‘I don’t care if the king apologises’: why sorry isn’t enough for Dutch anti-colonial campaigners

It first started in one city. In July 2021, the mayor of Amsterdam formally apologised for its role in slavery. Femke Halsema said it was “time to engrave the great injustice of colonial slavery into our city’s identity”.

Six months later, Rotterdam’s mayor, Ahmed Aboutaleb, formally apologised on the International Day of Human Rights. Aboutaleb said the predecessors of the city’s executive board were “partly responsible for colonial oppression, from the Caribbean and Africa to Indonesia”.

Then, two months after Rotterdam, Utrecht mayor Sharon Dijksma acknowledged the “dark side of our city’s history” and also formally apologised. By the end of 2022, the Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte offered a formal apology on behalf of the whole country for the Netherlands’ historical role in the slave trade.

The national apology followed the conclusions of a national advisory panel set up after the murder of George Floyd in the US in 2020. The panel described the Dutch participation in slavery as a crime against humanity, and called for a formal apology and financial reparations. While the government ruled out reparations, it agreed to set up a €200m educational fund.

Since then, a new study, State and Slavery, quantified the financial value to the Dutch royal family, whose colonial activities included the enslavement of at least 600,000 African men, women and children; and between 660,000 and one million people from Asia.

It’s this legacy that King Willem-Alexander is expected to formally apologise for in Amsterdam’s Oosterpark on Saturday, 150 years after Dutch slavery in effect ended.

These formal apologies haven’t been without controversy. Campaigners and descendants groups criticised the national apology for being rushed, and argued there was a lack of consultation, which showed the persistence of colonial attitudes.

What should we make of these apologies and are they enough? I spoke to Jermain Ostiana, a writer and poet, who lives on the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao. That’s after this week’s stories.

Jermain Ostiana, who is working on a forthcoming book and documentary called Bloodclot Colonialism, recently wrote this piece on the Dutch Caribbean for the Guardian’s opinion section:

Dutch colonies in the Caribbean, which were the centre of its genocidal slave trade during the so-called ‘golden age’ in the Netherlands, remained as such until 1954, when the government eventually agreed to semi-decolonise its territories.

The ruling white minority elites negotiated a six-island union, the Netherlands Antilles, which by the 21st century, after a series of referendums, had become an arrangement whereby three islands, stripped of their self-rule, are governed directly from the Netherlands as municipalities, and three are ‘autonomous countries’ within the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

The reality, Jermain told me, couldn’t be more different. Spending in these autonomous countries – Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten – needs Dutch approval, while social services and public sectors such as education are under-resourced.

For Jermain, the legacies of enslavement are starkly seen across Curaçao (pictured above) – and many Caribbean countries – in the concentration of power. “There are Black politicians, and I don’t want to denigrate them, but they are often puppets, and white people are the puppeteers,” he said. “If you really want to understand why the effects of slavery and the legacy of it are still here, still vibrant, why you can still feel it, still see it every day, it’s because they still have their power.”

I asked what he made of the Dutch king’s forthcoming apology. “I don’t recognise the king. And I don’t care if he apologises, because it doesn’t even matter,” said Jermain (pictured below).

“I don’t think the prime minister’s apology was sincere,” he said. “They didn’t want to give reparations and it’s the same thing for the king. There’s an older generation that feels that if you apologise, for them, it’s soothing to the soul. But it enrages me if he’s going to apologise and then it’s business as usual and there’s no reparations. That’s actually very offensive and dehumanising.” (King Willem-Alexander is pictured above at the opening of a slavery exhibition in Amsterdam in 2021.)

Are people in Curaçao discussing these apologies? No, Jermain told me. “No one is talking about the apologies, but that’s always been the case here. People don’t talk about slavery, they don’t talk about the colonial past or the colonial present. It’s taboo. It’s been the Suriname community in the Netherlands that have been pushing for the apology, not people from Curaçao or Sint Maarten.

“When the apology from the prime minister came, the government in Curaçao accepted it and passed a motion. They said if there’s going to be any source of reparative justice, then let the money go to the education system. And that’s it – there was no real debate in the media.”

I asked him why that was. “When you discuss slavery, it opens up a portal to Caribbean liberation and freedom to change society, because that’s what holistic reparations is about. You have to change the systems, the structures of oppression. That’s the end goal; the destruction of what we have right now.

“For people living here, if you want to have a stable life, you’re not going to talk about things that are going to make your life chaotic. So they just ignore it. You’re also battling with what’s described as the colonised mentality. You can talk to the people but it’s not going to penetrate, it’s not going to resonate. If you compare it to the Netherlands, for example, every week there’s an event on slavery or colonial history. But on the islands, there’s basically nothing. There’s a few groups that organise things like masterclasses, but generally over here it’s the opposite: almost complete silence.”

Jermain described the killing of George Floyd as “instrumental” to the conversations taking place in Europe right now, but it hasn’t had the same impact in the Caribbean.

“George Floyd’s killing started a global protest, and thousands of people marched in Amsterdam. It was organised mostly by Caribbean people, but none of them said, ‘Let’s free the Caribbean.’ They said, ‘Black lives matter,’ but they don’t talk about Dutch colonialism in Sint Maarten, Bonaire or Suriname, which is independent, but is really suffering because of the IMF and inflation.

“But they don’t mention that. There’s a disconnect between the activists, academics and the spokespersons for the people in the Caribbean in the Netherlands, and us in the islands. They don’t talk about us.”

Jermain told me the Guardian’s Legacies of Enslavement programme offered an opportunity to fund Caribbean media focused on reparatory justice. He wanted to see more engagement from columnists, academics, and activists, and said it is vital for spaces to be funded to offer critiques.

He also called for trauma-informed care to be at the heart of a reparative justice programme. “People don’t even know how to express what they’re feeling or they don’t even know that they’re feeling it. So there needs to be trauma care.”

Jermain added: “This is the perfect chance to actually create a media that is founded in the liberation of the Caribbean. This is a perfect moment.”