Sometime in the past week Teletext reported, like every year at the beginning of summer, that the first tropical day was measured in De Bilt. That is meteorological language for a day when ‘the mercury’ reached 30 degrees Celsius or higher. That ‘mercury’ refers to mercury thermometers, which are no longer used. Usually the Netherlands counts according to the KNMI between two and eight tropical days. Incidentally, in 1976 fifteen consecutive tropical days were measured in De Bilt.
That ‘tropical’ refers to the zone on earth between the tropics, the tropics. According to the etymological dictionary borrowed from ancient Greek tropicos kuklos. Tropicos is derived from train which means to turn or turn.
The word ‘tropical’ nowadays arouses all kinds of exotic associations in the Netherlands, derived from, for example, Caribbean atmospheres. With blue sea, kettle music and a sandy beach with palm trees.
When the Netherlands was still a colonial power, the words tropical and tropics had more connection with the harsh conditions in the overseas territories. There was tropical medicine that dealt with tropical diseases, specific conditions linked to living in areas with higher temperatures full of poisonous insects that were unknown in the Dutch temperate regions. Infectious diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever, hepatitis A/B, diphtheria, tuberculosis and typhoid fever.
People who traveled to the colonies usually bought equipment with airy, white, tropical clothing. Also consider the pith helmet to protect the head from the rays of the sun.
Physical load
Europeans who went to work in the tropics before the invention of air conditioning, especially in Indonesia, the then Dutch East Indies, suffered a lot from the heat combined with high humidity. The latter ensures that people can hardly cool down when they perspire. So there was already what we would now call a heat protocol: the colonial upper layer worked according to a tropical grid. Get up early, rinse with cold water and stop around one o’clock in the afternoon, if it got too hot, then take an afternoon nap. Society was completely geared to this, also in terms of noise pollution. For example, in the afternoon in the Menteng district in Batavia (Jakarta), domestic workers were even banned from sweeping. Towards the end of the afternoon another wash followed, after which people went into the evening refreshed.
All in all, living in the tropics was a heavy physical strain. That is why it was said that ‘tropical years count twice’: that was not just a saying, but also actually the case with the counting of pension years. A tropical year was a year that counted for two for the calculation of the pension accrual. Now that expression is still used metaphorically for a difficult period.
Tropical children are children who were born in the colony and after World War II, when the Dutch East Indies had become Indonesia, felt like an outsider after their arrival in the Netherlands.