On Wednesday the last episode of the wonderful series ‘Who are my ancestors?’ appeared in the newspaper, a total of ten ‘personal quests’ into the colonial past, described by Ianthe Sahadat, Elsbeth Stoker and Fleur de Weerd. This time, Jochem, who was in his late thirties, was a civil servant and distant descendant of Zeeland slave traders. Between the quotes I found a paragraph that I had to chew on for quite some time.
‘Under a search like Jochem’s for the problematic past of your ancestors’, I read, ‘numerous sub-questions hang: can you repay an original sin? Is there such a thing as original sin at all? How do you relate to historical perpetration? How do you account? And do I actually feel guilty?’
Naturally incompetent
My goodness, I heard myself say. As it happens, I grew up in the Orthodox Reformed wing of Christianity, where they know better than anyone else how to deal with original sin. I was taught from an early age that I was conceived and born in sin, naturally incapable of any good, and prone to all evil. Little consolation: Ever since Adam and Eve, that sad fate has befell everyone—without respect for persons, regardless of one’s own behavior or that of the ancestors.
Today the word original sin apparently means something quite different. Nowadays it apparently means that when your ancestry has misbehaved (‘historical perpetration’), you as a descendant want to be held accountable in one way or another.
As Jochem does in that interview.
Above all, it bothers him that his ancestors never showed any struggles with ‘moral dilemmas’. Nowhere in their letters is there any question of whether what they were doing was right. Jochem himself believes that he has ‘the moral duty’ to keep this history alive, he reflects on ‘tangible and lasting evidence of the painful family past’ and he wants to prevent involvement in slavery from sinking (again) from the family memory. . He also thinks about ‘fair compensation’, but he calls it ‘very gratuitous’: the family capital has long since evaporated.
Boy. Living under the orthodox-Reformed original sin doctrine should not be fun, living under the secular variant is certainly even less so. So because your 18th-century ancestors were so gullible that they didn’t know the 20th-century Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are you now wrestling with guilt? Because they were unscrupulous slave traders at the time, are you twisting a thousand corners now? Of course you can. I wonder who will help you with that.
But, the objection is always made, you cannot ignore the fact that the colonial descendants still profit from the crimes of their ancestry to this day? Perhaps not so much financially as because they are in the comfortable possession of what is called white privilege? That’s right. And a little more awareness among the privileged of our society that they belong to the privileged of our society would undoubtedly be a blessing.
Contemporary Achievements
At the same time, one of the most sympathetic achievements of our time is that you hold every individual responsible for his own actions and neither imitate nor blame him for his origin.
Once, by definition, you had the burden of the family name and honor on your shoulders, not anymore. No matter how much your (ancestors) parents misbehaved, you are quite rightly supposed to be unable to do anything about it. Everyone can judge you by the moral yardstick for your own actions and opinions, not for those of your dead relatives. (Nor your living ones, by the way.) So even though your great-great-great-grandfather behaved like a vicious human trafficker, your great-great-uncle used the whip daily and your great-great-grandmother had blood on her hands – you’re free.
Such an achievement should not be casually thrown over the hedge. And certainly not have to exchange it for a sense of sin that makes no one the wiser.
Elma Drayer is a Dutch scientist and journalist. She writes a change column with Asha ten Broeke every other week.