The descendants of slaves and indigenous communities have accepted this Monday the apology of King William of Orange for the slave past. They have also forgiven him, on a personal basis, since their ancestors profited from the slavery trade, which was legal until 1863, and they were never against it. Suriname became independent in 1975, and the sovereign and his wife, Queen Máxima, are currently making the first state visit by a Dutch monarch in 47 years.
The visit to Suriname will last until this Wednesday, and the monarch met with descendants of slaves on the first day. During the conversation, he assured: “We are all descended from those who were involved.” Then, he added: “I am aware that the pain lasts for generations,” according to Dutch public television NOS. This moment was essential in the program for the leaders of the Afro-Surinamese, indigenous and maroon communities, the latter successors of fugitive slaves who founded free communities in the jungle. “I hope to learn more about what exactly it means to live as a descendant of slaves,” King William also said. The last reigning sovereign to travel to Suriname was her grandmother, the late Queen Juliana, in 1978, three years after independence.
After the meeting with the monarch, the president of Suriname, Jennifer Simons, indicated that her country wishes to start talks about the so-called reparation program for the past for which the Netherlands has allocated 66 million euros. “They are not a reparation, but a gesture, and I think that is what the Dutch Government also considers,” he stressed.
Slavery was a big business for Europe in which the Spanish, English, Portuguese, Danes, and also the Dutch participated. Of the total of 12.5 million people enslaved by European merchants, control was in the hands of the West India Company. Men, women and children worked in Suriname in terrible conditions on coffee, sugar, cocoa or cotton plantations. Although slavery was abolished in 1863, in this colony, those who had been enslaved had to continue working on the same lands for another 10 years for poverty wages. In this way, its former owners were able to amortize their loss in labor. The East India Company, twin of the previous one, transported between 660,000 and 1.1 million people to present-day Indonesia and South Africa, according to data from research carried out by the Rijksmuseum for the exhibition open in 2021 on the country’s slave past.
In the last 50 years, more than 250,000 Surinamese moved to the Netherlands, according to the Central Statistics Office. Today there are about 180,000 people born in Suriname. You could emigrate and acquire Dutch nationality without major problems up to five years after independence. From then on it was more difficult to establish itself, mainly due to the military coup d’état perpetrated, among others, by Desi Bouterse, an Army sergeant major who was president between 2010 and 2020.
