Loud applause can be heard in the Vlissingen city council. “We don’t do that here!” exclaimed the chairman, somewhat surprised. It was therefore an unusual council meeting on Thursday, which provoked the unusual reaction. It was about making excuses for the slavery past of the Zeeland municipality. There had been a lot of discussion about this in Vlissingen recently. Contrary to expectations, a majority of the council voted in favour.
Also unusual was the bustle on the press benches in the council chamber. If there was no majority in favor of apologizing, Vlissingen would be the only important Dutch slave trading city that does not apologize for its slavery past. The other Dutch cities with a large share in the transatlantic slave trade were Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Middelburg. Those first two cities already apologized in 2021. Middelburg will do so on July 1 this year. Then it is Keti Koti, the holiday on which the abolition of slavery is celebrated.
Narrow majority
Vlissingen will also do it on July 1 this year. Fourteen councilors voted in favor of the proposal from the ChristenUnie to apologize for the role of the Vlissingen municipal council in the slavery past – co-submitted by GroenLinks, SP, PvdA and D66. Fourteen votes were just enough for a majority. Unexpectedly, an SGP member and a council member of the local party Perspectief op Vlissingen (POV) voted in favour. The other SGP’er and POV’er voted against.
It didn’t go well at all. The SGP came up with a complicated proposal. She tabled an amendment that would ensure that no apology would be offered for the slavery past, but for “the insufficient and one-sided attention paid to the slavery past in recent decades and, as a result, for the insufficient understanding of the feelings of the descendants of the enslaved.” The idea behind this, said Lilian Janse of the SGP, was that “one can only express sincere regret for one’s own mistakes”.
Read alsoWill ‘capital of the Dutch slave trade’ Vlissingen apologize? ‘It’s a tricky point here’
Pieter Jan Mersie (CU), the initiator of the proposal, said that it would be fine if apologies were also made for that, but those apologies should not replace the apologies for the slavery past. SGP member Cor Tromp therefore voted against the proposal. This adjustment was apparently sufficient for Janse.
The POV faction had already indicated in advance that they might vote divided. “The slavery past is Dutch history, so we prefer to join the national approach,” said Ruud Kleefman. “However, with this council proposal we are more or less forced to make a choice. And we will do that, on the understanding that it may well be that we will vote differently.” Kleefman was the POV member who voted in favour.
The main argument of most of the groups that voted against was that the slavery past is too long ago to make excuses for it. They thought that Vlissingen should pay attention to it in other ways.
The CDA one-man faction caused confusion everywhere. Marin de Zwarte would vote against, he said, because: “The fact that there were slave traders who were also aldermen or mayors does not mean that administrators were slave traders by definition.” Other factions pointed out to him that the proposal states that the current board only apologizes as a legal successor. “They were administrators, but not the organ,” De Zwarte tried. The confused fellow councilors didn’t seem to understand him now.
Bitter aftertaste
The way in which the decision came about gives Angélique Duindam of Keti Koti Zeeland a bitter aftertaste. “And the SGP’s amendment weakens the apologies,” she says on the phone on Friday morning. One-sided attention to the slavery past? Does the SGP not know that Duindam and other Zeelanders have been trying to show the other side of that past for years? “For example, I have been working for a long time to realize a knowledge center in Zeeland about the history of slavery.”
Vlissingen people are stubborn and level-headed, according to Duindam. “Don’t get too emotional. Don’t hang too much in the past, because that’s not where we live now. I understand that, but with excuses you say: we are not going to make the mistakes of the past again.”
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of April 15, 2023.