The Dutch Prime Minister apologized
In my own country we do not talk about our history because we are afraid of making school children uncomfortable.
Here’s my January column for the Holland Sentinel…
A few days before Christmas, the current Dutch Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, offered an apology on behalf of the Dutch government for more than two centuries of Dutch slavery. His remarks, given at the National Archives in the Hague, where I am living this year, acknowledged his country’s role in abetting and profiting from centuries of slave trading.
The Netherlands was directly responsible for the transport of an estimated 600,000 human beings over the Atlantic Ocean, mostly to Suriname, which is on the northern coast of South America. Through the East India Company, the Netherlands also traded human beings in Indonesia, India, and South Africa.
Rutte noted that the National Archives are “the home of our national memory” and that the history of slavery, preserved in millions of historical documents, is often “ugly, painful, and even downright shameful.”
The other countries, in addition to the Netherlands, which profited from the slave trade, include Portugal, Spain, Britain, France, and Denmark.
Listening to friends, neighbors, and church members talk about this apology has been instructive, not least because of what has been happening recently in my own country, which continues to resist the subject of slavery and its own role in the Atlantic slave trade, which brought more than 12 million Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas.
Most of the Dutch people I have spoken to had favorable reactions to the Prime Minister’s words, but overall, from what I read, the reaction has been mixed. Some thought Rutte should have waited a few months and made his speech on the 160th anniversary of the abolition of slavery. Others thought the apology should have come not from the prime minister, but from the king. Still others believe that apologies without talk of reparations are incomplete at best.
Rutte acknowledged that “no one alive now is personally to blame for slavery” and that “people of today could not easily take meaningful responsibility for something that happened so long ago.” But he made clear that slavery is not “behind us” and that centuries of oppression still affect us today, listing discriminatory exclusion, social inequality, and racist stereotypes.
Rutte, to his credit, spoke personally and described his own change of heart about apologizing for his country’s role in the slave trade. His change, remarkably, was spurred by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. In a news conference at the time, he said he found Floyd’s death “unacceptable,” and he began speaking with groups in the Netherlands about persistent racism here.
Government apologies for slavery (or anything else) are rare. The U.S. House of Representatives offered an apology in 2008 for enslaving African Americans and for the Jim Crow laws that followed abolition. In 2018 Denmark apologized to Ghana for the Danish role in the slave trade. During a visit to the Democratic Republic of Congo last summer, the king of Belgium expressed his “deepest regrets for these wounds of the past,” though he stopped short of an actual apology.
Over the months I have lived here, I have sensed a growing coming to terms with the past. For example, during a tour of the Mauritshuis Museum in the Hague, where Vermeer’s famous painting “The Girl with the Pearl Earring” can be found, our guide made clear at the start that Johann Maurits, whose vast collection includes paintings by Vermeer and Rembrandt, among others, made most of his money from the slave trade in Brazil.
Exactly how much money Maurits earned because of his slave trading is impossible to estimate, but he spent far more on his various palaces than his annual salary in Brazil would have allowed. This historical reckoning during a museum tour is new and indicates that, in what is at least a beginning, the Netherlands is beginning to acknowledge its role in what Rutte called a “shameful” past.
I now serve a church in the Netherlands with members from Suriname, Indonesia, and South Africa, all nations where the Dutch slave trade once flourished. These members are keenly aware of Dutch history and its impact on their home countries. They know the history better, in many ways, than other citizens of this country. They have endured its impact, and they continue to live with its legacy. They are not eager, generally speaking, to discuss the prime minister’s apology. Instead, they are curious about what happens next.
What seems hopeful to me is that these conversations are beginning to happen. They are not easy. They will take some time. But they are happening. In my own country we do not talk about our history because we are afraid of making school children uncomfortable.
I would be grateful if Americans could at least have the conversation.
(Photo: That’s the Dutch prime minister who is spotted often in the neighborhood around my church, including at the grocery store. I am still hoping for my chance encounter.)
Hi Tom, I sense that George Floyd's name touched a nerve.
My column was about the Dutch slave trade and the prime minister's apology and the reactions of my neighbors, friends, and fellow church members here in the Hague to that apology. I didn't mean to re-litigate the exact cause of Floyd's death, only to pass along the anecdote that Floyd's death caught the attention of the Dutch prime minister. Something about that death caused him to take racism more seriously than he had before.
Hi Doug,
This is an interesting article about how the justice system includes medical forensics from a wide range of 'experts - or not.
When we see the media (who I generally trust) take hold of an issue, sometimes their main motive can be to milk it for as long as possible, to make the most money out of the incident. Sometimes they may be motivated by seeing justice done, for sure. But, if George Floyd was combative because he had fentanyl in his system, and had a heart condition, that could have been the main reason he died. Of course, I am not condoning a police officer to put his knee on a suspect's neck for a half hour, but how do you subdue a 220 lb, 6' 5" combative person who is on drugs?
The people who have died at the hands of the police are sometimes law abiding people, and sometimes they are people with prior arrests who are resisting arrest. My point is that things may not be as awful as we think. If someone is resisting arrest, in my book, they are just asking for it. What I have always told my kids, is if you get stopped by the police, comply and be polite. That is a good way to avoid a problem. But if you are mouthing off and resisting arrest, you can probably expect to pay a price. Of course, the price should not be losing your life, but if you threaten a police officer who is carrying weapons, that is just a bad idea.
"Rulings on causes of death are often not cut-and-dried and can be controversial, especially in police-involved deaths such as the 2020 killing of George Floyd. In that case, Minnesota’s Hennepin County medical examiner ruled Floyd’s death a homicide but indicated a heart condition and the presence of fentanyl in his system may have been factors. Pathologists hired by Floyd’s family said he died from lack of oxygen when a police officer kneeled on his neck and back.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/30/health/coroners-cause-of-death-khn-partner/index.html
This is just to say that things are not always as they appear, and sometimes the news media tries to use something to get overall justice, but the case in point may not be the best example of unfair police action.
Tom