We Slaves of Suriname. Anton de Kom
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 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 Freedom We Slaves of Suriname as Literature Duco 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