On Thursday evening, about eighty people gathered in the Dorpskerk in Rheden in Gelderland for an edifying word. Not from the pastor this time, but from Karwan Fatah-Black, lecturer in colonial history at Leiden University. The Holy Scriptures have been replaced for the occasion by a book full of black pages. ‘Worldwide we do not find anyone so superior to another that they can possess people’, Fatah-Black addresses his predominantly white audience. “And no one should be treated like property.”
The reason for the meeting is Keti Koti, the annual commemoration and celebration of the abolition of slavery in Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles. The turnout may not be as overwhelming as at the annual Sheep Shearer Festival in Rheden, but it is only the first time that something is being done about Keti Koti. ‘The national dissemination of slavery history’, Fatah-Black preaches from behind his lectern, ‘is an important form of recognition.’
More and more celebrations
It was only a matter of time that Keti Koti (‘Broken Chains’) has now also reached this part of the Netherlands. More and more municipalities are marking the event on the calendar. In addition to Amsterdam, where the national Keti Koti meeting has been held since 2002, at least fifteen cities have joined the commemorations and celebrations in recent years. Amersfoort, Arnhem, Leeuwarden, Leiden and Zwolle followed last year. And now Rheden is also part of the party.
While colorful parades, drum bands and ‘dialogue tables’ with peanut soup and heri heri are on the program in many other places in the Netherlands, Rheden is keeping it sober for the time being, with only a lecture in the church, a wreath laying and an exhibition in the local library. The fact that the horrors of slavery are already discussed here on the evening before Keti Koti is a conscious choice, says organizer Marleen Noorland. ‘That way we don’t get in the way of the meeting in Amsterdam.’
As leader of the local PvdA faction, Noorland successfully submitted a motion for its own Keti Koti event last year. ‘The Surinamese and Antillean community is still in a lot of pain from slavery,’ she says. “You have to pay attention to that.” Not that there are many residents with Surinamese or Antillean roots among the more than 43 thousand inhabitants of Rheden, she admits. ‘It’s about tens. Almost everyone here is white. But that is precisely why this awareness is so important.’
Unlike in Amsterdam and Middelburg, for example, where many buildings have a dark past, Rheden is not a municipality where the traces of slavery immediately catch the eye. There is exactly one estate that is said to have been financed with the income from a Surinamese sugar plantation. However, Noorland finds it ‘unbelievable’ that her own Rheden is also entrusted with the inheritance of the West India Company. “When I first heard about that, I thought, how is it possible?”
The wish for a Keti Koti meeting did not come from her voters with a Surinamese or Antillean background, says the PvdA leader. “But for us it fits into our diversity and inclusion agenda. Earlier we submitted a motion for a rainbow flag on the town hall. This fits in seamlessly with that.’
Slavery has also brought prosperity
Yola Hopmans, leader of the local VVD, is significantly less enthusiastic about Noorman’s initiative and therefore voted against. “Everyone around me wonders if there aren’t more important things to spend our time on,” she says. Hopmans himself has an answer to this: ‘You have to see things in their time. I don’t want to justify slavery with that, but we also have to move on. Moreover, we must not forget that slavery has also brought us a lot of prosperity.’
The fact that Keti Koti causes sharp contradictions not only in Rheden has repeatedly been shown in recent years. When former PvdA leader Lilianne Ploumen made a plea on 1 July 2021 to make the commemoration and celebration a national holiday, as National Coordinator against Discrimination and Racism Rabin Baldewsingh did in this newspaper on Thursday, Geert Wilders tweeted: to quickly forget. Just stand up for all those native Dutch ordinary people who are discriminated against on a daily basis by all that multicultural madness regarding housing, jobs and their own culture.’
As is often the case in the culture war that has been raging in the Netherlands for some time, the resistance to the idea of assigning Keti Koti the same value as, for example, Liberation Day, seems to be fueled by the idea that reaching out to one group will be at the expense of another. .
This mechanism can also be discerned in the recurring discussion about the Islamic Sugar Feast, which, according to critics on the right side of the political spectrum, would also receive too much attention. Those same critics see with horror how in the meantime Zwarte Piet has been banned, the traditional Christmas stollen is being renamed ‘party stollen’ by some supermarkets, New Year’s Eve must be spent without bang fireworks and Easter bonfires are in danger of being banned because of the climate.
There is no sign of such dissatisfaction when the mayor of Rheden lays a wreath on a stone in memory of slavery after the lecture in the church. ‘I think it’s a beautiful evening,’ says 85-year-old Marius Monkau. ‘My grandmother was a slave in Suriname, so it makes me emotional that a small municipality like Rheden organizes this.’ He has one thing to say to him: ‘I think it’s a bit of a boring meeting. Some music and tasty snacks would have done the evening well.’