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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
Anton de Kom's We Slaves of Suriname is a literary masterpiece as well as a fierce indictment of racism and colonialism. In this classic book, published here in English for the first time, the Surinamese writer and resistance leader recounts the history of his homeland, from the first settlements by Europeans in search of gold through the era of the slave trade and the period of Dutch colonial rule, when the old slave mentality persisted, long after slavery had been formally abolished. 159 years after the abolition of slavery in Suriname and 88 years after its initial publication, We Slaves of Suriname has lost none of its brilliance and power.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Translator’s Note
Introductions
Frimangron by Tessa Leuwsha
Note
The Breath of Freedom by Duco van Oostrum
Double Consciousness
Facts Forgotten and Facts Suppressed
The Personal Decolonization of White Education
The Breath of Freedom
A Vision of Motherly Listening
Note
Bibliography
Why Anton de Kom Still Inspires Generation after Generation by Mitchell Esajas
“Race” and Class in Colonial Surinamese Society
Solidarity
A New Generation Rediscovers Anton de Kom
The Legacy of Slavery
Notes
Foreword
by Judith de Kom
We Slaves of Suriname
“Sranan,” Our Fatherland
Notes
The Era of Slavery
The Arrival of the Whites
El Dorado
The First Settlements
The Dutch Regime
The Slave Trade
The Market
Enslaved
The Slave Woman
The Masters
The Punishments
The Governing Council
The History of Our Nation
Van Aerssen van Sommelsdijck (1683–1688)
The Brutes
The Forest Expeditions
1712–1742
Johan Jacob Mauricius (1742–1751)
Divide and Conquer
Adu the Unbending
Mauricius the Crusader
Alabi
Governor Crommelin (1752–1768)
Governor Nepveu (1770–1779)
Buku (Decayed into Dust)
Baron
The Chieftain Joli Coeur
The Chieftain Boni
Open Warfare
Foreign Military Assistance
The Final Chapter for the Resistance
Suriname under British Rule
The Great Fire
The Fate of the Ethical
In Conflict with Amsterdam Merchants
White Settlement
Fighting the Current
Governors on Parade
The Abolition of Slavery
Freedom?
The Great Sellout
Notes
The Era of “Freedom”
How We Live
The Essence of Autonomy
Fin de siècle
Indentured Labor
The British Indians
The Indonesians
The Creoles
Free Labor
Free Workers
In Search of Gold
The Major Crops
What Becomes of those Millions?
The Pará Rubber Tree
The Banana Debacle
The Liquidation of the Banana Debacle
Results
Notes
Reunion and Farewell
Notes
Glossary of Surinamese Terms
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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We Slaves of Suriname
Anton de Kom
Translated by David McKay
polity
Copyright Page
Wij slaven van Suriname © 1934/1983/2020 by Anton de Kom
© Introductions by Tessa Leuwsha, Mitchell Esajas, Duco van Oostrum (2020) and Judith de Kom (1983)
Originally published in Dutch as Wij slaven van Suriname by Uitgeverij Atlas Contact, Amsterdam.
This English edition © Polity Press, 2022
This publication has been made possible with financial support from the Dutch Foundation for Literature. The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Dutch Foundation for Literature.
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
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Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4901-6 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4902-3 (paperback)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021942476
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Translator’s Note
Warning: This note mentions denigrating terms that express racist attitudes and may offend or upset some readers.
Although De Kom’s writing was in many respects ahead of its time, he uses terms for race and skin color that now seem quite dated and may occasionally confuse today’s readers. Rather than forcing him into a twenty-first-century mold, I have looked to English-language writing of the 1920s and 1930s for equivalents: books by Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and C.L.R. James.
These authors use the term “Indian” to refer to the indigenous peoples of both the Americas and the Indian subcontinent. Adjectives are often used to disambiguate, e.g. “Red Indian” and “British Indian.” (The term “West Indian,” used for all inhabitants of the West Indies regardless of race, adds another degree of complexity in James’s writings.) De Kom refers to the indigenous peoples of South America simply as “Indianen,” rendered here as “Indians,” or by terms such as “inheemsen” (“natives” or “indigenous people”), or often by the names of their specific peoples. He refers to the people of British India and the Surinamese people descended from them as “Brits-Indiërs” (“British Indians”), “Hindoestanen” (“Hindustanis”), and in two places “Hindoes” (“Hindus”).
Like Wright, Hurston, and James, De Kom is sparing in his use of capital letters in terms for race and skin color, using lower-case letters for the equivalents of “black,” “white,” “colored,” “maroon,” and “creole.” I have followed his example. De Kom also writes the Dutch term “neger” with a lower-case letter, but I translate this as “Negro” with a capital “N,” after my English-language models. This reflects the pride and self-respect with which De Kom uses the term “neger” and the distinct contrast with the highly offensive term “nikker” (rendered as “nigger”), which he reserves for expressions of the racism of the typical white colonist. “Neger” has become such a fraught term in contemporary Dutch that De Kom’s use of the word can be confusing or upsetting to twenty-first-century readers. “Negro” is actually less problematic in this respect; although it is now outdated, it is not generally seen as a term of abuse. In the introductions, the slightly different capitalization conventions reflect authorial preference and contemporary usage.
Some literary translators and other writers have recently argued that the use of italics for words regarded as foreign is an inherently racist or chauvinist practice, in that by drawing and emphasizing an absolute distinction between the native and the foreign, it reinforces invidious notions of cultural, national, and racial purity. I believe the intent and effect of this conventional use of italics vary from writer to writer and from book to book, but there can be no doubt that De Kom generally avoids italicizing “foreign” words, especially words from the Sranantongo language, and that this choice emphasizes the integrity of his distinctively Surinamese idiom. I have done the same in English but included a glossary of Surinamese terms in the back of the book, so that readers unfamiliar with Sranantongo and Surinamese idiom can better follow De Kom’s vivid descriptions of his country. Where Sranantongo or other foreign terms are glossed in the main body of the book, the glosses were introduced by De Kom. I have adopted modern Sranantongo spelling throughout the book (with the indispensable aid of Professor Michiel van Kempen), both for the sake of readers familiar with Sranantongo and to improve readability and usability for readers who do not speak the language but might wish to learn more. I hope De Kom would have approved of this choice and felt, as I do, that it disentangles his work from the spelling conventions of the Dutch colonial power.
When De Kom first published his book, it was not edited to today’s professional standards, and Dutch editions up to the present day have remained largely unchanged in this respect. De Kom was a political activist and a writer rather than a professional historian, and his access to research materials was severely limited; he had to rely heavily on a few main sources, mostly secondary works that quoted at length from primary sources. For these reasons, some proper names and titles contain obvious errors, and many names are given only in part (often the surname only). While this is not a critical or scholarly edition, I have attempted, with much-valued assistance from Professor G.J. Oostindie and Professor Van Kempen, to correct such errors and fill in missing names where possible. No doubt some errors remain, and I apologize for any that I have unintentionally introduced.
De Kom included both a scholarly apparatus of endnotes and a few footnotes defining terms or offering additional context. In this edition, his two sets of notes have been merged into a single series of endnotes. I have added a number of translator’s notes, often intended to clarify cultural references that might otherwise puzzle modern English-speaking readers; these too can be found among the endnotes, marked with “Translator’s note” or “TN.”
I am grateful to Professors Oostindie and Van Kempen, David Colmer, Professor Gloria Wekker, Dr. Duco van Oostrom, Tessa Leuwsha, and Lucelle Pardoe for their insightful input, which made a tremendous difference to the final version. My thanks also to the Dutch publisher Atlas Contact, particularly Hayo Deinum, for taking the initiative for an English-language edition, to Mireille Berman and others at the Dutch Foundation for Literature for their financial and institutional support for the project, and to Elise Heslinga, John Thompson, Susan Beer, Evie Deavall, and their colleagues at Polity Press for publishing this English-language edition and giving me the opportunity to translate it. I was very fortunate to be in the right position at the right time to translate this book for publication; others who have done much more than I to promote De Kom’s legacy, such as Professor Oostindie and Dr. Karwan Fatah-Black, deserve special mention here. Finally, a generous 2021 ICM Global South Translation Fellowship award from the Institute for Comparative Modernities at Cornell University enabled me to devote additional time to the daunting task of writing a translation worthy of De Kom’s landmark book.
Introductions
FrimangronTessa Leuwsha
I am in the Frimangron district of Paramaribo, standing in front of the birthplace of Anton de Kom. It’s a corner building. On the sidewalk in front of the house is a memorial stone with a quotation from the famed Surinamese resistance leader: “Sranan, my fatherland, one day I hope to see you again. The day all your misery has been wiped away.” Less than fifteen feet behind the stone, the two-story wooden house looks broken down. Drab vertical beams hang askew from nails, and part of the zinc roof has caved in. One window shutter is open, a curtain pulled aside; this is still someone’s home. Beside it, a plantain tree half-conceals the low house next door. Down the walkway between the two homes, a skinny black man comes out of the backyard. His hair and beard are gray. His T-shirt is too big for him; so are his flip-flops. Holding a flower rolled up in newspaper, he sits down on the stoop in front of the former De Kom family home. I’m curious who the flower is for. He pays no attention to me – so many people take photos here.
In the 1930s, hundreds of people stood waiting here to speak to Anton de Kom. Many were unemployed; others were workers struggling to survive on meager wages. After the abolition of slavery in 1863, the Dutch authorities had rounded up indentured workers in what were then British India and the Dutch East Indies to work on the plantations of Suriname. Later, when the agricultural economy went into decline, those workers had followed in the footsteps of the once-enslaved people, flooding into the city to find work. But Paramaribo, too, was riddled with poverty. They hoped for a chance to sit down at the little table in the back garden with the man who had returned from Holland with a fresh wind of resistance.
Cornelis Gerhard Anton de Kom was born in Paramaribo in 1898. He earned a degree in bookkeeping and worked for a while at the offices of the Balata Compagnie, which was in the business of harvesting balata, a kind of natural rubber. De Kom was struck by the difficult lives of the balata bleeders: laborers, mostly creoles (the term then in common use in Suriname for the descendants of freed slaves), who tapped the rubber trees in the stifling heat of the rainforest. He resigned and, in 1920, left for the Netherlands, where he married a Dutch woman, Petronella Borsboom.
As one of the few people of color in the country, De Kom came into contact with Javanese nationalists who were fighting for an independent Dutch East Indies: in other words, for Indonesia. That was when he first felt the winds of freedom blowing. He began to write articles for the Dutch Communist Party magazine; at the time, that was the only party with a clear anti-colonial stance. His articles and the revolutionary thrust of his arguments caught the attention of the Surinamese labor movement. He was especially popular with that group for criticizing wage reductions for indentured workers.
In late 1932, De Kom and his wife and children, four by then, returned to Suriname by ship to look after his ailing mother – who died during their voyage. Like-minded Surinamers were eagerly looking forward to De Kom’s visit. In the backyard of his childhood home, he set up an advisory agency and took meticulous notes on his visitors’ grievances. The Javanese, who felt disadvantaged relative to other ethnic groups, were the most likely to turn to “Papa De Kom,” as they soon began to call him. Their heartfelt wish was that De Kom would lead them back to Java like a messiah. He wrote about them in We Slaves of Suriname: “Under the tree, past my table, files a parade of misery. Pariahs with deep, sunken cheeks. Starving people. People with no resistance to disease. Open books in which to read the story, haltingly told, of oppression and deprivation” (p. 203). De Kom promised to submit their grievances to the colonial authorities, but the unrest he caused was anything but welcome to Governor Abraham Rutgers.
On February 1, 1933, Anton de Kom led a group of supporters to the offices of the administration. He was arrested on suspicion of attempting to overthrow the regime.
From the street, none of the backyard is visible. The sidewall of the house is completely covered with zinc, and a large mango tree leans on the roof. In front of the neighboring house on that side, a woman is raking the fallen leaves and fruit into a pile. She is wearing a pink skirt, a tight sweater, a cap, and dark glasses. Like many people here, she probably bought her outfit from one of the cheap Chinese clothing shops found all over Paramaribo. The few with more to spend buy their clothes abroad or online. In some respects, today’s city remains much like the Paramaribo in which De Kom grew up in the early twentieth century – even if the rich no longer live in the white-and-green mansions in the historic center, but in modern stone villas in leafy suburbs with names like Mon Plaisir and Elisabeths Hof.
It is not surprising that a revolutionary such as De Kom had his roots in a working-class district like Frimangron. In the days of slavery, enslaved people who had managed to purchase their freedom settled on the undeveloped outskirts of the city. Before then, emancipated house servants had made temporary homes in slave hovels in the backyards of Paramaribo’s mansions. Frimangron literally means “freed people’s land.” On the long sand roads, the new citizens built simple dwellings and practiced trades. The main traffic artery was Pontewerfstraat. From its small workshops came the sounds of carpenters sawing and cobblers pounding and tapping, of tanners and tinsmiths. The women there did laundry or ironing for the white and light-skinned elite who held the power in the Dutch colony. This street, renamed after Anton de Kom in the early 1980s, is the location of the house where he was born.
De Kom must have spent a good deal of time as a child on the very stoop where the elderly man is now sitting. His father had been enslaved, and his grandmother taught her grandchildren about “the sufferings of slavery,” in the words of De Kom’s fierce indictment We Slaves of Suriname. He published the book in 1934, a year after the colonial authorities banished him from Suriname.
De Kom was a quick student and must have learned from a young age not to take injustice for granted. Many children in his neighborhood went barefoot, wore rags, and roamed the streets after dark. Education was compulsory, but few parents could afford the school fees, let alone decent shoes and school clothes. They had a hard enough time giving their children a simple meal, such as rice and salt fish, every day. If they could, they sent their children to work as kweekjes, sweeping, raking, and lugging pails of water for a wealthy family in return for room and board. Child labor was rife.
Anton de Kom’s own childhood was probably easier. His father scraped together a living from his patch of soil and also worked as a gold miner. Young Anton must now and then have passed through Oranjeplein, a stately square in the alien realm of the city center, where the statue of Queen Wilhelmina stood in front of the governor’s magnificent palace, although the monarch never visited her colony. Under the tamarind trees around the square, the upper middle class promenaded in their walking suits and long white dresses. In Frimangron, everyone was black. That is still mostly true today.
One Sunday morning, I drive down Anton Dragtenweg, along which handsome houses overlook the Suriname River. My destination is the district of Clevia: tight rows of Bruynzeel houses, mass-produced modular wooden dwellings with front and backyards. I park beside a recently sanded fence. “I’m painting the gate,” Cees de Kom told me on the telephone, sounding a little breathless. Anton de Kom’s son is now ninety-one years old but still looks sprightly. He invites me to walk up the stairs to the balcony ahead of him. His wife, one year younger, shakes my hand just as energetically.
Cees de Kom and I have something in common: we’re both what used to be called “halfbloedjes,” multiracial people with a black father and a white mother. The accepted term these days is “dubbelbloeden,” not half but double bloods, and no longer in the childish diminutive form. When I speak to Cees at events – most recently at a screening of a film about his father’s life – he never fails to point out this similarity between us. If anything in his life has left scars, it is being described as “half.”
Cees, born in 1928, was four years old when the family arrived in Suriname. After his father’s arrest, a crowd of protesters gathered in front of the administration offices to demand his release. The police opened fire. Two people were killed and twenty-two wounded. For more than three months, De Kom was held prisoner in Fort Zeelandia. By historical irony this was the very fort, built by the Dutch, where slaveholders could pay to have their so-called “disobedient slaves” disciplined. The Dutch colonists outdid both the English and the French in corporal and capital punishment; their methods included whipping, the cruel torture known as the “Spanish billy goat,” the breaking wheel, and death by burning. De Kom’s imprisonment must have added fuel to the fire of protest within him.
After he was exiled to the Netherlands, the intelligence service kept an eye on him. De Kom was seen as a communist, even though he never joined the Communist Party. He had tremendous difficulty finding work. “I remember my father was always writing,” Cees tells me, “wearing his pencil down to a stub to save money. When World War II broke out, he joined the resistance and wrote for the illegal press. On August 7, 1944, he was arrested by the Germans. My mother sat looking out of the window for hours, hoping he would come back. But he never came. My brother and I were deported to Germany, where we worked on a farm.
“After we returned, we were told we had to leave again, this time to the Dutch East Indies. Restoring law and order there, that was our mission. And my father had sympathized with the Indonesian freedom fighters! I wrote a letter to the minister of defense asking for an exemption. My mother hadn’t heard from my father since the liberation of the Netherlands. The most recent news we had was that he was being held in the German concentration camp Neuengamme. I didn’t want to leave my mother until we found out what had happened to him, but that argument cut no ice with the Dutch authorities. Not until 1950 were we officially informed that my father had died in a camp on April 24, 1945.” Cees points into the living room. “And my mother died in that chair right there – just gave up the ghost. We’d been living in Suriname for years by then, and she was visiting on vacation.” A while ago, he decided the time had come to write his own memoirs: “All the dead weight you carry around.” He hands me a thick manuscript in a ring binder. Two Cultures, One Heart is the title; underneath is a drawing of two overlapping circles, his parents’ wedding rings.
“In the Netherlands, my name was written the usual Dutch way, with a K. I changed the spelling to Cees, which seemed more elegant to me, less Dutch, because in the Netherlands I could find no trace of my Surinamese culture.”
As a boy, he was once on a tram with his father when a woman pointed out Anton to her child with a nod of the head and said, “Look, that’s the bogeyman. Watch out, or he’ll come and get you.” There were also children who taunted Cees: “You don’t have to buy soap, ’cause you’ll always be dirty anyway.” Later, still in the Netherlands, he worked for the PTT – the state postal, telegraph, and telephone service. One day he was discussing cultural differences with his co-workers, and a Dutch co-worker made the clumsy remark, “To people in Groningen I speak with an accent too, you know.” On August 18, 1960, when his father’s remains were reinterred in Loenen, the field of honor for those who died as a result of the war, all the names of the dead were read aloud except De Kom’s. They were later told this had been a technical problem.
“One dirty trick after another,” Cees says with a sigh. Always inferior, always misunderstood – he was sick and tired of it. Six years later, he and his family departed for his father’s country on the ship Oranje Nassau. It was the same voyage his parents had made some thirty years earlier. But even in Suriname, as he discovered, the country’s unique identity is often underappreciated. “Almost all the books read here come from the Netherlands.” The family, through a non-profit, owns the house where Anton de Kom was born, but they do not have the money to restore it. The government has neglected it altogether.
To throw off the yoke of Dutch rule – that was De Kom’s aspiration when he wrote the book that has now become a classic: “No people can reach full maturity as long as it remains burdened with an inherited sense of inferiority. That is why this book endeavors to rouse the self-respect of the Surinamese people” (p. 85). In 2020, the forty-fifth anniversary of Surinamese independence, those words are as true as ever. In We Slaves of Suriname, De Kom was far ahead of his contemporaries – not only in Suriname, but also in the Netherlands. The land that the Netherlands had ruled for more than three hundred years would long remain a colonial blind spot. Only in the past few years has Suriname gained a modest place in Dutch collective awareness. This change is taking place in fits and starts, and the historical narrative coming into the spotlight is not always a pretty one.
When I was growing up in Amsterdam in the 1970s, I wrote a letter to the editors of my favorite girls’ magazine, Tina. I was twelve years old. In my childish handwriting, I complimented them on their work and asked, “Why isn’t there ever a colored girl on the cover?” Every day, I checked my mailbox for a reply. The fact that I never received one wounded me deeply.
Anton de Kom’s work stands out both for its profound eloquence and for the courage with which he points out injustices. It is a tirade against the pragmatic spirit of commerce, the small shopkeeper’s mindset that underlay the exploitation of a country and its people. Though its story is not by any means heartwarming, it is the story we share. The Dutch fathers of the colony boozed, fucked, and flogged with abandon, partly out of boredom and frustration with the tedium of plantation life. Such decadence would have been unthinkable in their own strait-laced homeland.
As a Surinamese schoolboy, De Kom had learned about Dutch sea rovers such as Piet Hein and Michiel de Ruyter and been required to memorize chronological lists of the colony’s governors, the very men who had imported his African forefathers in the holds of slave ships. In his own book, he delves deep into the psyche of the slaveholders. He is hot on their trail, breathing down their necks, not letting up for a moment. You can practically see De Kom writing: perched on the edge of his chair, craning forward, pressing his stubby pencil to the paper. His style is supple, essayistic, and now and then lyrical, with unexpected imagery. Using the writer’s toolkit, he infuses his work with color and emotion. And not once does he forget his own background, so aptly expressed by his use of an odo, a Surinamese proverb: the cockroach cannot stand up for its rights in the bird’s beak.
When did the cover-up of this history really begin? For many years, anyone who brought it up could count on a patronizing response, something along the lines of “But look what the French or the British did, or the Africans themselves!” It’s like the excuses made by buyers of stolen goods when caught red-handed. They point an insistent finger at the thief and the fence: it was them, not me! Yet without demand, there would be no supply. In a few places, monuments are being erected to commemorate the suffering, and explanatory labels are being placed next to statues of disgraced role models. But turning around and looking your own monster straight in the eyes still takes some effort.
We Slaves of Suriname still holds a mirror up to us today. The book delivers a message about might versus minority, capital versus poverty. Finding present-day parallels is easy enough; just look at the wretched circumstances of refugees in the Netherlands and other Western countries. Or Chinese shopkeepers working from early in the morning until late at night, in the clutches of a cartel. Or the drug rings in Latin America that extort money from ordinary citizens, or trafficking in women, or child labor in Asian textile factories. It is always systems that create the framework, and within them there are individuals who profit.
Oppression also depends crucially on stereotyping: us against the strange, unknown other. The rise of right-wing leaders around the world is, in large part, based on this us-and-them thinking. The Other is lazy or criminal, or both. “Do we want more or fewer Moroccans?” Dutch populist politician Geert Wilders has asked. Even firmer language was used in the Dutch campaign slogan “Act normal or go away.”1 “America First,” but who does America really belong to? All these sound bites suggest a presumed right of ownership. De Kom was only too able to see through this type of spin. He followed the anonymous word “slaves” with the phrase “our fathers.” Our fathers, not mere nameless creatures.
In the world after Anton de Kom, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, and Nelson Mandela, where are the human rights activists who will stand up to fight for rights that seem self-evident? Are the voices of opposition loud enough? Anton de Kom exposed the mechanisms of unfreedom. And of poverty. Therein lies the enduring power of his work.
On the sidewalk in front of Paramaribo’s most famous hovel, the old man’s flower is drooping in the heat. He stands and shuffles out into the street in his oversized slippers.
Note
1
Translator’s note (TN): This 2017 slogan, a warning to immigrants, was part of a successful election campaign by the VVD, which presents itself as a mainstream right-wing libertarian party. After the March 2021 elections, the VVD remains the largest party in the parliament, with the large populist right-wing anti-immigrant PVV party led by Geert Wilders in third place.
The Breath of FreedomWe Slaves of Suriname as LiteratureDuco van Oostrum
My work as a professor of American literature in England focuses on African-American writing. I am sometimes asked to say something about Dutch literature, and this led me to wonder: are there any well-known Black Dutch writers from the 1920s or 1930s? In the United States, that was the time of the Harlem Renaissance, the dawn of African-American literature, known for authors such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. When I asked Dutch literary scholars if these writers had any counterparts in our country, the answer was, “Not that we know of.”
An hour later, I was practically glued to my computer screen because, thanks to Google, I had found something. On the DBNL website, a digital database of Dutch-language literature, I had discovered We Slaves of Suriname, and I devoured it. Why hadn’t I known about this book? De Kom combined the themes and style of Du Bois, the outrage of Frederick Douglass, the probing analyses of Langston Hughes, and Harriet Jacobs’s struggle to share her story with the world. And all this in my own Dutch language, in a book about Suriname and about my country’s own suppressed history of slavery.
My astonishment grew as I explored the analyses of We Slaves. I work in the academic context of literary theory with an emphasis on postcolonial and African-American theory, as formulated in classic studies by Henry Louis Gates (The Signifying Monkey, 1984), Paul Gilroy (The Black Atlantic, 1993), and Toni Morrison (Playing in the Dark, 1996). But We Slaves has consistently been brushed aside as a strange hodgepodge of history, sociology, and a pinch of autobiography, and faulted for De Kom’s heavy reliance on earlier authors. We Slaves of Suriname, genuine literature? No, the scholars concluded, the term just didn’t fit.
It reminds me of the words of Du Bois: “Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it … How does it feel to be a problem?” (Souls of Black Folk, p. 9).
Yet by placing We Slaves in the context of African-American literature and theory, I intend to show that it is, in fact, a major work of Dutch literature. The “problem” of We Slaves as literature lies not in the book, nor in Anton de Kom, but in the prevailing perspectives on and framing of Dutch literature itself: what form it takes, who can write it, and how to read it.
Double Consciousness
We Slaves begins with a poetic ode to Suriname, interlaced with autobiography. This is directly followed by the historical narrative, from the beginnings of colonization to manumission (the release of enslaved people by their “owners”) in 1863, the new wave of immigrants, and, lastly, De Kom’s visit to and banishment from Suriname. It almost seems more like a collection of essays than a well-crafted story, and in a few places, De Kom directly addresses “the white reader,” as if he knows some readers will respond to what they read with skepticism.
What are we to make of this blending of genres and the autobiographical approach? Note how De Kom links the history of slavery in Suriname to his own individual self: “the right to use and abuse one’s living chattels, to buy and sell our fathers and mothers” (p. 54, italics DvO). This turns history into autobiography. In the African-American literary context, the form is practically traditional. Take, for example, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903), which sheds light on African-American culture from many different angles – history, economics, anthropology, biography, fiction, autobiography, and cultural history – emphasizing each time how the alternative perspective can overturn received ideas. Du Bois underpins every one of his claims with detailed historical accounts and facts. Each chapter is rooted in his now-famous concept of double consciousness: “One ever feels his twoness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body” (p. 11).
That same inner struggle, and the rewriting of the experience of double consciousness, come to the fore magnificently in We Slaves. Having grown up with the conventional Dutch history of Suriname as enshrined in the Winkler Prins encyclopedia, De Kom rewrote it by reinterpreting history and fictionalizing it from the perspective of the enslaved Black people. For example, he tells the story of Flora, Séry, and Séry’s daughter Patienta, taken captive on a 1711 expedition. The child is torn from Séry’s arms by “rough white hands.” Séry trembles with fear but “no scream came from her lips; she simply gazed at Ensign Molinay with fire in her eyes and then rose to her feet, displaying her pride to the white soldiers, defying them all without the slightest fear” (p. 95). The story is told from the women’s perspective, with Séry’s gaze fixed on the eyes of the white colonizer, rather than from the point of view of the soldier. Then De Kom quotes a long passage from a classic work of history accepted by scholars as authoritative, J. Wolbers’s Geschiedenis van Suriname (“History of Suriname,” 1861), choosing to italicize some phrases, such as these from a report quoted by Wolbers:
Notwithstanding all the torments with fire and blows, we [Dutch soldiers] were never able to compel her to answer, for notwithstanding all this she remained as stubborn as ever, and by pointing at the sky, grasping a long lock of hair on her head, slapping her mouth with her fingers, and running her hand over her throat, she let us know she would rather have her head cut off than disclose any information, whether by speaking or by pointing the way. (p. 96)
De Kom concludes that in this episode “defenseless Surinamese women fell into the hands of supposedly civilized Dutchmen who murdered them” and concludes with the words, “Brave Séry. Brave Flora. We will always commemorate and honor your names” (p. 97).
This rewriting and reversal of the narrative focus, shifting the center of attention from Molinay’s failed expedition to the women’s heroism, serves a crucial literary purpose. De Kom first situates us in Séry’s perspective, looking through her fiery eyes, and then makes her central to a documentary historical narrative. Instead of being presented with stereotypes of enslaved Black people, we read about named individuals in old, historical Dutch.
In his manifesto of the Harlem Renaissance (The New Negro, 1925), Alain Locke writes that Black authors should portray an African-American as a fully fleshed literary character, and no longer as “more of a formula than a human being” (p. 3). He urges them to avoid stereotypes like those in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in favor of realistic characters that do not let themselves be defined by others but instead define themselves. That is exactly what De Kom does in this passage, presenting the women as the decision-makers, in control of the situation, even though they die.
De Kom employs another literary strategy also found in the work of Du Bois, using white history (such as Wolbers’s work) as documented fact, as evidence for the truth of his own narrative. For example, De Kom keeps insisting that his book gives the “facts.” He repeats this many times: “Once again, we would like to start by presenting a few facts by way of example” (p. 70). This is a rewriting of what is already in the archive.
Facts Forgotten and Facts Suppressed
And that cultural archive was bulging with material.1 De Kom devotes one whole gruesome chapter to the “punishments” inflicted by the plantation owners, with details drawn from historical documents. In We Slaves, De Kom uses these documents to give literary form to facts forgotten and facts suppressed, so that the reader can no longer dismiss them as trivial.
Until the publication of We Slaves, much of the Dutch population felt that slavery in Suriname had been far away and irrelevant. They told themselves it couldn’t have been as bad as all that. Yes, perhaps there had been a few unfortunate incidents – so the argument went – but that was a question of a few rotten apples spoiling the reputation of all plantation owners. Meanwhile, the investors in Surinamese plantations had often been banks or individuals in the Netherlands. African-American literature contests this “bad masters defense,” often with horrifying facts and stories, and De Kom proceeds in exactly the same way, showing that the Dutch justice system had horrifying consequences. Because enslaved people were not seen as human beings but as possessions, public massacres came to be considered normal. The torture method known as the “Spanish billy goat” played a central role in all this; almost everyone has seen the prints by John Gabriel Stedman and William Blake. Surinamese slavery is known, despite continuing debate in some quarters in the Netherlands, as the cruelest form practiced by any Western power.
Another form of cruelty discussed by De Kom at length is the systematic sexual exploitation of “our mothers.” They “worked” for their owners and produced still more Dutch chattels: the children they bore. His trenchant analysis shows that this practice was inspired not by any Christian ideology, but by the deep-seated Dutch love of the koopje, the cheap buy. To De Kom, the combination of putative Christianity and the desire for a cheap buy is unique to Surinamese slavery.
De Kom also rewrites the rainforest expeditions against the maroon leaders Joli Coeur, Baron, and Boni, describing them from those leaders’ perspective and telling the stories of their individual backgrounds. He sets them in direct contrast to the governors heading the Dutch colonial administration and shows the reader that their conduct is more civilized than that of the “whites.” He writes, “We defy one and all to show us that whites have ever, at any time in Surinamese history, treated colored people this way” (p. 115)! Role models like these, “our fathers and mothers,” as De Kom consistently calls them, are the book’s literary heroes.
They were counted among the brutes, as the whites called the maroons in those days, but to us they are and will remain heroes of Suriname, who won their proud status as leaders through bravery and virtue, fighters for the rights and liberty of Surinamese slaves. Baron! Boni! Joli Coeur! Your memory will be forever cherished in our hearts. You are part of us. (p. 120)
Here De Kom places a literary image in the heart of the reader, so to speak – one which drives out any colonialist image of the maroon leaders. This revisioning from the perspective of the oppressed is central to the narration of the story of slavery. As Frederick Douglass reflected at the end of his life, “My part has been to tell the story of the slave. The story of the master has never wanted for narrators” (Douglass, pp. 310–311).
The Personal Decolonization of White Education
In the African-American literary tradition, we see similar depictions of heroes from the eighteenth century onwards. In 1853, Douglass wrote an essay about the heroic slave Madison Washington, and in The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois grounded the Black thinker, teacher, and minister Alexander Crummell in the history of the American Reconstruction era. What such examples show is that the sense of inferiority stemming from enslavement, which De Kom discussed with the same sensitivity as Frantz Fanon, can be combatted through literary valorization. This amounts to the personal decolonization of white education. After his banishment, De Kom spent a great deal of time in the National Archives in The Hague and read the materials available to those outside the academic system.
Among African-American writers, the struggle to obtain information from outside the establishment was likewise crucial to the development of self-knowledge and self-confidence. To borrow books from the Chicago library, Richard Wright needed a note from a white sponsor. As he wrote in “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” “I would write a note to the librarian, saying, ‘Please let this n----- boy have the following books.’ I would then sign it with the white man’s name” (p. 14).
In prison, Malcolm X re-educated himself from the ground up by memorizing the dictionary. On the first page, he was struck by a word that comes from Afrikaans: “aardvark.” And the young Frederick Douglass challenged other boys to write words down so that he could learn them.
The very act of writing undermines colonialist prejudices about the supposed unintelligence of enslaved people. Such prejudices formed the pretext for denying them formal education. In 1845, Frederick Douglass published his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. This slave narrative immediately became a huge success, and part of its radicalism lay in its subtitle, Written by Himself.
