After last year’s malignant theatricality a public apology from the Dutch government, municipalities, financial institutions and, recently, from the the monarchy himself for the genocidal enslavement of Africans in the Caribbean, the quest for true healing remains at its initial stage.
Dutch officials basically say: We are sorry for slavery, so here is a small, insignificant awareness fund. Now everyone shut up because we are never, ever going to give in to your demands for holistic restorative justice.
In typical reckless fashion, Dutch politicians made these racist claims the comfort of knowing that the royal family was about to visit the Caribbean islands. That the potential backlash was not registered as a geopolitical security risk and the mark of the Dutch monarchy and state proves in the world that they have absolutely no idea what they are doing.
After to visit Bonaire in JanuaryKing Willem-Alexander, Queen Máxima and Princess Catharina-Amalia were shaken with unease by a brave protester at a conference at the University of Aruba. Accompanied by a manifesto on decolonization and reparations, the LLM student showed the Caribbean how to rebelliously disrupt the cult of royalty by raising a flag and singing “Oh Freedom,” an age-old song from black freedom.
The next stop for the royal family was Curaçao, where they were invited by the Museo Tula to attend a recreation of a 1795 slave revolt led by Where are you now, who broke free and died fighting for the freedom of his people.
It was saddening to see how a museum that represents the decolonization of the spirit had fallen into the trap of thinking it was a good idea to make artistic scenes in spaces sacred to black liberation for King Willem-Alexander. Colonialism is a powerful opiate because the monarch of the Lowlands, as head of state, aligned himself with his government to dehumanize us by denying the restorative healing of the Caribbean islands.
Unquestionably, the Dutch political and royal position to pursue their harmful policies anti-black colonial racism is seen as a declaration of war.
It was a missed golden opportunity for the Tula Museum, an institution of black emancipatory struggle, to be guided by its principles and show creative acts of insurrection against the nobility who were the figurehead of hyper-looting. white dutch in the caribbean.
A strange trend has emerged in the Netherlands over the past two years whereby Dutch institutions believe in their own hype that they are decolonizing their privileged spaces. Museums are not excluded from this false perception. It’s fashionable to say that your museum is being “decolonised”, as seen in recent exhibits on slavery, colonial relics (the Royal Golden Coach) and the legacy of colonial disaster At Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam MuseumAnd Tropenmuseum.
Nevertheless, the violence of the logic of slavery persists within the precincts of these institutions, and has not even begun to disappear. The proof is there when these museums pretend be catalysts for public debate on the legacy of slavery and colonialism. But their exhibits do the exact opposite and silence the super obvious and visible links to slavery and colonial apartheid that breathe life into the current Dutch colonialism that is ruining our islands.
Only antagonists would argue that capital in the islands is not monopolized by Blacks, Browns and Natives. Social decay, financial plunder, educational inequalities and lack of political sovereignty are collective experiences In the Caribbean. The truth is that unfortunately white people still run this plantation.
In 2021, the Netherlands said it was unwilling to give in to the demands of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination to fully complete decolonization accordance with international law and provide reparations to the people of Saba, Statia, Bonaire, Curaçao, Aruba and Saint Martin for the enduring colonial legacy they are still crushed underneath.
Last month, in the corridors of this same institution in New York, an adapted version of the exhibition on slavery at the Rijksmuseum went to see as part of the United Nations Outreach Program on the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Slavery.
It was a perfect photo op moment for Dutch diplomats to use their national museum to manipulate their image as the patron saint of human rights and international law while violating their host’s recommendations.
During this period of so-called “decolonization” of Dutch museums, none of the artists, scholars, or curators who controlled the narrative ever raised the question: why are these Caribbean islands still stuck in colonial limbo? ? Neither are the illiterate Dutch media, the printed textbooks and the countless round tables and symposia across the country.
The main artistic institutions claim to defend decolonization, but this is a red herring. They displaying a glaring absence of curatorial work that seeks to lift the veil of hypocrisy, continuing instead to conceal the colonial violence committed by the Dutch state and private sector. One of the many examples is the current exhibition of the Tropenmuseum Somebody get rich, which aims to expose the entanglement of colonialism with globalized financial systems and “reveal how the legacies of colonialism are still entrenched in the financial sector today”. But the exhibition, which includes works by contemporary artists, does not keep its promises.
To really tackle these issues, the show would have to tell the story of the Dutch central bank, which recently apologized for his role in slavery, but still refuses to engage in internal and external restorative justice for the Caribbean. Subsequently, the silence of Maduro & Curiel’s Bank, a Dutch Caribbean private bank headquartered in Curacao, must be included in this repairs conversation. Without profiting from the slave industry, this bank would never have become a major financial institution with far-reaching tentacles in politics, local economies, and black life on the islands.
Decolonization would also require telling the truth about how the Dutch government imposing financial surveillance on our islands, accompanied by neoliberal reform, with the aim of keeping us impoverished in areas of underdevelopment and dependency to fit their Imperial agenda.
The bare minimum is to move away from traditional foreign policy and abandon the good image of current Dutch governance of plantations in the Caribbean. But no, it’s too many sacrifices for the people in power.
Art consumers are overwhelmingly white Dutch, as is the electorate. Therefore, arts institutions cannot alienate white visitors and voters because that is where they make their money. These are the people who keep their mouths fed and the careers going up, not the people of the Caribbean. We have become slaves to museum furniture. For us, liberation would mean the collapse of the ill-gotten financial well-being of the White Netherlands. Cultural institutions are not going to abandon White Holland and engage in the desirable politics of ending parasitic Dutch power structures.
Nevertheless, it should not be impossible to walk away from these exhibits and conclude that the afterlife of slavery on the islands is an inescapable reality since the policies of Dutch colonial rule are still in full force in the 21st century.
If the guardians of these cultural institutions claim to decolonize, then they should stop sabotaging our paths to Caribbean freedom and stop feeding the monstrous lies to Dutch and international audiences by silencing the true and true stories that are rarely told.
