Tag: abolition of slavery

Netherlands: King May Apologise for Slave Trade, but What Lies Ahead?

King Willem-Alexander is expected to make a formal apology to mark 160 years since the Netherlands abolished slavery. This could nudge European leaders closer to reparations.

For the second time in six months, Amsterdam district counsellor Vayhishta Miskin is braced for a historic occasion that may long have seemed unthinkable to many people of Surinamese descent like her.

After Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte apologised for the tiny country’s slave-trading past and pledged €200 million for educational initiatives in December, King Willem-Alexander is widely expected to follow suit on Saturday, July 1, according to local media.

“What people told me is that they felt emotional about the prime minister’s apology because these were words people were waiting for since 1863,” Miskin told DW‘s Christine Mhundwa in the Dutch capital this week, referring to the date when the Netherlands abolished slavery by law. “It’s a first step in order for us to move forward and heal as a society.”

Prime Minister of the Netherlands- Mark Rutte
Photo: Twitter/@MinPres

July 1 marks 150 years since the de facto end, and 160 years since the official abolition, of Dutch-organised slavery in the Caribbean. The occasion is known as Keti Koti, or Broken Chains Day, in the former colony of Suriname.

Willem-Alexander has not given any indications of exactly what he will say. But in Miskin’s neighbourhood of Amsterdam South-East, where many locals have roots in former colonies like Suriname and the Dutch Antilles, the bigger question for many is what comes after.

In fact, the community has held meetings to discuss precisely that question. “What people told us is that they need the wrongs and the injustice that they experienced in the past and still continue in the present day to be nullified,” Miskin said.

“Even if we receive an apology from the king, what does it mean?” she added. “What people really need is for their children to have a professional education, their children to get a job,” she said, pointing to ongoing inequality in one of the world’s richest countries.

A dark chapter remembered

At the height of its colonial era, the Netherlands presided over a huge global trade network as one of the world’s major imperial powers. Over centuries, the Dutch were responsible for about 5% of the overall transatlantic slave trade, buying and shipping close to 600,000 enslaved people from Africa to Caribbean colonies as well as other European colonies across the Americas.

Enslaved Africans were also forcibly moved to Dutch colonies in the Indian Ocean, like present-day Indonesia, and enslaved Balinese or Javanese were transported to modern-day South Africa.

Overall, 15% of those taken from Africa to the Americas in the transatlantic trade did not survive the abysmal ship conditions of the crossing, not to mention the many, many more who died before they had even left Africa.

The survivors and their descendants faced a brutal plantation life of hard labour and often violent punishment for perceived insubordination. The Dutch were one of the last European nations to end slavery in colonial territories.

Dutch Mauritius and First African slaves from Madagascar in the early 1640s. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Fenous/CC BY-SA 4.0.

To commemorate this dark chapter, a ceremony involving the King and marking the start of a memorial year is planned in Amsterdam’s Oosterpark. The Keti Koti festival celebrating Surinamese emancipation, anticipated to be larger than usual this year, will be held at Amsterdam’s Museumplein.

How a Lone Woman’s Consumer Boycott Pushed the British Towards Abolishing Slavery

If people must have the “sweet dust,” Elizabeth Heyrick said, they should at least make sure it was grown in Britain’s colonies in the East Indies – Bengal and Malaya – where cane-field labourers were impoverished but at least technically free.

While many companies have trumpeted their support for the Black Lives Matter movement, others are beginning to face consumer pressure for not appearing to do enough.

For example, some people are advocating a consumer boycott of Starbucks over an internal memo that prohibits employees from wearing gear that refers to the movement. And advocates are urging supporters to target other companies under the Twitter tag #boycott4blacklives.

Consumers boycotts, which put power into the hands of people of even modest income and can lend a sense of “doing something” in the face of injustice, have a mixed track record. There have been some notable successes, such as consumer-led efforts to end apartheid in South Africa. But others, such as boycotts of the National Rifle Association and of Israel, have yielded little.

But it may hearten Black Lives Matter consumer activists to learn that the first-ever boycott – organised over 50 years before the term was even coined – was ultimately a success, if not in the way the woman behind it intended. I stumbled upon this history during research for my just-published book about the end of slavery in the British Caribbean.

Blood sugar

In the 1820s, Elizabeth Heyrick felt disgust over Britain’s enslavement of people on islands such as Barbados and Jamaica in the West Indies, where large sugar plantations produced virtually all the sugar consumed in Western Europe.

Although England banned the British Atlantic slave trade in 1807, it still permitted people to own slaves in its colonies in the early 19th century.

Heyrick joined the abolition movement from a position of privilege and wealth. But after an early marriage to a hothead husband ended with his death in 1797, she converted to Quakerism and vowed to give up “all ungodly lusts.” She eventually found a passion for the antislavery movement, though with marked frustration for the slow-moving process of pushing bills through the English Parliament.

Contemptuous of the male abolitionists in Parliament whom she regarded as too willing to appease the wealthy slaveholders who clung to slavery as an economic pillar, Heyrick launched a campaign to get ordinary Britons to quit using the sugar produced on these islands and for grocers not to carry it.

If people must have the “sweet dust,” she said, they should at least make sure it was grown in Britain’s colonies in the East Indies – Bengal and Malaya – where cane-field labourers were impoverished but at least technically free.

Her campaign involved writing a series of booklet-sized polemics. In one such broadside, she asked those who favored gradual emancipation to reflect “that greater victories have been achieved by the combined expression of individual opinion than by fleets and armies; that greater moral revolutions have been accomplished by the combined exertions of individual resolution than were ever effected by acts of Parliament.”

Heyrick pulled no rhetorical punches:

“Let the produce of slave labour henceforth and forever be regarded as ‘the accursed thing’ and refused admission to our houses,” she wrote. “Abstinence from one single article of luxury would annihilate the West Indian slavery!!”

Her focus on citizen-driven change through deliberate consumer activism was unpopular with her contemporaries who preferred negotiations among government officials to achieve their ends.

The Baptist War

Heyrick grew despondent with the seeming lack of progress from her boycott effort and died in 1831 without seeing her goal of “imminent emancipation” achieved. Her passing was barely noticed by British newspapers, yet her efforts would come to bear astonishing results very soon after her death.

A poster advertised a chapel service in celebration of the abolition of slavery in 1838. Photo: The National Library of Wales., CC BY

Heyrick could not have known that an enslaved Baptist deacon in Jamaica named Samuel Sharpe was – while she was pushing for a boycott – reading about the anti-slavery movement she did so much to fuel, almost certainly including the “Quit Sugar” movement.

Heartened by the news that many people in the faraway capital of the empire were actually sympathetic to him and his fellows, he began to formulate his own revolutionary vision and preached about it and his plans for rebellion to select groups of elite slaves.

Sharpe’s rebellion, known as the Baptist War, began on Dec. 27, 1831. The uprising lasted less than two weeks and resulted in the destruction of dozens of buildings and killing of at least 500 slaves – both during the fighting and in reprisals. A giant pit had to be dug outside Jamaica’s Montego Bay to hold all the bodies. Sharpe was hanged a few months later.

But the mere demonstration of military competence – the rebels defeated the island militia in at least one head-to-head confrontation – made an impression like no other uprising had before and helped inspire the British Parliament to pass the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which abolished slavery in the West Indies. Full freedom wasn’t achieved until 1838.

The headlines of 19th-century newspapers thus performed a double-function as they crossed the Atlantic. News of the sugar boycott helped inspired enslaved people to revolt, and news of their visceral unhappiness to the point of mayhem helped inspire the British Parliament to push for immediate abolition – which is what Heyrick had been saying all along.The Conversation

Tom Zoellner is a professor of English at Chapman University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.