THE BLACK ARCHIVES
The Black Archives was another place Arjan Braaksma of Burobraak suggested to me in order to learn more about the diversity within Dutch culture. The Black Archives is a Dutch organization that deals with social issues and the history of the Afro-Dutch population.
From their website:
"The Black Archives is a unique historical archive for inspiring conversations, activities and literature from Black and other perspectives that are often overlooked elsewhere. The Black Archives documents the history of black emancipation movements and individuals in the Netherlands. The Black Archives is managed by the New Urban Collective. The Black Archives consists of unique book collections, archives and artifacts that are the legacy of Black Dutch writers and scientists. The more than 10.000 books in the collections focus on racism and race issues, slavery and (the) colonization, gender and feminism, social sciences and development, Suriname, the Netherlands Antilles, South America, Africa and more. As a result, The Black Archives provides book collections and literature which are not or little discussed in schools and within universities. The collections are intended as a start collection that can grow by gifts and collaborations with others. In this way, Black literature, knowledge and information is made accessible for study and research.”
Braaksma has worked with them around Zwart Piet protests, and 10x More History, a history poster created to help Dutch educators look beyond the Dutch canon. Initially I worried it was outside of my grant’s focus, but that couldn’t have been further from the truth. It helped to reveal layers of Dutch and Amsterdam history that created modern Amsterdam and the greater Netherlands. Part of why I found seeing these connections so valuable, is it helps me look at my home-country history in revelatory ways. It begins to illuminate my blind spots.
The Archives is located on the top floors of an old school building in the Oost (East), an neighborhood of Amsterdam with a greater multicultural community reflecting the former Dutch colonies, and more recent newcomers . It is also the home of the Tropenmuseum, the monument to enslaved people, and home to the Keti Koti festival. The archive itself is filled with books sourced from various collections, ephemera from communications with black intellectuals (Langston Hughes and Angela Davis among others), and objects related to Afro-Dutch history. It also includes office and exhibition spaces.
L: founder Mitchell Esajas; M: Esajas with Angela Davis; R: founder Miguel Heilbron (photo credits to the Black Archives website)
After introductions through Arjan, I met with Miguel Heilbron, one of the founders of the Black Archives. Heilbron's parents’ book collection was a seed collection, later joined by other collections related to the African diaspora, including the former Dutch colony of Suriname. Heilbron's own background includes architecture, with further degrees in economics and development. This, along with his lived experience, led him to question cultural assumptions about issues of race in the Netherlands, and to work to educate and act around matters of inequity and the intellectual and cultural contribution of Afro-Dutch citizens. Dutch schools are required to teach citizenship, race, and sustainability, and within that mandate the archives works to update the Dutch canon. The Black Archives are active in providing resources to schools including 10 Xs More History map designed by Burobraak (images below).
What I learned from my visit was part of my impetus to take a Black Europe history course at the VU in the summer of 2019, where I was able to study with Dr. Wayne Modest . Modest, along with an array of amazing professors, collaborated to flesh out the Netherland's colonial history, the contribution of black intellectuals, and their legacy. A large part of that course was looking at museums as colonial entities, and work being done around restitution, and in moving museums towards inclusivity, and honesty around their histories (previous entries speak to these ideas).
With the class I was able to visit the Black Archives a second time, this time meeting Mitchell Esajas, another founder, as well as American born Camille Parker, their Production Assistant. They went over the archives, and a brief history of Afro-Dutch history. We learned about Otto and Hermine Huiswoud, a Surinamese-American couple whose image greets you at the entrance to the Black Archives.
The Huiswouds were active in the communist party in both the US and Moscow, and later relocated to Amsterdam and started the Vereniging Ons Suriname (Association of Surinamese). Their collection is one of the founding collections of the archives. We learned from Mitchell about various anti-Zwart Piet protests, and that at one point the government had labelled the Black Archives as a terrorist organization. It was later rescinded, but it shows the force with which challenging racism can be met in the context of Dutch “tolerance”. We saw letters from Langston Hughes (a personal hero), and images of artist and activist Jerry Afriyie at anti-Zwart Piet protests. We discussed Keti Koti, the July 1st national holiday marking the emancipation of enslaved peoples. “Keti Koti” is a Surinamese phrase meaning “break the chain”. We compared it to Juneteenth, which at that point wasn’t yet recognized as a national holiday in the U.S.
KETI KOTI
Previously that summer, I was able to attend a Keti Koti tafel (table), and later the festival in Oostpark.
Keti Koti mission: The general objective of the Keti Koti Dialogue Table is to increase awareness of the internal- and social conflicts and blind spots that arise from the complex historical and social backgrounds of the Dutch slavery and colonial past and to gain new insights that lead to a society free from discrimination and racism.
The dialogue table marks the beginning of the Keti Koti festival, and provides a place where Afro-Dutch and White Dutch citizens engage in dialogue on the legacy of slavery. Being American definitely made it hard to understand the context, and (logically) much of the dialogue was in Dutch. (I did and still do question the appropriateness of my being there as an outsider to this experience.) My strongest memory was seeing Dutch police participating in the tafel, and how shocking it felt to see them engaging in dialogue and paying their respects to the event, people, and history. The complicated relationship of the police and communities of color in the States made this seem alien. This was one of many ways learning about race in the Netherlands led me to relook at issues in the US, and could create some moving if not saddening comparisons.
Images of Keti Koti: Bubble joy, Surinamese color, the name project by Burobraak, the Keti Koti table
QUESTIONS AND TAKE AWAYS
Given the importance of the written word and witnessed history in identities of Afro-Dutch, and therefor the importance of similar archives in the US, how can the idea of an archive be used in the classroom?
How can students begin to see themselves as creators of /owners of history and archives?
The Black Archive is independent and grassroots, having a strong advocacy and educational purpose. In the States, many archives are associated with universities and are more static, they are not a verb. How can the archive take on an active role in dialogue and action? And furthermore, how can a class benefit from this?
What lessons can I integrate into my teaching of visual art (especially in the context of social design): the idea of local and vernacular knowledge, the value in plurality of voices (via archives both written and crafted), and that the “expert” is not always the expert
Is the notion of expertise a left over from colonialism? I am still unsure about this.
The Keti Koti dialog tables used small and intimate conversations to address a larger societal inequity. Bringing the political to a personal scale seems full of potential. In reading Witness, about the teachings of Elie Wiesel, Wiesel talks about the importance of memory as an anecdote to hate. The table and meal are a wonderful way to share and witness memories.
The idea of food as an equalizer is an interesting one we will visit again.
Ideas the Black Archives and Keti Koti events led me to consider in thinking about teaching Social Justice:
Learning to see
Learning to listen
Learning to witness
Humility
Witnessing joy and celebration
Learning what came before than you might not (yet) be privy to
The importance of unlearning
Related links:
The Black Archive’s Website
10 Xs More History (map created by Black Archives, available to purchase in Dutch and English)
The Black Archive’s Instagram (really great use of Instagram)
Article about the Significance of Keti Koti
Keti Koti Tafel
Dutch professor and writer Gloria Wekker
Anton de Kom (Surinamese Dutch intellectual)
Afro- and Indo-Dutch contributors including (difficult to see, lower center image) Anton DeKom
BLACK HERITAGE TOUR
The Black Heritage Tour is another wonderful recommendation from Arjan Braaksma! He had recommended it a few times, and I was finally able to go with my European Black History class. As a result, I had planned to take my students on this tour on the next Social Design Field Trip, but …covid.
The tours were founded by Jennifer Tosch, an American scholar of Surinamese heritage. Her mother lived in Amsterdam for a time, and this along with her studies in the Netherlands led her to start the tours. Part of her impetus to start the Black Heritage Tours was the desire to tell a more complete story of Dutch history. She wanted to include not just the stories of the African diaspora in the Netherlands, but also to include the contributions of the Afro-Dutch to the Dutch culture as a whole.
Jennifer, along with Dr. Dienke Hondius (VU professor with expertise in Holocaust studies and slavery history, and professor in the Black History course), has written several books on Afro-Dutch history in the Netherlands, as well as in early New York City. Her love for history was clear, and I learned more about Dutch history from this boat tour than any of the typical Amsterdam boat tours.
Credit to Black Heritage Tour website
Some of what we learned on the tour:
Amsterdam was officially “free soil” meaning slavery was not legal in the Netherlands proper and one couldn’t not enslave people in Amsterdam. This didn't mean there weren't people enslaved in Amsterdam, but it was not legal or public. The colonies (Surname, Antilles, Indonesia) not only had legalized enslavement, but very much relied upon it economically. Economic historians have calculated that it significantly contributed to the building of the Dutch economy. Also, in the 1600s there were some free Black men, who were often sailors who decided to stay in Amsterdam.
Jennifer taught us to pay attention to visual clues in the architecture of the city. There were visual clues to Afro-Dutch history, often in the context of the rich slave holders who reaped financial rewards from enslaved people’s labor in the colonies. Many houses include gable stones which signified the profession of the house residents. It was a way for a preliterate society to know who lived at the location.
Many of the houses along the canals were adorned with imagery of Black figures, to signify their wealth, and where it came from. The story of Black culture in Amsterdam is directly linked to the VOC (Vereenigde Oost Indische Compagnie a.k.a. the Dutch East India Company), an import company which imported spices, porcelain, and other commodities from the colonies. The VOC is responsible for the “Golden Age”, and the middle-class as a Western phenomenon. The term "Golden Age" is currently being relooked at, as it was golden for some at the cost of others. The recent exhibition on Slavery at the Rijksmuseum shows how the VOC and colonialism permeate the whole of Dutch history. It was a brilliant show, linking visual history to hidden (in plain sight) histories. While the Rijks’ shows the history of the Netherlands, one can’t help but make parallels to similar links in Western museums around the world. I noticed on a subsequent trip to the MFA in Boston there were many visual clues to less savory parts of American history which were not included on the museum tags. The idea that objects are not inert is one museums are just beginning to let go of.
Along the Golden Bend of the Herengracht, there are many of these building adornments. The Van Loon family canal house includes ornaments of African heads. The Van Loons were co-founders of VOC and have throughout history, been one of the wealthiest families in the Netherlands. Their original family crest includes depictions of several Black persons. The intent was that the heads symbolize their connection to the VOC, and the wealth and power that comes with that. The family denied involvement in slave trade until recently. There is cognitive dissonance in showing the heads of enslaved persons to show the power and wealth of the family and expecting there to be no connection to the act of enslaving people for personal gain. Visual clues help reveal the truths of the history.
We also travelled by Hortus Botanicus, a garden respite in the city a friend had taken me to several times. It has several greenhouses full of plants from around the world, and an amazing butterfly house. Hortus is a 360-year-old museum for plants, many of which were brought over from former colonies.
Original Van Loon family crest
“The garden's initial collection was amassed during the 17th century through plants and seeds brought back by traders from the Dutch East India Company for use as medicines and potential commercial possibilities.”
-so sayeth Wiki
We traveled past a pharmacy with a sign including a Moorish head. The depiction was a caricature at best and difficult to look at. While acknowledging this, Jennifer stressed the importance of knowing the full context. She went on to remind us/inform us of the Moorish contributions to the fields of math, medicine, astronomy. The head was there to signify “this pharmacy knows what it is doing”, in other words the head depicts the high standards of this pharmacy. While this doesn’t negate the impact of the caricature, Jennifer emphasized the importance of knowing the complexities of a story. She advocated for renaming and contextualizing vs. erasing of history. It is important to note this tour took place before the recent debates in the States on Confederate monuments, and she used the term “erasing history” in a different cultural and historical setting.
I had seen an example of renaming and contextualizing the marker on a monument to Jan Pieterszoon Coen in Hoorn, a historical port north of Amsterdam. It was recently added to give a full story of Coen’s legacy the Banda Islands of Indonesia. It wasn’t of mere exploration and trade, but relied upon the slaughtering of the Bandu citizens.
Images of Coen monument in Horn, including a new label lending context, and some actions to name the slaughter he led against the Bandu people of current day Indonesia
The idea that colonialism underlies everything in much of our Western history, seems not so much hidden as we’ve been raised to not to think about them. We’ve been told half the story. The Slavery exhibition at the Rijksmuseum points out connections. One example is the use of the enslaved people portrayed in old family portraits (see below), meaning “they had a slave, and the slave this is the symbol of their wealth”. We often go over the use of women as allegories in Western painting in my feminist art history course. The use of a human’s image as a symbol is a dehumanization; they become an object. They are not to be seen as sentient individuals. This mode of looking leads to questions; questions that can peel back the layers that have been obscured.
Jan Steen-Fantasy Interior with Jan Steen and the Family of Gerrit Schouten (1660)
Simple questions bring the symbol back to an individual and a human: What was the enslaved person’s name? What was their role in the household? How did they come to be in this place? How did the enslaver come to own another human? What role did enslaved people have in these exploiting industries? And what does it mean erase a human’s identity in a painting? The dehumanization is clear, and it is our job to rehumanize our own assumptions.*
Addendum
Since I began to write this (as my writing apparently often takes years to get back to), the Rijksmuseum has presented a show on the history of Dutch slavery. It was a smart exhibition, following individual enslaved people and their stories and connections. The act of naming feels powerful here, as I spoke to in the use of enslaved persons as symbols of power, and not individuals. As the Tropenmuseum’s publication Words Matter shows, the accuracy or inaccuracy of the word we use can have powerful ramifications. In naming the individuals who were enslaved, we can connect to history in a humanizing way. The people are no longer symbols, but have a name, and a story.
While the Rijk’s show focused on stories of the enslaved, the Tropenmuseum focuses on the role of Dutch colonialism in a show this summer (2022) entitled “Our Colonial Inheritance”. The show explores colonial actions of the past, and how they were the basis for colonial structures that have been absorbed into current culture. Both of these shows tell stories through objects both familiar and unfamiliar. These objects are primarily historical, but the Tropen also includes new artworks reflecting both history and the colonial inheritance of today.
Farida Sedoc, We've Been Here Before You Know
Questions and take aways
What is the role of objects as firsthand sources to (re)learning history? What does this mean to the makers of objects (if it should mean anything)?
What is the importance of visual literacy (learning to read and contextualize those objects, big or small, even spatial) in learning the truths to the myths of history?
How can looking at objects help us connect the actions of the past to the structures of today?
How do we combine visual and written language to avoid the assumptions that looking at just one or the other can lead to? (I am thinking of the pharmacy’s Moorish head, and the importance of the combination of the back story and the image )
How, as teachers, do we help students move beyond the reactive (which is important and not to be disregarded), to the complexities of history?
Links
Black Heritage Tour info
Books on Afro-Dutch History by Ms. Tosch among others
Ms. Tosch’s blog
Rijksmuseum: Slavery
Tropen Museum: Our Colonial Inheritance
Tropenmuseum Publication: Words Matter
*Many artists and academics are doing the work to de-symbolize these individuals. Here are some links that further explore this work.
Were Those Black 'Servants" in Dutch Master Painting Actually Slaves?
People of Colour in European Art History
Boston’s Apollo: Thomas McKellar and John Singer Sargeant at the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum
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