Dutch leader apologizes for Netherlands' role in slave trade

[jgo]

Source: Associated Press

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte apologized Monday on behalf of his government for the Netherlands’ historical role in slavery and the slave trade, despite calls for him to delay the long-awaited statement.

Rutte went ahead with the apology even though some activist groups urged him to wait until next year’s July 1 anniversary of the country’s abolition of slavery. Some even went to court last week in a failed attempt to block the speech.

He said the government would establish a fund for initiatives that will help tackle the legacy of slavery in the Netherlands and its former colonies.

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/netherlands-slavery-the-hague-mark-rutte-81a0abdf1b17ea32a962d3b6b9bdf7e1

[Alexander Of Assyria]

1. Went to court to block a speech apologizing for slavery? Guess they have their own Kraken lawyers!

[appalachiablue]

2. Atlantic Slave Trade. The Portuguese were 1st, then Britain, Spain, France, Netherlands, Denmark.

The Atlantic slave trade, transatlantic slave trade, or Euro-American slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people, mainly to the Americas. The slave trade regularly used the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage, and existed from the 16th to the 19th centuries.[1] The vast majority of those who were transported in the transatlantic slave trade were people from Central and West Africa that had been sold by other West Africans to Western European slave traders,[2][3][4] while others had been captured directly by the slave traders in coastal raids;[5] Europeans gathered and imprisoned the enslaved at forts on the African coast and then brought them to the Americas.[6][7] Except for the Portuguese, European slave traders generally did not participate in the raids because life expectancy for Europeans in sub-Saharan Africa was less than one year during the period of the slave trade (which was prior to the widespread availability of quinine as a treatment for malaria).[3]

The colonial South Atlantic and Caribbean economies were particularly dependent on labour for the production of sugarcane and other commodities. This was viewed as crucial by those Western European states which, in the late 17th and 18th centuries, were vying with one another to create overseas empires.[8]

The Portuguese, in the 16th century, were the first to buy slaves from West African slavers and transport them across the Atlantic. In 1526, they completed the first transatlantic slave voyage to Brazil, and other Europeans soon followed.[9] Shipowners regarded the slaves as cargo to be transported to the Americas as quickly and cheaply as possible,[8] there to be sold to work on coffee, tobacco, cocoa, sugar, and cotton plantations, gold and silver mines, rice fields, the construction industry, cutting timber for ships, as skilled labour, and as domestic servants.[10] The first Africans kidnapped to the English colonies were classified as indentured servants, with legal standing similar to that of contract-based workers coming from Britain and Ireland. However, by the middle of the 17th century, slavery had hardened as a racial caste, with African slaves and their future offspring being legally the property of their owners, as children born to slave mothers were also slaves (partus sequitur ventrem). As property, the people were considered merchandise or units of labour, and were sold at markets with other goods and services.

The major Atlantic slave-trading nations, in order of trade volume, were Portugal, Britain, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark. Several had established outposts on the African coast where they purchased slaves from local African leaders.[11] These slaves were managed by a factor, who was established on or near the coast to expedite the shipping of slaves to the New World. Slaves were imprisoned in a factory while awaiting shipment. Current estimates are that about 12 million to 12.8 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic over a span of 400 years.[12][13]: 194  The number purchased by the traders was considerably higher, as the passage had a high death rate with approximately 1.2–2.4 million dying during the voyage and millions more in seasoning camps in the Caribbean after arrival in the New World. Millions of people also died as a result of slave raids, wars, and during transport to the coast for sale to European slave traders.[14][15][16][17] Near the beginning of the 19th century, various governments acted to ban the trade, although illegal smuggling still occurred. In the early 21st century, several governments issued apologies for the transatlantic slave trade...https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade

[live love laugh]

4. Great info 👍🏾

[Judi Lynn]

5. Thank you, appalachiablue. ⭐️

[appalachiablue]

3. DeWolfs of Rhode Island, lgest slave-trading family in US history; Legacy of the Dutch slave trade:

Last edited Mon Dec 19, 2022, 12:32 PM - Edit history (1)

A Northern Family Confronts Its Slaveholding Past. Filmmaker Katrina Browne discusses her family’s role in American slavery. Smithsonian Magazine, June 18, 2008.

When Katrina Browne discovered that her New England ancestors, the DeWolfs, were the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history, she invited DeWolf descendents to retrace the Triangle Trade route and confront this legacy. Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North, which airs June 24 on the PBS film series P.O.V., follows their journey and documents the North's intimate relationship with slavery. Browne's cousin Thomas DeWolf has also written a book about the trip, Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History. This year is the bicentennial of the federal abolition of the slave trade.

I was in seminary in my late 20s—I was 28-years-old—and I got a booklet that my grandmother sent to all her grandchildren. She was 88 and coming to the end of her life and wondering if her grandkids actually knew anything about their family history—whether they cared. She was conscientious enough to put in a couple sentences about the fact that our ancestors were slave traders. It hit me incredibly hard when I read those sentences. I probably would have just treated the whole thing as my problem to reckon with on my own with my family, privately, if I hadn't come across a book by historian Joanne Pope Melish called Disowning Slavery. She traced the process whereby the northern states conveniently forgot that slavery was a huge part of the economy.

Slavery itself existed in New England for over 200 years. History books leave most of us with the impression that because it was abolished in the North before the South, it was as if it never happened in the North, that we were the good guys and abolitionists and that slavery was really a Southern sin.

That book made me realize what I had done with my own amnesia, and my family's amnesia was really parallel to this much larger regional dynamic. That's what inspired me to make this film—that showing me & my family grappling with it would give other white Americans an opportunity to think and talk about their own intimate feelings, wherever their family history may lie, & that it would also set Americans straight about the history. What did you find out about how & why the DeWolfs first got into the trade? They were sailors & worked their way up to being slave ship captains. People typically would buy shares in slave ships & become part owners, & if you were successful you became a full owner. It was really [James DeWolf] who became extremely successful. He had a number of sons who all were in the slave trade. That's how it really became a dynasty—3 generations in 50 years.

How did they use the Triangle Route, from Rhode Island to Ghana to Cuba & back? In the late 18th century rum became a commodity that was in demand—it rose to the top as a commodity of interest on the West African coast as part of the slave trade. So more and more rum distilleries were built in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. The DeWolfs had a rum distillery—they would take rum to West Africa, they would trade it for people and then bring those captured Africans to, most frequently, Cuba and Charleston, South Carolina, but also to other Caribbean ports and other Southern states. In Cuba, they also owned sugar and coffee plantations. The molasses from the sugar plantations was a key ingredient for the rum-making. They had an auction house in Charleston, and they developed their own insurance company and bank. Your family wasn't the only Northern family involved in this trade. How widespread was the practice and how did it impact the North's economy?...https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-northern-family-confronts-its-slaveholding-past-88307/

- Traces of the Trade, A Story from the Deep North. The DeWolf Family, by Katrina Browne.
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- Hiding in Plain View, Dealing with the Legacies of Dutch Slavery,

The year 2013 marks 150 years since the abolition of slavery in the former Dutch colonies. It’s worth mentioning that the Dutch abolished slavery a while after the British (1833) and French (1848) and, only after much resistance. Melissa Weiner, an American sociologist, has done some outstanding and research on the representation of the Dutch history of slavery. She has studied depictions of slavery and multiculturalism in Dutch primary school history textbooks and norms and practices privileging whiteness in a diverse Dutch primary school classroom. Weiner’s findings, which will be published soon, are quite telling of the Dutch attitude towards the legacy of slavery.

This attitude is a mix of denial, ignorance, (supposed) innocence, and misplaced entitlement. Resistance to the dominant Dutch historic narrative is often met with aggression, marginalization and disdain. People that do question the dominant narrative — from activists to scholars — are often subjected to some fine Dutch repression, not only in everyday life but also institutionally. Try get funding as a scholar to research racism in the Netherlands or set up black, postcolonial, ‘critical race’ or any critical studies departments in this country – it will never happen.

One of the efforts to mark the occasion is The Next Step, a master class for upcoming films talents and a program for high school kids by Africa in the Picture, an African Film Festival based in the Netherlands. The central question of the The Next Step program is: ‘What does slavery mean to you, anything or nothing?’ Young filmmakers and high school students are challenged to make a 150 second film related to this question.While the legacy of slavery should mean something to everyone in the Netherlands, due to the lack of education on slavery, the politics around the commemoration of the abolishment of slavery and the silence of families that became wealthy through the slave trade means that many believe that slavery was really just a ‘black page in history.’ This phrase is frequently used by the Dutch to discuss the legacy of slavery. This is not only a false representation of history but also insulting given that the legacies of slavery are so present today – hiding in plain view.

An additional educational program on slavery is much needed and one hopes many young filmmakers and high schools will start thinking about the legacies of slavery and the role of the Dutch in this history. I say this especially because I have very little faith in the actual Dutch educational system to teach children about slavery. Being schooled in the Netherlands myself, I did not learn about slavery in school until my parents told me about it.
Part of the Africa in the Picture program was the documentary film, Traces of the Trade by Katrina Browne, who discovered that her New England ancestors, the DeWolf family, were the largest slave- trading family in US history...
https://framerframed.nl/en/blog/hiding-in-plain-view-dealing-with-the-legacies-of-dutch-slavery/