Dutch investigative journalist Leendert van der Valk has revealed that the minimum number of people enslaved by the Netherlands in the transatlantic slavery system is a shocking 3.3 million. The figure is five times higher than the previous number of 600,000 commonly cited in the country. That’s the low-end estimate – he said Dutch slavers may have stolen the freedom of up to 5.3 million people.
The Guardian note that King Willem-Alexander and then prime minister Mark Rutte have previously used the much lower number when apologising for the Dutch role in the hideous trade in human beings.
Van der Valk explained his new findings, saying that the previous figure of 600,00:
…did not take into account all the places where the Dutch colonised or enslaved people, the full period of the country’s involvement, or include many who were born into enslavement. It also did not account for Indigenous people whom the Dutch met in some of the countries they colonised and later enslaved.
The Guardiango on to quote:
…Peggy Brandon, a prominent Surinamese-born cultural leader and a curator of the Netherlands’ National Museum of Slavery.
She said:
What upsets me is that we never talk about the people who lived generation after generation within that system of enslavement. We don’t talk about the people who sometimes killed their young children because they didn’t want them to grow up in enslavement.
Dutch slavery: ‘circumstances too horrible to be given to the world’
There is still insufficient attention given in the Netherlands, Britain, and elsewhere to a system so barbaric it would prompt this kind of response from parents. It’s therefore worth reminding people of the horrors enslaved people had to endure. The following are examples from an 1805 abolitionist pamphlet published in New York. Many of the people kidnapped from Africa by the British, Dutch and other European nations would have ended up in the United States.
The author Samuel Wood recounts that a:
Mr. Fitzmaurice mentions the practice of dropping hot lead upon the slaves, which he saw performed by a planter of the name of Rushie in Jamaica, this same man, in three years, destroyed by severity forty negroes out of sixty. The rest of the conduct of this planter was suppressed by the house of commons, as containing circumstances too horrible to be given to the world.
He goes on to cite:
An overseer on the estate where Mr. J. Turry was, in Granada, threw a slave into the boiling cane juice, who died in four days.
Slaves were routinely whipped so brutally as to leave incisions:
…so deep that you can lay your finger into the wounds, and are such as no time can erase.
These were for so-called offences such as “not picking a sufficient quantity of grass” or for theft, often borne of hunger.
Brandon stressed that better knowledge of the true figures for people enslaved is crucial to emphasising their humanity. She said:
It’s going back to the fact that these were human beings. And every person has a right to be seen and to be known. We don’t know their names. And we didn’t count them for the longest time.
It’s striking that even a figure as pitiful as NATO head Mark Rutte was willing to apologise for his nation’s role in the barbaric slave trade, yet no equivalent British figure has done so. This is despite the fact Britain possessed the largest empire during the period of European colonisation, and transported an estimated:
…3.1m Africans to the British colonies in the Americas and Caribbean.
Europe’s present crimes show failure to reckon with past
Using Van der Valk’s methods Britain’s culpability would be far greater than that of the Dutch. As the above linked article referencing the 3.1m people indicates, only this year Britain:
…abstained on a UN resolution to recognise the transatlantic slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity” despite overwhelming support from non-European countries.
Recognising the scale and harm of slavery, and European colonialism more broadly, strengthens the case for payment of reparations to peoples that suffered most, and still do under modern neo-colonial practices. Historic culprits have been taking tentative – and thus far inadequate – steps in that direction.
The Church of England (C of E) set up the £100 million Project Spire to address its own historic profiteering from slavery. The Guardian reported the C of E’s claim that it will:
…invest in a better future for all, working with and for communities affected by historic transatlantic slavery.
However, a 2024 report cited negative feedback from “focus groups in Jamaica, Barbados, Ghana and England” alongside a “global questionnaire”. The authors said:
…there was deep concern that the full role of the Church Commissioners and the Church of England in African chattel enslavement and its legacies had not been sufficiently exposed, acknowledged and repaired.
Similarly, Amnesty International criticised Germany for only paying reparations to the Namibian state, without meaningfully consulting “affected descendants” of Germans who had out a genocide carried against them over a century ago. Amnesty say, to this day:
…the effects of the genocide continue to be experienced by Ovaherero and Nama communities.
Germany is currently an enthusiastic participant in the ongoing genocide perpetrated by a modern-day settler-colonial entity – so-called ‘Israel’. That colonialism can still operate with such overt barbarism, and with the full support of so many former colonial states, shows how far we are from truly reckoning with historic imperial crimes.
Featured image via the Canary
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