Trained as a historian, Anil Persaud is an independent researcher. He is currently working on a history of Campbellville and would love to learn from others about its beginnings. He can be reached at persaudk@gmail.com.
Related to reparations, in 2022 Germany returned 22 Benin Bronzes to their home in Nigeria. Closer to home, Barbados officially removed Queen Elizabeth II as its head of state and became the world’s newest republic. Also in late 2022 Susan Hussey apologised and resigned from her honorary position of lady of the royal British household after the leader of the black British charity (Sistah Space), Ngozi Fulani, said “she felt she was being forced to denounce her citizenship when she was “interrogated” by the late queen’s lady-in-waiting about where she “really came from” while attending a Buckingham Palace reception. In October, the European Union’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell issued an apology for his remarks that:
“Europe is a garden. We have built a garden. Everything works. It is the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion that the humankind has been able to build – the three things together,” Borrell said during the event. “The rest of the world,” he went on, “is not exactly a garden. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden.”
The Dutch, however, dominated December, beginning with the announcement that king Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands had “commissioned an independent study of the role of the House of Orange-Nassau in colonial history” (the results of which are to be ‘published’). That was followed, on 19th December, when the Dutch government issued its own formal apology for the Netherlands’ role in the history of slavery. Both come after the release of the Dutch government’s report entitled ‘Chains of the Past’, which was presented by the Slavery History Dialogue Group in July 2021. And everyone asked, “Where is Guyana?”
A few days after the Dutch apology, the CARICOM Reparations Commission issued its response acknowledging that “historic though it is, the statement is flawed on the basis that the Prime Minister did not seek the organised input and support of the Caribbean.” The Chairman of the Guyana Reparations Commission expressed “dismay that Guyana was not included in an apology recently issued by the Kingdom of the Netherlands despite almost 200 years of African enslavement in the country,” adding that even though “an indelible Dutch legacy lives through names within the country such as Sparendaam, Vergenoegen, New Amsterdam, Holland and Uitvlugt among others, yet no one from the Netherlands will be coming here.”
Some would argue that they never quite left.
In addition to names of places and things, the ‘indelible Dutch legacy’ lives on in Guyana in three other ways of notable significance: in ghosts, in land law and in the archives, and there is much to be learnt by studying them individually. All of this gets to the question of repairing harms, and each of these carries significant and related Dutch influence.
For instance, in the “Dutchman ghost view of history” – as outlined in anthropologist Brackette F. Williams’ 1991 article, “Dutchman Ghosts and the History Mystery: Ritual, Colonizer, and Colonized Interpretations of the 1763 Berbice Slave Rebellion” – even “though more Africans died during the rebellion, there are no African spirits produced of the rebellion who might tell their side of the story or interpret its events in relation to their contemporary social identities, as is the case for both colonizer and colonized accounts of the rebellion and its significance.” Which then begs the question: Were they deliberately excluded or are the African spirits produced of the rebellion now residing someplace else? In the ‘ghost view of history’, ghosts such as Landmaster and Landmistress preside over a land steeped in homesickness.
But then again, so too are the themes of home and land also present in what may be called the ‘archival view of history’, such as Marjoleine Kars’ Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast. With the help of records until now “buried in the Dutch archives” the author pursues the absent African ghosts of 1763. As Kars writes: in the Dutch National Archives in The Hague, I had happened upon a cache of records about a massive slave rebellion. It took place in Dutch Berbice—today’s Guyana—on the Wild Coast, the northern edge of South America, in 1763–64. The documents perplexed me. I had never heard of Berbice or of the 1763 slave rebellion. Few have: no one has studied the uprising in depth. Yet the archive was extraordinarily rich. In addition to the daily journal of the colonial governor and reams of European correspondence, it contained five hundred handwritten pages of slave interrogations and—even more tantalizing—letters the rebelling ex-slaves had written to the Dutch authorities. We have few sources for the eighteenth century in which “enslaved people actually speak, and here were their voices captured in old Dutch. [Kars, Blood, pp. 23-24
Home and land echo alike in both ritual and archival, in enslaver and the enslaved accounts of 1763.
This land, of ghosts present and absent, has been legally governed, from the Dutch arrival to the present, according to Roman-Dutch law. Roman-Dutch law was suitable for laying out a plantation society in which enslaved people could be treated as immovable property. It was abolished in the Netherlands in 1809. The British voluntarily retained it with the passage of the British Guiana Civil Law Act in 1917. As Fenton Ramsahoye, in his 1966 study of The Development of Land Law in Guyana, explains,
“Roman-Dutch law was the first system received into the colonies [of Berbice, Demerara and Essequibo, or Berbice and the Two Rivers colony] which subsequently became united in 1831 to constitute British Guiana and continued after their capitulation to British Forces in 1803 and their subsequent cession to Great Britain by the Anglo-Dutch Convention of 1814. It was later replaced gradually by English law until 1917 [the year of the end of the indenture system of labour recruitment for the colony that followed the end of slavery in 1838], when, with few reservations, it was abolished. At the time of abolition, certain Ordinances which embodied some of the principles of the Roman-Dutch law were left on the statute book while others were enacted to codify other principles which it was desired to retain. The law introduced to replace Roman-Dutch law in respects of interests in land was confined to the English common law of personal property and the doctrines of English equity.”
In a land already haunted by Dutch ghosts, questions of land and home, of possession and ownership, are settled according to some combination that includes the letter and the spirit of Dutch law. In Guyana homesickness is a Dutch disease that cannot be cured by a housing lot alone. The words of Shabine, the central character in Derek Walcott’s Schooner Flight, resonate:
“I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.”
Shabine was from somewhere in Berbice.
The Dutch PM delivered his December apology in the Dutch National Archives in The Hague:
“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen,
And for anyone listening or watching in a different time zone:
Bun morgu,
Bon dia,
Good morning,
Here in the National Archives, history speaks to us through millions of documents.
And though we can’t hear the unwritten voices from the past, the story that emerges from all those documents is not always pretty.
Often it is ugly, painful, and even downright shameful.
That is certainly the case with the role of the Netherlands in the history of slavery”.
[Delivered 19th December 2022.]
At the Dutch National Archives was a curious touch. Beginning his speech as he did, with an affirmation of archival collections, the Dutch PM issued a reminder that the rules by which these archives and archives everywhere operate were written by the Dutch. The Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives, popularly known as “The Dutch Manual” was published by the Dutch trio Samuel Muller, Johan Feith & Robert Fruin in 1898 for the Dutch Association of Archivists, and is the first codification of European archival theory. Through multiple translations, including French, German, English and Chinese, it has secured its place as ‘the last major milestone in archival science and practice’. The archival view of history is no less bewildering than the ghost view.
The Dutch National Archives’ ‘until now buried records’ of the 1763 rebellion in the Dutch colony of Berbice have been digitised and are publicly available on their website, in the original Dutch. While they were not enough to yield a Dutch apology, what other, until now unwritten voices of Guyana’s past are housed in the Dutch National Archives? When combined with The Deeds Registry of Guyana, what will these voices from The Hague tell us about the origin myths of land and home in our respective gardens and jungles?
