🧵 Today is Ketikoti, the official Emancipation Day of Surinam, where those enslaved under the Dutch colonial regime are remembered, and their emancipation is celebrated.
The Dutch slave owners were compensated 300 guilders per slave that was 'emancipated'. I put that in quotes because the
slaves were not only not compensated at all, they were made to perform forced labour on their masters' plantation for another DECADE under 'contract labour' that was little better than the 'official' slavery that came before. The King has made a formal apology for the Dutch role in
slavery last year, and that's good, but that rings hollow without reparations. I have little faith that will happen anytime soon - certainly not under the new government, which has had their invitation to attend the ceremonies today rescinded for the head of Parliament calling the
discussions on reparations 'slavernijgedram' ('moaning about slavery') and 'anti-white racism' (lol). The National Institute on the Dutch Heritage and History of Slavery (NiNsee), organises a host of activities, lectures and other evens today to raise awareness and advocate for an
inclusive society built on a reckoning with our past. You are supposed to be able to donate via their website, but the payment link's expired - I'll go give them a call to see if they can put up a new link. (Might be that one only works in the Netherlands, though, sorry if that's the
case). Sadly, I'm not particularly familiar with the specific organisations involved in the celebrations in Surinam, and I couldn't find any equivalent organisations there, so I can't point you to those. If anyone has ideas on which orgs to support in Surinam itself, I'd be very grateful
and happy to boost. There's little else to say but slavery is a horrific moral blight on history and the refusal of the Western colonialist-imperialist powers to meaningfully engage with their past acts of unspeakable cruelty and pay reparations to the people and nations affected is
The government did it in December of 2022, the King a year later.
And yeah earlier would have been better but the problem is that that would require a modicum of ethics from the Dutch, which is a forlorn hope 🙃
Ok maybe I spoke too soon, bc here in Spain we offered spanish nationality to descendents of sephardic jews who were exiled in the 1400s, in 2015. So, lmao
