The NTR program Hidden past reflects the interest of many in his origin: who were my ancestors, where did they come from, were they righteous or criminal, pious or violent, rich or poor, fearful or adventurer? Or perhaps, oh abomination, very average? All those questions that are covered by a thick fog of centuries and may or may not be answered by registry and archive research.
Hidden past links this innocent interest to the presumed curiosity that the viewer cherishes for the famous Dutchman – a reflex that is just as routine in Hilversum as in this case innocent, in favor of the viewing figures. I suspect that everyone will come across interesting histories if they shake the family tree long and hard enough, and the same goes for the Dutch celebrity. And therefore also for journalists and NOS Newspresenter Simone Weimans (50), whose search for ancestral traces in Suriname was followed on Saturday.
As the descendant of a Maroon, an enslaved man who freed himself from domination in the jungles of Suriname, Weimans went in search of historians and distant relatives in Paramaribo, in the cemetery and on an overgrown plantation. She saw assumed characterological family traits – a desire for freedom, entrepreneurial spirit – confirmed and vague suspicions about a Danish ancestral family branch disproved.
The shadow of the Dutch colonial past hung undiminished over Weimans’ quest through the natural beauty of rainforest and rivers. That already started when, while sailing on the Brokopondo reservoir, she read with emotion a letter from the childhood friend of her long-dead father. A letter wishing her success. The reservoir was created in 1964, during the Dutch rule. Eight thousand residents were forced to move, Weimans’ village also drowned.
Only dead treetops poke ghostly through the water surface of the lake, wry symbols for the erased history. Her father had learned not to look back and to look to the future. At the same time, those dead tops were not a harbinger of crippled genealogy research, because that surprisingly took Weimans back to the end of the 18th century. Files revealed that female relatives had already lived together as free women in one stately home in 1830, 39 years before the formal abolition of slavery in Suriname. That still stands.
Also beautiful: the rickety, camera-genic wooden house that father Weimans and his family moved into in 1964 after the forced move, and where he ran a food store. Still with the same Parbo beer ad and the same veranda; as if Weimans stepped into the black-and-white photo of that time.
That alleged Danish branch on my mother’s side – by the name ‘Schotsborg’ – turned out to be a corruption of the name Schots, belonging to a Dutch army captain who fathered a child with an enslaved woman. There was no formal acknowledgment, hence. In addition to her own family history, Weimans also explored embarrassing colonial hypocrisy.