Jan Pieterszoon Coen (1587-1629) was governor-general of the Dutch East Indies, in the service of the VOC. His most important achievement: the genocide on the Banda Islands, in the east of the archipelago. Of the fifteen thousand inhabitants, he had fourteen thousand deported and/or murdered. He sold eight hundred into slavery. He achieved his goal, to give the VOC the exclusive right to trade in nutmeg, with flying colors.
Anton de Kom (1898-1945) was a writer and fought against colonialism and racism. His book We slaves of Suriname is still impressive reading ninety years later. In Suriname, De Kom was imprisoned by the colonial regime. Later they put him on a boat to the Netherlands, where he would never find a permanent job again. He died as a political prisoner in a German concentration camp, just before the end of the Second World War.
For a long time I thought renaming streets was a bad idea, born from the minds of reckless activists. You’re not doing justice to history, I thought, by purging the city of ‘wrong’ historical figures. We once thought they were heroes and gave them a street. Explaining that on a sign is better than canceling their name.
I now think differently about that – at least with JP Coen. Why do 130,00 cars drive every day in the Western Docklands of Amsterdam through a tunnel named after a mass murderer? Someone who would be brought before the International Criminal Court today? Isn’t that a mockery of history?
December 19 marks one year since Prime Minister Rutte apologized for the Dutch slavery past. For the “untold suffering” that the State has caused to the enslaved and their descendants. De Koning followed last summer, at Keti Koti. Those excuses, Rutte said, are “a comma, not a full stop.” Now that they have been created, the government has a moral obligation to alleviate the impact of slavery on descendants.
If the State wants to take this seriously, it could start with the Coentunnel. The Komtunnel: isn’t that a nice symbolic gesture to everyone who still carries slavery – in the West and in the East?
It is not a disaster for the motorist: ‘Coentunnel’ or ‘Komtunnel’, it only makes a small difference in terms of pronunciation. And the great thing is: with De Komtunnel you not only honor the country’s best-known anti-colonial intellectual, but also someone who was irrefutably ‘good’ in the Second World War. When the Nazis invaded the Netherlands, Anton de Kom joined the resistance. He paid for it with his life.
The Remembrance Year for the Past of Slavery is almost over, with nineteen days to go. Who will take up the gauntlet?
Thijs Niemantsverdriet replaces Petra de Koning.
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