When would the editors of Khalid & Sophie have you thought of devoting an entire broadcast, on location, to the history of slavery? Before or after the elections? Tuesday marked one year since Prime Minister Rutte apologized to the descendants of enslaved people on behalf of the Dutch state. At the time, he emphatically did not end his speech with “a period, but with a comma.” Khalid & Sophie built the talk show studio in Middelburg – a city that flourished for centuries thanks to slavery. At the table the balance would be drawn up ‘one year after the decimal point’.
Great timing. A statement, it seemed to me, in view of the election results and an aspiring Prime Minister who says he wants to reverse the apologies and a House Speaker who, as a PVV MP, predicted that the 200 million euro slavery fund would result in 200 million “presents for left-wing activists”. For the right, Sophie, Khalid and their program are already the personification of left, woke, Randstad and activist. And with slavery as the subject, they had done it completely on Tuesday evening.
So kudos for their courage. But it was so good. And boring. I heard about processes and conversations. Image formation and awareness. Knowledge transfer and education. Are you still there? Support and processes. I understood almost nothing of what the VVD councilor from Hoorn said. The city council does not want to apologize for the history of slavery. I understood that sentence. But why was that? Blah blah blah, first recognition, whole process, blah blah, city conversations, long winded. Jörgen Raymann still had the presence of mind to inquire approximately how long the Hoorn councilor thought the trials would take. The answer to that has completely escaped me. The talk show table became a bit too much of a conference table for me.
In the following Eight o’clock news there was an item made by correspondent Elles van Gelder. She was in Kenya at a course for young women who were being prepared to work as domestic workers in Saudi Arabia or Qatar. They learned to dust, vacuum, iron and bottle-feed large white baby dolls. Hundreds of thousands have preceded them to the Gulf States. Many returned mistreated and abused. The Kenyan government sees the foreign currency that the women send home as a savior for the domestic economy. For the women it is the only way to earn money for themselves and the children they leave behind. So this is what slavery looks like.
Morning mood
Raven van Dorst always invites famous Dutch people Dorst Farm. On Tuesday they were the seasoned acquaintances All you need is lovepresenter Robert ten Brink, and the aspiring Dutch celebrity Petri Damen. She has a B&B in France and participated last summer B&B full of love and since then he can no longer cross the street in the Netherlands without being recognized. Robert ten Brink and Raven van Dorst, now also a well-known TV appearance themselves, had seen Petri in that television program. They knew her “horrible morning mood”, her blunt comments, her grumpiness.
In a chat with Raven, Petri said that she found that difficult. The hate she got from people she didn’t know who thought they knew her. “You are also intense and critical,” said Raven. “A control freak and quite direct.” Did we see the real Petri at Boerderij van Dorst or the caricature version on which her fame is based? If Raven said that Robert didn’t look a day older, Petri thought so. When Robert shouted about the silence on the farm, she heard the highway. This Petri certainly made the famous celebrities chuckle a little.
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