way of a good flirt. One night, chairs were arranged out on the pavement in front of Edouard’s mate Clifford’s home in what in Suriname is sometimes referred to as a ‘Surinamese café’. There we sat with two other guys

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chatting and slowly but surely getting drunk while Edouard’s attention frequently turned to passing women. At one point, a Ghanaian woman walked by, and Edouard called out in English: ‘My princess! You are my princess, you wanna go with me?’ The woman disappeared around the corner but then turned around and asked us for directions. She asked the men: ‘Are you Surinamese guys?’ Delighted, Edouard affirmed and got ready to get into some serious flirting. The woman, however, disregarded his advances and instead began a monologue about Ghanaians and Surinamese. She said that Ghanaians and Surinamese are brothers and sisters, that the food is the same, just like the music and the dance. ‘It’s the same culture!’ she exclaimed. Excitedly, she announced: ‘Suriname and Ghana are one, we are brothers and sisters. Because people from Ghana went to Suriname, so we are one.’ Edouard seemed to agree, and asked her in Sranantongo: ‘Omeni pikin? Omeni pikin?’ (How many children?) She did not understand, and Edouard translated; she nonetheless claimed that Ghanaians and Surinamese understand one another’s language. She asked us our names. ‘Clifford? That’s an African name! Maikel? That’s an African name! Edouard? That’s an African name.’ Then she said to me: ‘Markus? That’s not an African name, that’s a European name.’ After some more chatting, the woman eventually left in the direction of the metro station. Edouard called after her once more, ‘my princess, can I go with you?’ But the woman waved his remark aside. The handshake incident and the seemingly antagonistic relations between West Africans and the descendants of the enslaved are only part of the picture. Already it becomes clear that registers of ‘Africanness’ can switch quite smoothly according to the particular context and interests at stake, from ‘black reason’ to kinship.

Cultural Heritage The handshake incident, meted out extensively in the press, had glossed over a dimension of the relationship between Africans and Afro-Surinamese in Amsterdam Southeast that, in many people’s everyday lives, is much more important. ‘Africa’ has become a crucial part in African-Surinamese heritage claims. In Amsterdam Zuidoost, youth organizations in particular employ ‘Africa’ as an emancipatory search for one’s roots in order to provide young people with a sense of grounding for constructions of subjecthood (De Witte 2017). The youth centre, No Limit, opposite the apartment I stayed in with

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Edouard, had a programme called UnTold, which offers African drum lessons, dance and other expressive forms. Otmar Watson, who initiated the programme, told me that UnTold is ‘an empowerment organization in the area of culture and identity’. It stimulates young people to ‘know themselves’. To know yourself means to know who you are. To know, for example, that you are not a neger [negro, in a pejorative sense] but that you are of African descent. To know that you do not have to be embarrassed about your skin colour, that you have a powerful history behind you, that your ancestors were not slaves, but that they were enslaved, that your history does not begin with slavery, but your history begins long before slavery.8

Other youth workers follow similar trajectories. Gilo Koswal is like Otmar Watson somewhat of a VIP in Amsterdam Zuidoost and regularly organizes travels to Ghana with groups of adolescents in search of their roots. They travel to the slave fortresses, but they travel in particular to a small coastal village, Kormantse, where Koswal has been made a chief and given the chiefly name Nana Mbroh. Nana has a ‘palace’ in the village, where he can accommodate guests. He is also planning an Afro-Surinamese cultural centre where cultural activities can be hosted. Both Koswal and Watson thus partake in a ‘broader ideology of Black commonality’ that is ‘reiterated in various cultural, political and religious idioms, as, for example, in Rastafarianism, Afrocentric popular culture and the cultural nationalism of postcolonial African nation-states’ (Schramm 2010: 20). As Marleen de Witte has shown, these projects have become increasingly popular, especially among the younger generations in Amsterdam Zuidoost (De Witte 2014, 2017). Here I want to take a slightly different, more personal angle. Studies of African heritage have correctly analysed the ways in which its production is embedded in the political economy of cultural heritage and tourism more generally. But these larger, indeed global frames provoke very intimate and personal struggles through which people make sense of and find their place within these big narratives. I now want to look at some ways in which people trace these heritage frameworks in their own lives. Yvette, for example, was not charmed by the notion of an African origin. She was convinced that her African neighbours were the ones urinating in the elevator in our apartment building. To her, they were ‘animals’ (beesten) – dirty and uncivilized. She often claimed that she did not want to associate with ‘these people’. As I have argued above, these racial stereotypes should be seen as a form of ‘black reason’. That, however, does not answer the question why Yvette mobilized

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them in this particular moment and in this particular location. I will argue in the following that Yvette did so out of a concern for what she considers her own, Afro-Surinamese heritage that she feels is put in jeopardy by a notion of African origins that is so in vogue in Amsterdam Zuidoost at the moment. On a rainy and depressing summer day in Amsterdam Zuidoost, I joined Yvette to do the groceries. The car was loaded up with a heavy haul of meat, cans, rice, flour, bread and other staples for her catering job at the weekend. Before returning home, we took a short detour to Kantershof, a few blocks away from the grocery store. Yvette had bought a pair of badly fitting jeans for her son that needed to be returned. The ‘store’ where she bought the jeans was in fact the living room of an acquaintance. Yvette took a seat on the couch, and a chair was being vacated for me. The store was busy – a man was sitting next to Yvette on the sofa, and another woman was sitting on the other couch. The saleswoman was sat on a chair. The living room was filled with all kinds of items for sale. On the coffee table in front of the couches, there were about ten handbags that immediately drew Yvette’s attention. An intense debate ensued about the quality and fashionability of the handbags. The saleswoman was doing a good job, reminding the potential buyers that these handbags would cost 90 euros in the shop, but she would sell them for a mere 20 euros. Yvette was looking for a colourful one, joking that ‘Dan me prey kleine meid’ (‘then I’ll play little girl’). A boy and a girl entered, somewhat timidly, politely greeting the elder people in the room. The boy was the saleswoman’s son and the girl his partner. In the mood, the saleswoman immediately encouraged the girl: ‘Don’t you want to support the business?9 I have flip-flops, three pairs for just 10 euros.’ The girl politely declined, saying that they were not her style. Yvette was looking for a handbag because she was not only catering for but also attending the event that weekend as a guest. The event was a birthday party, and it had been advertised as a koto dansi. This meant that wearing a traditional koto dress was obligatory, and it also meant that there would be dancing. ‘Dancing’ here refers to both amusement – including sexual amusement – and worship (Wekker 2006). In Chapter 4, I will analyse these dancing events as a form of cultural memory in which the experience of slavery is kept alive in particular cultural forms. Here, I focus on one particular aspect of these events, the koto.10 The koto is a garment that originates in Suriname. Although probably the koto as it is known today is of a later date, many people

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claim that it was invented during slavery by the jealous wives of the planters, who wanted to conceal the beautiful bodies of the black women from the lustful gazes of their husbands. The koto is an opulent dress consisting of many layers of cloth that are intricately folded. Originally, the layers of cloth concealed and disfigured the body underneath. The koto is worn in combination with a headscarf (angisa). The koto, but in particular the angisa, has been framed in recent years as a central item of the Afro-Surinamese cultural heritage. The value of the angisa for cultural heritage derives not only from the cloth itself but most importantly from its use. There are literally hundreds of ways of folding the angisa, and each of these ways of folding it carries a particular meaning or message.11 Many people I spoke to proudly pointed out to me the rich meaning of these headscarves, and they have become one of the trademarks of Afro-Surinamese culture (Van Russel-Henar 2008). For example, older Surinamese women proudly display them during the celebration of abolition in Amsterdam and elsewhere on July 1. They are usually shown prominently on the front pages of many newspapers reporting on the celebrations around July 1. There are now even angisa-folding classes for tourists in Amsterdam Zuidoost. In short, the koto and the angisa have become important items that are showcased as prime examples of the uniqueness of Afro-Surinamese cultural heritage. The conversation in the ‘shop’ then turned to the koto dansi: ‘I never go to these things’, the other female customer claimed, ‘except when it is organized by very close kin’. ‘What!’ the saleswoman screamed: ‘Don’t tell me you’re not going to koto dansis, y kon na mi yari, toch (you will come to my birthday party, right)?! And I’m not close kin.’ Yvette then cut in, emphasizing that she always wears a koto on these occasions, never an ‘African’ dress. The women did not seem happy about the increasing popularity of kotos with African prints, or even ‘African’ dresses on these occasions in general. By ‘African’, the women refer to any garment made of Ghanaian kente cloth or in a kente print. As we saw above, kente, but increasingly also other, usually West African patterns, has become more popular in Amsterdam Zuidoost in recent years, what with people’s interest in their ‘African’ roots (De Witte 2014). In the conversation, Yvette strongly rejected wearing this kind of garment: ‘I always wear koto. Always! No mi na wan Afrikan sma’ (‘I am not an African woman!’)! and said that if she were to throw a party she would write on the invitation, ‘dress code:12 no African!’

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‘African’ heritage, in other words, is discussed controversially in Amsterdam Zuidoost. While tracing one’s roots to a prelapsarian and mythical Africa is framed as the rediscovery of a lost culture, Yvette feels that culture is lost precisely by looking for one’s cultural roots in Africa. She does not experience Africa as her ancestral homeland (Schramm 2010) but as an ‘other’ place she feels no connection with. Interestingly, there is a certain element of play involved in how one chooses to trace one’s past. One’s relation to the past is certainly informed by the power relations of the present, but one’s particular mode of tracing is not preordained. This will become clear in Zuster V.’s story, in which the ‘discovery’ of her African ancestry provided her with the clues she needed to solve the issues that had troubled her for as long as she could remember.

Tracing Africa To Zuster V., it was not at all self-evident that slavery and diaspora would be linked. To her, the seemingly intrinsic or almost natural link between slavery and diaspora is a very recent insight. Despite the popularity of Pan-African narratives of homecoming discussed above, she had never really noticed or thought about any link with Africa or Africans. Yet although the discovery of her roots was not motivated by a particular ideology, we can understand it as an engagement with the emerging discourse on Africanness in Amsterdam Zuidoost. One Sunday morning, I went to one of the many Pentecostal churches in Amsterdam Zuidoost. I was invited to attend a service by Gabriel, a young Ghanaian Dutch man whom I had interviewed earlier. He played in the church band and also ran one of the youth groups in the church. The church was located in the building of a former assembly hall in a business park. I arrived there at around10am, and the church was already packed. The huge room was partitioned into smaller units, each of them populated with one of the various church groups: youth, women’s and men’s groups. One corner was reserved for the ‘Surinamese’ group, a rather modest gathering of about fifteen people. Among them, there were a few white Dutch as well, and I was advised to take a seat here. Each group had a leader who gave an inspirational talk. The Surinamese group’s leader was Zuster V., an Afro-Surinamese woman of around sixty years of age. In her talk, she discussed a broad variety of current political issues. For example, she vehemently took up the issue of Dutch soldiers in Afghanistan, who, she argued, were

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ridiculed when they came home, instead of being treated as heroes for protecting the country. When the talk had ended, she immediately approached me and was very curious as to why I was there. I explained that I was a German anthropologist doing research on the cultural memory of slavery. Inevitably, we launched into a conversation. She was eager to talk to me, and we made an appointment for an interview at her home. I had a strong sense that she wanted to get something off her chest. Our appointment was two weeks after we had made acquaintance at the church. Zuster V. lived in Groeneveen, an apartment building across the road from my place.13 She was still very eager to tell her story and was clearly still blown away by it herself. She hurriedly made coffee, impatient to begin. As always, I had planned to do a focused life history interview, but as so often, this structure was soon abandoned. Zuster V. could not wait to tell me what she had so eagerly wanted to discuss. Disregarding my introductory questions, she spluttered: I must say, the reason why this whole slavery thing is coming back – it’s basically the younger generation. That generation, they are actually more occupied with their past than the older generation.

To Zuster V., Africa seemed to be a matter of generation more than genetics. She had never been that interested in slavery, or in the grand narratives of Africa as the ancestral homeland produced by the public memory of slavery. But she admired the younger generation for recovering Africa, and she was inspired by it. But before her story turned to the past, she started with the present. Full of excitement, and struggling for words, she told me that membership in the Ghanaian church was not an accident. Because, look, even in the churches – I don’t know if you listened carefully – that certain things have been discussed, and that certain ­ ­mentalities and characteristics, a way of doing and going about things, that this is from within the generation you are from, that this is still in you, that . . . You are going to, er, er, behave in a certain way, and, it is, you don’t know why, or how. But your ancestors, or your parents, they did certain things. You see …? MB: So the church service was also about parenthood …? ZV: Yes, yes, when you were there, right? And, er, [it was] also about culture. About that, too. And, so you do go and start to search. And the beautiful thing about me is, like I told you [after the church service], [in the interview] I will tell you where I’m from. I feel veeeery much attracted by Africans, Ghanaians. And Africans in general, right. I feel very much, it’s a whole story.14

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And, indeed, a whole story it turned out to be! What followed was an impressive and dramatic life story in which she associated the most important turning points in her life with the presence of Africans. Zuster V. was born in Suriname and moved to the Netherlands in the late 1950s. Aged 17, she married her first husband in the Netherlands and had three children. She later divorced him, and when her children were around 15 years of age, she left with them to Suriname in 1978. Whilst there, it seemed as if everything was going wrong, and she hit rock bottom. ‘It’s a long story’, she told me, ‘but in the end, all I was thinking was to commit suicide. . . . I had absolutely nothing. I was a woman set free into a world she knew nothing about.’ She subsequently returned to the Netherlands. Zuster V. had been brought up a Catholic and has remained a strong believer. At that time in her life, however, even the church did not provide much support. She did not like the pastor, and there were many problems in the church. She had lost everything, and now she was losing faith. Then, suddenly, things began to change. She described it as a turning point in her life: ‘And then this Ghanaian preacher came into the congregation, and I was really drawn to him.’15 And coming back to slavery, right. There were a whole lot of Ghanaians and Nigerians in my church. And I thought it was so strange. [One day,] [a]ll of us [church] leaders stood in the front. And everybody came, all the members of the congregation came to shake the leaders’ hands. But none of the Africans went to the other leaders! MB: And the other leaders were Africans? ZV: No, no, no, no. All different. And I thought it was strange that they all stood in a row to come to me and shake my hand. I thought it was strange, I thought, like, why do they only shake my hand and then walk away immediately? I began to look at the minister who had preached, say, did they agree on this beforehand: you all go to her? I thought it was strange. And this has kept me busy for years. And then I left that congregation, and I ran into this minister, also in a miraculous way. When I didn’t think yet that I would leave that congregation and go to an African church, I ran into him in my elevator. And I looked at him, he was wearing beautiful clothes, I still see him as if it was yesterday. And then I told him, like, hey, are you from, are you, are you a Christian? Are you a minister, I asked him. And he said, yes. And I said, Oh! I said I am also a Christian. I said, so we are family! And the elevator arrived, because I lived on the seventh floor, and I got out. And he went on up. And I never saw him again. Never again. And, eh . . . But that stayed with me, right.

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And my task was to lock and unlock the church. And, and then I left, when everybody was gone, around eleven, twelve at night, because I lived close by. And I stepped outside, and there was this old African sister whom I [had known] for years, who had been coming to this church for years, an African [congregation], too, and she was standing outside the door that late. On her own. So I got outside, and then she looked at me – they all call me Mami, right, [they call me] Mami in the church, because I’m such a mother figure, to care for them, et cetera. And then she said: ‘Mami, you are going to take good care of my people, right?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ but I had no clue. I said, ‘Yes mama Susie, yes mama Susie,’ and . . . And I left. But it stayed with me after all, all those Africans coming to me, and [when I stepped] out the door, again an African standing there by the door. And now I’m also in an African congregation, I thought, what on earth is this, what is it?!’16

I have reproduced here verbatim the story Zuster V. told me in a taped interview, because her breathless style of storytelling conveyed exactly the search for bearings that tracing can be all about. She told me her life story as a series of clues, which in her case can almost be called apparitions. All of these apparitions involved Africans, in quite mundane circumstances: at church, in the elevator, in front of the church. These apparitions have been as puzzling to her as they were to me. Nevertheless, the way she was drawn to the African presence in her life seemed to have taken Zuster V. completely by surprise. She could not figure out what attracted her to ‘these Africans’, because she had never thought of herself as an African woman. She saw herself as a light-skinned urban woman who had never occupied herself with this line of ancestry. It was not until she felt this strong pull towards Africans that she began to wonder about her ancestry. She told me how she solved the puzzle. ‘And now I’ll tell you about my background.’ And thus, Zuster V. launched into a long and classically Surinamese or even Caribbean17 deliberation about skin colour in her family. ‘My mother is an Indian, and my father a Creole.’ Her mother’s sisters were all Indian women, she told me, ‘but they all took dark men.’ Surprisingly, although most children in her family are dark-skinned, some are lighter. But her son, she told me, was unhappy about the light skin colour of his youngest daughter: He found it a bit annoying that [although] his first child was so dark, he had this [very light-skinned] baby; so when the sun was shining, in the morning, he went and sat in the sun a little bit. And I said, Clifford, she’s not gonna turn brown, you know. . . . I said it’s already in the genes, boy. She’s not gonna turn brown, and she never did. [laughs]

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MB: And he thought it was annoying that she was so light? ZV: Yes! Because the one is so dark, and she was so light, right! I said, what do you think people are gonna say, that she’s the milkman’s kid?! [laughing]18

This remained a great puzzle to her, and, as she put it, she kept wondering about it for years. Where did those light-skinned kids come from? And why was she so attracted to Africans? What she did not know was that her son, too, wondered about this. They had never talked about these issues until the year before I met her; in 2009, her son and his family went to Suriname on a holiday. In a spontaneous action, he decided to go to the National Archive and finally find out about their family tree. And then they went and had a look, and this I thought was so beautiful. He came back, very happy, and said: ‘Mami, now I really know where those Indians came from, Mami. You are not going to want to believe it! I went to look for it, you know, I went to look for it.’ And then he said: ‘You know how those Indians got under the Negroes?’ He said: ‘Your . . . your mother,’ he said like that, ‘was an African woman, who came with a slave ship, a slave [ship], an African woman, so you could say my ouma. She came with the white basjas on a ship to Suriname. And she had three daughters with her. And those white basjas, they had, they were stationed on an Indian plantation.’ Can you follow? MB: [unsure] Yes …? ZV: So those whites, they were on an Indian plantation. So she came as a maid, they took her from Africa, with three children, to work for them as a maid, of course.19

Finally, all the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. Her ouma had arrived in Suriname as an enslaved African woman with her three children. She worked as a maid on a plantation far upstream and deep in the Surinamese rainforest. These remote areas had become the home of the Surinamese Amerindian tribes after they had been driven away by the European colonists. The enslaved blacks and the Indians thus lived in close proximity and not infrequently they had sexual relationships. Zuster V.’s family originated from such a union. The genetic knowledge her son provided seemed to account for her attraction to Africans and their miraculous presence in her life, providing her with a sense of firm grounding, of being at home in her body, and she now knew why some of her children and grandchildren were light-skinned. Zuster V. does not use the term diaspora to refer to herself. Hers is not a political investment comparable to, for instance, that of Belliot.

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Nevertheless, her story bears political weight because it takes place in the context of the politics of autochthony described in Chapters 1 and 2, and the dynamics of African heritage in Amsterdam Zuidoost and the Atlantic world. It is important to take into account the existential grounding the narratives of Africanness provide for some people in Amsterdam Zuidoost but also the considerable work that goes into reframing one’s life story in these terms. Revelations of connections to Africa also played a central role in Ruben’s story. Ruben was a project manager at Kwakoe Podium, which is reputedly the oldest cultural centre in Amsterdam Zuidoost (Reus 2012). The centre was established in the 1970s, when the Afro-Surinamese community began to establish itself in Amsterdam Zuidoost. The centre has a variety of amenities, including a regular bar and kitchen, and hosts a number of cultural and political activities as well as birthday parties, dance events and the annual black singersongwriter contest. I spent a lot of time at the centre, hanging out in the office with Ruben and John. Over the years, I became quite close to Ruben. I first met him while I was doing research in Suriname, which he happened to be visiting. Back in the Netherlands, I spent countless hours hanging out with him at Kwakoe Podium, discussing music, religion, politics and the world in general. Black diasporic relations were a recurring topic. ‘There is no problem between Africans and Afro-Surinamese,’ he claimed. Ruben and I were sitting at one of the tables in the common room, near the bar. In front of us, cups of tea, for it was cold outside and the heating had been turned down during daytime to save precious funds. He had just told me how, like so many others, when he came to the Netherlands, he had considered himself Dutch. When he arrived, however, he had soon been made aware that most people in the Netherlands thought otherwise. He talked about his desire to belong and about wanting to be both Surinamese and Dutch in a society that has put more and more emphasis on singular belonging. Talking about his life was inevitably a conversation about politics in Zuidoost, and this also meant talking about the increasing presence of West Africans in local politics. For him, the conflict between Africans and Afro-Surinamese was something the media had blown out of proportion. ‘Sure, there are some people who blame the Africans, like, you sold us! But there are many others who think this is rubbish.’ He was clearly one of the latter. To Ruben, there ought not be a problem between black or African diasporas. He feels there is a deep sense of connection between Africans and Afro-Surinamese, and he experienced this on his

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journey to Ghana the previous year. He often told me about this visit. He would stand up and take a step forward, as though stepping into a new world: ‘When I got there, I really felt at home. It did not feel strange (vreemd) at all. And I was dumbfounded to see that there were only black people there! I got used to it very quickly, but in the beginning, I thought this was very special.’ He explained: ‘You see; I grew up among people with many different colours. In Suriname, in the Netherlands – I couldn’t even imagine otherwise. Even in my own family, there are all sorts of colours: Javanese, Hindostani, Chinese, African.’ Colonialism, to Ruben, had been an experience of difference based on colour. Even in his own family, this type of difference played a central role, but visiting Ghana for the first time, colour provided him with a sense of sameness. Not only skin colour but also language contributed to this experience. He told me how he could understand certain words and was surprised how similar the language was to Sranantongo. For example, he asked how to say ‘Thank you’. Although he did not know the words, they sounded familiar to him. Racking his brains, he eventually remembered a song from childhood he had learned at church. The words of gratitude in this song, he realized, resembled very much these Ghanaian words for ‘Thank you’. Back in the Netherlands he put his theory to the test and sang the church song to a Ghanaian taxi driver. The woman was so struck by it that she had to pull over to calm down. ‘She really got goose bumps,’ Ruben told me, ‘because the song resembled so much a song she used to sing back home.’ To Ruben, something magical had happened. Others make connections to Africa in their consultations of West African mediums. During my research, I often saw adverts for West African mediums in local papers or on the walls of garages and buildings. Sometimes I would find a flyer in the mailbox. These mediums offer ‘real African spiritual powers’ to heal afflictions in matters of love, business, study, sex and other ‘hopeless problems and occult dealings’ (Gemmeke 2016: 41). West Africans in the Netherlands do not seem to frequent these mediums, because they feel that their physical distance from the continent diminishes their power, and because they do not trust these urban entrepreneurs. Also, they find services of mediums who actually reside in West Africa cheaper, and therefore opt for telecommunicated healing sessions (Gemmeke 2016). The largest client group for these mediums are Surinamese of African descent, who are attracted to their ‘African power’. These mediums seem to profit from Pan-African symbols of Africanness such as West African Boubous and kauri shells, as they are now

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commonly worn by many Surinamese on festive occasions. Their performance, as Gemmeke has argued, is somewhat eclectic and includes anything from Islamic elements to palm readings and tarot cards. All this should not lead one to conclude that these sessions are inauthentic scams. African mediums also seem to be in conversation with African-Surinamese bonuman to exchange knowledge and skills about healing rituals (Gemmeke 2016). There is always openness to new ritual elements that may not have been part of a healing process before – an openness that is characteristic of West African societies more generally (Meyer 1999). Afro-Surinamese encounters and connections with Africa have also been documented in films. Ruben and others on several occasions referred to a film by Vincent Soekra, an award-winning Afro-Surinamese filmmaker, called Slave Route #1 (2001). The film documents Soekra’s journey to Ghana, in which he travels into the far north of the country to follow the old slave routes. Like many of these journeys of homecoming, this trip exhibits deeply felt ­ambiguities about the families of African slave traders. The film includes the disappointing experience of the 2001 Panafest, which Soekra dismisses as far too small and concerned more with local politics and power relations than with the grand narratives of homecoming and Pan-African unity: ‘the Durbar is a cultural tradition but appears to be a mere display of power.’20 Ironically, Soekra’s tour also includes a visit to the King Osei Tutu II, who has just returned from his trip to Europe where Belliot refused to shake his hand. Perhaps unsurprisingly given his experience with Belliot in the Netherlands, the King is not prepared to receive Soekra. A spokesperson says: It’s very unfortunate. Recently Otumfo Osei Tutu II was on a European tour and in America. And he came [back] just last week. So, you know, he’s tired, and he hasn’t rested for about two weeks before. So, it’s very unfortunate. Otherwise, your great-grandfather would have wished to see all of you and to welcome you, because you belong to our society.

These experiences reiterate what Katharina Schramm in her discussion of the Panafest has called ‘the impossibility of a one-to-one implementation of the Pan-African ideological premise, which is in itself full of contradictions, to the sphere of social interaction’ (Schramm 2010: 211). But the film also contains more hopeful scenes. On the way to the Panafest in Elmina, they catch up with another SurinameseDutch traveller, Orsine Nicol (1948–2019, better known as Orsine

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Koorndijk), an author and founding board member of schrijversgrop ’77. They meet at Assin Praso, now a Heritage Village commemorating the Ashanti victories over the British and the slave trade. Despite the ambiguity of the site, Nicol is shown explaining to Soekra her discovery regarding many words in Sranantongo and Twi: ‘We know the same words. Posuû. We say bossum. It means fetish.’ Regardless of whether her observations are correct,21 her experience speaks of a deeply felt connection and cultural unity the Panafest was unable to provide for her. The stories of Ruben and Zuster V. I highlighted here represent a broader experience with the ‘African neighbour’ that is convivial, not antagonistic. It is inspired by but not the same as the ‘highly mythologized Africanity’ (Gilroy 1993). Zuster V. and Ruben were not engaged in articulating a Pan-Africanist ideology of homecoming (Schramm 2010) but were nevertheless sensitized by the Pan-African narratives circulating in Amsterdam Zuidoost and used them to make sense of their own biographies, which had been somewhat mysterious to them. This implies that they did not accept the rigidity with which ethnic boundaries are in some cases discussed in public memory discourse. The handshake incident appears to be only part of a much more complicated story of Africanness in Amsterdam Zuidoost, one that oscillates between antagonism and conviviality.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have shown how my interlocutors articulate diasporic identity by reference to slavery. By looking at how slavery matters, to whom and in what precise moments, a complex picture emerges that is not captured solely in either the idea of an ‘African family’ in the narratives of African homecoming (Schramm 2010), or in the antagonism suggested by the handshake incident. Both dimensions play a role, but the relation can better be characterized as one between neighbours, who sometimes fight and sometimes get together. Here I was interested in the role slavery played in everyday life, say, in between doing the groceries and going to a party. My focus on the everyday thus departs from the analysis of the political history of black internationalisms. This is not a story of grand political projects such as the various Pan-African movements Négritude, the Harlem Renaissance and other forms of black internationalism (Edwards

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2003). In Amsterdam Zuidoost, black internationalism entails a different practice than, for instance, international congresses that formulate official positions pertaining to shared universals. Here, internationalism is an everyday practice that is sometimes antagonistic, at other times convivial. Antagonism seems to be foregrounded when the political-­ economic stakes are high and points need to be scored. Also, neighbourly issues such as garbage disposal and tidiness are sometimes framed in antagonistic terms. However, during more private and intimate exchanges with neighbours, my interlocuters were sometimes able to find a deeper sense of connection, one they described as ‘magical’. They described these moments of connection as a spiritual experience in which religion played a central role. It is significant that Zuster V. found her ‘African’ roots in a Pentecostal church, especially because these churches are not known to value ‘Africanness’ highly, in many cases quite the opposite (Meyer 1998; De Witte and Meyer 2013). I was not able to explore this theme in more depth, but it will merit a more expansive study in its own right in the future.

Notes   1. ‘De koning versus de koningin; Slavernij doet nog pijn bij contact tussen Ghanezen en Afro-Surinamers’, Trouw, 21 June 2002, p. 3.   2. Ibid.   3. ‘Osei Tutu II is de enige echte’, Het Parool, 18 June 2002, p. 3.   4. ‘Surinamers moeten die koning Osei niet’, Het Parool, 19 June 2002, p. 1.   5. ‘Geen hand voor koning van Ghana’, NRC Handelsblad, 20 June 2002, p. 1.   6. ‘De koning versus de koningin; Slavernij doet nog pijn bij contact tussen Ghanezen en Afro-Surinamers’, Trouw 21 June 2002, p. 3.   7. During my research in Suriname, I was hanging out a lot with a young Maroon from the Saramacca tribe. My landlady, my regular taxi driver and many others warned me that I was putting myself in harm’s way.   8. Watson, interview, 19 August 2010.  9. ‘Wil je niet de zaak steunen, ik heb slippers, 3 paar voor 10 euro.’ Interestingly, ‘zaak’ in Dutch can refer to both the business she is running as well as a ‘cause’ she is supporting. It seemed to me that both these layers of meaning were of importance in her statement. By supporting her business, she was also supporting a shared but not further specified ‘cause’. 10. In Chapter 6, I will pay closer attention to the ways cultural heritage is gendered through the use and meaning of this dress. 11. In Chapter 5, I will discuss these meanings in terms of what I will call an

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aesthetics of reticence, or the obligation to safeguard the hidden meanings of certain cultural elements and to leave certain things unsaid. 12. Normally, koto dansi have a dress code, and this dress code can be both profane and religious. For example, such a dress code can suggest a particular color, including anything from white to orange or pink. Sometimes, the dress code is ‘ala kondre’, which literally means ‘all countries’, and this is an explicitly religious code. In the Afro-Surinamese Winti religion, every Winti deity has their own colour. For example, Ma Aisa, the highest deity in the Winti pantheon, has the color white; the Ingi Winti, one of the most popular deities, has the color red. If the dress code for a party is white, the party is often dedicated to Ma Aisa. 13. Groeneveen is now part of what is referred to as the Bijlmer museum, still in the honeycomb shape of the original Bijlmer design (see Chapter 1). 14. ‘Ik moet zeggen van ehm, waarom eigenlijk het hele slavernij, eh, ding weer terug komt, het is door de jongere generatie, eigenlijk. Dat eigenlijk, uhm, die generatie, die is toch meer met hun verleden bezig dan de oudere generatie, he. Want, kijk, zelf in de kerken worden, ik weet nie als je goed geluisterd hebt, dat er ook over bepaalde dingen gesproken werd, en dat er bepaalde mentaliteiten en charaktertrekken, en manier van handelen en wandelen, dat het soms vanuit de generatie waar je uit komt, dat die in je nog zit, die ... . Je gaat je op een bepaalde manier eh, eh, gedragen, en, het komt, en je weet niet waarom, of hoe. Maar je voorouders, of je ouders, die hebben bepaalde dingen gedaan, en, begr-, snap je? M: Want de kerkdienst ging natuurlijk over ouderschap. SV: Ja. Ja. M: En, inderdaad, het was SV: Ja, ja. Toen je d’r was, he. En, eh, en ook over cultuur. Ging het ook over. En eh, dus eh, dan ga je toch zoeken. En het mooie van mij zelf is, ik zei je van, ik zal je dan vertellen waar ik vandaan kom. Ik voel me heeeeel erg aangetrokken door de Afrikanen, Ghanezen. En Afrikanen in het algemeen, he. Ik voel me heel erg, het is een soort heel verhaal.’ 15. ‘en toen kwam er een Ghaneze predikant in de gemeente waar ik me zo aangetrokken voelde.’ 16. ‘En om weer op die slavernij terug te komen, he. Er waren een heleboel Ghanezen en Nigerianen in mijn kerk. En ik vond het zo vreemd. Dat, en toen kende ik deze gemeente nog niet, he. Ik was nog in mijn eigen gemeente. . . . We stonden allemaal leiders voorin. En eenieder kwam, al die gemeenteleden kwamen de handen van de leiders schudden. Maar geen van die Afrikanen gingen naar die andere leiders. M: En die ander leiders waren Afrikaans? SV: Nee, nee, nee, nee. Verschillende. En ik vond het vreemd dat ze allemaal in een lijn stonden om naar mij toe te komen om mijn hand te schudden. Ik vond het vreemd, ik dacht van, waarom schudden ze alleen mijn hand en ze lopen gelijk weg. Ik begon naar die voorganger te kijken die gepredikt had, zeg, heeft, hebben ze, heeft die misschien een afspraak gemaakt, gaan jullie alleen bij haar. Ik vond het vreemd. En dat heeft mij

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jaren bezig gehouden. En toen ben ik uit die gemeente gegaan, ben ik deze voorganger tegen gekomen, ook op een wonderbaarlijke manier.   Toen ik nog niet dacht dat ik uit de gemeente zou gaan en naar een afrikaanse kerk gaan, kwam ik hem een keer tegen in me lift. En ik keek naar hem, hij was helemaal mooi gekleed, ik zie hem nog zo. En toen zei ik hem van, eh, ben je van, ben je, ben je een Christen? En toen zei hij... Ben je een voorganger, vroeg ik hem. En hij zei, ja. En ik zeg, oh! Ik zeg ik ben ook een Christen. Ik zeg dan zijn we familieleden van elkaar. En die lift, die kwam, want ik was zeven hoog, en toen ging ik er uit. En hij ging door naar boven. En ik heb hem toen nooit meer gezien. Nooit meer gezien. En eh ... Maar dat bleef bij mij hangen, he.’   En ik maakte de gemeente open, ik zette het ook op slot. En eh, en toen kwam ik d’r, eh, toen iedereen weg was, tegen een uur of elf, half twaalf ‘s avonds, want ik woonde niet zo ver van de kerk. En kom ik buiten, en stond er een oude afrikaanse suster die ik al jaren, die al jaren in de gemeente kwam, ook een afrikaanse, die stond zo laat nog buiten deur. Zij alleen. Dus ik kom d’r uit, en toen keek ze naar me – ze noemen me allemaal mami, he mami in de kerk, omdat ik zo’n moederfiguurtje ben, voor ze te zorgen enzo. En toen zij ze: Mami, je gaat goed voor me mensen zorgen, he? Je gaat gooed voor m’n mensen zorgen! Ik zei ja, maar ik begreep er helemaal niets van. Ik zei ja mama Susie, ja mama Susie, en eh ... En ik ging weg. Maar het bleef toch bij me hangen, al die afrikanen naar mij toe, en de deur uit, weer een Afrikaan die bij de deur staat. En nu ben ik ook in een afrikaanse gemeente, ik dacht, wat is het nou, he, wat is het?’ 17. In Suriname, people jokingly say that when two strangers meet the first thing they ask is: ‘who is your mother, who is your father?’ Knowing the other’s family descent immediately clarifies not only race relations but also where one is from geographically (for example, from ‘the city’ or from ‘the districts’, from what part of town, and from what particular plantation. I was told that each plantation, for example, has a different reputation, and ‘on every plantation lives a specific kind of people’). 18. SV: Hij vond het een beetje vervelend dat z’n eerste kind zo donker was, en dan had die die baby, en wanneer het zonlicht zo scheen, ‘s morgens he, dan ging die lekker met de zoon in die zon een beetje zitten, en ik zeg Clifford, die word toch niet bruin, hoor! . . . Ik zeg het zit al in de genen, jongen. Die word toch niet bruin, en ze is nooit bruin geworden. [lacht] M: En hij vond het vervelend dat ze licht was. SV: [lacht] Ja! Omdat die ene zo donker is, en dat zij zo licht is he! Ik zeg, wat denk je dat mensen gaan zeggen, dat het van de melkboer is [lachen]. 19. En toen gingen ze kijken, en dat vond ik zo mooi, hij kwam terug, heel blij, hij zei, mami, nu weet ik echt waar die Indianen vandaan komen, mami. U gaat het niet willen geloven. Ik ben gaan zoeken, hoor, ik ben gaan zoeken. En toen zij hij: Weet u, hoe de Indiaan onder de negers gekomen zijn? Hij zegt: Uw... Uw moeder, zegt die zo. Van, was een afrikaanse vrouw, die met een schip uit slaaf, een slaven-, afrikaanse

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vrouw, die met een schip naar, eneh, dus je kan zeggen mijn ouma. Die is met een schip met die blanke basja’s naar Suriname gekomen. En ze had, ze had drie dochters bij d’r. En die blanke basja’s, die hadden, waren gestagneerd op een Indiaanse plantage. Snap je het een beetje? M: Ja...? SV: Dus die blanken die waren op een Indiaanse plantage. Dus zij kwam als dienstmeisje hebben ze haar meegenomen uit Afrika, met drie kinderen, om voor hun als dienst te werken natuurlijk. 20. Slave route #1, dir. Vincent Soekra (Soekra AV & Films, 2001). 21. It is difficult to determine what words Nicol is talking about exactly. The common word for a protective fetish in Sranantongo is ‘tapu’; if it is a fetish that causes harm it is called ‘wisi’ (‘black’ magic). ‘Bossum’ is not a word found in the standard Surinamese dictionaries. Posuû could refer to Abosom, the lower deities of the Akan religion, who are related to the Surinamese Winti spirits or the Orixá in Candomblé.

Figure 4.1.  Bigi Ten performing at a birthday party, 2009. Photograph by Markus Balkenhol.

4 Kaskawina – Politics of a Lower Frequency

Got one mind for white folk to see / ’nother for what I know is me. ––Popular slave aphorism (Carpio 2008, xiii–ix)

It is a Sunday afternoon, my first day of fieldwork. The previous day I had moved into Edouard’s three-bedroom apartment on the eighth floor of one of the high-rise buildings in De Bijlmer. Edouard tells me that a Surinaams feestje (Surinamese party) is taking place tonight at Kwakoe Podium and that there will be live music and many beautiful women. With the eagerness of a fieldworker new to a place, I propose to go to the party. Slavery comes up immediately after leaving the house. At around 7pm, we walk over to the main road to get a snorder for a short ride to De Poort, the big shopping mall near Kwakoe Podium. The taxi driver is Ghanaian, and during the ride, Edouard urges me to talk to him, even though it is clear that they are not acquainted. The fact that the taxi driver is Ghanaian is enough for Edouard to say: ‘Here, you need to ask this guy about slavery, he can tell you everything.’ Obligingly, I try to strike up a conversation, but I fail to seduce the taxi driver into a chat. Clearly, not everybody is prepared to plate up their opinions and feelings about this subject. The driver drops us near Kwakoe Podium, and Edouard and I withdraw some cash from an ATM. On the way to the party, Edouard seizes the chance to show off his extensive network in De Bijlmer. There are only a handful of people in the street, but nearly all of them are acquaintances of Edouard’s. Proudly he explains: ‘I know

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everybody around here. Ask anyone about Edouard, and they will know me.’ As I would learn later, Edouard had established a good part of this network through his music. Pumped, we make our way through the empty mall towards the party. We can already hear the faint sound of music emanating from the cultural centre. The sound is very promising. Our enthusiasm, however, leaves as soon as we reach the entrance: the cover charge is 12,50 euro. Edouard is raging: ‘Who can afford this kind of money around here! It’s a joke.’ He refuses to go in. We had better take a snorder to Amsterdam Oost, Edouard argues. This will cost us 12,50, but they have no cover charge there, and we can split the fare. So we head off. Again, Edouard launches an attempt to find interlocutors for me who he thinks are ‘experts’ on the issue of slavery.1 After the decision to take a snorder to Oost, I am surprised that Edouard walks straight into a bar around the corner, announcing that this is his local. Later it turns out that this is true for most cafés and bars in De Bijlmer. The bar is busy. Most of the occupants are middle-aged AfroSurinamese men, many wearing baseball caps, leather jackets and gold jewellery. Edouard and I get two beers from the bar and make our way to the back, where men are playing at three pool tables. Edouard walks straight to one of the tables and launches into a conversation in Sranantongo I understand little of. After a few minutes, I begin to wander around, rather unsuccessfully trying to make conversation with some of the men. Pool is a game taken serious here, and the men’s expressions make clear that they will bear no disturbance. Then Edouard calls me over. He has sat down with an older man and motions for me to get a chair and join them. He explains to the man that I am doing research on ‘slavery and stuff’. Edouard asks him to talk to me, but without looking at me, the man, who had spoken Sranantongo until now, declares in Dutch that: ‘He is a scientist, I will not tell him anything, ’cause he is going to publish a book with only lies in it.’ Edouard looks at me apologetically and implores the man to talk to me – he almost begins a fight with him, but to no avail. Annoyed, Edouard decides it is time for us to hit the road. Denis, a friend of Edouard’s, decides to join us, and we leave in the direction of the main road to get a snorder to Oost. On the way, we meet Boeroe, a middle-aged man Edouard introduces with the words: ‘He is like a brother to me.’ Boeroe also decides to join, and the four of us make our way to the bus stop on the main road to flag down a snorder. A couple of times, the police pass the bus stop, provoking irritated and muffled comments from the guys.

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The police know we are waiting for an illegal taxi, and the taxi drivers know the police know, and the guys know the taxi drivers know the police know, so they get annoyed because the taxis do not stop for us.2 Eventually, the police disappear, and we are picked up by another Ghanaian driver. Immediately, Edouard returns to my research and, supported by the other two men, pressures the Ghanaian taxi driver to tell me something about slavery. A discussion emerges with difficulty; for one, the taxi driver, Sly, does not speak Dutch, and only Edouard speaks English sufficiently for a conversation. Struggling a bit, Sly says: ‘Yeah, slavery is difficult. Through slavery, the black man has been spread all over the world, and it is the reason why we are here.’ Not everybody is convinced of this assessment, and the discussion quickly turns to safer subjects such as Bob Marley, and, of course, women.3 Finally, we arrive at Café Muiderhoek, a Surinamese watering hole in Amsterdam Oost. The cafe has a rich tradition dating back to the 1970s and is well-known especially among middle-aged and older Surinamese to be a place for Surinamese music. It is on the ground floor of a regular three-floor apartment building. The café is inconspicuous and has an almost clandestine air; if it were not for the small Heineken sign on the façade, you would hardly notice it was a café at all. The windows are blinded to prevent people looking in. The tiny entrance door is closed, which does not seem very inviting. I pay Sly, who heads off, and we enter the café. The interior is not much larger than a living room, and it has an almost cave-like atmosphere. The ceilings are low, and it is loaded with all kinds of yellowed curiosities. The café is packed with people, and the air is thick with smoke. A band is already playing on a tiny stage in the corner of the café. Despite the small size of the stage, there are at least seven or eight people crammed on to it; three singers as well as people playing drums, a keyboardist, a guitarist and a bass guitarist. The fat sound of the band as well as a constant stream of djogos (onelitre bottles of beer) topped off with shots of sopi (strong alcohol like rum) thickens the air even more. Tonight’s programme is a jam session, so the composition of the band constantly changes as people enter and leave the stage, sometimes even during a song. I am among a handful of people who do not go to the stage at any point. The songs seem to be well-known to everybody, and the men fall into the rhythm smoothly when they enter the stage. So smooth is the change that I do not even notice any interruption to the music at all. Edouard, too, grabs the microphone

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at some point and effortlessly begins to sing the background vocals. After a while, he switches to the saka saka, a kind of rattle. We had already indulged heavily in the djogos and sopi, enough to have a sense of comradery and confidence. I had not felt unsafe, but the guys had repeatedly told me that I need not worry, nobody could harm me, and that they were there to protect and avenge me – a show of trust that almost had me worried. Standing on the sidelines watching and listening to the music with Denis, something happened that would determine a good part of my research agenda. The event as such was deeply ordinary, but it was precisely this ordinariness that immediately drew my attention. ‘Here, this song comes from the times of slavery!’, Denis shouted in my ear. Through the pounding music, he explained the lyrics of the song. Boto ye, boto kon, the boat leaves and comes back. According to Denis, this song referred to the ‘pirogues that crossed the water’. I asked him whether he meant the pirogues of the Surinamese Amerindians and the Maroon communities on the upper reaches of the Surinamese rivers. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘the boats that crossed the ocean and took people.’ He explained: ‘They saw the boats leave and always return; they thought it was some kind of miracle.’ The rest of the night consisted of an initiation of sorts. In my memory, the night has receded somewhat into a sopiinduced haze, and I spent the next day trying to cure its massive consequences. Yet as I was typing the field notes, I perfectly recalled that moment the night before when Denis had told me the meaning of the music. Because he said it quite matter-of-factly, a self-evident fact of life, with some pride even, it lent it an air of importance to me. I had a strong sense that something important had been said that was both different from and related to the formal registers of public memory. During the night, the memory of slavery had changed registers. From articulated to implicit, and from outspoken to withheld. Thinking again about this night, I feel that a terminology of trauma (Alexander 2012) and denial (Cohen 2001) does not equip us well to grasp what happened here. As Nicholas Argenti has argued in his work on the Cameroonian grasslands, [i]n this sense, the oft-noted discursive silence on the topic of slavery in Africa should not be seen as evidence of forgetting or denial, but rather as evidence that, in many instances, these memories still constitute quite literal bodies of experience rather than discursive knowledge; bodies of experience that cannot be reified explicitly without reproducing the violence to which they refer. (Argenti 2006: 35)

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For although there was certainly a strong dynamic between concealment and revelation, it seemed to me that this was not a consequence of individual or social pathologies. As my research progressed, a sense continued to emerge that slavery can move people in different ways from the articulated public forms but also different from the trauma that slavery is often said to have caused. Edouard, even as we got to know each other better, never really talked to me about slavery, and he never went to the commemorations in Oosterpark or on Surinameplein. He did not care much about reparations, or formal excuses by the Dutch government. Nor did the idea of trauma as a political claim hold much appeal to him. What he did care about, however, was his music. Many times, he emphasized: ‘Look, I often just sit here on the couch listening to music. I don’t need much. I listen to my music and hang out with my band. That’s who I am.’ My feeling was that it was not exactly trauma and pain that prevented him from talking about slavery. Instead of a ‘talking cure’, other expressive forms seemed to appeal more to him. In this chapter, I look at kaskawina, a particular kind of Afro-Surinamese music – and Edouard’s music – as one register through which slavery is remembered. Through the public rituals of remembrance on Surinameplein and in Oosterpark, slavery has become a form of public memory and cultural heritage. This is a dynamic of symbolic capital, and as a consequence, the pressure to establish and maintain access to this dynamic has risen considerably. Afro-Surinamese cultural forms and practices increasingly have to relate to the master narratives of public memory and cultural heritage, a situation that creates new modes of binding and belonging but also new rivalries and social cleavages. In order to understand this public culture of heritage and claimmaking, we also need to look at other modes of the political that operate beyond the limelight of memory politics. I thus pay attention to the non-discursive or ineffable modes of the political that are conveyed in the performance of kaskawina music and that constitute how slavery is mobilized in the domain of public memory and heritage politics. By non-discursive, I refer to what Paul Gilroy has called the politics of a lower frequency. In black music, Gilroy argues the political: exists on a lower frequency, where it is played, danced, and acted, as well as sung and sung about, because words, even words stretched by melisma and supplemented or mutated by the screams which still index the conspicuous power of the slave sublime, will never be enough to communicate its unsayable claims to truth. (Gilroy 1993: 37)

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With the idea of frequencies, Gilroy wants to draw attention to the ‘ways in which closeness to the ineffable terrors of slavery was kept alive – carefully cultivated – in ritualised, social forms,’ arguing that ‘[t]hough they were unspeakable, these terrors were not inexpressible’ (Gilroy 1993: 73). He thus proposes to ‘explore how residual traces of [these terrors’] necessarily painful expression still contribute to historical memories inscribed and incorporated into the volatile core of Afro-Atlantic cultural creation. Thinking about . . . black musics . . . requires [a] reorientation towards the phatic and the ineffable’ (ibid.). This implies an understanding of the cultural memory of slavery as a dynamic between the discursive (monuments, historiography, historical canons, commemorations, etc.) and the ineffable – the things that are unspeakable. The notion of ‘trauma’ plays a role in analyses of the non-discursive (Alexander 2004; Eyerman 2001; Trouillot 1995b), but I do not find such a terminology of social pathology helpful for its deterministic tendency; the term ‘trauma’ does, however, suggest an absent presence. After all, the point is that a traumatic event is traumatic because it cannot be successfully repressed, nor worked through properly. It therefore forces the traumatized to perpetually repeat it. Gilroy’s idea of frequencies is helpful in moving beyond pathologies while keeping the non-dualistic nature of memory both present and absent, articulate and inarticulate (Bijl 2016). Gilroy’s emphasis on the political in modes beyond, or underneath, the discourse of speech is akin to Michael Taussig’s notion of implicit social knowledge, which he described as the things that move people ‘without their knowing quite why or how, . . . what makes the real real and the normal normal, and above all . . . what makes ethical distinctions politically powerful’ (Taussig 1984: 87). The issue of the political can therefore be seen in a different light. In the preceding chapters, I have paid attention to the ways in which slavery has become implicated in the domain of memory politics. I have looked at the commemoration of slavery as a politics of autochthony. In this chapter, I want to analyse an additional but different register of the political, namely the aesthetics of kaskawina music. In the following, I show that this music has a very particular form in which the histories of its emergence I have discussed above resonate. I call it an aesthetics of reticence, which to me captures the sense that certain things are better left unsaid, that an inner circle ought to be maintained, that there are hidden messages in the music outsiders ought not to be given access to easily. Reticence can also mean things like modesty, self-control, reservation, holding back, caution or

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secrecy. This is certainly not unique to kaskawina music but pervasive in the cultures that emerged from slavery. In understanding these cultures, Saidiya Hartman has argued against a kind of hermeneutics that attempts to understand the true meaning of these expressive forms. Rather, she calls on scholars: to give full weight to the opacity of these texts wrought by toil, terror, and sorrow and composed under the whip and in fleeting moments of reprieve. Rather than consider black song as an index or mirror of the slave condition, this examination emphasizes the significance of opacity as precisely that which enables something in excess of the orchestrated amusements of the enslaved and which similarly troubles distinctions between joy and sorrow and toil and leisure. (Hartman 1997: 35)

With my notion of an aesthetics of reticence, I take up Hartman’s call to give full weight to the opacity of Afro-Surinamese music as that which enables something in excess of amusement, which also complicates a clear-cut distinction between joy and sorrow, toil and leisure. I think such a perspective avoids many of the pitfalls of notions of cultural trauma, which run the risk of reducing the wealth of AfroSurinamese cultural forms to social pathology. It is important to underline that I do not see Afro-Surinamese music and proverbs as an ossified cultural form that has existed unchanged since the time of slavery. As I will show, the historical conditions under which it emerged, developed and exists today cannot be ignored, but that does not mean that the music today is the same as it was at various points in history. As Ineke van Wetering (1995: 213) has pointed out, ‘[t]he cultural strategies of a rising middle class in a new nation [i.e. independent Suriname] are different from those of former slaves, and the interests of migrants point in other directions still.’ Not only have the historical conditions changed, music as a cultural form is performative, or, as Gilroy put it, music is a ‘ritualized’ and ‘cultivated’ form that cannot be seen as a simple ‘repetition’ (as the terminology of trauma would suggest). Music, and in particular the music of the Black Atlantic, is improvisation and invention. As a performance, it is also a specific, ‘ineffable’ form of expression that involves the senses in particular ways. Music can be seen as a form of sensory knowledge, and therefore as an aesthetic in the sense of, for instance, the German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, who was ‘devoted to the study of the production of knowledge through the senses and emotions’ (Van de Port and Meyer 2018: 20). Understood in this way, music appears as an embodied form

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of knowledge that differs from discursive memorial forms such as monuments, historiography or exhibitions. While these memorial forms are not disembodied, they are not an implicit form of knowledge. Indeed, it is their raison d’être to make explicit references to their historical object. In music, as we will see, these references may be more implicit. Nonetheless, music can provide a sense of immediacy even across temporal and spatial gaps. Birgit Meyer has conceptualized aesthetics as a ‘generator’ of presence: through sense perception, cultural forms can make present something that is posited as absent or beyond (Meyer 2012). The performance of kaskawina, then, can create a sense of immediacy, or a sense of presence and acuteness that defies the idea of historical distance. Hence, while the political dimension of black music has undeniably changed simply because the political economy of oppression it addresses has fundamentally changed since the times of slavery, it can convey a sense of the immediacy of the terrors of slavery that continues to inform people’s experience. Such an understanding of the political is helpful because it disallows a slippage into exoticism. Some may argue that looking at music boils down to a deflection of ‘real’ problems such as social and economic marginalization, discrimination and racism. Focusing on music may thus be seen as ‘merely’ looking at ‘culture’, no more than a somewhat romanticized tactic of looking the other way once more. Instead, I argue that to understand music as eminently political sharpens an analysis of not only how cultural forms and practices become politicized but also how political issues may be negotiated in modes that reach beyond the domain of formal politics. Indeed, such a view argues against the very idea that an isolated realm of ‘culture’ as separate from politics even exists. Such a view goes against the grain of an idea that slavery has been artificially ‘politicized’ or instrumentalized in order to tap into various kinds of resources. Instead, looking at the political in black music uncovers the social and cultural grounding out of which the public memory of slavery emerges. Afro-Surinamese music, as I will show, draws the parameters of moral conduct that inform people’s everyday lives as well as the political claims they make through the public memory of slavery. The power of the memory politics of slavery, I suggest, derives from these parameters. While I agree with Taussig’s emphasis on the political dimension of the ineffable and the phatic, I prefer the idea of frequencies for two reasons. Taussig’s idea raises the question of ethnographic

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authority: who is the anthropologist to define what people really believe, ‘without their knowing’? Is this knowledge there just because I, the anthropologist, will it into existence, because I’m the one tracing it?4 Moreover, Taussig’s terminology suggests a kind of duality that risks pitting the intimate, communal and inarticulate against the public, discursive and articulate. The idea of frequencies allows a view in which modes of relating to the past can change on a whole scale of frequencies and move from infra-sound to ultrasound in different modes of audibility. They may even emit different, conflicting and dissonant frequencies at the same time. Moreover, the idea of frequency also puts more emphasis on relationality of sender and receiver, thus making memory an eminently intersubjective phenomenon. Tuning the frequencies, in the terminology of the trace, means covering one’s tracks and not leaving clues precisely because one does not want to be found. In short, this chapter is an investigation into the ways in which the discursive and the non-discursive relate in processes of heritage formation and public memory, and in the commemoration of slavery in the Netherlands in particular.

Kaskawina’s Changing Frequencies Kaskawina has become immensely popular among Afro-Surinamese in the Netherlands, especially for middle-aged people who were not born in the Netherlands (Sansone 1994). Some authors have argued that this attraction has to do with the sense of home that music can provide. This seems to be supported by, for example, the Facebook page of Corona, a very popular kaskawina band, which states that the band was founded because ‘the realization that [with the move to Rotterdam] they would have to leave their musical heritage behind on Surinamese soil was a painful and unbearable idea for them’.5 As I got to know Edouard and the band he played in, Bigi Ten, as well as the world of music and musicians they moved around in, two other almost magnetic aspects seemed much more important to them than ‘home’: money and women. Bands can charge up to three hundred euros per hour to perform, and depending on their popularity, this can generate a considerable source of income. Bigi Ten had become one of the more popular bands during my fieldwork. The money earned from their performances and the sale of their CD is administrated by a specifically appointed penningmeester (bookkeeper). In 2010, they made enough money to go on a joint trip to

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Suriname, and in 2012, they played in Belgium as well as New York and Miami. The other major appeal of being a (successful) musician are sexual encounters. Much of the talk among the guys was about women and sex, and musicians are known to be ‘players’ in that respect. An older Afro-Surinamese woman once told me that she would never allow her daughter to come home with a musician, because they are ‘loose’ and not to be trusted. ‘They love their guitar more than they love their woman,’ another woman told me. It has already become clear that kaskawina music, and by extension the memory of slavery, cannot be reduced to trauma and pain. Or, rather, if we aim for a more thorough understanding of these feelings of trauma and pain, we need to look at the ways in which they are embedded in and informed by cultural forms and practices. Edouard and his friends, although not convinced by the idea of trauma, were well aware of the weight of the past that is carried by the music, as I will show in more detail below. In order to understand what is meant by both the notion of politics as well as the lower frequency on which it operates, it is necessary to get a sense of the oppressive conditions under which kaskawina music emerged. The term politics implies a certain degree of agency. In a total institution such as slavery, how can we speak of politics, suggesting at least a common ground for negotiations? Could there be a politics in a system characterized precisely by its denial of humanity and therefore access to any social and political institutions? Gilroy’s notion of the political addresses these issues, as it moves beyond the framework of formal institutionalization. I am, therefore, here not primarily concerned with open resistance in the form of rebellion or revolution (Genovese 1979) but with forms of political negotiations outside of the formal political domain. Music was one register through which these informal politics took place; musical performances gave the enslaved a certain degree of leverage and influence. Planters were normally compelled to permit musical performances on certain occasions; on New Year’s Eve and on one day in June, as well as for funerals, there were days off work, for example, and the Banya dance was performed publicly on such occasions (Van Stipriaan 2000: 19). The performance of music and dance was experienced by the planters as a risk because they were acutely aware that it could stimulate solidarity among the enslaved. Nevertheless, planters often allowed these performances ‘for peace’s sake’ because ‘premature interruptions or the delay of dance

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performances could be a reason for all sorts of slave resistance’ (Van Stipriaan 2000: 28). A prohibition of musical performances would have caused considerable tension (Van Stipriaan 2000: 19) and would likely have realized the planters’ almost constant fear of rebellion. As Alison Blakely has argued, ‘the slave dances were both feared and admired, for their subversive and outright rebellious potential as well as for their connection to the supernatural (an observer reports to have seen slaves dance on hot coal without being burned). Most common dance styles were the banja, the soesa and the tambú’ (Blakely 1993: 73–74). In other words, the enslaved were able, despite their subjection to the totalitarian plantation society, to exert a certain degree of pressure on the planters through the performance of music and dance. The absence of a common ground on which to enter political negotiations6 thus did not imply a complete absence of political subjectivity among the enslaved. Should we understand this as ‘resistance’? For a long time, these forms of political subjectivity have been discussed in precisely these terms (Aptheker 1939; Herskovits 1990). As Sidney W. Mintz argued, an obligation has emerged to speak of the experience of enslavement first and foremost in terms of resistance: ‘in order to establish that the slaves truly abhorred their condition, historians and anthropologists considered it absolutely essential to document such resistance’ (Mintz 1995: 12). However, he continues, it is nonetheless a fact that during the nearly four centuries that slavery flourished in this hemisphere, only a tiny fraction of daily life consisted of open resistance. Instead, most of life then, like most of life now, was spent living; and most of it was lived in daily, even perfunctory, association with the holders of power. (Mintz 1995: 13)

A focus on violent resistance can obscure not only most of African American history (ibid.) but also reduce African American cultural forms and practices to pathologies of oppression (see also FatahBlack 2018). Mintz therefore suggests a closer look at everyday life on slave plantations, and to him, this ‘surely does not mean to turn one’s back on the study of resistance’ (Mintz 1995: 13). There is a growing body of scholarship on ‘what has come to be called day-to-day resistance . . . such as malingering, destruction of tools and farm animals, self-injury, and abortion’ (Raymond A. Bauer and Alice H. Bauer 1942 as quoted in Mintz 1995; Scott 1985; see also Van Stipriaan 2000). Moreover, the maintenance of the European monopoly of

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power entailed that the roles of oppressors and oppressed did not map exactly on particular phenotypes, especially in the complex chromatocracy of Caribbean race relations. Mintz underscores ‘the necessary dialectics between institutions and individuals, system and contingency, adaptation and resistance, and structure and creativity: “The house slave who poisoned her master’s family by putting ground glass in the family food had first to become the family cook” ’ (Mintz 1971, as quoted in Trouillot 1992: 31). Rather than entering a long-standing debate about resistance,7 I want to follow Mintz’s argument of strategic association, such as that of the cook who poisoned her master. I understand ‘association’ here in the sense of an ability, despite the institutionalized terror of slavery, and despite a profound lack of access to formal political institutions, to enter into more ‘subterranean’ (Gilroy 1991) political negotiations with the planters. Music is therefore better understood as a ‘cultural politics’ through which musical practices become ‘constitutive of subjectivities that are positioned in relations of power’ (Guilbault 2007: 3). The political dimension of Afro-Surinamese musical performance must be understood in its complex relation to the repressive regimes of plantation society (Van Stipriaan 2000). During slavery, only certain kinds of music and dance were permitted; other kinds of dances, especially the religious dances for the Winti deities, were strictly prohibited and could therefore be performed only in secret. These dances were performed outside of town, on remote plantations and out of reach of colonial law enforcement, but the enslaved also found other ways to perform these dances right under the noses of the planters. Initially out of necessity, a specific aesthetics emerged that Van Stipriaan calls the ‘internal dimension’ of slave culture (Van Stipriaan 2000) – a cultural system that was hidden from the colonial gaze. I find a terminology of internality and externality somewhat misleading here because it posits the existence of bounded individuals and groups, which, as Van Stipriaan shows, did not exist as such. Moreover, the ‘internal’ or secret dimension of Afro-Surinamese culture was also the foundation for a political relation with plantation society, not simply an isolation from it. I therefore find Gilroy’s politics of a lower frequency better suited to understand the political dimension of this aesthetics that moves in and out of secrecy and thus draws its political force precisely from this mobility. Individual and group boundaries emerge as part of this mobility performed through dance and music. For the cultural system was not merely introvert

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and exclusive but perceptible also to the planters as a kind of public secrecy (Taussig 1999). Indeed, its political impact hinged on this partial perceptibility because pressure could only be built through the planters’ partial knowledge. Secrecy here has a double function in Georg Simmel’s sense. Secrecy provided protection from prosecution by the planters by limiting their grasp on these practices, and thus enabled an ‘enlargement of life’ that could not emerge in the presence of full publicity (Simmel 1964: 330). Beyond its functional value, the mystery and fascination of secrecy also lent it the power to ‘intensify the unknown through imagination’ (Simmel 1964: 333). The secret was not exactly hidden, but instead it derived its political power precisely from the fact that to the planters it was palpable without them being able to fully understand and thus suppress it. This aesthetics of secrecy revealed just enough to maintain among the planters a constant reminder of potential unrest, which provided the enslaved with a certain degree of leverage. Van Stipriaan (1993: 163), for example, provides an account by Von Sack, a traveller to Suriname in the early nineteenth century, in which this sense of threat becomes palpable. Von Sack reports a trip on a river boat that was being rowed by six to eight men to a plantation that turned out to be further away than he had anticipated. Against the usual custom of taking a break in such a situation, the rowers were told to continue and were promised a reward upon arrival at the plantation. Von Sack reports: Our negroes gave no answer, but their eye-brows were knit; their foreheads became very much wrinkled; and they looked at each other with very expressive countenances . . . I could not help observing the negroes, in whose humour a great alteration had evidently taken place. After rowing about ten minutes in the most profound silence, they began a song, which was not in Surinam negro language, but in their own native African tongue, which of course was understood by none in the barge but themselves. The tune was harsh and the words short, as if they were oppressed by the lips.8

Von Sack was clearly fascinated by the ‘negroes’; he ‘could not help observing’ them closely. The situation reveals precisely his lack of understanding and the limitation of his gaze; he imagines the harsh tone and short words of the song, which convey that something is the matter without knowing precisely what that is. The fact that we have to rely on Von Sack’s account of the situation means that we can only speculate about intentionality in this situation. We have no unmediated access to Von Sack’s actual feelings

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in the situation except an aestheticized account that was undoubtedly written with a specific audience in mind. We know even less, of course, about the rowers. We have no way of knowing what inner state the rowers’ knit eyebrows, wrinkled foreheads and very expressive countenances conveyed and what Von Sack describes as ‘harsh tunes’ and ‘short words’ were expressions of. It may well have been sheer exhaustion, but it may equally have been suppressed resistance, or, perhaps most likely, even both. Sidney Mintz based his analysis on a normative model of resistance in which ‘the difficulty posed by what is called passive or covert resistance is precisely that we must infer the will of the actor’ (Mintz 1995: 14). Unlike Mintz, I suggest we can understand AfroSurinamese music as an aesthetics whose political dimension emerges in relation to the specific social situation in which it is performed. This allows me to forego the need to know about intentionality. As Mintz correctly argued, we can only speculate about the intentions of the enslaved (and one might add, the planters), but what I am interested in here are not the intentions of the enslaved (or the ­planters). Indeed, I suggest that the intentions are not even important in order to discuss the political dimension of Afro-Surinamese music in a given social situation. In Afro-Surinamese musical performances during slavery, the political lies in the way in which they influenced power relations in plantation society. The songs usually consisted of a call-andresponse structure with a lead singer and a chorus. According to Van Stipriaan (2000: 21), this opened up a space for social commentary. The songs thus constituted one of the most important platforms on which the enslaved could produce and maintain social boundaries, both among themselves and towards the planters. In that sense, it was also a political platform. The political, in this situation, is to be understood in Gilroy’s sense of a politics of a lower frequency, in which the oppressive conditions often forced demands to be articulated below the level of language. In the example above, the enslaved were not able to change their immediate situation, but they did convey a response that, at the very least, was picked up by Von Sack. In this situation, it was precisely the fact that Von Sack did not know exactly what was going on that created some basic leverage. Song and dance ultimately allowed the enslaved room for manoeuvre in its hints and codified messages, the essence of which did not fail to reach the planters. Van Stipriaan documents that from 1763 onwards a law prohibited not only libellous talk but also libellous song (ibid.). Such a law attests

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to the rigidity of repression, but at the same time, the very necessity of such a law also indicates precisely the limitations of repressive regimes. The law legitimized punishment, but the planters often had few means of determining at what point a song became libellous for their sheer lack of linguistic and cultural knowledge. To sum up briefly, music offered the enslaved a means to enforce, at least to a certain extent, demands. It was also a way to create a sense of cultural community. It was a way of producing and expressing political subjectivity. The question will now be how these boundaries continue to be maintained and negotiated through music today.

Kaskawina and the Aesthetics of Reticence It is true that getting people to talk about slavery proved to be a crucial problem during my fieldwork. This may come as no surprise considering the sensitive nature of this topic, and as my research progressed, I began to get a sense of the complexity of this situation. There was the fact that I am white, an outsider and a researcher (i.e. both an ‘educated person’ and ‘a spy’) but the sense that it is not always a good idea to speak one’s mind was more general and did not just apply to (white) researchers: people also disciplined one another. Gradually, I realized that this resistance amounted to what I call an aesthetics of reticence, as expressed in and informed by AfroSurinamese cultural forms, most importantly in kaskawina music and proverbs (odo). One autumn night, I found myself fighting through rain – the first storm of the season – to get to an interview I had planned with Eugene, the bartender at Kwakoe Podium. Eugene is a 55-yearold Afro-Surinamese man, born in Suriname, who has lived in the Netherlands for many years. Eugene is knowledgeable about Afro-Surinamese culture. As always, he was sitting behind the bar, half hidden behind a cashier booth. In front of him was a meticulously compiled tally of every beverage he had sold. It was not a busy night; there were only a couple of groups of old men sitting around the tables playing the card game memory. He took his job seriously, and the bar was always tidy. Plastic cups were piled neatly next to the ice dispenser, from which he would take precisely two cubes for a cup with a small silver pair of tweezers. One of the old men approached the bar, and he began to joke with him, performing Surinamese pop-up theatre, which I had become

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familiar with. Eugene seemed to say something provocative. The old man pretended to be furious; he froze then stuck his chin and chest out as though taking an attack position, his eyes popping. Eugene made a funny reply, and both men screamed with laughter. The others at the table, who had been watching, also folded with laughter.9 Eugene explained to me that he would never do this with anyone he had not known for a long time, especially a person of that man’s age, out of respect for them. To begin the interview, I pulled out my tape recorder and notebook, but Eugene hesitated, indicating that he had work to do and could not really do an interview here and now. Looking around, I got a sense of why he was refusing. Although he was sitting behind the bar, he was sat virtually in the middle of the building, in clear sight of the kitchen as well as the hall. The kitchen staff as well as the other men in the bar had already begun to glance half distrustfully, half curiously in our direction. Clearly, there was something suspicious about a guy with a tape recorder. This is especially so when that guy is white, which became clear to me much later. I had been hanging out at Kwakoe Podium for quite a while and had always talked to Ruben and John when in the office upstairs. The men shared the office with three other people, all of whom I had talked to except Sonia, the administrator. Whenever I was in the room, she seemed profoundly disinterested in talking to me. Almost demonstratively, she continued to play a card game on her computer during my conversations with the men. It is not that she was unfriendly, but she made a point of not being interested in chatting. During a long conversation with Ruben, we once turned our attention to bakru, by many understood to be a particularly nasty figure in the Afro-Surinamese cosmology. Although religious experts argue whether bakru’s nature is indeed evil, he can be manipulated to do the most unspeakable things to other people, including the planters, who were in fact quite afraid of this. Sonia was seemingly absorbed by the card game, but I could see her beginning to shift with discomfort in her chair. Eventually, she could no longer hold back and burst out to Ruben: ‘Don’t tell him all of this, he will only use it against us!’ At Kwakoe Podium, Eugene may have had other reasons for not wanting to talk to me, but gradually it became clear that talking to outsiders about cultural matters was certainly not appreciated. As Ineke van Wetering has argued, ‘[c]ultural knowledge among Creoles is regarded as cultural capital, a source of power, not to be divulged to all and sundry’ (Van Wetering 1997: 192). He essentially

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demonstrated what I have called an aesthetics of reticence, reinforced by the social codes of Kwakoe Podium. Despite his refusal to do the interview, Eugene and I began to chat when I had put away my fieldwork gear. I told him a bit about my research, and immediately he became quite enthusiastic about my attempts to learn Sranantongo. I told him about my admiration for the language, especially because it has so many different layers and registers, including what is known in Suriname as bigisma taki, which the old/wise folks speak and about which Ruben had told me: ‘I speak Sranantongo alright, but when I hear the old folks talk I have no idea what is going on!’ Indeed, people would often say things like: ‘Well, you may know how to speak some Sranantongo, but if we don’t want you to understand, you won’t.’ Bigisma taki is highly metaphorical and takes considerable skill and cultural knowledge to master. The central aspect is odo (proverbs), and there are literally thousands of them (Neijhorst 2002). Those who master Bigisma taki need to know precisely what odo to use in which situation, a skill that comes with considerable status. An influential member of the district council of Zuidoost who was a hard worker but known to enjoy the limelight came into the office one day at Kwakoe Podium and started complaining about his workload (I had heard remarks that he was forging ahead too much). In reply, one of the men raised his hand to get everybody’s attention and said: ‘Ba suku, ba feni, ba tyari’ (You seek, you find, so you should carry too). Immediately, the room exploded with cheers, laughter and clapping. Exasperated, the politician fell into a chair, raised his hands in surrender and sighed: ‘This man is stabbing under water’, meaning that you’d better watch out for this one. The enthusiasm in the room derived from having heard figurative language that showed considerable knowledge and from which emerged a sense of community and of sharing knowledge that only the initiated knew. As our conversation at Kwakoe Podium continued, Eugene let me in on more cultural knowledge concerning proverbs, at one point raising his hand to draw my attention to the music playing on the stereo. The refrain of the song, he explained, was ‘a no nyang me nyang di mi mengre so’, which literally translates as: ‘it is not a lack of food that makes me look meagre like that’. When I looked at him blankly, he asked: ‘You know the egret, right? The egret is meagre, right? But he stands next to the water, so he has enough to eat. So he is not meagre because of a lack of food. So this is what the proverb says: things are not always what they seem.’ There was not much time to mull this over, as with the next song beginning Eugene

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again directed my attention to the lyrics: ‘tan teri a no don’. Eugene explained: ‘Maybe I’m not saying anything, but that does not mean that I’m dumb.’ The messages encoded in the music are, at least for Eugene’s generation, a binding codex of being in the world that is heeded in everyday practice – music informs and is informed by the practice of everyday life. The proverb documented by Glenda Carpio (2008, xiii/ix) at the beginning of this chapter, moreover, reflects the reticence that has emerged from slavery. It shows that rather than hegemonic repression or traumatic displacement, some proverbs may also be read as very political statements. The obligation to be reticent is summed up most poignantly in a proverb documented by Gloria Wekker: ‘When a friend comes to your home / Give him food to eat / Give him water to drink / But don’t tell him your inside story’ (Wekker 2006: 95).

Incorporating Kaskawina The meaning of the proverbs, which often conveyed this sense of reticence, corresponds to the modes in which kaskawina music is performed. Although it is a popular kind of music performed in public, Kaskawina is marked by an aura of secrecy, which became clear the first night of my fieldwork in the inconspicuous café in Amsterdam Oost. It seemed a subterranean world of music existed almost out of view of the rest of the world. As my fieldwork progressed, I became close with Bigi Ten (lit. ‘Big Time’), the kaskawina band Edouard played in, and joined them during rehearsals, performances and nights out. I even managed to organize a trip abroad to Germany for them, which earned me the title of manager buitenland (‘manager of international relations’) on their album release. I met the band for the first time on a night when Edouard took me to Bigi Ten’s rehearsal studio in the basement of a former garage in De Bijlmer. The studio was only a short walk from our apartment, but we took a snorder nonetheless. We stepped out of the taxi in front of one of the old parking garages De Bijlmer had been known for and that had now become notorious for a dark and seedy underworld.10 The garages in De Bijlmer are colossal concrete slabs, about a hundred meters long and three to four levels high. Many of them were torn down during the renewal process, but the few remaining ones have been repurposed. A lot of sometimes unlicensed charismatic churches, often West African, have settled in these along with a well-known Maroon club and a variety

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of other cultural associations. Maintenance has been largely discontinued, and so many garages are beginning to disintegrate, creating an air of disarray and abandonment at first glance, despite their vibrancy inside. The studio kept a low profile; there was no sign and only a small door that looked like the door of an abandoned maintenance closet. A group of men was standing on the porch in front of it smoking and debating the latest politics and gossip both from Suriname and the Netherlands. To Edouard, this was, as he put it, his second home, and he entered the studio self-assuredly. The studio was a very masculine place. The only woman there was the wife of the owner, Tony, a HindostaniSurinamese man of maybe sixty years of age. Tony’s wife ran a small bar in the entrance hall where she sold Surinamese snacks such as teloh and banana and cassava crisps, as well as beer and soda. Young men were hanging out, some making phone calls and some drinking beer and discussing things like women and politics. On the wall, there was a pinboard with dozens of business cards of the various bands that rehearsed there. A tiny TV set was showing soccer. When we entered, Tony, who acted somewhat like a patriarch, was just finishing negotiations with a teenage boy about lending him equipment, sealing the deal with the words: ‘If you find anybody who is willing to lend you equipment at this time of day for 100 euros, I’ll gladly pay you 200, cash in hand.’ He was not just the owner of the equipment and the studio but also in charge of making dreams of stardom come true. Calling Tony ‘Papi’, Edouard made clear the power in the familiarity he had with him. He announced that Tony was his great friend (mijn grote vriend), by which he seemed to allude to both the closeness of the relationship as well as the size of the man. I felt far from home indeed. If it hadn’t been for Edouard’s company, I would not have entered such a place, and I did not fail to notice the many distrustful looks in my direction. People stopped doing what they were doing when I entered, and somebody even told Edouard in Sranantongo that he should have vergaderd (conferred) with them before he brought me here. Edouard tried to appease people by explaining that I was his good friend who was writing a book about Surinamese music. The explanation only partially satisfied people, and one of the band leaders asked me directly if I was a tax officer sent by the government. The owner, in turn, was eager to downplay the situation: ‘All these people think you are with the police, because white people never come here.’ He then added: ‘als

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je boter op je hoofd hebt, ga je niet in de zon staan’ (lit. ‘if you had butter on your head you wouldn’t go standing in the sun’). An interesting dynamic was unfolded by my presence in the studio. There was a general sense that the studio needed to be protected from outside interference. Not only was I not known to people there (though as I became more familiar with them, I was included more and more), I also had no obvious business in the studio, as I was not a musician myself. One of the most central aspects of my foreignness, however, was my skin colour. It was eminently clear that whiteness was associated with the outside world. In other words, there was a strong tendency to equate blackness with intimacy and cognizance, and whiteness with strangeness and even danger. Whiteness, in other words, is of central importance for an aesthetics of reticence.

Secret Stories and Moral Groundings Both Edouard and Tony assured me that it was OK to walk around freely as long as I was with them. Tony even suggested that I ‘admit’ that I was the police because nobody would believe me anyway. They assured me that I was under their protection, and Edouard insisted on showing me the rehearsal rooms and recording studio in the basement. Despite its somewhat improvised appearance, the recording studio really was quite professional, sound-proofed and with a 24-channel recording outfit separated by a window from the actual recording chamber, just like the ones in music clips. The five rehearsal rooms, also sound-proofed, were filled with high-tech equipment and were all occupied with bands. Edouard insisted on showing me each of the rooms, and as we entered I received many more distrustful looks. I was nevertheless glad to be somewhere that would not have been accessible on my own; this way, I was able to experience an aesthetics of reticence that marks kaskawina music. More importantly, however, I learned how this aesthetics is entwined with a sense of immediacy of the past. Down here, in the basement of the garage, it seemed as though the veil (Du Bois 2008) had been lifted. This was the place where the story of slavery continued to be told. In the first rehearsal studio, a Kaskawina band was playing full throttle. The seven middle-aged guys were all deeply immersed in the music. I could not understand the lyrics and so I asked Edouard. Shouting in my ear, he said: ‘Den doe mi ma mi no man bari’ (They are harming me but I cannot scream). I was intrigued. On the way home, I asked Edouard about the song and if they had written it

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themselves. But it was a song from the ancestors, he said – a song from the times of slavery. To me, the harm mentioned in the song spoke unmistakably of bondage and oppression and brought to mind the kind of punishment the abolitionist Thomas Branagan wrote about in his book The Penitential Tyrant (Wood 2003: 424 ff.).11 The book shows an iron contraption resembling a mask that was strapped round a person’s head, a metal rod protruding into the mouthpiece to keep the person from speaking or even swallowing – a very literal mode of silencing. But Edouard was not thinking of the harm done to the enslaved by planters and graphic depictions of punishment that have been widely used in the commemoration of slavery (Wood 2000). When I asked Edouard who was meant by ‘den’ (they) in the song, he replied: ‘Bad people who do black magic. They have done something so the person is suffering but he cannot scream. It’s voodoo.’ In other words, Edouard was thinking of witchcraft, not slavery. ‘Witchcraft’, however, is very much entangled with slavery in Suriname. ‘Voodoo’, for instance, was dismissed by missionaries, who saw the Afro-Surinamese Winti religion as dangerous ‘superstition’. One might say that witchcraft is always political (Geschiere 1997), and in Suriname it necessarily implied an engagement with slavery and colonial rule (Thoden van Velzen and Wetering 2004). As we have seen above, the enslaved employed supernatural forces like the bakru to harm the planters, and the planters were often afraid of these forces. Perhaps even more frequently, and intensified by the oppressive conditions of slavery, these forces were also wielded against other slaves. In other words, the song may very well refer to the totality of oppression during slavery, which goes beyond the duality of master and slave, oppressors and oppressed; a kind of power that fundamentally destabilizes solidarity, as Primo Levi and others have argued. Initially, the members of Bigi Ten claimed that their songs were mainly about love; the more I got to know them, however, the more they revealed to me the deeper layers of meaning their songs conveyed. I became particularly close with Tom, the band’s spiritual leader and songwriter. Tom was a middle-aged man born in Suriname, and Edouard had urged me to talk to him because he knew ‘cultural things’. He worked as a bonuman, both in the Netherlands and in Suriname, and we had to postpone a meeting for several months because he went to Suriname on spiritual business. He told me that he had always been interested in Afro-Surinamese culture and had always associated with the old folk, who taught him everything he knows.

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Sitting down with Tom in Edouard’s living room, I had asked him to talk to me about the CD they were recording because I only had a vague sense that the songs were something to do with slavery. Tom told me that the CD relates the story of the band’s genesis. As its title announces, this is a story of alienation: Bun Kompe Tron Feyanti, which translates as ‘Good Mates Become Enemies’. Tom along with another band member, Patrick, had been playing in a band that had become quite successful. At some point, however, they fell out with the rest of the band, who accused them of all sorts of things, including plagiarism and embezzlement. They founded Bigi Ten to continue on their own. The CD is at once a musical rendition of this story and the story of the distant past. Indeed, through the music, present and past begin to merge. The songs utilize old, highly metaphorical language and references to iconography, which Tom told me were arranged in such a way so as to fit the story he wanted to tell. The CD opens with a Christian choral that praises and thanks God, with the story of the band beginning with the second song, called Lai na boto (Load the boat). In the song, the protagonist wonders about the betrayal he has suffered: ‘who did this to me? Who has taken my story?’12 Devastated, he decides to leave: ‘a big tree has fallen and broken by gold wash trough. Load the boat and leave, I will work no more.’13 Not all is lost, however, for at the end of the song the protagonist insists that ‘a big day shall come’.14 Tom and I discussed its meaning. Clumsily, I asked him whether the song was about slavery and whether it was about escaping from the plantation and he told me: No! I don’t think so. It is more about, well, na suma ben du mi so, that’s something from the times of slavery, for sure. And bigi bon fadon, e broko mi lonton, lai a boto go gwe, at that time, it was already emancipation, I think. It was already there. I think there was already freedom, ’cause everybody had, well, this song is more for people who were working in the woods, balata [rubber] bleeders, gold diggers, you know. That’s how they earned their living. But number three is more related to the binnenland [outback]. The Saramacca maroons. You know, and bigi dey sa de ya na, that’s a bit before slavery [sic], when emancipation was about to come; so they were singing, my God, free at last! Bigi dey, a great day is coming when we will be free. You see? I just made a repertoire, let’s say. But they are old songs, you know. So I formulate my own texts. Cause for me this is a whole story, basically, ay. Basically, I made this poti [song] like this, well, not combined [composed] it myself, but I put it together like this, er, ’cause for me, my thing, I went

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through some things up to last year, and that’s why I formulated this poku [music] like this. Cause then I sang [begins to speak more softly] in a different band, let’s say, and it didn’t go well. And bigi dey sa de ya na, now I have my own band, let’s say, and it is going well. This is my way of putting it, basically. In terms of these potis [songs], you know. MB: So, the way you put them together, that’s yourself, but, for example, this sentence, bigi dey sa de ya na, is from the olden times? T: Yes, the olden times. Cause there will be a day that we’ll be free. So, I mean, the slaves, let’s say. You see?

In the songs of Bigi Ten, the biography of the band members and the history of the enslaved begin to merge. In the music, a situation of distrust is underscored by the third song on the CD, which is about slander: ‘They are ruining my name. Why are they walking around gossiping? . . . I did not make an obia [fetish], I did not make a herbal bath. Why are they giving me a bad name?’15 There is also reticence and jealousy in the song but a sense that this oppression will end someday; they will be emancipated. The nightmarish black magic that pervades the song seems to conjure the horrific situation from which the enslaved eventually emerged. Hence the aesthetics of the music here is not to be understood in terms of artistic sublimation, in which the experience of distrust, accusation and terror is domesticated into the experience of art. Rather, the aesthetics ought to be understood as a means of tracing not only historical events but making these events meaningful in the present as a binding moral framework.

Class and the Politics of Distinction Although the terror of slavery reverberates in many odos, this is not always palpable in Bigi Ten’s songs. What all odos have in common is that they provide social commentary and guidelines for moral behaviour. Indeed, their efficacy derives precisely from their capacity to deal with the historical experience of terror through their pervasive presence in everyday life. As Gloria Wekker shows, women’s AfroSurinamese expressive culture is central to self-understanding as part of the black diaspora (Wekker 2006: 111). She argues that: [o]do serve multiple functions: first, they encapsulate orally transmitted wisdom. Second, they were used in the communication that women had with each other by means of the angisa/headdresses they wore. . . . Third,

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they promote living memory in an oral culture, and, fourth, they provide a subordinated group’s perspective on the world, which is often a contestation of society’s dominant values. (Wekker 2006: 111)

Wekker shows how these expressive forms are classed and gendered. I think paying close attention to this classed, gendered and raced commentary on the dominant values of a society (whether the Surinamese or the Dutch society) is crucial for deciphering the political position it conveys. As Eugene and I were talking about Sranantongo and the complex cultural skills and deep learning it takes to master its different registers, he mentioned the expression pras’oso afkati. According to Eugene, this proverb refers to someone being out of line, or not knowing their place: ‘He did not go to university, but he is opening his mouth’, a proverb that Yvette also seemed to have taken to heart. Elections were coming up in Suriname, and she certainly had her opinion about them. But she cut the discussion short by saying: ‘Did I go to university? No. I never went beyond primary school, so I keep my teeth firmly clenched.’ In Suriname, pras’oso (lit. backyard-house) are small houses in the at times very extensive back yards of town houses. These houses are often no more than wooden shacks, which had typically been the homes of the servants. During slavery, this is where the so-called ‘house slaves’ had their quarters. The shacks have become a symbol for poverty and low status. Afkati is the Sranan term for lawyer. The expression thus reminds the addressee of their position whenever they are felt to have acted or spoken above their station. I learned that for many, proverbs like this are not just sayings but rather reflections of history and experience; in this case, slavery. To a certain extent, slavery is not an issue people talk about lightly, if at all.16 A kind of trauma that has been passed on down the generations may well be one reason for this. However, as previously discussed, other factors certainly play a role. When I approached people for an interview, in the majority of cases I was redirected to somebody ‘who knows about slavery’, as they thought I was after some historical expert’s account. I also thought their refusal to talk was because I was white, an outsider, being nosey about issues that were none of my business. However, even when people got to know me better and we had established a level of trust, they still would not talk to me about slavery. With Yvette, for example, I had long conversations about the pain she still felt about her husband, who had passed away a few years before. She told me how after his

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death she had suffered to the point of losing her mind, a period in her life she did not find easy to talk about, especially to a stranger. Hence, if she would not talk about slavery to me, trust certainly was not the issue. When I asked her about slavery, she genuinely wanted to help me. However, instead of sitting down with me to talk about how she personally felt about slavery, she said: ‘Well, I am always thinking: who can I send you to who knows about these things. Someone you could talk to for your research. I am really racking my brains, but I can’t come up with anyone.’ In the case of Yvette, and many others I became close to, not talking about slavery did not seem to be due to traumatization. In Yvette’s view, it was not her place to talk about historical matters. To her, it would have been pretentious to figure as an expert in my academic research: she was only an ordinary woman trying to get by. History was for the experts. Of course, this class consciousness can itself be traced back to colonialism and slavery, and is cemented in songs, proverbs and dance.

Conclusion Talking about slavery can be difficult and painful. But pain may not be the only language in which slavery is rendered, and a terminology of trauma may thus be insufficient to capture the complex and embodied ways in which people relate to a painful past. I have shown that cultural forms and practices are shaped in a certain way by what I have called aesthetics of reticence. As I also hope to have shown, this has important consequences for the mobilization of Afro-Surinamese culture in the domain of public memory and heritage politics. There is a great risk involved in pushing these cultural forms and practices to the foreground, because to a certain extent, this necessitates the articulation of things that are maybe felt to be better left unsaid. In terms of politics, the relation of kaskawina music today to the songs sung during slavery and from which it emerged is not a straightforward one. I have argued in this chapter that this relation is best understood in terms of aesthetics. Afro-Surinamese music is not merely analogous or similar in content – it has a diachronic relation to slavery, or is one of traces. The music performs the double movement of the trace. The movement of music across the Atlantic drew a political map in the domain of cultural heritage. Such movement carried with it a history that is accessible only through a practice of

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tracing – of piecing together a past that exists in the clues, cultural codes and metaphors the music performs.

Notes   1. I will come back to the issue of cultural experts in the following chapter.   2. I later learned that a white guy on his own is not suspicious for snorders, because police agents are ‘not crazy enough to work on their own.’ A white guy together with a black guy, however, is too obviously police.   3. In this case, this has to do with the complex relationships between AfroDutch and African postmigrants in Amsterdam Zuidoost, in which slavery plays a central and recurrent role. In the next chapter, I will look more closely at the ways in which slavery informs the social relations between Afro-Dutch and African postmigrants.   4. Indeed, when I sketched the idea to colleagues over lunch that AfroSurinamese music might constitute an implicit kind of social knowledge, I was immediately accused of ‘over-interpreting’. They were convinced that I was seeing ghosts.   5. ‘Het besef daarmee hun muzikale erfgoed op Surinaamse bodem achter te moeten laten was een pijnlijk en ondraaglijk idee voor hun.’ https:// www.facebook.com/pages/CoronaBand/158997750802136?sk=info, accessed 13 January 2013.  6. Although the Maroons of Suriname did succeed in enforcing such negotiations.   7. See Mintz (1995). Van Wetering (1995: 213) argued that a focus on AfroAmerican cultures as resistance had lost its explanatory power, but she did see the ‘continuity of cultural code’ in terms of class struggle, the maintenance of ethnic boundaries, and a survival strategy for individuals (ibid.). As early as 1995, Troulliot argued that ‘resistance can be easily trivialized nowadays. Everything can become resistance to the point that we are not sure whether or not the word stands for an empirical generalization, an analytical category, or a vague yet fashionable label for unrelated situations’ (Trouillot 1995b: 9).   8. Von Sack. 1810. ‘A narrative of a voyage to Surinam; of a residence there during 1805, 1806 and 1807; and the author’s return to Europe by the way of North America’. London, p. 62, as cited in Van Stipriaan 1993.   9. In such exchanges, an imagery of violence often plays a crucial role. For example, a reply to a challenging statement could be: ‘M’e pansbok’ yu’ (I will punish you with the Spanish rack). The Spanish rack was a type of punishment by which a person’s hands and feet were tied, then their knees bent, and the arms folded around the knees. Then, a pole was stuck between the knees and the arms, so the person was completely immobilized. Then the person was beaten with sticks or whipped. The procedure was repeated on both sides of the body. See (Carpio 2008) for a study of violence and humour.

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10. These garages were inspired by the utopian vision of Le Corbusier, in which the automobile played a central role. At the peak of a general belief in progress, the car was seen as a central object in the society of the future. The garages in De Bijlmer were constructed close to apartment buildings so people could access their cars directly, as it were, from their living rooms. In contrast to light-flooded modernist phantasies, the garages soon became seedy and dangerous places reigned by the underworld. At some point, they had become too dangerous to be used for their original purpose as places to safely park one’s car. 11. It is difficult to separate in these accounts documentation, literary sublimation and ideological thrust. Marcus Wood, for example, points out that ‘[w]hat [Branagan] wrote is not, perhaps, as important as the manner in which he published it. In the context of the abolitionists’ later use of graphic methods Branagan was innovative, and his most significant contribution to the abolition movement was his ability to show the uses to which wood engraving could be put as both a satiric and a didactic tool’ (Wood 2003: 425). 12. ‘Na suma ben du mi so? Na suma ben teki mi tori? Na suma ben teki mi tori, tya go a doro?’ 13. ‘Bigi bon fadon, broko mi lonton. Lai a boto go gwe mi n’e wroko moro.’ 14. ‘Bigi dey, bigi dey sa de ya na.’ 15. ‘Mi tapu mi nen den de. Fa den waka y taki? . . . A no obia mi meki. A no watra mi teki. San y de mek den djen por nen?’ 16. On the other hand, in some contexts, slavery can be talked about in quite explicit, even provocative ways. For example, it is mobilized in specific, unpersonal political situations. Talking about the meaning of slavery in one’s own life is a different thing, however.

Figure 5.1.  Angisa headdresses at a birthday party, 2009. Photograph by Markus Balkenhol.

5 Doing Cultural Heritage Race, Gender and the Politics of Authentication

Sex and the Other The advertising brochures and news items about De Bijlmer in the early 1970s were usually aimed at ‘families’– that is, a heterosexual couple with two children. The conversations I had with early residents of De Bijlmer, however, suggest that next to ‘families’ there were also single parents, singles and couples without children who moved there (Dukes 2007: 229–30). Often, these people were looking to escape the social control of their parents’ homes and the more intimate city centre. The emptiness of the place, people told me, offered certain liberties and room for alternative lifestyles. Artists found a kind of freedom in Zuidoost they had lacked in the centre of Amsterdam, as did many gays. Hendrik, one of the first inhabitants of De Bijlmer, remembered in an interview how right at the beginning he wanted to set up a running club. Sporting facilities were lacking, but there was an abundance of open spaces and fallows. He distributed flyers announcing the establishment of a ‘male jogging club’, meeting on Wednesday mornings in front of the apartment building Hofgeest. He tells me, ‘Well, all of a sudden all these men started to show up, who were clearly after anything except running.’ Apparently, these men had read the ad as code for a sexual encounter. It was not long before Amsterdam Zuidoost gained a reputation for being sexually charged. The notorious Blue Movie (1971), produced by Pim de la Parra and Wim Verstappen, was shot in

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Amsterdam Zuidoost. It is one of the most popular Dutch movies of all time, and much of its popularity is owed to its explicit sex scenes, for which it was initially banned by the film commission. In the film, the high-rise apartment buildings constitute one of the central dramaturgic means to convey sexual liberty. The anonymity of these social microcosms and the proximity of bodies they provide facilitate the sexual encounters in an almost inevitable way. The film was the perfect foil for debates on the sexual mores of Dutch society. This early reputation resonated in later, racialized, images of vice in De Bijlmer. In 2005, an investigation by the University of Amsterdam about street- and hidden prostitution had chanced upon young girls and women of 15 to 20 years of age performing sexual acts for cash. The research report stated that: With considerable effort we finally managed to get in touch with young girls who are actively working as prostitutes. These ‘young girls’ are generally between 15 and 20 years of age, sometimes younger, sometimes a little older. They are usually not addicted to (hard) drugs and often still live at home. They are sometimes called ‘blowgirls’ or ‘fuckgirls’. They have diverse ethnic backgrounds. Probably Surinamese and Antillean girls constitute a majority, but also girls of African, Central American, and Dutch descent earn money this way. . . . We cannot give a reliable estimate about the extent, but from the fact that we had to perform an intensive search we can conclude that it is certainly not a common phenomenon. (Korf et al. 2005)1

The researchers’ sketch of the phenomenon is quite calm, contemplating whether these findings ought to be seen as a problem in the first place. They methodically emphasize the mixed background of the girls engaging in prostitution as well as the limited incidence of the phenomenon. Despite the report’s sobriety, an intense, nationwide moral panic erupted after its publication about the so-called ‘Breezer girls’, who supposedly would have sex with anyone for as little as a bottle of alcopop (Krebbekx et al. 2013). Alarmed by the report, Hannah Belliot, then at Amsterdam city council, ordered a more thorough investigation. Her decision to order a new report, in turn, was picked up by the media, who caused ‘a flood of negative news about teen prostitution’ (Van der Walle et al. 2010: 13). Although it was emphasized time and again that the phenomenon was isolated, it seemed clear to all that ‘sexual morals are slipping in De Bijlmer’ (NRC Handelsblad, 12 May 2006).2 Like the apparent small scale of the phenomenon, the researchers’ insistence that such sexual practices are to be found among all ethnic

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groups was soon forgotten when newspaper journalists descended on Amsterdam Zuidoost to exclusively interview young black girls, who provided journalistic titbits such as ‘This is De Bijlmer, you know’.3 The phenomenon, though clearly not widespread, had become a ‘black’ thing that typified Amsterdam Zuidoost as sexually immoral. With the concept of the ‘Breezer-girl’, these reports reproduce an old fantasy about, and desire for, black sexuality, which imagines black women as loose and available. bell hooks has described this as ‘eating the other’ – a sexualized desire, an ‘obsession with the white consumption of the dark Other’ (hooks 1992: 30). Amsterdam Zuidoost, already framed as sexually licentious, was now associated with colonial ideas of black hypersexuality (Partridge 2012; Stoler 1995, 2002). Colonial views of black hypersexuality have worked their way into fiction such as Robert Vuisje’s Alleen Maar Nette Mensen (2008). In this semi-autobiography, the protagonist, David Samuels, is a young Jewish man who grew up in Amsterdam Zuid, one of the richest neighbourhoods in Amsterdam. Bored with his parents’ and friends’ conservative lifestyle, he decides to realize his desire for black women. He throws himself into the nightlife of Amsterdam Zuidoost, which Vuisje portrays as extremely promiscuous: here, a simple ‘how are you honey’ seems enough to provide easy access to all kinds of sexual encounters. Simultaneously appalled by and drawn towards this casually boundless sexuality, he embarks on a search for a black woman that is both intellectual and vulgar. His search is in vain, however, because apparently a combination of this kind of sexuality and brains does not exist. Expelled from his social milieu, he remains torn between his boredom and the desire for the black other. Perhaps even more so than the novel itself, its reception reproduced stereotypes of black sexuality. The novel won the prestigious Gouden Uil book prize. In his laudatory speech, the chairman of the jury said that the book won the prize because Vuisje is writing in a language that ‘swings like an African tit, in a rhythm that is tighter than a black butt in a leopard legging a size too small’.4 This view of black sexuality articulates colonial fantasies of black hypersexuality, tropical sensuousness and sexual precociousness (Kempadoo 2004: 1), epitomized in the figure of the black Venus (Sharpley-Whiting 1999; Wekker 2016). In the colonial and imperial imagination, sexuality was not only a marker of difference but also one of inferiority that was pitted against the imagined modesty of Europeans (MacClintock 1995). Such a view is in itself a form of

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tracing the colonial past and slavery that reproduces a racial geography and normalizes inequality (Van Gent and Jaffe 2017). Gender relations during slavery, and especially after emancipation, were an important theme in twentieth-century scholarship. Especially earlier twentieth-century studies of gender in the Caribbean have produced the image of a specific type of sexuality in which ‘women’s sexuality and sexual agency are in some instances pathologized, often simplified or obscured, while masculine heterosexual, polygynous behavior is privileged and normalized’ (Kempadoo 2004: 21). These colonial stereotypes of black sexuality gloss over the far more complex ways gender and sexuality are experienced and discussed in Amsterdam Zuidoost. A comprehensive study of sexuality in Amsterdam Zuidoost would merit an investigation in its own right, which is beyond the scope of this chapter. Here I want to explore one dimension of this theme, namely the intersections of sexuality/gender and cultural heritage. As I will show, my interlocutors engage with these images of black masculinity and femininity. For them, slavery forms an important backdrop to how gender and sexuality are lived and discussed. At the same time, they trace slavery in different ways, following, as it were, different clues.

Gender and Commemorating Slavery In the weeks before July 1, glossy posters and flyers begin to appear all over Amsterdam, announcing the Keti Koti festival, the celebration of the abolition of slavery. Keti Koti, which means ‘broken chains’ or ‘the chains have been broken’ in Sranantongo, has been celebrated in Suriname every year since the abolition of slavery in 1863. Since the creation of the national slavery memorial and NiNsee, the National Institute for the Study of Slavery and its Legacies, in 2002 and 2003 respectively, the celebration has been turned into a large open-air festival, with 30,000 visitors. The festival in Amsterdam’s Oosterpark is organized professionally by entertainment organizations. There is a tight schedule of events, and the owners of various stalls have to buy licenses in advance and display them visibly on their stalls; some of them complained about the high fees they are asked to pay. The day begins in the morning with a Bigi Spikri (lit. big mirror), a parade of several hundred people walking approximately two kilometres from City Hall to Oosterpark. The parade, which takes about an hour, is an impressive event that never fails to draw the attention of the media and bystanders, who cheer enthusiastically but may not

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always know what the occasion is. In 2010, I saw how the police blocked streets, congesting the traffic and drawing resentment from some bystanders. As one middle-aged man explained to me, ‘I have no problem with the celebration of the abolition of slavery, but can’t they stay in the park, where it doesn’t disturb anyone?!’ (they can’t, as we have seen in Chapter 1; being visible is the whole point). The participants of the Bigi Spikri are mainly Afro-Surinamese women, dressed up in beautiful and intricate koto and angisa. As mentioned in Chapter 3, the koto is an opulent dress that was said to have been designed by the jealous wives of the planters, who, I was told, wanted to conceal the beautiful bodies of the black women from their husbands’ lustful gazes. The angisa, a complexly folded headscarf, is a form of art that takes considerable skill to master. There are literally hundreds of ways of folding it, and every design has a different coded meaning (Van Russel-Henar 2008); it is a form of communication that in the olden days allowed enslaved women to convey secret messages. Before the festival begins, the parade makes its way towards the slavery monument, which is tucked away in the south-western corner of Oosterpark. For the occasion, a small stage is set up at the head of the monument, and in front of the stage, there are hundreds of chairs arranged in neat rows. The women of the parade always take a seat in the front rows, which are reserved for them, next to the high dignitaries, typically (but not always) the Prime Minister, the Mayor of Amsterdam, ministers, state secretaries, Members of Parliament, members of the city council and other VIPs. The ceremony is inaugurated by a libation, which is usually poured by Marian Markelo, one of the most important Afro-Surinamese spiritual leaders. Then, some of the dignitaries give speeches in which they remind people of the importance of this commemoration and pledge never to let something like slavery happen again. After the ceremony, the park begins to fill with festival-goers, most of whom will not have been very interested in the official ceremony at the monument but are seeking a nice day of hanging out on the grass and enjoying the food or a cool beverage from the stalls. In 2010, the smell of marihuana filled the summer air. The lines in front of the food stalls were lengthening quickly. On a corner, a man had covered the grass with his paintings, trying to make a buck. One of them showed what is known as slavenhutten (slave huts), little wooden shacks in which the enslaved used to live. He told me that he had made the painting in prison, on the day his mother died; that day, he had had a vision of the slave huts, and later his brother visited to tell him that his mother had passed away.

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On the central lawn, the main stage was coming to life. The line-up that year included Ellen ten Damme and Do, both white Dutch singer-songwriters; Berget Lewis, an Afro-Surinamese popular singer; Tweede Kamer, an indie-pop band; and Maikal X, an AfroSurinamese solo artist. Three other, smaller stages were hidden away behind the main stage. One of these stages featured a photo exhibition by Afro-Surinamese photographer Nardo Brudet and a programme for the youth, including debates, hip-hop acts and spoken word poetry. There was also a stage for children, where a storyteller read stories of the spider Anansi. The third stage known as kas di kabra, a Papiamentu expression for the house of the ancestors, hosted different ‘cultural’ bands, many of them Surinamese playing kaskawina but also Surinamese Amerindian music. The bands included A Sa Go, who performed the spiritual soko psalms; Shirito Yare, a well-known Surinamese Amerindian group, and Corona, who were arguable the hottest kaskawina band of the moment. A decade before this, such a large festival commemorating slavery and celebrating its abolition would have been unthinkable in the Netherlands. The current size of the festival alone makes clear that slavery has without doubt entered the arena of Dutch memory culture and cultural heritage, taking its permanent place in historical and heritage canons (Horton and Kardux 2004; Oostindie 2009). Such a festival has forced the state to ‘face up’ to its past (Oostindie 2001). Slavery has become a kind of symbolic capital, and the festival constitutes a marketplace of countless food stalls, bookshops and spiritual entrepreneurs of the Winti religion. The yearly celebration of the Keti Koti festival is often framed as ‘blackening’ historical narratives about the Dutch nation that have long been imagined as ‘white’ (Raphael-Hernandez 2004). The festival is thus part of a wider European trend. As Jo Littler has argued in the case of Great Britain, ‘British Heritage’ has long been seen as ‘a process in which white (and often upper- or middle-class) Englishness is used to define the past’ (Littler and Naidoo 2005: 1). By the first decade of the twenty-first century, it had become clear that ‘the peculiar synonymy of the terms European and white cannot continue’ (Gilroy 2004: xii). Despite such a growing unease about an implicit conflation of whiteness and Europeanness, ‘all across Europe, identity, belonging – and consequently the imperilled integrity of national states – are being communicated through the language and symbols of absolute ethnicity and racialized difference’ (Gilroy 2004: xii). The massive celebration of the abolition of slavery has not sufficed to change white normativity. Even if the Prime Minister,

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Mark Rutte, can seemingly no longer afford to ignore the event, it is the same Prime Minister who signed for the termination of all subsidies for NiNsee. His politics make his pledge that slavery will never be forgotten and will always have a place in Dutch memory culture sound stale at best, and cynical at worst. As a consequence, the event is felt by many to be unbearably hypocritical. Roy, for example, referred to the festival in Oosterpark contemptuously as de braderie (the fair). I agree with analyses of how cultural heritage both reproduces and potentially challenges racialized difference and white normativity, and much of this book has explored – traced – some of the complex ways in which race operates. In this chapter, I therefore want to look more closely at the intersections of race and gender in cultural heritage. What I find striking in the celebration of Keti Koti is not only the project of ‘blackening’ Dutch national history but the particular place of women in this project. The festival, like the monument and its so-called ‘dynamic part’ NiNsee, is the outcome of the initiative by a black women’s organization, Sophiedela, chaired by a feminist activist, Barryl Biekman. At the festival itself, too, women play a central role. The Bigi Spikri is not only one of the most prominent elements of the celebration, visibly and audibly intervening in the space of the city, but women are its most prominent participants. The bystanders admire their colourful and impressive dresses, complete with intricately folded angisa headscarves. The central part of the ceremony at the monument, the pouring of the libation, is also the domain of women. In this chapter, I therefore would like to draw attention to the ways in which race and gender intersect in the redefinition of slavery as national cultural heritage. I will build on my analysis of AfroSurinamese music in the previous chapter and look at how male musicians feel pushed to redefine their masculinity in new ways, informed by the increasingly binding gendered and racialized regime of cultural heritage. As I will show, new conflicts emerge when implicit or even secret knowledge is subjected to regimes of cultural heritage that presuppose publicity.

Heritage Politics Music has been a central element in the celebration of abolition ever since 1863. In 1863, the festivities went on for days (Van Stipriaan

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2004), and the echoes of these celebrations now resonate in the commemorations of slavery in the Netherlands: music still plays a central role, but now it has become part of heritage politics. What this means became clear during my fieldwork at and around the Keti Koti festival in 2010. Significantly, what was debated most heatedly in the aftermath of the event were not, or at least not only, the speeches of the dignitaries at the official ceremony, or the way in which slavery figured in the national imagination, whether it was represented correctly, or whether it had become sufficiently part of national heritage. There would have been sufficient cause for such debates. In 2010, neither the Prime Minister nor the Queen, indeed, not even a minister gave speeches at the ceremony. The state was represented by second-row officials, but this did not cause much debate. Instead of a fierce critique of the fading political enthusiasm, what came under attack was the organization of the event itself. The lack of high-profile political representation notwithstanding, the event remains the focal point when it comes to the commemoration of slavery in the public sphere. There is always a report, often with photographs, about the event in all national and local newspapers, often on the front page. It is the largest commemoration of slavery (there are many local ones on a smaller scale) and the best advertised. In other words, the Keti Koti festival continues to offer considerable symbolic capital for anyone performing or otherwise participating in it. For the artists participating in the event as representatives of AfroDutch communities, this means exposure to a large audience, which can significantly enhance careers or help a group to break through. Just how much this is the case became clear to me two weeks after the festival, when I attended a gran krutu (plenary meeting)5 at Kwakoe Podium. The meeting was an elite affair, attended by some of the most prominent representatives of the Afro-Surinamese community in the Netherlands. Among them was Barryl Biekman, the driving force behind the memorial project in Oosterpark. The meeting was called by Glenn Codfried, an Afro-Surinamese celebrity who up until 2011 worked with a highly popular multicultural radio station in Amsterdam, Radio mArt. The station has been broadcasting for more than 30 years, and among others, Roy Ristie has stood at its cradle. It now has a strong Surinamese flavour, organizing koto parties, and featuring call-in programmes like kruderi,6 a political platform discussing current issues in Amsterdam, the Netherlands and Suriname. Codfried is omnipresent in the Afro-Surinamese community in

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Amsterdam, organizing events, lobbying and networking. He is known for his strong stance on reparations and his sharp social and cultural critique. The meeting at Kwakoe Podium was organized to address a particular grievance that had emerged in the wake of the festival. As is often the case, this debate had emerged on the local radio in one of Codfried’s call-in shows. Visitors and participating artists of the festival had clashed with the organizers of the event, and this standoff between ‘the elite’ and ‘the people’ had escalated to an extent that, Codfried felt, necessitated a meeting. So he invited the organizers of the festival, including Vincent Soekra, an Afro-Surinamese journalist, documentary film-maker (see Chapter 3)7 and event manager, to respond to complaints. The argument between the two parties was over the status of the ‘traditional’ bands during the festival. The argument concerned a supposed hierarchy implied in the physical set up of the festival. Some in the audience felt that the main stage, set up most visibly at the centre of the festival ground and producing the most audible presence, had a higher profile than the other stages. They were disappointed that the ‘traditional’ bands all played on the smaller, less visible and less audible stages in the background, while the ‘white’ artists were given the main stage and thus received the main share of attention. To them, this came down to a marginalization of those who should, both literally and figuratively, have taken centre stage at the event. The presence of the organizers of the Keti Koti festival had attracted the Afro-Surinamese elite to the meeting at Kwakoe Podium. I arrived at 1pm and saw a woman sitting near the entrance by herself. I knew this woman well: for one, Ma Abrewa is an influential AfroSurinamese spiritual leader in Amsterdam. I had seen her on many cultural occasions, especially in the context of the commemoration of slavery. She leads the Bigi Spikri that opens the commemoration in Oosterpark and had poured the libation at the slavery memorial in Middelburg, at the Jewish cemetery in Ouderkerk, during the commemorations at the residence of the Mayor of Amsterdam,8 and at a commemoration on 4 May in Amsterdam Zuidoost; she led a group of protesters against the monument for the Surinamese hero Anton de Kom in Amsterdam Zuidoost; and she is the owner of a wellrespected koto design business. Once I heard her deliver a speech at NiNsee about slavery and its legacy, and the room was packed to the rafters for the occasion (Balkenhol 2012). Ma Abrewa is a cultural icon who embodies the way in which cultural authority is mobilized in political contexts. Both a political

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and a cultural figure, she moves up and down the political frequencies, connecting, as it were, the infrasound with the spectrum of more widely audible frequencies. As usual, Ma Abrewa was clad in traditional attire, wearing a colourful koto and angisa, and a necklace with golden coins of Surinamese guilders and golden bracelets. She did not remain on her own for long and was soon joined by a group of women also dressed in traditional clothes. The room gradually began to fill with people, and at around 3 or 4pm, the meeting was opened with a drum solo played by Percy Holland, who regularly introduces various commemorations of slavery. After the drum solo, Guilly Koster (who we met in Chapter 1) gave a short introduction. He said: ‘I would have done this in Sranantongo, but [he looked at me, the only white guy in the room] I see that there are Dutch people present, so out of respect, I will do it in Dutch.’ He kept the introduction short, remarking that there were more women than men present – ‘as usual,’ a woman at the back exclaimed – and asking people to treat one another with respect. He then handed the microphone to Glenn Codfried. Welcoming the audience, Codfried explained that he had wanted to organize this gran krutu because to him this was a ‘great form of civilization’ (een grote vorm van beschaving) firmly anchored in Afro-Surinamese culture, a culture to be proud of. He encouraged the audience to be more confident about their culture, instead of doubting its value. He thus reminded the audience that there are established cultural institutions through which conflicts can be solved and that the gran krutu are organized as a way of strengthening their work. He explained that emotions had run high in the call-in radio programme about Keti Koti the day before: ‘Sometimes we have the problem that we are mentally immature. We can’t deal with criticism, for instance. [Instead we should say:] Criticism? With pleasure! But learn how to deal with it!’9 Codfried set the tone for the meeting: right away, it became clear that it was about the politics of cultural heritage. To be proud of one’s culture implied not only a return to established cultural institutions but also the installation of these very institutions in the first place. Although the gran krutu is a Maroon rather than Creole tradition (Thoden van Velzen and Wetering 2004), Codfried had mobilized it for all Afro-Surinamese.10 What was at stake became clear when a Maroon woman spoke up right after the introduction. After once more imploring the audience to be respectful, Codfried gave the microphone to Ms. Amoksi, a young woman of Maroon

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descent. She apologetically explained that she had been very busy with the organization of the Keti Koti festival, and that she therefore had had little time to prepare for the meeting. Instead of a more formal presentation, she then weaved her life story, colonial history and Keti Koti into one narrative. She was born in the tiny hamlet of Klaaskreek, some 80 kilometres from the Surinamese capital, Paramaribo. Like many places in that area, Klaaskreek is a Maroon settlement, out of reach of the plantations and the colonial authorities during slavery. When she was young, Amoksi’s family decided to escape the isolation of the place and, like many young Maroons looking for better opportunities, move to the city. Like most Maroons in the city, Amoksi was confronted with racism; people laughed at her when she mentioned her place of birth. She was brought up without learning her parents’ mother tongue, Saramaccan: ‘I was brought up as a Creole girl’, she said. She now lives in the Netherlands, and it was here that she began to ‘delve into her culture’. She said she had gone back to her roots and now knew who she was. She had recently been elected kapitein, an important Maroon representative, in the Netherlands. Amoksi thought Keti Koti ought to be an inclusive event: ‘I sometimes hear dismissive voices from my community. “1 July doesn’t mean anything to me.”11 But 1 July is about freedom, and that means something for everybody!’ Amoksi’s story was very emotional, approaching the touchy subjects regarding the relationship between Maroons and Creoles in Suriname and the Netherlands. Gradually, the mood in the room began to change. The atmosphere reached its tipping point and made way for an explosive mix of emotions when the next speaker was given the floor, Hannah Belliot. As I have shown in Chapter 2 and 3, Belliot had been a controversial figure ever since her election as chairwoman of the district council in 1998. Belliot delivered a lecture based on her MA thesis, in which she discusses gender relations in Suriname. She provided a sweeping account of cruelties during slavery; the economic mechanisms, manumission and the consequences of all this for black communities today. She then focused on gender relations, reiterating the oftenheard argument that the origin of the absence of many black fathers in their children’s upbringing must be sought in the economic system of slavery. She said: Why are there so few black men in top positions? It’s because the Europeans intervened in the development of black people! But black men

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can do it! If black men really want something the world’s in trouble [i.e. there’s no stopping them]! Look at Tiger Woods: there’s none greater. Or look at Michael Jackson! If they really want something, they are unrivalled.

When Belliot was finished, a man jumped up. He had clearly been holding back during the lecture, but he now vented his frustration about the pressure being put on black men. Why is it always about black men?! Black men this, black men that! You hear it on the radio, radio mArt, radio Apintie, everywhere! She [Belliot] may have studied [to be] professor, but why is it always blakaman this and blakaman that. Un no wroko, un no de f’a pikin [We don’t work, we’re not there for the children]! I’m sick of it.

It took a while for him to calm down, and when he was finished the mood in the room had irrevocably changed. This was the moment when Ma Abrewa stood up. Immediately, the room fell silent. She announced in Dutch: ‘I have a message, and the message goes like this.’ This is the formal way of introducing a statement in front of an audience (Mi e abi wan boskopu, nanga a boskopu tak’ so). She then switched to Sranantongo and fired off a salvo of complaints about the festival. There had not been enough chairs for the women of the Bigi Spikri and no water for them. They had had to stand in the searing heat having walked halfway through town. She talked herself into a rage, screaming that the ‘Indians’ (ingi, the Surinamese Amerindians) had not been let through to the ceremony. ‘Inheemsen’ (native people) shouted a man in the audience: ‘Indians is a colonial term, they are called inheemsen!’ Now, an escalation of the discussion could no longer be prevented. Roy Groenberg, alias Kaikusi, jumped up and screamed at the top of his voice in Sranantongo that the musicians had been fobbed off with scraps instead of being paid properly. After Kaikusi’s intervention, all hell broke loose. It was difficult to understand the details of the complaints because everybody was screaming over the top of each other. One central complaint, however, did come through clear as air: the main stage should have been reserved for black artists, since this was ‘their’ day. At any rate, the black bands ought not have been demoted to the smaller stage. They should have been on the main stage, not the ‘white’ artists! The meeting escalated to the point where the wildest accusations were uttered and people began to swear at each other, until Guilly Koster decided to interrupt the discussion and take a break.

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In the break, I joined a group gathered around Hannah Belliot and asked her why this meeting had escalated like that. ‘It’s about the money,’ she said. ‘They think they should have received a better pay for what they did.’ Yet money was only part of the story; Belliot continued: ‘It’s about who gets to be the representative of black people.’

Blackness, Whiteness and the Gender of Cultural Heritage Glenn Codfried had called the meeting at Kwakoe Podium because an increasing part of his radio public was beginning to feel that black artists had been marginalized at the festival. They were concerned that the bands playing ‘traditional’ music had been relegated to the sidelines in having to play on a smaller stage, which, they felt, did not give them enough exposure at the festival. Hence the intention of the meeting was to discuss the perceived race problem of the festival. It soon culminated into a more complex debate about cultural heritage and race. Yet although race was in question that day, the argument inadvertently brought to the fore a subsidiary issue. In addition to the marginalization of blackness in the dynamics of cultural heritage, what was revealed was how these dynamics had exacerbated and exposed a perceived marginalization of black men. The fierceness of the debate can only in part be explained by an existential struggle for recognition and membership in these grand narratives of belonging, identity and the nation. The initial goal was to attack an implicit notion of whiteness inherent in dominant articulations of cultural heritage, and thus the racialized difference such articulations inscribe. Yet the debate at Kwakoe Podium was only in part a struggle with, or even against, these narratives of nation and racialized difference. The debate at Kwakoe Podium brought to the fore the complex ways in which race, gender, nation and cultural heritage intersect. The picture appears much more complex than a Manichaean divide between black and white, oppressor and oppressed. Put differently, the debate showed that power does not work in neat binaries but that it works through the production of intersectional locations that are positioned in different, sometimes contradictory ways (The Combahee River Collective 1977). The debate shows that the categories of blackness and whiteness offered by the memorial narratives are losing their neatness when they are confronted with the messiness of cultural and social practice in everyday life. Looked at

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superficially, the debate about Keti Koti festival at Kwakoe Podium certainly configured cultural heritage in terms of blackness and whiteness. As I have shown before, the memorial project had explicitly been aiming to incorporate ‘black’ history into the national memory culture of the Netherlands. The debate shows, however, that what at first glance may seem, and at times was handled, like clear oppositions between black, white, oppressed and privileged become much messier when they are spelled out in practice. The debate shows that doing cultural heritage in practice brings to the fore not only generalized ‘black’ and ‘white’ positions but genderspecific ones. First, notions of whiteness and blackness themselves are complex here. The argument during the debate concerning the main-stage artists’ whiteness was a referent to their position within the political economy of cultural heritage, and thus referred to their social and cultural positionality rather than to phenotypical determination. Hence, while cultural heritage is clearly entwined with processes of racialization that have emerged out of empire (Littler and Naidoo 2005), these legacies cannot be conceptualized as rigid chronotypical delineations. Rather than fixed categories, what empire has left us with is the very flexibility of such notions. I would therefore argue that it is this very ability to adapt that enables frameworks of race to continue to form the subtext to new contexts and to endure as a socially meaningful (that is, powerful) categorization. Most importantly, what came to the fore in this heritage debate was not only race but the particular ways in which race is gendered. With the organization of the debate, Glenn Codfried had aimed to restore unity. Yet when the debate had ended, if anything the differences seemed to have become more entrenched, and unity had become more elusive. This elusiveness must be understood in the ways race emerged at the intersections between the political economy of cultural heritage and gender, and this necessitates a short detour to the ways in which gender is done in Afro-Surinamese culture. During my fieldwork in Suriname, I interviewed an AfroSurinamese poet I will call Cynthia. She invited me into her home, and we sat on her back porch for several hours talking about her life, both in the Netherlands and in Suriname, and the place of slavery in it. She told me a lot about being a mother, and in particular being a black mother in the Netherlands. Having moved to the Netherlands in 1968, she had returned to Suriname several years before I met her. She remembered well how in the Netherlands she was confronted with the memory of slavery in ways she had never encountered in

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Suriname. One story about her granddaughter in particular defined this experience for her. At school, the girl was confronted with racism many times. It had caused agonizing self-doubt, and the girl began to reject the Netherlands. Nevertheless, Cynthia managed to strengthen her daughter’s self-esteem. She had made a photo book with black role models such as Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin and Martin Luther King, showing her daughter that, as she put it, ‘you are not alone’. She told me that ‘this was when I began to really become interested in our own history.’ Cynthia turned to poetry as a way to address these personal struggles. She wrote her first poem in 1974 and published her first compilation of poetry in 1989. In her work, she found a way to articulate her experiences of racism in everyday life, and slavery and colonialism became important reference points. Sometime in the 80s, she became a grandmother. One day, she found her granddaughter in the bathroom chalking her face white. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked her. Crying, the girl replied: ‘If I am white, I won’t have to be blackface at school’. Hurt but also enraged, she went to complain to the teacher, who replied that she was ruining the children’s fun and that she was having problems with her blackness. ‘Indeed she has,’ she replied, ‘and I will tell you where that comes from.’ She wrote a story entitled ‘White woman, black spirit’, in which she explained the historical roots of her granddaughter’s trouble. Sincerely shocked, the teacher said that she had not been aware of this and invited Cynthia to give lectures at the school. When we had recovered emotionally from the story, Cynthia told me the meaning of it. ‘You have to know,’ she said, ‘that women are the cultuurdragers (lit. culture carriers) in our culture.’ It was women, she explained, who safeguarded the continuation of cultural practices (see Wekker 2006). Her point was brought home to me when I was invited to join a meeting of an organization called Fiti Fu Wini (lit. Fit for Winning), an organization founded by Claudette Toney in Paramaribo in 2005. Fiti Fu Wini is dedicated to establishing ‘co-operation between persons and organizations carrying out activities in the context of African-Surinamese consciousness’ and to the transmission of Afro-Surinamese culture. Although Fiti Fu Wini is not specifically a women’s organization, women clearly constitute the driving force behind it, confirming Cynthia’s assessment that women are cultuurdragers in Afro-Surinamese culture. On the morning of the meeting, I went to Poele Pantje, where the group and I would get buses to the meeting, which was to be in Boxel, a small place a half hour’s drive along the Suriname river.

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There were about thirty-five middle-aged and older women, and a handful of men, already sat waiting on minibuses when I arrived. When the group was complete, the buses headed off. Upon arrival, everybody had to wash their hands with water poured from a kalebas (the woody round fruit of a tree that is dried and cut in half, to be used as a bowl). The fragrant oils mixed into the water gave it a pleasant jasmine and rose scent. One of the women later explained to me that this is to wash off all the bad things from the past. After we had sat down, Cynthia asked the group’s consent regarding my presence; all stood up and held each other’s hands. Banana and cassava crisps were served and then Cynthia opened the meeting with a prayer in Sranantongo. The meeting turned out to be an evaluation of earlier training sessions. Kortensia Sumter-Griffith, vicechair of the organization, stated that Fiti Fu Wini’s aim is not to provide people with solutions. Rather, it was their task to give people the tools necessary to solve their own problems. She argued that no two people ever need the same tools to solve their problems, so it is impossible to provide a generic tool to solve things: ‘Alasma hab den eegie sani fu los dingen op.’ Claudette Toney, chairwoman of Fiti Fu Wini, reported that she went to Trinidad with her daughter and took a bath in one of the natural springs. She said that the contact with the water had made it so she could walk again, having had problems with her foot that the doctor had been unable to help her with. Another woman exclaimed that katibo (slavery) and all the suffering and bloodshed caused by it should remain in the past never to return, while yet another woman told a story about a burglar who was imprisoned after breaking into her house. When he had been released, she met him by chance in a shop. She greeted him in a friendly way, which surprised the burglar. He replied that he was doing well and working on himself to be better person. The woman seemed overwhelmed by her own story and added that after the encounter she was walking on air. There were many women who indicated that they had changed something about their house, especially about the sleeping room. Cynthia repeatedly said that it is important to take care of your physical environment, especially the sleeping room. Also, many women – I would estimate 50 per cent – indicated that they had started raking their yards frequently, many did so every morning.12 As homework, the women had been told to look in the mirror, and the brochure that was handed to me suggested looking yourself deep in the eyes for five minutes. In the session, Cynthia even suggested that it would be good to look in the mirror for fifteen minutes!

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However, the women did not report doing this as frequently. Most of them said they were raking the yard and praying to God a lot, which Cynthia later took as a sign of their indoctrination into the church. Cynthia also gave a short lecture on Winti. She said that it was not a question of making a decision of whether to believe in Winti OR the church but that it was a question of doing BOTH. She recommended eclecticism, to take from every religion those elements that feel good for oneself. ‘I want to take everything with me from the different religions, if it is good for me,’ she said.13 In these meetings, the women were ‘carrying’ culture. They had actively researched the ways of the ancestors, and they regularly organized and attended lectures by cultural experts, both academics and professionals. To them, carrying culture also means carrying out culture. The women therefore looked for ways to make the culture they had inherited from their ancestors meaningful in everyday life, even in such seemingly small things as raking the garden or decluttering and cleaning their homes, which helped them deal with, for instance, financial or relationship problems. The particular way in which the women carry and carry out culture thus suggests that the value of cultural heritage is not only determined in the process of lifting cultural elements out of the ordinary and putting them on a pedestal (Van der Laarse 2005) but also in terms of the value they hold for an assertion of selfhood in everyday life. Cultural heritage, then, is not only itself a practice but also derives its currency from the value it has in the social and cultural practices of everyday life. As Gloria Wekker (2006) has shown, the way in which the division of labour in Suriname is racialized and gendered must be seen in relation to the way in which Surinamese society is embedded in a world economy that is deeply rooted in colonial systems of exploitation. This intersectional system of gender, race and class marginalizes women socio-economically to a significant extent; for example, they earn less for the same kind of work. Their marginal position worsened during the various economic and political crises in Suriname in the 1980s and 1990s (Wekker 2006, chapter two). For example, women’s participation in the formal economy declined from 39 per cent to 33 per cent in the 1990s (Kromhout 2000: 208). Despite a more stable economy in Suriname in the 2000s, women’s access to the formal labour market did not significantly improve (Verrest 2007: 259). However, as Wekker also argues, despite this relative marginalization, women wield significant social and economic power. They often have control over considerable financial resources (Bijnaar

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2002). Afro-Surinamese women are also very active in various other forms of social association, from labour unions to political parties. A ‘Caribbean’ model of relationship also gives them considerable room for negotiation, and even a significant degree of independence (Wekker 2006). Hence ‘women can be called brokers, mobilizing their various networks to command goods, services, money, information, and, as the case may be, sex’ (Janssens and Van Wetering 1985; Wekker 2006; Wetering 1989). Such was certainly true for Yvette, my second host in Amsterdam Zuidoost. In the statistics, Yvette would probably have been counted as an unemployed widow struggling to make a living on the meagre allowance of social benefits. Yet this would be a skewed representation of her status, both socio-economically and culturally. In fact, Yvette is what is referred to as kankan misi or dyadya uma: ‘a plucky woman [who is] able to be counted upon when something major needs to be organized, e.g., cooking for a hundred people or canvassing for one’s political party’ (Wekker 2006: 114). Yvette had a small commercial kitchen installed on her balcony, where she regularly cooked for large social occasions such as birthdays, weddings or anniversaries. I spent hours hanging out with her in this ‘kitchen’ or doing the shopping, all the while talking about her husband, who had passed away several years earlier; her sons and daughter; her grandchildren and life in general. Yvette is also a dinari (lit. servant), a ritual expert who prepares the bodies of the deceased for their burial, a very prestigious position in Afro-Surinamese culture in which women play an important role (Van der Pijl 2007). In other words, she is a very successful woman who clearly handles her life well.

Women and the Winti Religion To an important extent, this independent position derives from their role as culture bearers. Women are typically seen as the most knowledgeable in cultural matters. They are often the ones who know the art of medicine, both in the form of herbal treatments as well as man-made medicines. Women’s role as culture bearers, and their social and economic position deriving from it, is inextricably entwined with the spiritual world. In the Afro-Surinamese Winti cosmology, the self, as Gloria Wekker has demonstrated, is entwined with the supernatural world (Wekker 2006: 83 ff.). As Gloria Wekker has argued, ‘the culturally prominent role of women and mothers is underpinned by and

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embedded within a religious system that strongly validates women’ (Wekker 2006: 85). The social position of Afro-Surinamese women is, as it were, at the intersection of the material and the supernatural world. I will therefore now look briefly at the position of women in Winti cosmology. The Winti cosmology, as Gloria Wekker has argued, is fundamentally egalitarian in terms of gender. The highest spiritual being, Anana Keduaman Keduampon, has no clear gender determination and is sometimes represented as male, at other times female. Since Anana largely retreated from governing the world after the act of creation, day-to-day spiritual business was left to a pantheon of lesser deities who dwell in four different domains: the sky, the water, the forest and the earth. Some of these deities are male, such as the chief Winti of the sky, Opete (the Vulture), and his brothers (Wekker 2006: 91; Wooding 1972); others are female, such as Mama Aisa. Mama Aisa, the Goddess of the Earth, is the highest of the Winti deities, and in every Winti Prey (worship), Aisa takes a key position. Mama Aisa has many of the characteristics a dyadya uma in the human world ought to comply with: ‘Aisa’s personality is construed as a typical mother’s personality: she is sweet, she cooks, plants, loves to nurture, often wears koto, the traditional Afro-Surinamese dress of many-layered wide skirts when she visits people in their dream, is fond of beautiful clothes, jewellery, gold, and copper basins and pots’ (Wekker 2006: 91). This spiritual cosmology is an ‘epistemic framework’ in which ‘constructions of selfhood’ are embedded (Wekker 2006: 84). As Wekker has argued, Winti shapes the ways working-class people think and talk about themselves and the ways in which they act out of understandings of what a person is. Even when women are not actively involved in Winti, its discourse extends beyond active practitioners and is a primary locus for the construction of selves for all women (and men) who are embedded within working-class culture. (Wekker 2006: 85)

Although Wekker here puts the emphasis on the working class, Winti has also informed the elite; for instance, cultural and nationalist organizations such as Wie Eegie Sanie (Our Own Thing) and intellectuals like Koenders and Eersel. In fact, the search for a national culture intensified a turn towards Winti, not only as a cultural symbol but also as a formative element in political subjectivity, both individual and collective (Marshall 2003; Van der Pijl 2007). In the Winti cosmology, the person is made up of two domains, one biological, supplied by the biological parents, the other spiritual.

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The spiritual side of the person consists of three components: the kra (approximating the soul), the dyodyo or a person’s divine parents, and the yorka or the ghost, an entity which remains after the person has passed away (Wekker 2006: 95; see Wooding 1972). The yorka can cause serious trouble in the world of humans if, for example, there is an unresolved spiritual issue, such as a curse etc., or if the relationship of the living with their ancestors is not maintained correctly. I have heard many stories about encounters with yorka. Whilst I was told that they do appear in the Netherlands, they are especially active in Suriname. For example, a woman who grew up in Suriname told me how, as a young girl, she was once late getting home after school and encountered a man she had never seen before at a bridge she had to cross. Night was already falling, and coming closer to the man, she noticed with terror that his feet were hovering just above the ground. In complete panic, she ran home. Her parents understood immediately what had happened. She had had a very narrow escape. The kra, like the dyodyo, has both a male and a female part, both of which can be called upon through ritual. The yeye is distinct from the ‘I’ and is manifest as an independent entity with a will of its own. If not listened to properly, the kra (often referred to as yeye) can cause serious problems in everyday life, including issues related to work, love or health. In other words, Winti pervades everyday life and is not restricted to clearly delineated spaces and times of worship. As Gloria Wekker has argued, Winti pertains to many different aspects of everyday life, to food, relationships, work, health, mattes of life and death, to subjectivity and sexuality . . . Winti offers templates for how to act in particular situations and explanations of why certain events occur. A synonym for Winti is kulturu (culture), and in its broadness that is exactly what it signals: a way of living, a way of being in the world. So that even when workingclass women and men are not actively involved in Winti practices – and sometimes, they may speak about Winti with the same disparagement that I was brought up in – its worldview is shared in the way they think and speak about themselves, in the etiology they assign to events, and which course of action is necessary in a particular situation. (Wekker 2006: 90)

Afro-Surinamese selfhood thus needs to be understood in terms of its inextricable links to spirituality. Yet as everything to do with Winti religion, including koto dresses, angisa headscarves, calabashes, cloths, to herbal baths, is being redefined as the domain of cultural heritage, this also signifies a confrontation of two regimes of

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subjectivity. A person is at once intertwined with the metaphysical world and the secular regime of cultural heritage, which generates subjectivity along the lines of cultural citizenship and belonging to the nation (Duyvendak, Geschiere and Tonkens 2016).

Subjecthood, Citizenship and Belonging We have nearly come full circle. The particular position of the female in the Afro-Surinamese concept of the spirit-self and the social and cultural position of women in Afro-Surinamese communities provide women with a prominent and authoritative place in the unfolding dynamics of cultural heritage. To the extent that cultural heritage has become increasingly important in new regimes of cultural citizenship and ‘national culture’, and the articulation of political subjectivity within them, the role of Afro-Surinamese women as c­ ultuurdragers has offered them a structural advantage in becoming spokespersons for Afro-Surinamese communities as a whole. Such regimes of cultural citizenship have opened up new spaces of agency in which women can articulate and negotiate belonging through the mobilization of kulturu as cultural heritage in negotiations of belonging to the nation. The koto dresses and angisa headscarves have become an important item in the domain of cultural heritage. In the Netherlands, there is an association aiming to preserve the tradition of koto displays, which are typically performed on the occasion of Keti Koti, among others. In the spring of 2010, I visited a selection procedure in Amsterdam Zuidoost, held in a gym. The selection was serious business. About a dozen girls, the youngest barely able to walk and not competing, accompanied by their mothers, were showing off their skills in the style of a beauty pageant while a jury of experts, mainly women, judged their performances. In the end, most of the girls went through to the second round, and I saw most of them again at the actual performance in the summer. For this they were judged seriously, with points for improvement gravely pointed out by the panel. Next to skills such as singing, the girls had to be able to recite odo, Afro-Surinamese aphorisms that originated from slavery (Neijhorst 2002). They receive quite a thorough training in this skill, and I was able to witness them over several sessions becoming quite secure in it. I suggest that the care women put into the transmission of AfroSurinamese culture has given them a self-evident role as experts. It

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is no coincidence, then, that the memorial project in Oosterpark was started by an Afro-Dutch women’s organization and that Barryl Biekman became one of its most important spokespersons. Such a perspective has an important implication. As the history of slavery started to receive more attention in the Dutch public sphere, not only the position of black Dutch came under renewed scrutiny. In particular, the socio-economic and cultural position of black men became a matter of debate. During my fieldwork, the ‘absence’ of black men in the family was discussed on a number of occasions, including, as we have seen, at the gran krutu. One night, Roy and I attended a meeting that was aimed at ‘absent’ Antillean and Surinamese fathers. ‘Absent’ in this case meant that they were not supporting their families in economic, emotional and educational terms. They often had children with several women and were not always able to provide for their different families. It was a calm discussion, and all participants stated their good intentions and their determination to make a change. There was a lot of talk about self-confidence; a shared agreement that self-respect is needed to pass on love and care. Somebody argued that monogamy may not be the only workable family model and that the most important thing is that mothers and fathers dedicate sufficient time and attention to their kids. A family support worker asked the fathers provocative questions; for example, about what frustrates them, and whether they had disappointed their children before. Towards the end, Richard Knel, who had organized the debate, reminded people that it is the economic system that forces fathers to go to work all day, thus keeping them away from their kids (he hesitated to use the word ‘Capitalist’). Immediately, a man from the audience spoke up. According to him, such statements were ridiculous. ‘You can’t keep blaming someone else, you also have to look at yourself for the causes. This is rubbish, just like the argument that the vaderloze families (fatherless families) are a consequence of slavery.’ In reply, Glenn Helberg, an Antillean-Dutch psychiatrist reasoned: We cannot say that it is because of slavery, but we must not embezzle (verdonkeremanen) history. We have not appeared here just out of the blue, we are the result of history, and slavery is part of this history. The colonial system and slavery have created structures that continue today. The phenomenon of buitenvrouwen (extramarital partners) is not an Antillean thing, but the white man has participated in this.

Roy was nodding emphatically while Helberg further stressed the fact that the current composition of the population is the result of

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the sexual practices of whites just as it is of Antilleans, and that one also has to consider that in African societies most Antilleans descend from family structures that are matrifocal. ‘We have taken with us a matrifocal system from Africa, but it has become corrupted by the colonial past and slavery.’ At the end of the discussion, I had a chat with Richard. He asserted that ‘black deniers’ (zwarte ontkenners) are the most difficult people to deal with. In his opinion, you can barely reason with them because they are so deeply convinced that they are not victims. ‘You can’t deny that we are victims, because we simply are. I have grown up in a colonial system in which it was impossible to become aware of these things.’ He also told me that talking about slavery is painful for him and that sometimes he simply cannot talk about it at all. Family structures have been a matter of debate in Caribbean studies throughout the twentieth century (Potthast-Jutkeit 1998). While some argued in a Herskovitsian tradition that polygamous and polygynic family models were ‘African survivals’ (Herskovits and Herskovits 1947), others asserted that the structure of black families was part of a ‘culture of poverty’ inaugurated by the devastation of slavery (Frazier 1939). Both hypotheses are seen as problematic because in their own ways they essentialize culture as static, either in the assumption that cultural elements can be ‘transplanted’ in place and time (see Mintz and Price 1976) or that a supposedly internalized ‘culture’ becomes the source of inequality. Both hypotheses are nevertheless still defended today, both among scientists and, as we have seen, among my interlocutors. The point here is not to assess whether these statements are correct – ethically, historically or politically. Rather, what interests me here is that events such as this generate new dynamics and new pressures that further complicate race relations. Put differently, events such as the one described here show that race relations must be understood as intersecting with notions of sexuality and gender, class and the imagination of the nation. Moreover, to come back to the theme of this book, these different interpretations of a social phenomenon show that different people trace it in different ways, without any one interpretation being ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. In the case of family structure, there is probably some truth to both hypotheses, even if some dimensions of them are evidently incorrect. Tracing, then, becomes a matter not of absolutes but of different emphases. While one hypothesis highlights the role of slavery in the emergence of social structures, the other underlines the influence of the present political economy. The point is that these traces can exist next to one another.

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Since slavery has moved into the public realm of cultural heritage, not only race relations but also gender roles have become intensely debated. In particular, the roles of men and fathers have been put under increased scrutiny. This has led to considerable pressure on men to review their role as sexual partners. So how do Edouard and the men of Bigi Ten negotiate this field?

Masculinity Bigi Ten most certainly did not feel that they had been stripped of their masculinity as a consequence of slavery. They were constantly talking about sex and ‘scoring a chickie’. Standing on the balcony of our apartment one day with Clifton, who had recently moved in with Edouard and me and who had just returned from the market, he began pointing excitedly at one of the stalls. ‘You see that chickie down there? …There, next to the stall on the far left? Tonight, I’m going to fuck her. I just sealed the deal.’ The men were proud of their sexual adventures and boasted about their ability to score, but for them this did not necessarily interfere with loyalty to their wives and girlfriends. Edouard often encouraged me to find a ‘chickie’ too: Look, you have your vrouwtje (wifey) in Utrecht, and that is your woman. You know that. She will always come first. But here, you are in De Bijlmer, you can have chickies. It’s ok. You really can! If you want the apartment for yourself to be with a chickie, just say the word and I’ll give you the space.

He was married to a woman in Suriname, with whom he had two children. He called her often, regularly sent her money and often emphasized that no woman was more important to him. At the same time, he was also in a steady relationship with a woman in Amsterdam Zuidoost. She even had access to his bank account, and Edouard was in serious panic when the ATM swallowed his card one day. What became clear to me was that the men’s swagger belied a reality in which the women were largely in control. In Edouard’s relationship with his partner in the Netherlands, she was the one calling the shots. She had considerable control over not only her own money but Edouard’s as well. She was the one who got things done. For example, it was only when his girlfriend arranged for me to move in that he finally got round to covering the concrete floor with laminate. And when she visited our scantily furnished apartment,

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she often sighed: ‘If I were living here, things would look different. I cannot fathom how he can live here and not even put together that bloody cupboard.’ It was she who refused to move in with him, not the other way round: ‘Dear God, I can’t even imagine living together! No, it’s just fine the way it is.’ All this suggests that even though slavery has undeniably had a fundamental influence on gender relations, many Afro-Surinamese men’s attitude towards sex and relationships seems to have been influenced by the strong position of Afro-Surinamese women both culturally and socio-economically. In particular, the important role of women in the relocation of slavery and its commemoration into the realm of cultural heritage has perhaps aided a feeling of inadequacy among men. All the boasting about sexual conquest sometimes seemed to me almost compensatory. Have men come to feel marginalized in the context of the importance of women? Assuming any simple causality would be mistaken here, of course. In the next section, I will argue that kaskawina, which is now strongly seen as a ‘manly’ thing, is also increasingly framed in terms of cultural heritage. The men playing this music put more emphasis on ‘authenticity’, and I argue that this is to distinguish themselves from other bands but also to claim a place within an increasingly important Afro-Surinamese cultural heritage.

Politics of Authenticity ‘But those young people, they are making it into something else, they are turning it on its head,’ said Edouard, when we were on the way home from the recording studio one time. We had been talking about Bigi Ten and their music. As mentioned before, the lead singer, Tom, was someone with real cultural knowledge. According to Edouard the other bands, ‘young guys’, were just playing superficial stuff; these young folks did not even speak Sranantongo correctly, a fact he took as an indication that they had no idea about the deeper meaning of the kaskawina songs. In my very first meeting with Tom, he had been somewhat reluctant to talk and was even inclined to call the whole thing off. I had managed to persuade him, however, that it would be a good idea for us to sit and listen to the music together. He gave me permission to record the conversation, but a couple of minutes in, he asked me to stop the recording and start over. He said: ‘I want to do it neatly. I don’t want all this rubbish we talk in between on tape.’ I argued,

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however, that to me, all his words were precious and important. He finally agreed to tape the conversation, but it became clear that his talking to me was something big. Kaskawina is precious to musicians like Bigi Ten. For example, as already mentioned in Chapter 4, on the Facebook page of Corona, one of the most successful kaskawina bands of the moment, they had stated that when some band members migrated to the Netherlands, ‘the realization to leave their musical heritage behind on Surinamese soil was a painful and unbearable idea to them.’14 In the Netherlands, there is a palpable anxiety about losing an important part of one’s cultural heritage if it does not receive adequate care. Eventually, as we have seen, Tom welcomed my interest in their music. Another time when he was explaining the songs to me, he emphasized the importance not only of recording them on CD but also of preserving their meaning: T: You’re getting it? MB: I get it. No man, it’s beautiful! T: No, that’s why. That’s why, and it is that we just talked about it, cause today or tomorrow, when you have the CDs, and someone says, hey, Markus, what are you doing with Surinamese CDs, and then you can explain things, like this means that, and that, that. MB: It’s important, man. T: Yeah, ’course.

I got a sense of this on the way home from the studio that Edouard, too, was quite anxious about the safeguarding of the musical heritage: ‘the young guys are making something different out of the music.’ Bigi Ten emphasized to me on numerous occasions that they, unlike the other bands, are taking care to adhere to the true form of Kaskawina. In our conversations, it became clear that Bigi Ten see the kind of Kaskawina they play as more ‘authentic’ than other bands. In fact, many conversations were about whether or not the music the others played was authentic or not. Hence they felt that the old ways need to be protected from encroaching distortion and oblivion. In other words, they had come to see their Kaskawina as cultural heritage. Edouard insisted: ‘You have to write all of this down, and then write a book.’ It was important for him that the old ways (which to him have a ring of authenticity) are not lost. This is an eminently political process. We talked about what impact a book like mine might have in Dutch society. I speculated that many would be surprised to read about the hidden meanings of Kaskawina, a kind of music that for them was first and foremost the happy music that fit a

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rather stereotypical image of Afro-Surinamese as a people who love to dance and throw a good party. I was worried that people may be shocked and may even reject the book. Edouard immediately tried to calm me, telling me that I need not worry. ‘Nobody can touch you, otherwise they have a real big problem with me. If that happens, you don’t even need to mention it, because I’ll know, and I’ll get them.’ Edouard’s protectiveness along with Tony’s, the studio owner, had indicated that I was now part of the group, and as manager buitenland, or manager of foreign relations, for the band I also enjoyed their protection as a whole. Through the performance of ‘authentic’ Kaskawina, not only personal but also group boundaries are being negotiated. Bigi Ten’s claim for authenticity is an attempt to set themselves apart from other bands, but with this politics of authenticity, they also relate to the larger discourse of heritage politics as I discussed above. As cultural heritage, Kaskawina may work as what Cohen (1998) has called a symbolic construction of community – the organization of group boundaries through symbolic self-representation. Needless to say, this ring of authenticity also adds to their marketability (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). Bigi Ten claimed that they stay close to the origins or roots of the music. In the previous chapter, I argued that this is part of a sense of the immediacy of the past. Yet this sense of origin and rootedness is also part of a politics of authenticity. This authenticity is expressed through one central concept: ‘depth’. If the music is played well, and adequate registers of language are used, it is referred to as ‘deep’. ‘Depth’ could also describe the emotional state induced by listening to or playing music. Whenever people realized that I was honestly interested in the subject, people would often respond with the words: ‘Jij gaat diep’ (lit. ‘You are going deep.’). For example, when I once approached a group of adolescents hanging out in front of Edouard’s apartment building, my bidding them a good morning provoked a short exchange in which they wondered, first, if I was a plainclothes police officer and then what on earth I was doing in these parts. I explained that I was doing research about the memory of slavery. Just before they took off, one of the guys said approvingly: ‘Jij gaat diep.’ The term ‘deep’ is thus a complex one, capturing a sense of authenticity, origin, as well as emotion. As with any cultural phenomenon, there is no identifiable place or point in time at which it emerged, and much like any cultural phenomenon, Kaskawina is a bricolage of different styles, instruments and repertoires that has emerged out of the music enslaved

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Africans and their descendants played on the plantations during slavery. Tracing cultural forms and practices in the present to particular forms and practices in the past is never simple, and even problematic, because history rarely works in such linear ways. Particularly in the case of Kaskawina, the historical sources are written from a highly biased perspective of colonial hegemonic power, in which their authors lacked sufficient factual knowledge, but also wrote from a particular colonial ideology in which they generally failed to understand black culture beyond rigid notions of superiority and inferiority. It is perhaps precisely because of this vagueness that the notion of origin is highly contested and politically charged. What I found striking in these songs is that they derive their authority precisely from the fact that they are ‘old’, and have emerged over a long period of time. It is as though they are a living reservoir of a kind of knowledge that has been accumulated over centuries. Gloria Wekker has called this the ‘cultural archive’ of Afro-Surinamese culture (Wekker 2006). This is not to say that this knowledge is unchanging. Indeed, the kind of music Bigi Ten and most of the Kaskawina groups play is informed by the present day as well, and the music is interwoven with many other forms of AfroSurinamese music, such as the Banja, Laku and Tuka (O’Bryan 1990: 35). O’Bryan (1990) asserts that Kaskawina (or Kawina) emerged right after the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century and speculates as to the origin of its name and practice: [i]n any case, the name has to do with the river Commewijne, located in the [Surinamese] district of the same name. In Sranantongo, both are called Kauna. Some think that kawina originates in the upper Commewijne river, where Creoles supposedly developed the music under Indian influence. Others hold that this music was originally called mabu-poku, and was later named after a talented singer from Commewijne district. According to yet another theory, rubber bleeders working in the forest developed it for recreation. (O’Bryan 1990: 35)

My aim here is not to decide on the origins of Kaskawina music. Like any cultural practice, Kaskawina is dynamic and changing. Song references to gold washers in Bigi Ten’s song Lai na boto indicate the influence of a phenomenon that emerged in Suriname only in the post-slavery period. The point I want to make here is that these dynamics of style and repertoire notwithstanding, the songs do succeed in conveying a sense of the immediacy of the past, which includes both slavery and other historical events and phenomena. I argue that the songs provide a sense of the moral grounding that

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informs everyday practice as well as the public memory of slavery in the Netherlands, as I have argued throughout this book. If scholarship of Afro-Surinamese music, whether Maroon or Creole, has been concerned with its relation to the past, its focus has been on the ‘African’ elements that have ‘survived’ the Middle Passage (Van Stipriaan 2000; Weltak 2000). To the extent that recovering an ‘African’ identity has increasingly become a central element in Afro-Surinamese projects of self- and world-making, such studies more or less explicitly and more or less intentionally become part of such projects. They hold the promise of recovering a kind of scientifically sanctioned authenticity that has been brutally destroyed by the violence of slavery and colonialism. Hence while such projects are valuable in terms of cultural and social reconstruction, theories of creolization have a tendency to essentialize the presence of ‘African’ and ‘Creole’ elements. Moreover, they tell us little about the ways in which the knowledge conveyed in the performance of music informs people’s lives today, beyond or underneath the public memory of slavery. I therefore suggest understanding the term Afro-Surinamese, and the music that is labelled in this way, in terms of political subjectivity. This is not to doubt the origins of particular cultural forms and practices in a particular place and as deriving from particular cultural systems. Rather, it draws attention to the ways in which these truths are inextricably linked to political projects of claim- and world-making. To Bigi Ten, knowing about the past is perhaps also a spiritual kind of knowledge, as the conversations with Tom and Edouard suggested, and this knowing, to them, is linked to making a buck. Yet I suggest that their negotiation of authenticity also engages in a discourse that does not exactly bear on the past and how it reaches into the present. Rather, what they negotiate through their claims to authenticity is also their position as men within a domain of cultural heritage in which women call the shots. Of course, they never framed their politics of authenticity literally as an address to women. However, the strong emphasis on manhood as well as on cultural heritage suggests that these are more than mere coincidence. I argue that they have to be understood in the context of the commemoration of slavery, in which the role of women as culture bearers has gained central importance. It seems plausible that as female cultural knowledge has become cultural capital in the field of slavery heritage and commemoration, men like Edouard and Tom have responded to this by reframing Kaskawina music as AfroSurinamese heritage.

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Conclusion The commemoration of slavery, as I have shown in Chapter 1 and 2, can be understood as an intervention in the politics of autochthony, in which the nation is conflated with whiteness. But this racial politics should not turn a blind eye to other dynamics that emerge from the negotiations of slavery-as-cultural-heritage. I have therefore suggested here to look at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and nation in the dynamics of cultural heritage. Such intersections, however, should be understood through the cultural registers through which they are negotiated. For example, an understanding of the strong position of women in the realm of AfroSurinamese culture needs to take into account the ways in which women’s social position is informed by the status of the female in the Afro-Surinamese Winti religion. This emphasis on cultural registers has important implications. For example, the claim that sexuality and sexual relations were racialized during slavery and that the reverberations of this continue to the present is undoubtedly justified. Yet an understanding of sexuality and sexual relations today that looks first and foremost through the lens of slavery disregards the rich cultural practices and cosmologies that have had and continue to have an equally important influence on sexuality and sexual relations. While these cultural forms were shaped in fundamental ways during slavery, it would be a mistake to reduce them to the experience of slavery. This would not only deny the agency of the enslaved and their descendants; it would also reduce very complex dynamics to social pathologies. For example, the commemoration of slavery may have had an almost equally important impact on sexual relations as slavery itself. The commemoration of slavery needs to be understood within broader trajectories of emancipation. In this chapter, I have argued that to the extent that slavery has moved into the realm of cultural heritage, the role of women as culture bearers has given them a structural advantage as representatives of the Afro-Surinamese community. If the formation of cultural heritage can be understood as a trace, or better as an activity of tracing, such an activity, as I have shown in this chapter, cannot be entirely controlled. While following a trace, one chances upon things, one crosses other traces. Collecting evidence for one case frequently turns up evidence for subsidiary or even unrelated cases that may nevertheless influence the original case.

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This chapter has shown how gender dynamics took many of my interlocutors by surprise. They have become the unforeseen result of the heritagization of slavery. In other words, this time the trace took on a life of its own and led into uncharted territory.

Notes   1. ‘Het heeft ons veel moeite gekost, maar uiteindelijk zijn we toch ook in contact gekomen met jonge meiden die actief zijn in de prostitutie. Deze ‘jonge meiden’ zijn doorgaans tussen de 15 en 20 jaar, soms jonger, soms wat ouder. Ze zijn meestal niet verslaafd aan (hard) drugs en wonen vaak nog thuis. Ze worden ook wel “pijpmeisjes” en “neukmeisjes” genoemd. Ze hebben diverse etnische achtergronden. Waarschijnlijk vormen de Surinaamse en Antilliaanse meiden hierbij een meerderheid, maar ook meisjes van Afrikaanse, Centraal-Amerikaanse en Nederlandse afkomst verdienen op deze manier geld. . . . Over de omvang kunnen we geen betrouwbare schatting geven, maar uit de intensieve zoektocht kunnen we wel concluderen dat het bepaald geen wijd en zijd verspreid verschijnsel is.’   2. It is quite striking how in the endlessly repeated assurance that ‘nothing is wrong’, ‘nothing’ disappeared and ‘wrong’ remained in the discursive distribution of attention: ‘Researcher Arnoud Verhoeff of the GGD reassured a room packed with residents and parents last month. Verhoeff nuanced the research and explained that sex for a “dime” was not prevalent on a large scale. “We are not talking about a thousand girls, and not about a hundred, but about a number of girls.” According to Pieter Litjens, a local politician of Amsterdam Zuidoost, the research has created the wrong image. “It’s not like every 16 year old girl in De Bijlmer will pull off her pants for a Breezer.” Olivier Duthil of the capital’s vice squad: “Teenage prostitution is nearly non-existent”. But he can see by looking at the street culture that “sexual morals are slipping in De Bijlmer.” ’ (‘Seks in kelderbox normaal, maar niet voor Breezer’, NRC Handelsblad, 12 May 2006, p. 3).   3. ‘Verse meisjes, domme meisjes’, De Volkskrant, 10 March 2006, pp. 26–27.   4. ‘Gouden Uil voor debutant Vuisje’, Het Parool, 5 May 2009, p. 21.   5. A gran krutu is a Maroon expression for a plenary meeting in which grievances can be addressed or political elections be held.   6. The term has various meanings in Sranantongo; it can mean alliance or bond but also precondition, agreement, unification or gathering.   7. His documentaries, including ‘Another Symphony in Black – A modern Rhapsody of Negro Life’ and ‘Lekker Loopje – een hommage aan Kid Dynamite’, have featured at various film festivals.   8. Since 2006, there has been a plaque at the entrance to the Mayor’s residence on Herengracht commemorating the fact that in the eighteenth

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century this was the home of a slave trader and plantation owner. Since 2010, there has been a yearly gathering in front of the residence in June to commemorate the ancestors with a libation, speeches and flowers.   9. ‘Soms hebben we het probleem dat we geestelijk nog niet rijp zijn. We kunnen bijvoorbeeld niet omgaan met kritiek. Kritiek? Graag! Maar leer er mee omgaan.’ 10. Codfried normally engages in a politics of blackness in a broader sense, including Afro-Dutch, but in this case, it was a strictly Surinamese affair. 11. Maroon communities commemorate 10 October rather than 1 July as the abolition of slavery. On 10 October 1763, a treaty was signed between several Maroon tribes and the Dutch colonial authorities to end the Maroon wars that had been raging for more than a century and that having not been decided by either side resulted in a stalemate between the Maroons and the colonial army. The treaty formally ended the war and is understood as the document that effectively freed the Maroon tribes from enslavement, but it also inaugurated a marginalization of Maroon communities in the interior that continues to this day. 12. Soil has a prominent position within the Winti cosmology. Mother Aisa is the soil, and keeping the soil clean means caring for one’s relationship with mama Aisa. 13. A man that was taking care of the sound installation at the meeting told us a story about his own identity. His father, he said, was fullblooded Javanese, and his mother Dogla (a ‘mix’ between Hindostaan and Creole). ‘People cannot place me… they ask me, what are you really, you are nothing really, but my reply to them is: “I am Surinamese!” [Ik ben een Surinamer!].’ He said that he unites the whole of the Surinamese society and all the different ethnic groups in himself – including all the different religions. 14. ‘Het besef daarmee hun muzikale erfgoed op Surinaamse bodem achter te moeten laten was... een pijnlijk en ondraaglijk idee voor hun.’ https:// www.facebook.com/pages/CoronaBand/158997750802136?v=info#!/ pages/CoronaBand/158997750802136?sk=info, accessed 3 May 2012.

Conclusion

After years I have finally learned to look up. To see in the facades, the buildings and the birth of a modern city the old remains. I can hear joints cracking under the thunderous voice of people and traffic. Read entire years on her shoulder blades as she curves her back. 1602. 1621. 1873. 1945. Sometimes I almost hear her say: can’t you see it? How encompassing I am? How many names I wear? How many lives I have known? Can’t you hear them? The echoes of women who came here as servants. The muffled voices of men who envisioned different lives. And their children who spoke out about it. Do you not recognize me in the offices, churches, courts and family coats of arms? How we may now be tourists in our own city, how we, with tightened lips omitting every unbearable detail, sometimes still consciously look away. How we run, blinkers on, preferring to forget the other side of the ocean. How we pretend we are not descendants of this legacy. How I wish that we would not let ourselves be poured into bronze bodies for once but dare to explore the cracks. Who was the nameless boy, depicted as a slave in a 1660 painting? How did people survive and how did people alienate each other into commodities? How does it sound, this cacophony of extreme violence and prosperity? And where can we store knowledge if we are not making us all part of it? If we do not learn to look at the many faces of the city. Let us tell about the story of the thousands of Bandanese who were driven from their islands. Of the great Ambon war and the pockets of resistance that arose along the archipelago. Of the meetings between Mohammad Hatta and Anton de Kom. Of the first plantations and the enslaved who were forced to leave home and hearth. To be able to escape. From the shareholders. Their owners and the system that

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made it all possible. Let us tell about the story of Dutch Brazil, of the abolitionists who presented us with new societies on paper. Of Maurits van Nassau and Martha Christina. After years I have finally learned to look up. Speaking a language to bring history home in the facades, the buildings and the birth of a modern city. —Jasper Albinus, 2020

I began this book with the question of how the public memory and cultural heritage of slavery resonate with the everyday lives of people they are intended to address. If anything, this question has become more urgent today. As in Jasper Albinus’ spoken word, more and more people are ‘learning to look up’; they are tracing slavery in their own neighbourhoods. Since my research in Amsterdam Zuidoost in 2009–2010, slavery has become a permanent part of public memory in the Netherlands. The Keti Koti festival and the commemoration of abolition have grown into a nationally televised and increasingly well-known event; slavery is part of the historical canon, it is increasingly taught at school, and it has been expanded in a new canon (2020 https://www.canonvannederland.nl/) to include, for instance, Anton de Kom; a growing and visible body of new historical scholarship is broadening perspectives on slavery; and several museums (including the Rijskmuseum and the Tropenmuseum) are planning (permanent) exhibitions on slavery. However, this has not led to closure. Controversies are now emerging about the collections of ethnographic museums and issues of repatriation; colonial statues and street names (intensifying in the wake of ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ and ‘Charlottesville’); ‘diversity’ in the academy and academic curricula; and, of course, the controversy about the blackface figure of Black Pete, which dominates all of this (Balkenhol et al. 2016). With the increasing violence that accompanies some of these controversies, opposing positions have hardened. The nation has become conflated with whiteness and cultural protectionists, who see culture as threatened by alien intruders, a discourse in which, as Paul Gilroy has recently argued, ‘race and nation are now primary sources of groupness and absolute ethnicity’, an ‘ethnic absolutism’ that is sometimes even shared in anti-racist discourse (Gilroy 2019b). All of this takes place in a context where ‘truth’, including historical truth, is both a commodity in high demand and corroded. As Gilroy states: In the twentieth century, militarist appeals to racial hygiene, and ethnonational unanimity resulted in genocide. That history of warfare and

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mass death is something it should be inexcusable not to know. However, as those epoch-making events pass from living memory, familiarity with them becomes patchy and intermittent. The archive of ineffable horror drifts into an indeterminate space where information is untrusted. News can be faked and spun, and truth held hostage, not by the politics of knowledge but by the political machinery that assembles carefully managed ignorance, a curated ignorance. (Gilroy 2019b)

We have reached a confused and schizophrenic moment in which the epistemic foundations of our being in the world are shifting under out feet. We live in a post-truth era of ‘alternative’ facts, ‘fake’ news and flat earth societies in which what we know about the world is becoming fundamentally uncertain. George Orwell described this long ago with uncanny precision, only now it is not ‘the Party’ but the self-proclaimed authorities on social media who lay claim to that authority: To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself – that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink. (Orwell 1949: 32)

In this moment, it is of crucial importance to think through the constructivist paradigm in which the world and what we know about it is understood to be a ‘social construction’. Of course, such a perspective is indispensable for a critical analysis of the power relations played out through contestations of history (Trouillot 1995a), but it also stops ‘at the point where the research should begin’ (Van de Port and Meyer 2018: 2). For why is it that if the past is a construction, traditions invented and communities imagined people convince themselves and others that this is not the case (ibid.)? Indeed, the presidency of Donald Trump has shown that many people are not dissuaded by even the most blatant and fantastic fabrications such as the alternative path of a hurricane or the denial of a pandemic. The success of these obvious fabrications underlines the urgency to better understand so many people’s readiness to accept them as real. Mattijs

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van de Port and Birgit Meyer have therefore proposed to look at the ‘cultural production of the real’ through what they call the ‘politics of authentication’ and the ‘aesthetics of persuasion’. This entails an investigation into how cultural heritage and historical narratives are ‘authorized in specific power constellations’ and ‘how heritage is appropriated and embodied in lived experience’ (Van de Port and Meyer 2018: 6). However, a weakness remains even in this advanced model. The focus on the politics of authentication and the role of aesthetics in this offers an important tool for understanding how some people become convinced to accept certain constructions as real. However, the fact that they are real for them does not mean that they are real in an absolute, ontological sense. Trump may draw an alternative hurricane, but that does not change its actual path accordingly. He may deny the existence of a virus, but people will not stop dying because of it. In other words, we cannot grant every construction of reality the same value. The earth is round, and even though we can investigate ethnographically why that is not some people’s reality, we must insist that some pieces of evidence are just better than others. The question, however, is whether this can be done from within a constructivist paradigm in which, ultimately, all social constructions are created equal. In this book, I have developed the notion of the trace to grapple with this dilemma. The trace suggests an ontology of the past. Footprints, for instance, are an index of somebody who walked here. Especially in the case of historical horror, it should be imperative to accept certain facts. For instance, the ‘Human Shadow Etched in Stone’ at Hiroshima has been researched thoroughly, submitted to conservation regimes, and it is now part of the exhibition at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. It can certainly be seen as a ‘cultural production of the real’, authorized by science and institutions and embodied in lived experience (Waterton 2014). But it is also the index of a person who died. I think this is an important step in the context of memory and heritage studies, where the cultural heritage is understood as eminently a cultural production in the present (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1995). At the same time, traces require certain skills of the one following it. While the dots are clearly there, it is up to the follower how to connect them and how to understand intersections with other series of clues. I understand the trace as a thing that has been left or made by someone or something and that can be followed by people with the necessary skills to recognize the trace in a series of clues. By

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following the trace, the follower maps a particular route in social and physical space, and by moving through these spaces, the follower also moves in time, both backwards and into their own future. I think such a model can address several issues arising with the formation of slavery-as-cultural-heritage. Traces are the product of past events, but they do not work in a linear way, a straight, or even causal line from the past to the present. They meander, they are rhizomatic. The one who is tracking it may get sidetracked or discover other traces that lead elsewhere, take turns or go in circles. I think this is crucial in a world of ethnic absolutism. The Alt-right has moved past the denial of a racist past and instead increasingly embraces once more whiteness as a sense of superiority, given by a now secularized God. Positions of blackness, on the other hand, are sometimes mapped onto a past in a way that identifies the past with the present, at the risk of neglecting the often successful struggles that have taken place. Throughout the book, I have therefore argued that in answering the question of how people relate to the past and the memorials representing it, it is useful to understand the divergent ways people trace the history of slavery in their own lives. In this ethnographic investigation, several themes have emerged. One central theme has been what I call an aesthetics of reticence, a general sense among Surinamese of African descent that certain things are better left unsaid, that it is not always a good idea to speak one’s mind, that it is risky to be in the limelight, and that outsiders cannot easily be trusted. This sense is conveyed and transmitted through proverbs that are often rendered in song. My argument is supported by Aby Warburg’s pathos formulae, a kind of energy preserved in and accessible through cultural forms, in this case the aesthetic of reticence conveyed through Afro-Surinamese music and proverbs. In other words, this aesthetic, while a production in the present is itself historical. Although it, too, emerged as a cultural production geared to the specific conditions of slavery (Mintz and Price 1976), and although it, too, as I have shown, can be appropriated as cultural heritage, it also bears an indexical relationship to the past. It carries, even in sublimated form, within it something of slavery’s ‘unspeakable terror’ (Gilroy 1993) that continues to form a moral framework for many of my interlocutors. I call this reticence because it is a form of secrecy that is different from the kind of discursive silence Trouillot speaks about (Trouillot 1995a). For Trouillot, discursive silence is the Foucauldian notion of power/knowledge that fundamentally shapes what can be known about the world. Reticence might be seen as a

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response to this; a necessary means of survival under the conditions of slavery, it has now become a way to control what is submitted to discourse and public scrutiny. This demand for reticence clashes with new regimes of cultural heritage and their demand for publicity. The material I presented about Afro-Surinamese music and its reappraisal as cultural heritage in the context of the memorial projects has demonstrated how the dynamics of the heritage domain interact with the cultural codes and practices that have so fundamentally been shaped by slavery and colonialism. While cultural heritage is an inherently public form, such a form has to be articulated with regard to the ambiguous status of publicity in Afro-Surinamese culture, where cultural knowledge cannot in all cases be easily shared. A basic kind of incompatibility with the late modern public sphere, in which expressions of belonging are increasingly articulated in the transparent and almost surgical forms of cultural heritage. The aesthetics of reticence signals a degree of unease with this kind of publicity, where questions of ownership can easily be taken out of one’s hands once cultural objects begin to circulate. In a broader arena, this also reverberates in controversies about cultural appropriation that are now playing out on social media. Another theme is the social and political context in which the commemoration of slavery takes place. In Chapter 1 and 2 I have analysed the commemoration of slavery as an intervention in the politics of autochthony that have come to dominate the Netherlands in the past decades. Especially the monument on Surinameplein, with its emphasis on rootedness in the Dutch soil, engages this politics. Its memory politics do not reject but reappropriate a colonial geography in which Suriname and the Dutch Antilles had been imagined as part of the Dutch Kingdom. With the central notion of besef, the memorial project frames Dutch colonial history as a shared history that has ‘sentenced’ Suriname, the Dutch Antilles and the Netherlands to each other. A shared future, the initiators argue, is possible only with the awareness of this shared history. This implies a claim on the nation; the right to belong is here formulated as a ‘birthright’. In other words, it both partakes in and critiques a nativist logic that is centred around the notion of being ‘from the soil’. This reappropriation of colonial geography can be understood as a response to their experiences of racialized disenfranchisement. The arrival of larger numbers of Surinamese nationals in the 1970s was seen by the Dutch authorities as problematic, especially because these settlers were no longer educated students but came from different

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class backgrounds. Upon their arrival, they were racialized as ‘tropical bodies’ that were not rooted, and thus did not belong in the Netherlands. When they finally settled in Amsterdam Zuidoost, that suburb was racialized and came to be seen as a ‘ghetto’. The colonial geography of empire was thus mapped onto the city. This has implications for an understanding of the politics of autochthony and nativism. The rise of right-wing populists and the exclusionary politics it has entailed has come as a shock to many in the Netherlands and has drawn scholarly interest from, among others, anthropologists and sociologists, who have focused on the politics of autochthony (Geschiere 2009), the politics of home and nativism (Duyvendak 2011) and the culturalization of citizenship (Duyvendak, Geschiere and Tonkens 2016) and integration (Schinkel 2007). The racial dimension of these processes in Europe has come into broader focus only recently (Cesari 2017; De Cesari and Kaya 2019; Mepschen 2017; Modest and De Koning 2016; Schinkel 2017; Wekker 2016). My analysis of the commemoration of slavery as an intervention in the politics of autochthony and nativism underlines the importance of paying attention to the colonial afterlives and processes of racialization undergirding the politics of autochthony, nativism and home. As Wayne Modest and Anouk de Koning have argued, the anxieties about home, culture and nation ‘evidence a difficulty to deal with the colonial past in the present, even a denial of any relationship between this past and the present’ (2016: 102). Gloria Wekker has called this a ‘paradox of colonialism and race’: a strong paradox that is operative in the Netherlands and that, as I argue, is at the heart of the nation: the passion, forcefulness, and even aggression that race, in its intersections with gender, sexuality, and class, elicits among the white population, while at the same time the reactions of denial, disavowal, and elusiveness reign supreme. (Wekker 2016: 1)

In other words, the exclusionary politics we are witnessing today have longer histories and did not begin with the spectacular rise of right-wing populism in the early 2000s. The fact that slavery entered public memory precisely when the politics of autochthony began to peak, then, is not a coincidence. Rather, the renewed presence of the colonial past and slavery in the public sphere is a reminder that the politics of autochthony and nativism should be understood as part of longer historical trajectories. Having said that, my research has also shown that the afterlives of colonialism and slavery are not straightforward or a unilineal process from the past to the present. The racial geographies in which

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Amsterdam Zuidoost is embedded cannot be understood in isolation of the colonial past and slavery, but that past alone does not explain the complexities of processes of racialization in Amsterdam Zuidoost. Empire lingers on, but as my analysis of Amsterdam Zuidoost has shown, the legacies of empire need to be analysed in tandem with urban restructuring, the local microgeographies of race and the neoliberal present. The goal cannot be an indictment of the present on the grounds of its bearing the traces of empire. Instead, I have offered an ethnographic analysis of the entanglements of the present with empire, without reinscribing quasi-preordained positions but certainly with sensitivity for historically grown and racialized hierarchies, both implicit and explicit. For example, the complexities of these afterlives become clear in Chapter 3, where I analyse the ambiguous relation between different diasporas living in the same neighbourhood. In this Atlantic world in a nutshell, ethnic rivalry alternates with conviviality and solidarity. While many ‘descendants of the enslaved’ adhere to a ‘heavily mythologised Africanity’ (Gilroy 1993: 87) of Pan-Africanist ideology, they often reject and even detest their West African neighbours. Many West Africans, in turn, regard African Surinamese as European rather than African or black, and therefore privileged. If they are excluded from Dutch society, it must be because they are lazy. These colonial stereotypes, too, are a trace of the colonial past and slavery, but their mobilization must be understood in the context of the pressures of autochthony and integration policy under which all people of African descent in the Netherlands are forced to exist. Common ground is found, it seems, in the spiritual realm. As the story of Zuster V. demonstrates, a shared Christian faith is sometimes able to transcend the racialized political economy in Amsterdam Zuidoost. In Zuster V.’s story, the church as a social space played a vital role in the discovery of her Africanness and her mysterious attraction to Africans in Amsterdam Zuidoost. Although some of these experiences of connection are scripted – for instance, through film – people like Ruben experience them as deeply felt acts of healing. There will be a lot more to say in the future about these complex relations. For although Zuster V. has found spiritual companions in the Pentecostal community, this brand of the Christian faith has been known to reject ‘African’ traditional religion (Meyer 1998; De Witte and Meyer 2013). How this plays out and what kind of connections and disconnections are emerging will have to be researched in much more detail than was possible in this book. What has become clear already, however, is that ‘Africanness’ and faith can be traced in

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various and often complicated ways. While the past plays a central role in these encounters, their outcome depends on the way people trace it to imagine alternative futures. Not only dynamics across diasporas played a role in how the cultural memory of slavery resonated in people’s lives. I found that relations within the African Surinamese community, too, both informed and were informed by the new importance of slavery. In particular, discussions about gender have intensified in the context of cultural heritage and public memory. African Surinamese in Amsterdam Zuidoost live in an environment that has been heavily stigmatized in terms of gender and sexuality. Issues like teen sexuality and presumed sexual licentiousness have been magnified in the Dutch public sphere and in scholarship (Krebbekx et al. 2013), and the people who are subjected to this discourse are forced to relate to it. Although (young) women are often the main targets of this discourse, my research suggests that men, too, struggle with these stereotypical images. Pressure is put on them, for instance, in discussions about ‘absent fathers’. I have shown that men deal with this pressure in different ways; some trace the ‘absence’ of black fathers to slavery, arguing that the social destruction on the plantation, followed by colonial regimes, has lastingly imprinted gender roles in black communities. Others see the role of men in families as an ‘African’ or ‘Caribbean’ family model that should be recognized in its own right. Yet others emphasize individual responsibility. In other words, people trace slavery in different ways in their strategies to make sense of their lives in the present. Gender plays into this in yet another way, namely through the role of women in Afro-Surinamese culture. Women have traditionally played a central role as cultuurdragers (lit. culture bearers) in AfroSurinamese culture, the ones who maintain and transmit cultural practices. This is bolstered by a positive valuation of the female in Winti cosmology, where female spirits are highly authoritative. As cultural heritage becomes increasingly important in processes of culturalization, women’s symbolic capital increases significantly. This puts pressure on men to find their own position within the heritage paradigm, giving rise to a politics of authentication in which the authority to define ‘culture’ is at stake. As I have shown, Edouard and his band are actively trying to frame their music in this context as the real or authentic Afro-Surinamese music. Finally, what this book has shown is that people who, like Yvette and Edouard, do not seem interested in the grand narratives of the commemoration of slavery have their own ways of tracing slavery.

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The fact that they are not attending official ceremonies does not mean that slavery does not play a role in their lives, or that they have repressed it in a traumatic way. It does show, however, that the past, although it informs the present, does not fully determine it. This is the nature of the trace: it leads into the past but following it also means to step into the future.

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Index

Abcouderstraatweg, 43 ABO. See Allochtonen Breed Overleg abolition in Amsterdam, 97 in Great Britain, 4–5 music connected to, 147–48 Abrewa, Ma, 149–50, 152 accountability, 25–26 aesthetics of persuasion, 175–76 aesthetics of reticence, 107n11, 118–19, 132, 137, 177–78 kaskawina and, 127–30 affective economies, 25 Africa matrifocal system from, 162–63 tracing of, 98–106 Africanity, mythologised, 9, 106, 180 African survivals, family structures as, 163 Africentrism, 8 Afro-Dutch, 138n3 Afro-Surinamese Africans connection to, 103–4 culture, 1–5 lack of political representation for, 13–14 men and relationships, 164–65 perception of dehumanization for, 17 rights of, 14–15 West Africans view on, 90 women in, culture, 181 Ahmed, Sara

on affective economies, 25 on declarations of whiteness, 25 ala kondre, 108n12 Albinus, Jasper, 173–74 Allochtonen Breed Overleg (ABO), 78–79, 81 alternative lifestyles, 141–42 ambiguity, conflict and, 90–94 van Amersfoort, Hans, 40–41, 52 Amsterdam, 46 abolition in, 97 gabion walls in, 13 housing shortage in, 43–44 Amsterdam Oost, 114–15 Amsterdam Zuidoost, 1–5, 78 approaching, 42–48 architecture in, 47–48 black internationalism in, 106–7 criminalization of weed in, 74 descendants of the enslaved in, 9–10, 34 disenfranchisement in, 47–48 ethnography in, 23 handshake incident of, 87–90 history of, 54 memory of slavery in, 89 pakkenmannetjes in, 75 racial geographies in, 34, 179–80 racialization in, 71–75 radio as community-building in, 56–57 sexuality in, 144 solidarity in, 71–72 urban renewal in, 76–77

198  ◆ Index

ancestry identity in, 8 as interest of younger generation, 99 the past and, 98 angisa, 97, 140, 145, 150, 161 anthropology, colonialism and, 32 anti-anti-essentialism, 9 anti-essentialism, 9 architecture, 47–48 Argenti, Nicholas, 116–17 articulation, 89 Assmann, Aleida, 15–16 Assmann, Jan, 15–16 Atlantic world, 4, 10 authentication, 141–71 authenticity, politics of, 165–69 autochthony in Netherlands, 34 Peter Geschiere on, 6, 40–41, 179 politics of, 6–10, 39–64, 178–79 Surinameplein memorial and, 56–63 Axwijk, Harald, 81 bakru, 128, 133 Belliot, Hannah, 82–84, 87–88, 142, 151–52, 153 Benjamin, Walter, 11 Biekman, Barryl, 147, 148 bigisma taki, 129 Bigi Spikri, 144–45, 147, 149, 152 Bigi Ten, 112, 121–22, 133–36, 164–69 De Bijlmer, 47–48, 82–84, 139n10 alternative lifestyles at, 141–42 racial geography in, vs. Gooi, 48–49 racialization of, 49–50, 52–55 Ristie political career in, 73–74 squatting in, 79–80 subsidies in, 77 Bijlmer East, 83 De Bijlmermeerpolder, 45 black internationalism, 106–7 black music, 117–18 blackness racial geographies and, 51 whiteness vs., 72–73, 74–75, 76, 132, 153–58, 177 black reason, 92

blaka foto, 2 Blakely, Alison, 123 Blue Movie, 141–42 de Boer, Henk, 74 bonuman, 105 boundaries, racialization of, 82–84 Bourdieu, Pierre, 15 Branagan, Thomas, 133, 139n11 Breezer girls, 142–43 buitenvrouwen, 162–63 Café Muiderhoek, 115–16 carrying culture, 157 CDA. See Christian Democratic party Centrum Democraten, 57 chattel slavery, 4 Christian Democratic party (CDA), 74 CIAM. See Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne citizenship, 6, 161–64 class, politics of distinction and, 135–37 Clifford, J., 24 Codfried, Glenn, 148–49, 150, 153, 154, 172n10 collective memory, 36n10 colonial geographies, 71–85, 178 colonialism, 66n8, 80, 84–85 anthropology and, 32 difference and, 104 hypersexuality and, 142–44 in Netherlands, 28–31 race and, 179 racial geographies of, 54 slavery and, in poetry, 155 territory and, 60–62 Comité 30 juni/1 juli, 41–42, 58 communicative memory, 15–16 conflict, ambiguity and, 90–94 Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), 46–47 Connerton, Paul, 15 Conscripts of Modernity (Scott), 36n8 constructivism, 11 contract marriages, 93 Corona band, 121

Index  ◆  199

Creoles, 150–51 cultural capital, 128–29 cultural heritage, 4, 5, 94–98, 170, 178 African, 9, 91–92 ethnicity in, 8 gender of, 153–58 intersections in, 35 national culture and, 161 protectionism in, 6, 8 public memory and, 117, 137, 174, 181 slavery in, 16 cultural identity, 20–21 cultural memory of slavery, 117–18, 146 tracing as, 13–19 culture, 17, 163 cultuurdragers, 155, 161 dance, 122–23, 124 dehumanization, perception of, for Afro-Surinamese, 17 de Kom, Anton, statue of, 1–2, 3, 14, 15, 16, 17, 30 Deleuze, Gilles, 21, 36n12 denial, trauma and, 116 Derrida, Jacques, 12 descendants, of the enslaved, 9–10, 34, 40–41, 87 Desmond, Matthew, 24, 25, 37n19 diaspora, 135–36 ethnography and, 89 practices of, 87–107 racial geographies and, 64 slavery and, 98 as tracing, 19–22 difference, colonialism and, 104 dinari, 158 disenfranchisement, 47–48 dodenherdenking, 58 dreven, 83–84 Durbar, 105 Dutch resistance, 1 Dutch welfare state, 90 dyodyo, 160 emancipation, commemoration of slavery and, 170–71

embodied intersubjectivity, 26 Emirbayer, Mustafa, 24, 25, 37n19 emotions, social phenomena and, 25 energeia, 17 errantry, 21 Esajas, Emile, 81 essentialism, 9 ethnic absolutism, 174–75 ethnicity, 8 ethnographers, 22–30 ethnographic interviews, 31–32 ethnography, 23–25 diaspora and, 89 of memory of slavery, 32–33 of past matters, 30–33 tracing and, 22, 31 family structures, as African survivals, 163 Fanon, Frantz, 8–9, 17–18 fingerprint, 18–19 Fiti Fu Wini, 155–56 folk seminars, 31–32 Foucault, Michel, 36n11, 177–78 France, slavery in, 5 frequencies of kaskawina, 121–27 politics of lower frequency, 117–18, 124–25 gabion walls, 13 Ganzenoef, 76 Geerdinkhof, 76, 83 Geldershoofd, 76 gender of cultural heritage, 153–58 race, and authentication, 141–71 slavery and, 144–47 in Suriname, 151–52 genealogical construction, 27 van Gent, Wouter, 40 Germany, 27 Ghana, 88 Gilroy, Paul, 8, 117–18, 119, 124, 126, 174 on anti-anti-essentialism vs. antiessentialism, 9 on politics, 122

200  ◆ Index

Ginzburg, Carlo, 18–19 Glissant, Édouard, 21 de Goede, Arend, 50–51 Goldberg, David Theo, 40 Gooi, 48–49 grachtenpanden, 30, 46 gran krutu, 148–49, 150, 162, 171n5 grassroots organizations, memorial projects of, 7–8 Gravestein, 76 Great Britain, 4–5 Groenberg, Roy, 152 Groeneveen, 99, 108n13 groupism, 39–40 Guattari, Felix, 21, 36n12 guilt, 23–24, 26, 27, 28 Halbwachs, Maurice, 11, 15 Hall, Stuart, 8–9, 20, 89 handshake incident, 87–90 Haraway, Donna, 24 Hartman, Saidiya, 21–22, 26, 119 healing, 104–5 Heijboer, Pierre, 72–73 Helberg, Glenn, 162–63 Herinnering aan Holland (Marsman), 44 Heritage Dynamics, 28 heritage politics, 147–53 historiography, Benjamin on, 11 history of Amsterdam Zuidoost, 54 in community, 19 memory and, 14, 15 power relations in, 175 the trace and, 39 Hoogendijk, F. A., 54, 55 hooks, bell, 143 housing, 43–44, 45, 52 humanism, black subjectivity in, 14 Hunsel, Renate, 80 Huyssen, Andreas, 17–18 hypersexuality, colonialism and, 142–44 identity, 8, 40, 91 identity politics, 25 immigration policy, 90

implicit social knowledge, 118 individual rights, 26 Indonesia, 50 Islamization, 73–74 Jaffe, Rivke, 40 Jim Crow, 37n13 Jones, Guno, 50 Kanhai, Krish, 82 kapitein, 151 kaskawina, 166–69 aesthetics of reticence and, 127–30 frequencies of, 121–27 incorporating, 130–32 lyrics in, 132–35 politics of, 113–38 Keti Koti, 37n15, 144–47, 148, 149, 150–51, 153–54, 161, 174 kinship, 92–94 Knel, Richard, 162 de Kom, Anton, 174 de Koning, Anouk, 179 Koster, Guilly, 53, 150, 152–53 Koswal, Gilo, 95 koto, 96–97, 145, 150, 161 koto dansi, 96–97, 108n12 Kout, Winston, 62–63 kra, 160 kruderi, 148–49 Kruitberg and Groeneveen, 46 kulturu, 161 Kwakoe Podium, 31–32, 103, 113, 127–30, 148–49, 153 labor, division of, 157 Le Corbusier, 46–47, 139n10 liberal individualism, 26, 27 lived anatomy, 26 Lokale Omroep Bijlmermeer (LOB), 56 Luqman, Roel, 81 Maatrijk, Just, 53, 81 Manifest van Besef, 42 Marcus, G. E., 24 marginalization, 153 Markelo, Marian, 145

Index  ◆  201

Maroons, 150–51, 172n11 Marsman, Hendrik, 44 masculinity, 147, 164–65 matrifocal system, 162–63 Mbembe, Achille, 92 McKittrick, Katherine, 55 mediums, West African, 104–5 memorial projects in Amsterdam Oosterpark, 88 of grassroots organizations, 7–8 in Oosterpark, 162 memory, 32–33, 89, 135–36 active vs. passive, 16 collective, 36n10 communicative, 15–16 cultural, 13–19 history and, 14, 15 the past and, 11 personal, 36n10 politics of, 117 public, 15–16 of slavery, 89 slavery as, 34–35 Meyer, Birgit, 120, 175–76 Mintz, Sidney W., 123–24, 126 Modest, Wayne, 179 Monument van Besef, 57–58, 59–60 Moore, Henrietta L., 24–25, 26 moral groundings, 132–35 Morrison, Toni, 19–20, 22 museums, 6, 7 music, 146 abolition connection to, 147–48 masculinity in, 147 as political, 119–24, 126 slavery and, 132–35 Sranantongo and, 165–66 the trace and, 137–38 Nationaal Comité 4 en 5 mei, 58, 60, 62 national culture, 161 national heritage, slavery as, 148 nationalism, 55 national landscape, 44–45, 46 National Museum of African American History, 4 National Slavery Memorial, 5

nativism, 64 Négritude, 8 Netherlands authochthony in, 34 colonialism in, 28–31 Creoles in, 150–51 descendants of the enslaved in, 41 immigration policy in, 90 local radio in, 56–57 Maroons in, 150–51 overseas nationals in, 50–52 politics of place in, 48–52 racism in, 57 relations with Ghana, 88 slavery in, 3–4, 5, 30–31, 33, 39–40 Suriname and, 62, 63 Surinamese in, 49–50 Nicol, Orsine, 105–6, 110n21 NiNsee, 144, 147, 149 No Limit, 94–95 nomadism, 21 Nooit gedacht, 45 nostalgia, 45, 46 objectivity, scientific, 24 odos, 127, 129, 135–36, 161 ontology, 11, 176–77 Oosterpark, 144–46, 162 slavery memorial in, 88 oral culture, 135–36 Orwell, George, 175 Osei II, 87–88 the other, sexuality and, 141–44 overseas nationals, 50–52 pakkenmannetjes, 75 Panafest, 105–6 Pan-Africanism, 8, 104–6, 180 the past, 18 ancestry and, 98 culture and, 17 memory and, 11 racial formations and, 22 the trace as, 12 The Penitential Tyrant (Branagan), 133 Pentecostal church, 98–100 personal memory, 36n10

202  ◆ Index

plantation, 55 Platform Bijlmer, 81–90 poetry, slavery and colonialism in, 155 polderlandschap, 44–45 political economy, 154, 180 political mobilization, 6–7 politics of authentication, 175–76 of authenticity, 165–69 of autochthony, 6–10, 39–64, 178–79 of distinction, 135–37 Gilroy on, 122 of kaskawina, 113–38 of a lower frequency, 117–18, 124–25 music and, 119–24, 126 of subjectivity, 123 van de Port, Mattijs, 175–76 positionality Moore on, 24–25 the trace and, 40 West African and Surinamese, 91–94 postmigrants, African, 138n3 post-truth era, 175 power relations, 175 prostitution, 142, 171n2 proverbs, 130, 136–37 Provo movement, 53 public memory, 15–16 cultural heritage and, 117, 137, 174, 181 of slavery, 39–40, 99 race colonialism and, 179 gender, and authentication, 141–71 Morrison on, 22 urban restructuring and, 76–79 racial discrimination, 37n13 racial formations, 22 racial geographies in Amsterdam Zuidoost, 34, 179–80 blackness and, 51 of colonialism, 54

diaspora and, 64 in Gooi vs. De Bijlmer, 48–49 racialization, 64, 178–79 in Amsterdam Zuidoost, 71–75 of De Bijlmer, 49–50, 52–55 of boundaries, 82–84 racial stereotypes, 95–96 racism Goldberg on, 40 in Netherlands, 57 in school, 154–55 radio, 56–57 recherche, 17–18 red berets, 37n14 Redi Musus, 22–23 Renfurm, Henry, 57–58 resistance, 123–24, 126 responsibility, 27, 30 rhizome, 177 Deleuze and Guattari on, 21, 36n12 the trace vs., 36n12 Ristie, Roy, 41–42, 55, 56–63, 67n20, 67n24 political career in De Bijlmer of, 73–74 roots Schramm on routes and, 20 subjecthood and, 94 tourism, 9 Rutte, Mark, 146–47 Samuels, David, 143 Saramacca, 107n7, 134 Schramm, Katharina, 9, 20, 93, 95, 98, 105–6 Scott, David, 36n8 secrecy, 125 Sekyere, Ernest Owusu, 88 sexuality, 35, 141–44 silence, slavery and, 116 Simmel, Georg, 125 SIO. See Surinaams Inspraak Orgaan skholè, 37n19 skin color, 101–2 slavenhutten, 145 Slave Route #1, 105 Slave Route Project, 4

Index  ◆  203

slavery, 10 accountability and, 25–26 colonialism and, in poetry, 155 commemoration of, and emancipation, 170–71 commemoration of, on Surinameplein, 41–42 in cultural heritage, 16 cultural memory of, 117–18, 146 diaspora and, 98 ethnography of memory of, 32–33 in France, 5 gender during, 144–47 Hartman on tracing, 21–22 memorial in Amsterdam Oosterpark, 88 memory of, 4–8, 10, 15, 17, 22, 31, 35, 89–90, 116–20 music and, 132–35 national heritage including, 148 in Netherlands, 3–4, 5, 30–31, 33, 39–40 public memory of, 39–40, 99 representation of, 7 rhetoric of, 84–85 silence and, 116 social positioning and, 29–30 social relationality and, 24 subjectivation and, 29–30 the trace and, 31 tracing, 11–13, 174, 181–82 trauma and, 122 in United States, 4 witchcraft and, 133 snorder, 113, 114, 130, 138n2 social engineering, 47 social pathology, 118, 119 social phenomena, 25 social positioning, 29–30 social relationality, 24, 138n3 Soekra, Vincent, 105, 106, 149 Sophiedela, 147 spectres, 12 squatting, 53, 79–80 Sranantongo, 104, 110n21, 129, 136, 144, 150, 152, 171n6 music and, 165–66 Steering Committee, 79

Stichting Interim Beheer, 56 stories, secret, moral groundings and, 132–35 Stuurgroep Vernieuwing Bijlmermeer (SVB), 77 subjecthood, 94, 161–64 subjectivation, 29–30 subjectivity black, 14 Foucault on, 36n11 local, 63 metaphysical and secular in, 160–61 political, 123 tracing and, 19 subsidies, 77 Sumter-Griffith, Kortensia, 156 Surinaams feestje, 113 Surinaams Inspraak Orgaan (SIO), 73–74 Suriname, 1–5 division of labor in, 157 gender in, 151–52 Maroons and Creoles in, and Netherlands, 150–51 Netherlands and, 62, 63 the trace in, 12 Surinameplein, 33, 178 ceremony at, 60–62 memorial and autochtony, 56–63 slavery commemoration on, 41–42 Surinamese, 49–50 independence, 64 positionality of, vs. West Africans, 91–94 welfare organizations of, 52–53 SVB. See Stuurgroep Vernieuwing Bijlmermeer SV Bijlmer, 72 Sweet, Elvira, 81, 82, 88 tapir, 12–13 Taussig, Michael, 118, 120–21 territory, colonialism and, 60–62 The Trauma of Slavery, 28 tokenism, 82 toko, 36n5 Toney, Claudette, 156

204  ◆ Index

trace, notion of the, 121 cultural identity and, 20–21 ethnography and, 22 history and, 39 music and, 137–38 ontology and, 176–77 as the past, 12 positionality and, 40 the rhizome vs., 36n12 slavery and, 31 in Suriname, 12 of tapir, 12–13 tracing, 63, 85, 135 of Africa, 98–106 as cultural memory, 13–19 diaspora as, 19–22 ethnography and, 31 Hartman on, slavery, 21–22 Ruben and John on, 13–15, 17 slavery, 11–13, 174, 181–82 subjectivity and, 19 transatlantic slave trade, 4, 5 trauma, 117, 118, 137 denial and, 116 slavery and, 122 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 27 UNESCO, 4, 6 United States, 4, 37n13 UnTold, 94–95 urban inequalities, 40 urban planning, 43–44, 46 URBAN programme, 77–79 urban renewal, 34, 76–77 urban restructuring, 76–79 vaderloze families, 162, 181 Verdonk, Rita, 49, 65nn6–7 verloedering, 74 Verwey-Jonker, Hilda, 41, 52 violence, 138n9 Von Sack, 125–26 voodoo, 133

wandel, 85n2 wandelingen, 73 Warburg, Aby, 17, 177 watersnoodramp, 62 Watson, Otmar, 95 weed, criminalization of, 74 Wekker, Gloria, 135–36, 157–58, 160, 179 welfare organizations, 52–53, 55 We Slaves of Suriname (de Kom), 1 West Africans, 90, 91–94 Wet Schijnhuwelijken, 93 whiteness Ahmed on, 25 blackness vs., 72–73, 74–75, 76, 132, 153–58, 177 conflation of Dutchness and, 50–52 within political economy, 154 Wilhelmus, 60 Winti religion, 35, 42, 124, 133, 146, 157, 181–82 soil in, 172n12 Wekker on, 160 women and, 158–61 witchcraft, 133 de Witte, Marleen, 91 women in Afro-Surinamese culture, 181 as cultuurdragers, 155, 161 Winti religion and, 158–61 World War II, 45 Writing Culture (Clifford, J. and Marcus, G. E.), 24 yeye, 160 yorka, 160 Zelfbesef, 62 Zwart Beraad, 79–82 zwarte ontkenners, 163