Five bronze and iron bells from estates and plantations in Indonesia, Curaçao, Suriname, Guyana and South Africa represent the many bells throughout the world, the penetrating sounds of which marked the beginning of another day in slavery – in some parts of Indonesia far into the twentieth century. Here, the bells open an exhibition that reflects on the significant Dutch share in this global colonial economy. Today, the tourist industries profit from the legacy of slavery, while the pain it caused lives on in the names, historiography, oral history and arts of countless people, descendants of the enslaved and their displaced ancestors.

This exhibition, carefully designed by the architect Afaina de Jong, presents historical documents, artefacts, natural objects and works of art that invite viewers to look closer and to change their perspective.(1) Endeavouring to contribute to multivocality, the museum chose to focus on ten stories, each involving either a victim, a perpetrator or a participant from the past, told by their genealogical, moral or cultural descendants. Listening to these voices connects visitors with various communities, their memories and identities in today’s society. Conscious of their institutional responsibility, the curators, Eveline Sint Nicolaas, Valika Smeulders, Maria Holtrop and Stephanie Archangel, emphasise the history of the constituent countries and special municipalities in the Caribbean that belong to the Kingdom of the Netherlands as well as of Suriname, in South America, which became an independent state in 1975.

The display holds up a mirror to the visitors. Among the emblematic and sometimes deeply problematic images and objects is a painting by Pieter de Wit, which shows a kneeling enslaved woman holding a painting of a colonial landscape for Dirk Wilre, Director General of the Gold Coast, in his richly appointed office in the fort of Elmina on the Gold Coast, now Ghana (1669; private collection). There are paintings showing wealthy families with their black servants in the Dutch Republic; diplomatic gifts, such as a Peruvian gilt silver basin (1586, Evangelische Nikolai-Kirchengemeinde Siegen) given by King Garcia II of Congo to Johan Maurits, stadtholder in Brazil, which illustrate the use of soft power in the theatre of war between European powers on other continents. There are detailed maps of natural resources and territorial possessions as well as of communities of enslaved people who escaped, and drawings of early modern industries. Altogether they demonstrate the rational, systemic and institutional nature of slavery.

An undated branding iron with the letters GWC (Fig.18) is one of the few historical objects that had a direct emotional effect on this reviewer. It has been placed in a room of its own, following Romuald Hazoumè’s powerful installation The mouth of the king (1997–2005; British Museum, London), consisting of tightly packed petrol cans, which are arranged so that the top of each resembles a gaping mask. The installation refers to the trade of enslaved people and its relationship to the crooked economies of their homelands today. The subsequent encounter with the small tool used to brand people with the initials of their owner makes visitors aware of the pain and humiliation of the individuals involved. The link between commerce and branding is highlighted by the identity of the object’s lender: the National Numismatic Collection of De Nederlandsche Bank, Amsterdam.

The contrast between these sobering exhibits and the playful display of blue glass beads in the last section of the exhibition (Fig.21) is striking. Dozens of beads are hung from the ceiling, glittering in the light like a chandelier. Glass beads were used as currency by Dutch traders all over the world. On the island of Sint Eustatius in the Dutch Caribbean inhabitants collected the beads and, according to oral history, they were used as symbols to mark meaningful rituals in their lives. Such practices reveal a relationship with Africa, where the wearing of beads is associated with status and identity. When slavery was legally abolished on the island in 1863, the islanders threw their beads into the sea in a collective rejection of the colonial system, as Smeulders discusses in the accompanying catalogue. Today the beads are associated with hope and resilience, which is emphasised in in the attractive display chosen for their presentation.

With the help of such thoughtful installations and objects, the exhibition carefully balances documentary evidence with the testimony of human voices. Resistance to colonial rule in Suriname, for example, is told from the perspective of the Maroon women, slaves who had escaped from Dutch plantation colonies. Living in harsh conditions, the women were responsible for food supply. In order to safeguard the seed stock in times of conflict, stalks of rice were braided into the women’s hair. This practice, also used when enslaved Africans were transported to other continents, must be one of the reasons for the presence of African rice in South America. The narrators of this story, Susi and Simba Mosis, who share a bloodline with Ma Sapa (or Sapali), one of the Maroon’s tribal mothers, express their discomfort with one of the exhibits in this section, a map made of silk (Fig.19), produced by the officer Alexander de Lavaux in 1737, depicting what was then the Dutch territory of Suriname with its four hundred plantations. Shown on the map are military expeditions by colonisers forcing Maroons from their settlements (Fig.20). The pride Susi and Simba Mosis take in the stalk of Ma Sapa rice and the affection they express for the calabash rice spoons of their clan, also on display, is based on the symbolic value of these objects, which represent the legacy of the physical and spiritual care of Maroon women that shaped their identity.

Rembrandt’s two full-length portraits of the wealthy Marten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit acquired jointly in 2015 by the Musée du Louvre, Paris, and the Rijksmuseum, take centre stage in the exhibition. The curators open visitors’ eyes to the fact that the couple participated in slave industries, to which they owed their wealth. Soolman’s capital was built up in his refinery, using the processed sugar imported from plantations in Brazil, and his stepmother owned shares in the Dutch West India Company. Oopjen’s family were longstanding members of the wealthy ruling elite and she went on to marry Maarten Baey, who had been a military officer in Brazil. According to the fashion of the time, Marten and Oopjen are dressed in black and it has been argued that this was designed to highlight the paleness of their faces, perhaps as a way to stress their positions of white privilege in response to the appearance of the immigrant communities of Portuguese Jews and Africans in Amsterdam.(2)

It would not be difficult to highlight gaps in the exhibition:the majority of the objects relate to the distant history of the West and East India Companies, ignoring the ongoing practices of slavery as well as the scholarship produced in the countries under discussion after the abolition of slavery in 1860 (Dutch Indies) and 1863 (Suriname and the Caribbean), which followed the British Abolition Act of 1833 and its French equivalent of 1848.(3) However, the curators deserve praise for the courage it took to distil a narrative out of a number of contested histories, which divide communities and generations in the former colonised territories as well as in the Netherlands. The sophisticated catalogue, designed to resemble a scrap book rather than a glossy coffee table accessory, reflects the painstaking research of the curators, which they admit remains a work in progress.

Although over the past decade the bigger picture of Dutch colonial history has become a matter for public debate, especially in museums and history books, it is only slowly being reflected in education and only at secondary school level. This exhibition, which coincides with debates in the Dutch parliament that might result in an annual commemoration of slavery and celebration of its abolition, is a promising start to encourage both creativity and scholarship in the production of cultural memory.

1. Catalogue: Slavery: The Story of João, Wally, Oopjen, Paulus, Van Bengalen, Surapati, Sapali, Tula, Dirk, Lohkay. Edited by Eveline Sint Nicolaas and Valika Smeulders. 352 pp. incl. numerous col. ills. (Atlas Contact, Amsterdam, 2021), €27.99. ISBN 978–90– 450–4427–9.

2. M. Ponte: ‘Black in Amsterdam around 1650’, in E. Kolfin and E. Runia, eds: exh. cat. Black in Rembrandt’s Time, Amsterdam (Museum het Rembrandthuis) 2020, pp.45–57; for a review of this exhibition in this Magazine, see C.T. Seifert: 'Young Rembrandt and beyond', THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 162 (2020), pp.784–91; and J. Bikker: Marten and Oopjen: Two Monumental Portraits by Rembrandt, Amsterdam 2016.

3. See, for example, A. de Kom: We Slaves of Suriname, London 2019.