Emplacing Slavery: Roots, Monuments and Politics of Belonging in the Netherlands

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/187254611X606337

African Diaspora 4 (2011) 135-162 brill.nl/afdi

African Diaspora

Emplacing Slavery: Roots, Monuments and Politics of Belonging in the Netherlands

Markus Balkenhol*Meertens Instituut and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands

[email protected]

AbstractIn this article, I argue that the commemoration of slavery should be seen as a process of emplace-ment. It refers to a specific politics of belonging in the Netherlands that is focused on autoch-thony and that carries strong notions of place. I discuss two strategies of emplacement that both engage in these politics of belonging. One is the search for roots in Africa, through which black Dutch negotiate their place in Netherlands as citizens. The other engages in the transformation of the Dutch memoryscape through formal commemorations and monuments. I understand both strategies as processes generating local subjects in Appadurai’s sense, emphasizing that local-ity as a relationship of body and place is a fundamental ingredient in processes of political subjectification.

Keywordsemplacement, local subjects, Suriname, the Netherlands, Africa, politics of belonging, subjecti-fication, slavery, roots, commemoration, autochthony

RésuméDans cet article, je soutiens que la commémoration de l’esclavage devrait être vue comme un processus d’emplacement. Cela réfère à des politiques d’appartenance spécifiques aux Pays-Bas qui se concentrent sur une idée de l’autochthonie et qui véhiculent de fortes notions de lieu. Je traite deux stratégies d’emplacement qui adressent toutes les deux ces politiques d’appartenance. L’une concerne la recherche des racines en Afrique, au travers de laquelle des Néerlandais noirs négocient leur place aux Pays-Bas, comme citoyens. L’autre prend l’engagement de transformer la pratique de mémoire aux Pays-Bas au travers de commémorations et de monuments. Je com-prends ces deux stratégies comme un processus générant des sujets locaux au sens d’Appadurai, accentuant le fait que la localité en tant que relation présence physique/lieu est un ingrédient fondamental dans le processus de subjectification politique.

* A different version of this paper was initially presented at the ECAS conference in Leipzig in 2009. I wish to thank the editors, the anonymous reviewers, and Birgit Meyer for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper.

136 M. Balkenhol / African Diaspora 4 (2011) 135-162

Mots-clésemplacement, sujets locaux, Suriname, les Pays-Bas, l’Afrique, les politiques d’appartenance, subjectification, l’esclavage, racines, commemoration, l’autochthonie

Introduction

The commemoration of slavery is a matter of place. In places as diverse as West-Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean, and Europe there are now memori-als for the trans-Atlantic system of slavery and its victims. A monument has even been lowered to the Atlantic seabed both to commemorate the victims of the Middle Passage and to call for renewed efforts to unify “Black people around the world” (Wayne James as cited in Kardux 2004: 90), thus evoking Black Atlantic, even global diasporic communities.

Yet these oceanic1 projects of community building intersect with initiatives that engage in concrete local contexts of national citizenship or even urban forms of belonging. In the Netherlands, there are now several monuments commemorating the Dutch role in the trans-Atlantic system, most promi-nently in Amsterdam and Middelburg as former centres of Dutch activities in the trans-Atlantic system. One of the two monuments in Amsterdam, an ini-tiative by a group of Dutch men of Afro-Surinamese descent, is the expression of a demand to reconsider official historical narratives from which the alterna-tive histories of Black Dutch had been excluded. This demand is represented in the name of the committee organizing the commemorative ceremonies at the monument on Surinameplein. It is called Nationaal Committee 30 Juni/1 Juli,2 a name emphasizing that this memorial addresses all Dutch rather than any group in particular. The monument thus partakes in negotiations about Dutchness and national belonging through recourse on history as an element both shared and divisive.3

In this article, I follow Appadurai (1996: 178) in asking about “the place of locality in schemes about global cultural flow”, and propose to understand the

1) Freud understood the oceanic feeling as an experience of wholeness in which the subject regresses to a realm preceding the split between subject and object. Here, the term includes the reference to Gilroy’s narrower notion of the Black Atlantic, but I understand it in a phenomeno-logical sense as the experience of community through concrete objects and places.2) Lit. National Committee 30 June/1 July. Slavery was abolished in the Dutch colonies on 1 July 1863.3) The emphasis on the national character of the monument emphasizes both the equal right to hold historical shares and the unequal shares received.

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memory politics of slavery as processes of emplacement that intervene in a politics of belonging and provide a sense of political subjectivity for black Dutch in the Netherlands.

Drawing on my doctoral research in Amsterdam Zuidoost, I will introduce two prominent Afro-Surinamese, Jetty Mathurin and Roy Ristie, to show their particular strategies of place-making. Amsterdam Zuidoost, a satellite suburb in the South-East of Amsterdam, is home to many black Dutch, and since its inception in the 1960s, the place has grappled with its marginal posi-tion within the Netherlands as a whole. I will explore Jetty’s and Roy’s nego-tiations of autochthony and belonging in terms of what Appadurai has called local subjects: “actors who properly belong to a situated community of kin, neighbors, friends, and enemies,” and who employ “ways to embody locality as well as to locate bodies in socially and spatially defined communities” (Appadurai 1996: 179). Similarly, Feld and Basso emphasise the “relation of sensation to emplacement; the experiential and expressive ways places are known, imagined, yearned for, held, remembered, voiced, lived, contested, and struggled over; and the multiple ways places are metonymically and meta-phorically tied to identities” (Feld and Basso 1996: 11). Edward S. Casey (1996), then, argues against abstract notions of space in favour of a phenom-enological account of how people relate to concrete and palpable places. Senses of place, to borrow Feld and Basso’s expression, have proven particularly important to understand past events of violence, as recent scholarship on cul-tural memory has shown (Schramm 2011; Argenti and Schramm 2010). Here, I will explore how the memorial emplacement of slavery intersects with poli-tics of belonging focused on notions of autochthony. In particular, I want to look at how large-scale projects of political subjectification in terms of nation and diaspora find expression in embodied relationships with concrete places.

Emplacement and Autochthony in the Netherlands

Remarkably, the emphasis by black Dutch on a shared past coincides with recent negotiations of Dutchness through place. In his recent book about the “Perils of Belonging”, Peter Geschiere (2009) shows how a “global conjunc-ture of belonging”, a heightened concern with citizenship around the globe, has been expressed in the Netherlands through a particular notion of autoch-thony. At the turn of the millennium, concerns about multicultural society began to rise in the Netherlands. Religious and ethnic minorities were increas-ingly put under pressure to adapt to “Dutch culture”, which in turn exposed


the inherent vagueness of such a term. But instead of discarding the idea of a clearly bounded Dutch identity, arising ambivalences exacerbated the entrenched positions. A lack of awareness of a past the Dutch people could be proud of was perceived to be a crucial factor in the perceived failure of multi-cultural society (Geschiere 2009: chapter V). How could minorities be per-suaded to adapt to a culture that even lacked the self-esteem needed to believe in itself, this logic suggested. Paul Scheffer, for example, in his infamous news-paper article entitled “The multicultural drama”, perceives a lack of historical consciousness (i.e. the pride in Dutch history in Scheffer’s terms) to be the reason why multiculturalism, in his view, has failed. He therefore argues in favour of a binding historical canon in which the landmarks of Dutch history would provide a common basis for a shared belief in a coherent set of author-itative norms and symbols (Geschiere 2009: 137).4

In the Netherlands, this “return to the local” (Geschiere 2009: 1) is expressed in a particular configuration of autochthony as opposed to the figure of the “allochtoon”. Hans van Amersfoort, a geographer, introduced the neologism “allochtoon” as a seemingly neutral term in a minority report in 1971 (Geschiere 2009: 149). The term was thus imported from a geographical framework, where it is used for instance in the sense of allochthonous sediments (ibid.). It seems as though this origin of the term would highlight its etymo-logical reference to the soil, and thus employ an ancient Greek concept of autochthony (lit. “of the soil”) based on the ius soli. However, Geschiere argues that “the Dutch – whether the experts who use the term or people at large – do not seem to be conscious of its powerful ‘chtonic’ root. . . . autochthony with its direct reference to the soil was some sort of negative choice” (2009: 153).

Nevertheless, “place” is undoubtedly a central theme in Dutch debates on belonging. There are regionalisms with a strong focus on place in the Nether-lands (Ashworth and Graham 2005; van Ginkel 2007),5 but national belong-ing and autochthony, too, are processes of emplacement. Even the Dutch historical canon, inaugurated in 2007 and chiming in with ever more noisy calls to reinforce the historical foundations of Dutch identity, literally grounds Dutchness in the soil: the canon opens with the “Hunebedden” in the province of Drenthe. If there was ever any doubt about an emplaced seniority – these

4) Geschiere (2009: 142) shows that rather than a historical and national consciousness that has been lost this preoccupation with a shared national past is a very recent phenomenon. Up to the 1960s, group allegiance in the Netherlands was to the respective pillar (Protestant, Catholic, liberal and socialist) rather than the nation.5) Indeed, Geschiere (2009: 153) notes that the term “autochtoon” had been in use to express regional identification.


boulders outweigh it: “even when the earth was five thousand years younger, people dwelled in the Low Lands.”6 The importance of place is also reflected in the way in which some areas in the Netherlands, especially in the urban centres, are increasingly seen as “allochtoon”, which is often equated with the label “black”. These places are not only structurally disadvantaged (Aalbers 2007), they are also perceived as dirty, unhealthy, and dangerous, and there-fore foreign to the Netherlands.7

Again, place clearly matters in issues of belonging. Yet the ius soli (citizen-ship based on the place of birth) is also entangled with the ius sanguinis: people whose parents, or even grandparents, have migrated to the Netherlands count as allochtoon in official terminology. Blood as a determinant for belonging thus returns “through the back door” (Geschiere 2009: 152). In other words, belonging is about place as well as the body.

I will therefore understand belonging as senses of place – the embodied ways in which “people encounter places, perceive them, and invest them with

6) “Ook toen de wereld vijfduizend jaar jonger was, woonden er mensen in de Lage Landen” (http://entoen.nu/hunebedden, accessed 23 March 2011). The implication here seems to be that these people were not migrants – they simply dwelled here. These ancient people are imagined as “white”, as the case of Marcus van Eindhoven shows. Accidentally uncovered in a former graveyard in Eindhoven, the bones of a human being were given the name Marcus by the scien-tists. A facial reconstruction was undertaken, in which the image was given the “neutral” colour white (M’ Charek 2010). Here is another instance in which autochthony, whiteness and place become entangled.7) In 2007 (the same year in which the Dutch historical canon was presented), the minister for housing, neighbourhoods, and integration, Ella Vogelaar, presented a list of 40 neighbourhoods all over the Netherlands that were seen as problem areas and in need of special attention. The “Vogelaarwijken”, as they have come to be known, have been subject to intense debate in which these neighbourhoods have been increasingly discussed in terms of “allochthony” rather than as socio-economic problems. For example, the wikipedia-style website “wakkerpedia” that frames itself as the representative of those “hard-working Dutch” who have no time for the political discussions in Den Haag bluntly sums up such widespread xenophobic resentment: “A Vogelaar-wijk is an area where almost only foreigners live, and where all parabolic antennas are adjusted in the direction of Mecca. The place is always in a mess, because they cannot read Dutch and therefore do not know that they must throw their garbage INTO the container. The men wear white dresses and a frayed hate-beard. The women are all fat and wear headscarves. Teenage boys always hang around at street corners and show each other all they have stolen today.” (“Een Vogelaarwijk is een woonwijk waar bijna alleen buitenlanders wonen en waar alle schotelanten-nes op Mekka gericht staan. Het is er altijd een troep want ze kunnen geen Nederlands lezen dus weten ze niet dat ze hun vuilnis IN de container moeten gooien. De mannen dragen witte jurken en hebben een rafelige haatbaard. De vrouwen zijn allemaal dik en dragen een hoofddoek. Tie-nerjongens hangen altijd op de hoek van de straat rond en laten aan elkaar zien wat ze vandaag weer gestolen hebben.” From: www.wakkerpedia.nl/index.php/Vogelaarwijk, accessed 24 March 2011).


significance” (Feld and Basso 1996: 8). Making sense of how cultural memory becomes entangled with regimes of belonging, therefore, requires an under-standing of how body relates to place. The monuments are clearly an interven-tion into a symbolic topography of the past through which the Dutch nation imagines itself. In a more literal sense, they transform a concrete memoryscape in the material structure of the city. Moreover, they relate to biographies and lived experiences of diaspora.

Colonial Emplacement

Changing places entails changing senses of belonging. As people moved from the former colonies in the Caribbean to the Netherlands, they have become increasingly disenfranchised from the nation. While they had belonged for-mally to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and understood themselves to be Dutch, the move to the Netherlands was for many an alienating experience.

In 1667, the Treaty of Breda had officially established the area between Marowijne River and Corantijn River on the northern coast of South America as a Dutch colony. The Dutch continued and expanded the former British plantation colony and increased the production of sugar, coffee, and cocoa. As a consequence of increasing labour demands in the colony, the Dutch West-Indian company (WIC) intensified its involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, putting enslaved Africans to work on the plantations now mushroom-ing in the new colony. Two hundred years later, in 1863, slavery formally came to an end in the Dutch colonies. The formerly enslaved left the plantations, and were replaced by contract labourers from British India and later Dutch East India (present-day Indonesia).

In 1975, Suriname formally ceased to be a Dutch colony and became an independent republic. Nevertheless, it retained close bonds with the Nether-lands. The dependency relation of Suriname to the Netherlands was contin-ued after independence to a certain degree through large sums of development aid. Also in terms of formal citizenship, a special relationship between the Netherlands and Suriname remained. Movement between and residency in the respective countries were determined in a document called toescheidings-overeenkomst, an appendix to the independence contracts. The appendix deter-mines formal belonging through a complex mix of place of residence and choice. It allocated citizenship according to the current place of residence, but at the time, as citizens of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, people could move without formal constraints within the borders of the Kingdom. Opting to


retain the Dutch nationality, about 130,000 Surinamese, equalling half of the country’s population, therefore emigrated to the Netherlands in the years pre-ceding and following independence.8

Overwhelmed by their numbers, the Dutch state authorities housed the emigrants in unsafe and unhygienic boarding houses (Konter and van Megen 1988). The labour market was unable or unwilling to absorb them, and many drifted into drugs (Gelder and Wetering 1991) and crime (Niekerk 2000; Haakmat 1974).

In the Netherlands, Afro-Surinamese were perceived as “Other”, whether as a spectacle or as dangerous (Wekker 2007). Blackness came to be seen as prob-lematic, and as out of place. The general public imagined Surinamers, espe-cially Afro-Surinamers, as knifers and junkies on the one hand (Blakely 1993; Geschiere 2009; Niekerk 2000), or fostered folkloric images of, often sexual-ized, natural musical talent on the other (Wekker 2007).

In other words, the movement from Suriname to the Netherlands entailed a disenfranchisement for many Afro-Surinamese. From Suriname, the geo-graphical margin of the Dutch Empire, where they had been brought up in regimes of colonial discipline aiming to assimilate them into the Dutch body politic, they moved to the margins of Dutch society. Their marginality as colo-nial subjects became apparent in the Netherlands. In the following, I will look at how Afro-Surinamese in the Netherlands find strategies to re-enfranchise, or better to re-emplace themselves as black citizens in the Netherlands.

Displacements

Jettty Mathurin and her family moved from Suriname to the Netherlands in 1961. I met Jetty and her associate, Glynis Terborg, in their home office in Amsterdam Zuidoost on a warm and sunny early summer day in 2009. Jetty is a well-known Afro-Surinamese artist and comedian, who has become a repre-sentative for many Afro-Surinamese and Antilleans in the Netherlands. I had contacted her to talk about how the issue of slavery has influenced her work. She was very interested to meet me, and gave me a warm welcome in her office with a brasa, a robust hug.

8) The reasons to leave the country ranged from the wish to retain the Dutch nationality, to doubts about the success of the new republic as well as ethnic tensions to socio-economic moti-vations including work and study.


She told me how as a 20-year-old she arrived in Cuijk, a small place in the southern Dutch countryside. Cuijk was different from Suriname, but next to obvious things like the climate and the food, her experience of blackness came to matter in fundamentally different ways. In Cuijk, she stressed several times, “we were the first black family” and “the only ones who looked like me”. For some, her blackness was sensational. Jetty, like many of the people I spoke to during my research, told me how white folks would even want to touch peo-ple’s black skin, and children wanted to see if the colour rubbed off.

She experienced this as an estrangement which became increasingly appar-ent in social relations. Jetty told me about what she calls an “inburgeringscur-sus” (lit. “classes to citizenize”, see Geschiere 2009), “even though they did not exist at the time”:

I remember a neighbourhood party in Cuijk, when we were the first Surinamese family there, in a neighbourhood centre. The party was meant to introduce the new Surinamese neighbours. The caretaker of the neighbourhood centre was a friendly man, he was very good-willed, almost a friend. Well, at the end of the party we needed to tidy up the place. But the man was not satisfied about the progress, it did not match his pace, he thought. So he began to rush the men who were lugging furniture and stuff. They had to do it faster. A fierce argument ensued, because it was very painful for these black men to be rushed like that by a white man. I myself had some distance to it, so I was able to mediate, because this man was almost a friend, and very good-willed. But he simply did not realize what role history played in this situation. When these black men heard this white man rush them, they were overwhelmed by slavery-feelings. For me this shows that you can only respect each other when you know your history.9

With this story, Jetty opens a complex and layered discourse. She tells me about a situation that shows a fundamental gap between Surinamese and Dutch Weltanschauung. While for the black men, receiving orders from a white man is inherently problematic, the white caretaker is not even aware of

9) Toen wij aan het begin in Cuijk waren, we waren daar het eerste zwarte gezin, was er een feest in het buurthuis van de wijk. Het was een soort inburgeringscursus, ook al heette het toen nog niet zo. Maar de accent van het feest lag wel op de surinaamse deelnemers. De beheerder van het buurthuis was een heel aardige man, hij was heel “goedwillend”, een vriend bijna. Nou, aan het eind van het feest moest er opgeruimd worden. Maar die man vond dat het niet snel genoeg ging, het ging niet volgens zijn tempo. Dus hij ging die mannen die daar aan het sjouwen waren aan-sturen. Ze moesten het sneller doen. Toen ontstond er een grote ruzie, want het was heel pijnlijk voor die zwarte mannen om zo van een witte man te worden aangestuurd. Ik kon het toen over-zien en heb bemiddeld, omdat die man haast een vriend was, en heel goedwillend. Maar hij had gewoon niet in de gaten welke rol de geschiedenis in deze situatie had. Toen die zwarte mannen hoorden hoe die witte man hun aanstuurde, kwamen echt die slavernijgevoelens naar boven. Het was voor mij het teken dat je elkaar alleen kan respecteren als je de geschiedenis kent.


the implications of his actions. Informed by an upbringing under colonial rule, and by strongly racialized social hierarchies, Afro-Surinamese are acutely aware of racial difference. Slavery, and the relations between black and white that have been shaped by it, constitute an ethical horizon that fundamentally informs Afro-Surinamese agency. On this level, the story conveys a sense of many Afro-Surinamese of being misrecognized and disenfranchised, a sense that has been one of the driving forces behind the creation of slavery monu-ments, as I will show below.

However, at the time, in the 1970s, this was not yet formulated in these terms. The terminology of “slavery-feelings” did not exist at the time, but rather derives from a discourse that has developed later. Now, this terminology is part of a well-established repertoire of political speech that has emerged with the monuments.10

Jetty also frames the story as an “inburgeringscursus”. This refers to recently introduced classes for emigrants who are thought in need of education about Dutch culture. Jetty thus explicitly makes a link between politics of belonging in the Netherlands at the moment, and her experience of arriving in the Neth-erlands, when her experience was that the Dutch, not herself, needed educa-tion about their past.

Also the idea of knowing your history in order to know your Self 11 is not new, but it has been reinvigorated in the last two decades. It clearly establishes a relation to the idea of gaining strength from historical knowledge – a process in which both history and knowledge about it mutually constitute each other – that has dominated the Dutch debate on autochthony in the last decade.

On yet another level, Jetty tells me this story in order to exemplify the estrangement she felt after she had arrived in the Netherlands, which was deepened by more exclusionary experiences. One of these experiences she had during the application for a speech therapist:

I wanted to be trained as a speech therapist. I had to do a test for the selection procedure. The test was done by an official who had to test my vocal chords. He wasn’t satisfied, and he said: “Your vocal chords are not flawless.” I thought, what is this supposed to mean? Whose vocal chords are flawless after all! So I asked him for more explanation. And then he said: “Well, you see, once you pass the test, you will have to be able to teach Dutch chil-dren, as well.” And that, of course, could only be done with flawless vocal chords. Later, when I had passed my exam, I had to work with this man. But for me, what had happened

10) I deal with this in more detail in my doctoral thesis, but I cannot go more in depth here.11) Which also links up with discourses on Sankofaism in West Africa – a link that will have to be explored elsewhere.


still felt sore. When I talked to him about that, he said that my vocal chords had changed now. He thought that I was built differently, and that I had a different body.12

The body is a matter of belonging – it is the site upon which politics of belong-ing are being played out. Jetty interprets the official’s statement in the sense that her black body is not up to the standards deemed adequate for white children. In this case it is unclear, but very well possible, that the official actu-ally meant it in that way. Yet the story shows that there are fundamental issues of distrust on the one hand, and oblivion to the sensitivity of the situation on the other. It left Jetty with the feeling of disenfranchisement, of being out of place.

Despite experiences such as this one, Jetty began to feel at home in Cuijk. She made friends, and became a speech therapist, and later a renowned artist. But the questions kept nagging. Jetty tells me “I stopped counting how many compliments I received for how good my Dutch is. Dutch! My mother-tongue! As a certified speech therapist!” When she tells people that she is from Cuijk in Brabant, they did not believe her.

She began to take these questions about herself seriously. Where was she from? Where did she belong? This is when her experience of diaspora, living “in a place where the centre is always somewhere else” (Hall 2001: 284), began – in the Netherlands. The feeling of displacement did not emerge in Suriname, but only when her presence as a black woman was being addressed as problematic in the Netherlands.

“So, eventually I went on a quest,” Jetty tells me. When in the 1980s, stud-ies began to appear about the history of slavery in the Dutch colonies, she turned to what seemed to her an authoritative voice: historical science. Alex van Stipriaan, a historian-anthropologist publishing on the issue, assisted her in finding out more about her ancestors: “Because he studied that.”13 Like many others, Jetty began to piece together a genealogy. She visited different archives, in the Netherlands and in Suriname, and found out that her

12) Ik wilde een opleiding logopedie volgen. Daarvoor moest ik een test doen voor het selectie-proces. Die werd uitgevoerd door een foneater die mijn stembanden moest testen. Hij was niet tevreden, want hij zei: Je stembanden zijn niet feilloos. Ik dacht van, wat is dit nou, wiens stem-banden zijn nou feilloos! Dus ik vroeg hem om meer uitleg. En toen zei hij, dat ik, als ik eenmaal geslaagd zou zijn, ook nederlandse kinderen zou moeten kunnen onderwijzen. En dat kon alleen met feilloze stembanden.

Later, toen ik geslaagd was voor mijn logopedieexamen, moest ik met deze man samenwerken. Maar voor mij zat wat er gebeurd was wel ertussen. Toen ik hem er op aansprak zij hij dat mijn stembanden nu wel veranderd zijn. Hij vond dat ik gewoon anders gebouwd was, alsof ik een afwijkend lichaam had. (interview Jetty Mathurin, 07-05-2009).13) “Want hij studeerde dat.”


great-grandmother may have been the daughter of a German man and a black woman whose name did not appear in the archive. But there, her ancestral line seemed to stop. Her ancestors were untraceable, creating a feeling of loss and uncertainty.

This feeling, although it is shared by many, is not self-evident. I suggest to understand it as a condition of the hegemonic insistence on blackness as alter-ity on the one hand, and the ensuing perpetual demand to explain this other-ness. Where do you come from (since this origin can’t be here) and why are you here (explain yourself )? Whiteness becomes equated to autochthony, although this is rarely made explicit, and it becomes the norm. Whereas autochthony, despite, or perhaps because of, its vagueness and ambiguity, appears to be in no need of explanation, blackness is perceived as originating some place else, and therefore in need of explanation.

“Africa”, Icon, Place

It became clear to Jetty that the place she had to look for was “Africa”. Her search is part of a rich symbolic repertoire in which “Africa” and “African heritage” have become iconic points of reference. Jetty’s story links up with the millions of roots seekers making their journeys to Africa, both imaginary and physical. “Africa” is therefore a topos in both an iconic (or metaphoric) and material (or emplaced) sense. It is a process of emplacement through which symbolic points of identification and material presence are negotiated. Bor-rowing from Appadurai (1996: 180), this could be seen as the “processes by which locality is materially produced”. Rather than looking from either a materialist or an idealist point of view, processes of emplacement emphasize indeed the correspondence of icon and matter.

In 2007, long after Jetty had begun to look for her ancestry, Alex van Stipri-aan was setting up a project called Back to the Roots, in co-operation with Erasmus University Rotterdam and Tropenmuseum Amsterdam. The project was financed by prestigious Dutch institutions such as the NWO, Mondriaan Foundation, and Prins Claus Fonds. It also received support from NiNsee, the National Institute for the Dutch slave past and its legacy. According to its website, the project was inspired by Alex Haley’s classic (1976) novel, and by the ubiquitous presence of the idea of roots: “everybody is talking about roots”.14 The project wants to answer two questions: What are roots, and what

14) Alex van Stipriaan in the introductory film on the project website (http://www.mijnroots.nl, accessed 27-03-2011).


do they look like – in other words it looks at roots from both an ontological and an aesthetic point of view. Back to the Roots asserts that roots are about the body and place: a set of DNA samples of Afro-Surinamese artists is being sent to the United States for ancestry testing. Then, some of the participants travel to Cameroon, where they visit the villages which the test had indicated as their ancestral homes.

Back to the Roots is a complex entanglement of cultural registers of “Africa”, technologies of Self-making, as well as a dynamics of body and place that bear some analytic disentangling here.

The endeavour appeals to complex registers of “Africa” and “African heri-tage” among Black Dutch. Such registers, as many scholars have argued, are diasporic rather than from the African continent (Appiah 1993; Palmié 2007; Moore 1998; Du Bois 1965), and they are “contested icons” (Davis 1999) rather than unchanging essences: “Throughout the trans-Atlantic exchange that led to the creation of traditional as well as modern black cultures, Africa has been endlessly recreated and deconstructed.” (Sansone 2003: 53). Hence Africa is a body of symbols, an iconology or a topology that indicates “[ l ]ess a foundational past than a possible future” (Palmié 2007: 165; Nelson 2008; Palmié 2002), and specific “spaces of experience” and “horizons of expecta-tions” (Koselleck 1985 as cited in Palmié 2007: 165).

“Africa” in Amsterdam has become a positive point of reference in recent years. Especially youth centres focusing on young black people have adopted “African” culture and heritage as positive points of reference which young Blacks can identify with. The aim is to “find your Self ”, and realize that Black people descend from cultures (Afro-Surinamese, Afro-Antillean and African) they can take pride in. Otmar Watson is a well-known figure in Amsterdam who works with young people in different cultural projects. He tells me what it means to

know yourself, to know who you are. To know that you are not a “neger”, for example, but that you are of African descent. To know that you don’t have to be ashamed of your skin color, that you have a powerful history behind you. That your parents were enslaved, but not slaves, that your history does not begin with slavery, but that your history begins long before slavery.15

15) “Je zelf kennen, weten wie je bent. Weten dat je bijvoorbeeld geen neger bent, maar dat je van afrikaanse afkomst bent. Weten dat je je niet hoeft te schamen voor je huidskleur, dat je een machtige geschiedenis achter je rug hebt, dat je geen, dat je voorouders slaaf gemaakt zijn maar geen slaven waren, dat je geschiedenis niet begint bij de slavernij, maar je geschiedenis begint ver voor de slavernij.” (interview 19-08-2010).


This means a revaluation of the image of Africa. “We show the young people that Africa is not a continent where only lions . . . live, but that you can live a normal and safe life there . . . and that it is not just negative in certain [African] countries.” In his work, Watson conveys this positive image of Africa through African drum music and dance. He travels to Africa as well as the Caribbean and the United States, on his own and with young people on exchange pro-grammes, in order to show them that there is a history to be proud of. Watson understands his work as part of processes of decolonization. He wants to unlearn a colonial habitus through which Blackness is defined as inferior. Like Watson, there are many other similar projects directed especially at young Blacks in the Netherlands. In these projects, Africa is depicted as a noble place with rich traditions, and with great achievements.

So, as scholars have argued, if “Africa” is an idea, a project, an icon – what happens when it is experienced in specific places, like in the project Back to the Roots?

In order to find these ancestral places, the project actually turns inward, to the body. The participants purchase a DNA test at a US-based company called African Ancestry.16 This particular company offers ethnic lineage testing, which lets customers choose between tracing the paternal DNA through the Y-chromosome, or the maternal DNA through the mtDNA (Nelson 2008; Schramm forthcoming). Companies such as African Ancestry assert to be able to find the exact location of the ancestral home in Africa. The scientific sound-ness of such projects is debatable, especially as they are entangled in commer-cial enterprises. Indeed, they may be seen as a reification of racialized notions of otherness that are highly problematic. Yet despite its claimed scientific authority and powerful notions of race it seems that the authority of genetic ancestry testing is less absolute than one might think. Despite its claim for ultimate answers, genetic testing needs to correspond to cultural processes of meaning-making in order to be persuasive. These cultural forms inform the very choices that are at the basis of the genetic testing procedures (Palmié 2007; Schramm forthcoming).

As Alondra Nelson has convincingly argued:

the scientific data supplied through genetic genealogy are not always accepted as definitive proof of identity; test results are valuable to “root-seekers” to the extent that they can be deployed in the construction of their individual and collective biographies. Root-seekers align bios (life) and bios (life narratives, life histories) in ways that are meaningful to them (Nelson 2008: 761-2).

16) See www.africanancestry.com (accessed 04-04-2011).


I suggest understanding the DNA testing in Back to the Roots as a deployment in larger sociocultural frameworks. One such deployment is gender. The group opted to trace the maternal DNA, not the paternal line. This is not at all sur-prising, because of the matrifocality in Afro-Surinamese culture. Mothers occupy a central place in the transmission of Afro-Surinamese cultural knowl-edge: in my research, I was reminded countless times that women are the “culture bearers” (kultuurdragers) in Afro-Surinamese culture. This already indicates that the persuasive power of genetic testing depends on the cultural frameworks of meaning that inform the very choices of genetic testing. Genetic testing can be persuasive as a technology of the self only if it corresponds to cultural frameworks of meaning.

As in the case presented by Nelson, DNA testing is deployed in narratives of Africanness in the Netherlands. These narratives are projects of framing political subjectivity in relation to specific historically, culturally and socio-economically situated contexts. Indeed, it turns out that DNA is secondary to the embodied experience that the group has when Africa turns from icon into place.

Jetty’s test result, for example, was somewhat of a disappointment to her at first. She had hoped for it to relate her to a noble, even royal past. She smiles cheekily: “I had hoped to descend from a Massai princess or something like that.” The test, however, located her ancestry in Liberia and Sierra Leone, especially the latter a war-torn country at the time, and unfit to represent a golden past: “Who wants to be from Sierra Leone, for Pete’s sake?!” To make matters worse, the unstable political situation in Sierra Leone at the time did not allow the group to actually travel there. In April 2007, the group went to Cameroon instead. Here, the DNA test had identified the ancestral home of some members of the group.

Emplacing Africa

The roots seekers in the project were accompanied by a camera, and the film is now available on the project’s website.17 The way in which Africa is framed in the film corresponds to the notions of Africanness referred to above. The film begins with a scene at Schiphol airport, as the group is about to leave the Netherlands to travel to “their roots”. In front of the check-in counters, Jetty

17) See www.mijnroots.nl (accessed 04-04-2011).


explains: “I have a bit of a Suriname-feeling. That I will meet familiar people, you know?” Travelling to Africa, for Jetty, seems as familiar as travelling to Suriname. It seems as though she already knows upon departure what she will find there.

The film frames the journey as a sort of time-travel: the group leaves the hyper-modernity of Schiphol airport, to enter a pre-modern, and thus pre-slavery world of tradition. In the film, the “Africa” of the group’s roots is mainly rural Africa. They visit small villages and perform rituals surrounded by the purity of “mother nature”. The signifiers of modernity are conspicu-ously absent in the film – the group is clearly tracing an image of pre-contact Africa.18

“What does it do to you”, van Stipriaan frames the group’s arrival in Africa, “when you literally set foot on African soil? And I mean literally, the soil that you believe is the home of your ancestors?”19 Back in her office in Amsterdam, Jetty tells me what it felt like when “my feet felt African soil for the very first time in my life”. She remembered sitting on the beach, watching a ship on the horizon, slowly disappearing in the misty grey. She could smell the sea breeze blowing its salty air into her lungs. Finally, she told me, she had found a place that feels like home. The fact that her DNA test contradicted this experience did not seem to matter. The strong feeling she had sitting on the beach told her that this was her ancestral home. Half jokingly, she added that there is bauxite in Cameroon, just like in Suriname, and that Cameroon looked and sounded like Suriname anyway: the language, the customs, the houses, the bumps and holes in the road, and the music. There was no doubt, these were her roots.

When the group was taken to a grotto by two Cameroonian women, this feeling of recognition and being at home was reinforced. The women talked to her in a language that she did not understand. “But language was not impor-tant at that point, I felt that there was an understanding without words,” Jetty told me. The women then performed a ceremony the purpose of which did not become entirely clear to her. They started splashing water over her head, while they continued talking to her. She giggled when she tells me about it: “Can you imagine, a Western sista like me in this grotto, in a ritual I did

18) The tradition of nativism in diasporic cultures is as long as its critique (Appiah 1993; Fanon 2004; Gilroy 1993), which I will not reproduce here.19) “Wat doet het feit met je dat je voor het eerst afrikaanse bodem betreedt? Maar dan ook let-terlijk de bodem waarvan jij denkt dat je voormoeders vandaan komen?”


not understand anything about?” And yet, she did not feel out of place there. “All of a sudden, sitting there on that beach, and experiencing that ritual in the grotto, I felt this incredible calmness in me. I was out of this world for a moment. I felt like I finally had found a place where I could find some rest”.

Despite the disappointing test result, Jetty finds the experience of whole-ness she had been looking for. It seems confusing that Jetty should find this wholeness in a specific place that is different from the one specified by the DNA test. I suggest that this need not be confusing if both DNA testing and travelling to Africa are understood as strategies of making sense – of making the topos of “Africa” available to sense experience. It is what Appadurai called the production of locality, “a complex phenomenological quality, constituted by a series of links between the sense of social immediacy, the technologies of interactivity, and the relativity of contexts” (Appadurai 1996: 178). Or, in Basso and Feld’s words, it is establishing a sense of place: “the ways in which people encounter places, perceive them, and invest them with significance” (Feld and Basso 1996: 8).

Africa, Blackness, Body

Even when there is a “genetic match”, it seems that DNA depends on an aes-thetics of persuasion (Meyer 2010) that organizes its deployment. Twenty-six-year-old Herby is another participant in the project. Although I was not able to talk to him in person, it is interesting to look at how the film depicts his experience in Cameroon. The test had traced Herby’s ancestry to the Tikar, Hausa and Fulani of Cameroon. He was able to “meet his ancestors” in a small village in the Cameroonian countryside. Portraying his first encounter with the “tribe”, the film shows Herby in a Fulani house, sitting in front of one of the elders. The unspecified old man is sitting somewhat elevated on what appears to be a throne, richly decorated with colourful cloth. Herby, kneeling on the floor in front of the man, is seen showing the old man a souvenir from Holland he brought for him: a little windmill made of Delfts Blauw, one of the most prominent items of Dutchness. He explains to the elder that “this is just something small for you to remember the Dutch boy that was here to see his people”. It is unclear whether the old man quite grasps the idea of this. In the scene, the man somewhat clumsily plays with the wings of the windmill and remains silent. As the scene continues, Herby explains in a voice-over that: “I would never have imagined to descend from these people. It’s just that they are dark people, with straight hair, and, you know, Muslim. I have frizzy


hair, and lighter skin.”20 When Herby nevertheless claims that he, too, is a Fulani, the villagers respond with consternation: how could he possibly be a Fulani without being a Muslim?!

For Herby, the sensation of wholeness failed to materialize. In his experi-ence, there was a mismatch between both his skin colour and his hair, and that of his prospective ancestors. In this ancestral place, it seems, he would have expected to find people with bodies similar to his own. Also, he frames him-self, and is framed by the film, as a Dutch boy, not a Surinamese boy. Hence, despite the claim made by genetic testing, this test is itself subject to the expe-rience of locality: the culturally informed ways in which people establish a sense of place and belonging.

The Politics of Belonging

It has become clear that the choice for genetic testing, as well as the interpreta-tion of its results, is informed by cultural registers embedding genetic testing in processes of meaning-making. Moreover, genetic ancestry testing, as an act of emplacement, is also deeply political.

In the past two decades or so, the promise of obtaining a lost ancient purity has attracted an increasing number of roots tourists pursuing what Holsey (2004) has called a “transatlantic dream”. Like the participants of Back to the Roots, these roots seekers follow “phantasy trope[s] of transatlantic reunion” (Holsey 2004: 166). As several authors show, roots tourism is highly problem-atic and contested (Schramm 2004, 2010; Bruner 1996; Holsey 2004, 2008; Hasty 2002), not least for the anthropologist (Schramm 2005). Holsey points out that: “In contrast to these dreams, in real life, most such connections are much more fraught with tension and misunderstanding” (Holsey 2004: 167). The Ghanaians and the roots seekers she encountered occupy different posi-tions in the global world order. The tourists, Holsey argues, are interested first and foremost in an “intensely personal experience” that is also highly exclusive (Holsey 2004: 176) and “[. . .] many African American tourists leave Ghana having established a sense of connection to their imagined Ghanaian ances-tors, but without having established a sense of connection to contemporary Ghanaians” (ibid.). Holsey shows that Ghanaians, in turn, are more interested in, but often disappointed by, the economic benefits that these tourists may

20) “Ik had helemaal niet gedacht dat ik van hun zou afstammen, want het zijn gewoon donkere mensen, met glad haar, en moslim. En ik heb gewoon kroes haar, en ben wat lichter.”


yield. Similarly, Hasty argues that roots tourists are often uninterested in local politics and desire an unpolluted, pure experience of “traditional” culture. African American “claims for autochthony”, Hasty concludes, are “limited to a carefully constructed depoliticized notion of traditional African culture” (Hasty 2002: 57).

As Back to the Roots shows, an involvement in West African local or national politics is not the primary objective of these roots seekers. However, that does not make such projects a-political. As Delpino shows (this volume), roots seekers willy-nilly become involved in different political spheres, such as con-tested chieftaincy issues or national agendas of “return” policy. Nevertheless, the frames of reference of the parties involved continue to differ fundamen-tally, and involvement in West African politics seems to be a necessity rather than an end in itself within the roots seekers’ own respective projects. I want to suggest here that the political project Back to the Roots engages in is directed at a politics of belonging in the Netherlands, rather than, in this case, Cam-eroon. Africa, then, is not the place where Jetty and the Dutch group want to settle down (in fact, as different authors show, it is only a small minority of roots seekers who permanently move to Africa), but it does provide a sense of settlement – in the Netherlands.

This becomes clear in Jetty’s 2007 piece, Zeven. Jetty (as well as the movie) had portrayed her experience of “Africa” as fulfilling and cathartic: at peace with the world, and at one with the African soil, water, and ritual. In Zeven, she engages critically with this experience. Here, she returns to the question of emplacement and makes clear that this is a politics of belonging in the Neth-erlands rather than Africa. The stage is decorated with carrots. In Dutch, the word for “roots” and “carrots” is the same: wortels. The piece, Jetty explains to me, is thus about wortels – and it is no coincidence that these vegetables grow in the ground. The title of the piece, Zeven, she explains to me, refers to the number Seven (as in 2007, and her seventh piece), but also to the verb “to sieve”. She tells me that on the one hand, this refers to a selective process of recalling: “It’s about what you take with you from the past, and what you leave behind.” At the same time, it is also about exclusion: “It is about how society sieves.”

Thus she frames her search for roots by referring to her feeling of disenfran-chisement in the Dutch nation on stage:

I know it for a fact, right. In this very moment, here in this room. At least one who thinks: “Where is she from?” You know it, right, you are walking, you look at someone, you think: “Where would this person be from? Look, where would this person be from?” [to herself ]


I will tell them. [she gets up] Because you guys look at me, like . . . Well, so you’ll know. I am from Cuijk.21

Zeven is a solo performance with three characters: Jetty, Stanley, and Taante. The characters represent three stereotypical Surinamese roles. Jetty is a spiritual and critical modern Surinamese woman, Stanley an urban “hosselaar” (jack-of-all-trades), and Taante an elderly, somewhat cynical, Surinamese lady. Stanley’s interest in Africa is mainly economical; he is looking for ways to make money rather than embarking on a search for his Self. Taante is utterly disinterested in “Africa”, but she tagged along because the trip was free of charge (“When I heard it was for free I pretended to be furiously interested”). Jetty went because she was looking for her inner Self, her history and who she really was. She reflects on this in her monologue:

Africa! [the light dims, drum music sets in] No children with naked bellies, flies, snotty noses, like the TV images always show. A land of standing! A tribe of standing. Water. [ Jetty is bathing] Oh, water! And the wind [sound of wind begins to accompany the music] I am a princess. I descend from these long, royal tribes. Bouncing long men. Hoekgabbers 22 in the desert. [she is dancing, the sound of the wind is audible, as well as drum music] And I search for the water. [drum music stops, only the sound of the wind is audible] By the water I want to salute. I want to salute mother earth. I want to say thanks . . . I smell . . . [lights brighten] I smell Cuijk! I have grown roots in Cuijk!

In her performance, she explains that the journey to Africa indeed leads her to her roots. Part of these roots are “African”, a mythical past with noble black princesses and high culture. Another part is, inescapably, Cuijk. Hence, the search for roots, the recovery of a lost and suppressed essence that is “African culture”, is not about casting off your Levi’s jeans in favour of animal skins, or going hunting for Zebras with a spear instead of shopping at the local supermarket.

The journeys to Africa are about creating a palpable experience of a past that induces pride instead of shame. In this sense, it is comparable to the Hunebedden: nobody wants to actually live like the people who built them,

21) Ik weet zeker, noh. Op dit moment, hier in de zaal. Minstens een die denkt: “Waar komt ze vandaan?” Je kent het, toch, dat je gewoon loopt, je ziet iemand, je denkt: “Waar zou die van-daan komen? Kijk waar zou die vandaan komen.” Ik ga het ze vertellen. Want jullie zitten me aan te kijken, zo van . . . Nou, dan weten jullie het. Ik kom uit Cuijk!22) A devotee of a particular stream of techno music, typically clad in training suits.


but there is a strong desire to have a material form in which one’s very own past becomes palpable.

Emplacing the Colonial Past

The idea of roots tourism to West Africa and a mystical return to a pre-slavery culture does not appeal to Roy Ristie. Roy is a well-known Afro-Surinamese radio DJ, spin doctor, and, since 2010, a council member in Amsterdam Zui-doost. Although he chose a route that is different from Back to the Roots, he, too, is engaged in a politics of belonging through emplacement.

Roy was born in Suriname in 1953. He grew up under regimes of colonial discipline installed to incorporate its subjects into a body politic that was cen-tred around the colonial metropole. Roy calls himself “A child of the flood”. In 1953, the Netherlands was hit by the worst flooding in the country’s his-tory. More than a thousand people died, tens of thousands lost their homes and wide stretches of agricultural land were destroyed. The flood became the incentive for the enormous waterworks like the “Deltawerken” and the “Af-sluitdijk”, for which the Dutch have become famous. In Suriname, people were shocked when the news arrived, and they began to collect donations. “For years after the flood,” Roy told me, “every Monday, us schoolchildren had to give a cent for the flood victims.” These “Maandagscenten” (Monday cents) are well-remembered by many Surinamese of Roy’s generation now. To Roy, these donations were self-evident: “A disaster had happened in our country.”23

At school he had learned from school books published in the Netherlands, the same books Dutch schoolchildren in the Netherlands had been reading. “You know what it said in these books? The river Rhine enters our country near Lobith! Well. There are great rivers in Suriname, but there is no Rhine, and no Lobith!” He knew everything about the Netherlands before he arrived: the way people dressed, the way they socialized, even down to the train sched-ules, he adds somewhat polemically. The familiarity with the Netherlands was self-evident to Roy, as it was to most Surinamese, despite considerable geo-graphical, cultural and social distance to Dutch people and the Netherlands. Nevertheless, Roy felt emphatically Dutch. Surinamese people, according to Roy, knew the Netherlands better than the Dutch knew it themselves. Only half polemically, he therefore claims that the Surinamese are the real Dutch.

23) “Er was een ramp in ons land gebeurd.” Fieldnotes 28-04-2009.


“We are more Dutch than the Dutch themselves. Surinamese are the Über-Hollanders.”24

Thus, when Roy arrived in the Netherlands in the 1970s, he felt he came well-prepared, expecting to blend in with fellow countrymen and – women. Like for Jetty, the moment quickly turned into one of disillusion. Little things were unexpected and annoying, for example, that his driver’s licence was invalid in the Netherlands.

Yet the discomfort deepened on a more fundamental level, beyond such small nuisances. In Suriname, he had worked as a radio broadcaster, running an important radio station in Suriname. In the Netherlands, he was forced to take on a job as an “assistent schrootbrander” recycling fridges. He was obliged to take on a job below his qualifications in order to obtain a work permit. He remembers cutting open the doors of fridges without any idea of how to do it correctly, and without any form of protection. He tells me how he tore out the insulation from the fridges, and how, with the blowpipe burning the insula-tion material, he produced the most awesome colours: “colours I had never seen before.”25 Without protection, he inhaled the fumes emanating from the burning, until some colleagues noticed his amateurism and gave him advice.

The move to the Netherlands, in his view comparable to a move from Maas-tricht to Amsterdam, led to a radical downward move on the socio-economic ladder. His Surinamese qualifications all of a sudden lost their currency, and he had to sell his work below value.

Later he found work with NOS, one of the most important public radio and television broadcasters in the Netherlands. He was making programmes addressing Surinamese people in the Netherlands, sometimes with provocative statements and reports, and always in one way or the other directed at the social well-being of the Surinamese community in particular. The NOS, con-cerned about their image, approached Roy, asking him whether he “felt Suri-namese or an employee of the NOS”.

To Roy, this expresses the lack of historical consciousness in the Nether-lands that was beginning to manifest itself to him. He began to look for ways to address this problem, and eventually, this led to a new form of public com-memoration of slavery that explicitly links the problems of Afro-Surinamese and Antilleans in the Netherlands with a lack of historical awareness in the Netherlands.

24) “Wij zijn hollandser dan de Hollanders, de Surinamers zijn de Über-Hollanders!” (fieldnotes 28-04-2009).25) “Kleuren die ik nog nooit eerder had gezien”.


Beginning in the 1990s, Roy and a group of Afro-Surinamese men and women organized bezinningsbijeenkomsten (contemplative meetings) on Suri-nameplein in Amsterdam. On 29 June, 1993, Roy and dozens of others gath-ered at Surinameplein for a tori neti, a night in which stories about slavery and the olden days were told. On the morning of 30 June, there was a breakfast, and the Surinamese, Antillean and Dutch flags on Surinameplein were hoisted to half-mast. A group of Surinamese Amerindians (“inheemsen”) played a drum. The atmosphere was solemn and ponderous, Roy told me. At eight o’ clock that night, traffic was halted in the entire area, and two minutes of utter silence were observed. Roy recalled that: “The silence was almost complete; you could hear a pin drop. There was only the eerie sound of the samboera-dron of the Indians: Boom. Boom. Boom. People told me that they heard the drum from five blocks away.”

In 2010, I participated in the ceremony on Surinameplein. During the afternoon, people begin to gather. Food stalls had already been cooking up a feast, and as the day ages, the lines in front of the stalls lengthen. In a large tent, there are different discussion panels and performances, and the atmos-phere is loose and sociable. At exactly eight o’ clock in the evening, the flag ceremony begins. The flags are in the middle of a large roundabout, and the crowd needs to cross a three-lane street in order to get to the flags. The police, who have dispatched an unusually high percentage of black officers on this day, have cordoned off the road, blocking all traffic for at least ten minutes. The crowd crossing the street is led by a group of Surinamese Amerindians, dressed in their conspicuous red ceremonial outfits, and beating a Samboera drum. Roy, who is walking next to me, puts on his radio announcer voice and declares to me: “A Negro is blocking the road and a group of Indians is cross-ing the street in the centre of Amsterdam.”26 His use of the word “neger” (Negro) is cynical and provocative – Roy is aware of the political implications of this term. To him, the blocking of the street by a black officer, and the cross-ing of the Indians represents a claim of historical importance. It literally means claiming a place in the Netherlands, and he is anxious about the extent to which this place, literally, is being claimed. He tells me that in the beginning, “they even opened the bridge over there to block the traffic, and there were no trams running, because they would make too much noise and disturb the solemnity of the moment. And look at it now!” Indeed, the trams are still run-ning and the traffic is only blocked for the duration of the crossing. Forcing

26) “Een neger blokkeert de weg, en een groep Indianen steekt de straat over in het centrum van Amsterdam.”


the city to be silent and listen to its other voices exemplifies impressively the “sensuality of place” (Feld and Basso 1996: 9). It is both a symbolic statement in a politics of belonging and the manifestation of a physical and sensuous presence.

This event inaugurated a change in the way slavery had been commemo-rated thus far. In Suriname, 1 July, the day slavery was abolished in the Dutch colonies in 1863, has been a national holiday since 1963. Even before eman-cipation had become a fact, and ever since, the event had been framed ideo-logically in different ways. It has been articulated as a “cult of gratitude” to God and the King in religious and colonial hegemony (Stipriaan 2004: 273ff ), but also in terms of Afro-nationalism as a response to Asian immigration in Suriname (2004: 279). In the 20th century, it was also the stage on which an Afro-consciousness began to develop as Afro-Surinamese elites looked for ties with the African diaspora, especially in the U.S. (ibid.: 279ff ). It also figured in the process of decolonization and nation-building (Marshall 2003; Meel 1998, 1999), and it has played a role in the radicalized political rhetoric of the 1980s military regime (Stipriaan 2004).

Ever since there were Surinamese in the Netherlands, it had also been cele-brated there, be it in Surinamese associations or as neighbourhood celebra-tions. Especially in student circles, nationalist and emancipatory ideas emerged that would in turn influence the situation in Suriname. Most people, however, saw it as a pleasant opportunity to feast, and meet and greet. Generally, it remained a Surinamese internal affair, and it was ignored by Dutch society at large.

With the event on Surinameplein, this situation began to change. Its moti-vation was explicitly to address the weak position of Afro-Dutch in the Neth-erlands. Addressing Dutch society at large, it strengthened an idea of shared history. Explicitly, the event was meant to point out that Surinamese were not only Dutch legally, but that they had been part of the Dutch nation for cen-turies. The word “besef ”, equivalent to consciousness, contemplation, and recognition, was and continues to be the central term for this event. It calls for an awareness of the shared past that is by no means reduced to slavery, and of the concrete problems and responsibilities arising from it in the present.

The event on Surinameplein should be seen as an intervention in Dutch memory culture. One of the central events of national effervescence in the Netherlands is the national commemoration of the casualties of war on 4 May, and the festivals to commemorate the liberation from Nazi occupation on 5 May. This event is organized and coordinated by the Nationaal Comité 4/5 mei, one of the most powerful organs in Dutch memory culture, and it takes


place on Dam Square, in front of the National Monument and the Royal Palace. In this event, the Dutch Nation emerges most powerfully through a shared sense of rootedness in a common past, a link to those who have come before us, the living.

The bezinningsbijeenkomst on Surinameplein addresses this national event explicitly. The organization that launched the event named itself “Nationaal Comité 30 Juni/1 Juli” as an intentional analogy with the committee organiz-ing the national event on Dam square in May. The event itself, too, parallels that on Dam square. The minute’s silence, hoisting the flags half-mast on 30 June, and the solemn sphere all resonate with the event on Dam square. The event on Surinameplein may be seen as a form of mimesis in Benjamin’s sense: it is a way to “get hold of an object at very close range by way of its like-ness”, which is common in post-colonial contexts (Benjamin as cited in Taus-sig 1993: 32). Like the national commemoration on Dam Square, the event on Surinameplein establishes a genealogy that is a claim for membership of the Dutch nation, a claim which erodes the idea of strangers. These statements insist that instead of the 1970s, when emigration from Suriname to the Neth-erlands peaked, the date of “arrival” has to be set many centuries earlier, before the Netherlands even became a nation. The membership of Afro-Dutch in this becoming nation began when the West Indian Company began to transport the African ancestors to work on their plantations in the Caribbean. The claim for recognition, thus, is not merely the recognition of this past, but through it, also the request for recognition as full, authentic citizens of the Nation. Roy, for example, insists that Suriname is, or remains, a province of the Nether-lands, reinforcing the idea that his ancestors have been “of the land” (autoch-thonous) for ages. The claim that Suriname remains a province of the Netherlands should be seen partly as a polemic statement; certainly not all Surinamese, or Dutch, would subscribe to. Yet Roy is not alone in the opinion that Suriname and the Netherlands continue to be tied by a special relation-ship asking for a sense of responsibility. Indeed, the appeal of the event on Surinameplein testifies to its popularity.

The claim is formulated in terms of seniority: our claim is as old as yours; we did not arrive at a later date. The event on Surinameplein should therefore be seen as a form of politics addressing not only Dutch society at large; its addressees are also specifically other minority groups, particularly Turks and Moroccans. Ristie clearly states: “I am not Moroccan or Turkish,” meaning that he should have a different status than Moroccan or Turkish emigrants.

Positioning himself vis-a-vis other minorities in the Netherlands situates his negotiation of belonging within debates about autochthony and an increas-


ingly hysterical islamophobia in the Netherlands. In the last decade, a radical-izing sequence of anti-immigrant parties has sought new ways of excluding minorities, particularly Muslims, from the nation (Geschiere 2009). On a cer-tain level, Roy’s statement is meant to differentiate himself from these other Others, defining himself as autochthonous (“über-hollands”) as opposed to allochtoon, and thereby sharing a logic of exclusion reproduced in these debates.

Interestingly, the initiative on Surinameplein, exactly by claiming to be part of the nation, appears to be an affirmation of hegemonic notions of autoch-thony rather than a critique. What the commemoration seems to convey is not a critical stance towards memory politics as such, but rather to claim a place within them. As Schramm argues, the relation between political subjec-tivities, memory and emplacement is not at all self-evident: “it implies the complex entanglement of procedures of remembering, forgetting and the pro-duction of counter-memories” (Schramm 2011: 5). Yet even what may appear as counter-memories is not as clear-cut as it may appear. It would be too easy to understand this in terms of simple dichotomies between mutually exclusive positions in asymmetrical power relations: “such a dichotomization of posi-tions tends to obscure the many overlaps between them” (ibid.). It is true that the commemoration of slavery has been inserted into the Dutch memoryscape in the form of monuments, and by successfully demanding to change histori-cal canons and install alternative versions of them. Yet these counter-memories have made use of the very forms of commemoration that are part of the very historical regimes that are under critique. In other words, these counter-mem-ories provide an ambivalent stance that is both critical and affirmative by tak-ing notions of autochthony by their word.

Conclusion

The trans-Atlantic system of slavery has become recognized as one of the great-est atrocities of humankind. Its commemoration, in turn, operates on a simi-larly epic scale, producing narratives of oceanic and global diasporic belonging. Yet these vast narratives become available for experience in very specific local-ities, engaging in local politics of belonging and producing local subjects (Appadurai 1996).

In the Netherlands, the commemoration of slavery partakes in what Peter Geschiere (2009) has called the return of the local – a specific idea of autoch-thony that is opposed to the culturalized figure of the “allochtoon”. In the past


two decades, slavery has been inserted into the Dutch memoryscape, produc-ing specific local subjects vis-a-vis this political formation of belonging. In these dynamics, locality has come to matter in particular ways.

On the one hand, there is Jetty’s rite of passage in Africa. Paradoxically, it seems, she can negotiate her Dutch autochthony on African soil, which pro-duces a specific kind of political subjectivity that is efficacious in a political formation in the Netherlands. Jetty claims that “Africa is also in Amsterdam”, and I understand that claim in the sense that some Dutch citizens have to travel to Africa in order to negotiate, or locate, their status as Dutch autochthones.

Roy, on the other hand, intervenes in a politics of autochthony in the Neth-erlands by emplacing slavery in the Dutch memoryscape. He conjures up the figure of the black slave and that of the Amerindian, who, in the centre of Amsterdam, force the city to remain silent in a moment that is charged through its historical importance. Pointing at his body, he claims that: “I am slavery,” thus creating a sense of place that is also a political claim for participation.

Hence belonging, despite global trends of displacement and the emergence of non-places, still comes to matter through locality – the different iconogra-phies of belonging have to rely on concrete and palpable places to unfold their appeal. However, at least in the case of the Netherlands, topoi like the Hunebedden can no longer lay claim to the exclusive location of Dutchness. Such localized politics of belonging are now explicitly carried out in (and to) places like Cameroon as well as Surinameplein in Amsterdam. An understand-ing of political subjectification thus needs to pay attention to issues of locality that both question and take seriously dominant notions of autochthony.

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Emplacing Slavery: Roots, Monuments and Politics of Belonging in the Netherlands

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