Like other former imperialist nations, the Netherlands hears strongly critical voices from within against colonialism and colonial institutions. It is important to pay attention to these voices, not only for the authors of this chapter, both of whom are post-colonial Dutch citizens of mixed ethnic descent with family linkages to the East (Captain) and West (Jones) as well as to the Netherlands, but for a more balanced historiography of Dutch colonial rule and decolonization in general.
The year 2002 proved to be unusually significant in this respect. First, the 400th anniversary of the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) was commemorated by a special government-funded committee set up for this occasion, and by other official institutions. These were contested by various private initiatives, varying from symposia featuring highly critical appraisals of Dutch colonialism by speakers of Eurasian, Dutch, Indonesian and Moluccan descent to a committee called ‘Celebration of 400 Years of VOC? No!’. Second, a long-awaited monument commemorating the abolition of slavery in the West Indies was unveiled in Amsterdam by Queen Beatrix, in the presence of many distinguished Dutch and international guests, on 1 July 2002. This represented an important step in recognizing slavery as an integral part of Dutch history. Yet many visitors to the inaugural ceremony, mostly black, were kept out of sight of the dignitaries and away from the monument itself by fences, treatment that provoked tension and fierce protests.
At the same time, no one can deny the sheer magnitude of the historical Dutch presence overseas. The Netherlands is a small country. Yet, beginning in 1682 with the foundation of the West Indische Compagnie (WIC), Dutch trade, exploration and – when it came to colonization and slavery – exploitation stretched across the entire globe. In North America and the Caribbean, Dutch possessions ranged from New York, a city founded by the Dutch as New Amsterdam, to islands in the West Indies, including Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao, Sint Maarten, Sint Eustacius and Saba, still part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. In the Old World, in addition to the Indonesian archipelago, the Dutch claimed trading posts on the coasts of Africa, in India and in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and Dutch Boers (‘farmers’) established major settler colonies near the Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa.1
Colonization enriched the Netherlands in many ways: from the fortunes made by private individuals and money earned for the national treasury, to the birth of new population groups of mixed ethnic descent and thus an increased demographic diversity in the country. The foreign relations of the Netherlands have been characterized as an intriguing mixture of peace, profits and principles.2 Imperialism can be considered historically as an adjunct to the Netherlands’ trading activities. Since decolonization, the Dutch have promoted human rights and development aid for other countries in global affairs. As a free-trade nation and an active member of international organizations, the Netherlands is often eager to set an example to other states, sometimes forgetting its own complex history of exploration as well as exploitation.3
Before discussing Indonesia and Suriname, the main subjects of this chapter, two other areas of Dutch imperial enterprise deserve to be briefly mentioned. Neither counted seriously as empires, though both, in different circumstances, might have had lasting and far-reaching consequences: Africa and North America.
The settlement of South Africa was a consequence of the Dutch occupation of Indonesia. Dutch East India Company ships plying the spice trade formed the habit of putting in at the southern tip of Africa to replenish their food and water supplies. In 1652 a permanent station operated by company employees was established under Governor Jan van Riebeeck. The station, which soon expanded into a proto-colony with freehold farms worked by African slave labour, flourished to such an extent that by 1707 there were nearly 1,800 European settlers, including women and children. They were self-governing, though ultimately subject to the authority of Batavia, and beyond that to the European directors of the VOC in the Netherlands.
This arrangement, which amounted to virtual independence, continued until the late eighteenth century. The language spoken by the settlers, Afrikaans, in time deviated markedly from that spoken at home. The area under European occupation increased rapidly, the only opposition coming from Khoisan villagers. The colonists were rugged individualists, often living far from urban areas. Many had children with African women, giving birth to the population that came to be known as ‘Cape Coloured’. All this formed a social milieu virtually beyond the control of the Dutch government, and very different from that of Indonesia and Suriname. No attempt was made to draw Dutch and Africans together.
From about 1780 relations between the Afrikaners and Africans deteriorated. As the Boers took over more territory, they found that northerly tribes such as the Xhosa proved more formidable enemies than the Khoisan. In 1795 the situation was further complicated by the arrival of two other European powers. First the French, who had conquered the Netherlands and now presumed to do the same with its colonies. Then the British, who captured Cape Town in the name of the Prince of Orange, whom they supported as the legitimate ruler. In 1814 the Congress of Vienna decreed that South Africa should be British. After that, it becomes part of the story of the British empire, though it retained, and still retains, crucial elements of its Dutch origin in areas such as law, commerce and land ownership. English became the official language. British immigrants flooded in, although they did not bond with the Boers. Tension increased until breaking point was reached when 12,000 Boers decided to leave the colony and found a new country of their own: this was the Great Trek, which lasted from 1835 to 1843. After years of mutual hostility and bloodshed a new republic, the Orange Free State, was recognized in 1852. There followed more years of a three-way conflict between British, Boers and Africans ending in the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902, which the British won. In 1910 South Africa became a self-governing dominion of the Commonwealth, characterized by a (not always happy) balance between British and Dutch: an unusual, if not unique, end to the story of an empire. In constitutional terms, to be more precise: the Dutch presence left as its legacy the enduring ideological and political legacy of ‘apartheid’, designed by (Amsterdam-born) Hendrik Verwoerd, which only came to an end after decades of persistent liberation struggle and continued pressure from the international community. After the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990, the oppressive apartheid system was finally dismantled and replaced by a non-racial democracy, based on the principle of ‘one person one vote’.
Does North America perhaps offer a parallel? In 1609 the Dutch East Indies Company employed Henry Hudson to explore the coast of what is now New England and, encouraged by his report, claimed it for the Netherlands. In 1614 a company was formed by merchants from Amsterdam and Hoorn which promoted immigration, settlement and trade in the province they called New Netherlands, where they built Fort Orange (now Albany) and Fort Amsterdam (at the southern end of Manhattan Island). Immigrant farmers were encouraged to cross the Atlantic and settle there. The colony did well, though in 1641 the Dutch engaged in serious conflict with the Native Americans. By 1650, however, English settlers were building up another colony up the coast to the north and were claiming Manhattan as their own. In 1664, by which time the Dutch population numbered 10,000, the governor, Peter Stuyvesant, was forced to surrender New Amsterdam, which became New York. Apart from a brief period from 1673 to 1674 when the Dutch managed to recapture the outpost, that has been its name ever since, a few old family traditions and various street names now providing the major reminders of the Dutch colonial presence. Dutch colonialism in other parts of the world had a longer life.
In 2005 the Dutch foreign minister, Ben Bot, journeyed to Jakarta for a ceremony commemorating the Indonesian Republic’s sixty years of independence, a visit laden with symbolism even in the very choice of date. The Dutch Government, for the first time, implicitly recognized that the key date in contemporary Indonesian history was 17 August 1945, when Indonesia was declared independent by Sukarno, who became its first president, rather than 27 December 1949, when the Netherlands formally transferred sovereignty to Indonesia. In previous years no one from the Dutch Government had even attended the independence celebrations of its ex-colony.
In the western hemisphere, Suriname (often known in English as Dutch Guiana) also celebrated thirty years of Srefidensi, or independence, in 2005. In this case, the partition date of 25 November 1975 is undisputed by either Suriname or the Netherlands. Other parts of the Dutch empire, the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba, autonomous territories in the West Indies, are still part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands; they will not be discussed in this chapter.
The remarkable difference in the timings of these acts of political decolonization shows that, for several reasons, it is impossible to talk about ‘the Dutch empire’ in the singular. The ‘Kingdom of the Netherlands’ covers very different economic, historical, political, constitutional and social situations. The two former colonies of Indonesia in the East and Suriname in the West were very different in size. The Netherlands established its rule in those countries with different administrative practices, and in the thirty-odd years between the two decolonization processes the historical context altered greatly. The mother country therefore left the two ex-colonies varying legacies.
All the same, there exist similarities and cross-connections between the two colonies. Racist views about the Indonesian and Surinamese peoples were used to justify the Dutch presence in both countries. Administrative methods that had been tested in the East were sometimes applied in the West. The populations of Indonesia and Suriname were alike in not submitting meekly to colonialism and its legacy. Neither in the East Indies nor in the West Indies, however, were colonizers and colonized totally divided into separate spheres, even though the distancing of the groups provided the basis of the colonial system and the ideology that underpinned it. To understand how Indonesia and Suriname were colonized and decolonized, it must be realized that the distinction between colonizers and colonized was flexible, and metamorphosed over time as circumstances themselves changed.
This chapter will address four main questions. First, how did the Netherlands establish its rule in Indonesia and Suriname and what were the administrative practices associated with that domination? Second, what was the legacy of Dutch colonialism in the countries that the Netherlands ruled? Third, how did their populations react to Dutch rule and its legacy? Fourth, how were the two countries decolonized? Paradoxically, perhaps, these questions are most easily answered by starting with the current situation and looking at Indonesia and Suriname from a contemporary perspective.
Indonesia is an enormous archipelago, covering an area of 1,919,440 sq km (741,096 sq miles), with a population of about 264 million.4 This compares dramatically with Suriname, which covers an area of only 163,000 sq km (62,934 sq miles) and has a population of 550,000.5 This contrast explains why the national self-image of the Netherlands as an empire was related first and foremost to the East rather than the West, and also why the decolonization process was so different in the two countries.6
Both Indonesia and Suriname are culturally and ethnically very diverse, though in different ways. Indonesian society comprises 300 different ethnic groups speaking 250 languages.7 Muslims form the overwhelming majority in religion; indeed, Indonesia is the largest Islamic country in the world. Suriname does not have a dominant religion. Besides the original inhabitants who are now few in number, there are descendants of Dutch farmers, Jews, Chinese, Lebanese, Javanese (from the East Indies), Maroons (descendants of rebel enslaved Africans who settled in the interior of the country), Creoles (of African or mixed descent) and Hindus (from British India). Numerically, the last four groups in particular (in ascending order of size) define Suriname’s ethnic ‘mosaic’, while the métis population is growing.8 Christianity, Hinduism and Islam are all well represented. Since the ancestors of the current population came from all over the world, Suriname has been called ‘the world in a nutshell’. That term reflects an important distinction between Indonesian and Surinamese diversity. The Dutch had virtually no impact on the make-up of the Indonesian population, because there the demographic diversity was already established when the Europeans arrived. In Suriname, on the other hand, the Netherlands created ‘its own subjects’ by taking people (or forcing them to come) there from all over the world.
Indonesia was originally a Dutch trading colony and remained so for several centuries; the Dutch presence in the East Indies was always based on economic interests. On 29 March 1602, the parliament of the Netherlands granted the VOC a charter giving it administrative powers, as well as an exclusive right to trade and sign treaties with indigenous rulers, in the Indonesian archipelago. The East Indies Company recognized these rulers and their legal systems, so long as they did not conflict with Dutch economic interests. Indonesia thus remained primarily a trading colony until about 1830.9
As the years went by, the Dutch state’s grip on the colony nevertheless became stronger. In 1796, property acquired by the Dutch in Indonesia was taken over by the state, and the VOC’s administration of the country was dissolved.10 The Netherlands henceforth ruled Indonesia directly, through a governor-general appointed by the Dutch parliament. Maintaining a hands-off policy in most of the East Indies, the Dutch concentrated their rule on specific parts of the archipelago, in particular Java and Ambon (the largest island in the Moluccas),11 while exercising only limited authority over the other islands, which were known as the ‘Outer Provinces’. The Dutch administration, it was officially stated, ‘should refrain from expansion and seek to establish good relations with the Indonesian rulers’,12 a policy that continued until around 1870. Subsequently further territory was slowly but surely brought under Dutch rule. For instance the Sultanate of Aceh, whose independence the Netherlands had initially recognized, was taken over by the Dutch in a thirty-year war.13
The hands-off policy did not prevent the Netherlands from keeping a firm hold over the territories considered the core of its eastern empire. In 1830, for example, Governor-General Johannes van de Bosch introduced cultuurstelsel, or forced farming, to Java.14 Under this system,15 which reflected the transformation of Java from a trading colony to an agricultural colony, the Dutch administration forced the Javanese to grow crops such as sugar, indigo, pepper, tobacco, coffee, tea and cinnamon for the European market, paying labourers a pittance,16 a form of exploitation reminiscent of slavery and indentured labour. The system underlined Indonesia’s status as a conquered territory, which in fact the Dutch parliament proclaimed the East Indies colony to be in 1854.17
The forced farming system proved of relatively short duration and was abolished in 1891. From about 1900, the guiding principle of Dutch rule was the so-called ‘ethical policy’. Open forms of exploitation of the Javanese population gave way to a phase in which the Dutch presence was legitimized as a mission civilisatrice for the people of the archipelago. Since ‘strong state authority’ was considered essential to the civilizing mission, the Dutch colonial administration, through military action, now established effective control over the Outer Provinces. From 1922, the Dutch East Indies was officially part – not simply a possession – of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Even so, sovereignty was still vested in the central government, which long ignored Indonesian nationalism. Although the latter had first emerged around 1908, it was less tolerated in subsequent decades, widening the gulf between the Dutch and the Indonesians. Moderate nationalism did find expression in 1936 in the People’s Council, a consultative body of the Dutch East Indies government, although the setting up of this ‘Volksraad’ did not signify the beginnings of self-government. The historian Elsbeth Locher-Scholten calls the 1930s, in which the Netherlands was hit by the world economic crisis, ‘the most repressive decade in twentieth-century Dutch rule’ in Indonesia. That rule lasted until 1942, when it was brought to an abrupt end by the Japanese occupation, which ‘reversed the colonial hierarchy’.18
In Suriname, too, the pursuit of profit was the main factor in the genesis and establishment of Dutch colonial rule, which began in 1667 when Abraham Crijnssen captured Suriname from the British on behalf of the province of Zeeland. The West Indies Company administered Suriname in conjunction with the municipal government of Amsterdam and the Aerssens van Sommelsdijck family (proprietors of the ‘Suriname Company’).19 In contrast to the East Indies, where the Dutch presence was linked to trade, the Dutch in Suriname established a plantation economy based on slavery – slavery certainly existed in Indonesia, but was not the basis of Dutch colonialism in Asia as it was in the Americas.20
Although the original slaves in Suriname were indigenous peoples, Africans were soon brought in as plantation labour. In the transatlantic slave trade, the British, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch, among others, imported slaves from Africa and then sold them throughout the Americas and the Caribbean.21 Dutch slave traders are estimated to have been responsible for 5 per cent of the total transatlantic slave trade, involving about 555,000 people.22
In 1791, when the West Indies Company collapsed, the Dutch parliament decided that administration of the colony would be transferred from the ‘chartered company of Suriname’, of which the West Indies Company had been part, to a ‘council of state colonies and possessions’. The governor no longer represented the ‘chartered company’, but the state of the Netherlands. That change, however, did not end slavery, which was not officially abolished until 1863.23
From 1873 to the beginning of the twentieth century, indentured labourers recruited by the Netherlands from Java and from British India replaced slaves on the plantations, though the conditions in which Javanese and Indian contract labourers worked often differed very little from slavery.24 The Surinamese thinker and activist Anton de Kom, born in Paramaribo in 1898, in Wij slaven van Suriname (1933) offered an analysis of the complex power relations between colonizer and colonized and an indictment of the practice of slavery and exploitation of the indentured labourers who took the place of the slaves.25 De Kom added that as long as famine, poverty, unemployment, infanticide and poor health care affected the lives of many Surinamese, they remained virtual slaves.
Suriname remained under direct colonial rule until the Second World War. The governor represented the Netherlands as head of the administration and could bypass the Surinamese people’s council, which in any case was not representative; the first general elections were held only in 1949.26 In 1954, Suriname was granted autonomous status within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, but only two decades later sovereignty was transferred.
What did Dutch policy mean for the people of Indonesia and Suriname? In general terms, Indonesia developed into a culturally pluralistic society with a dualistic political structure, whereas in Suriname, especially after the abolition of slavery, the guiding principle of Dutch overlordship was assimilation.
In the East Indies, Dutch rule was for long characterized by pluralistic legal and administrative systems. In particular, the colonial rulers rejected the idea of disseminating the Dutch language and Christianity to the Indonesian population, largely because of the size of the territory and population and the fact that Islam was an established faith. Dutch rule in Indonesia was closely associated with strict racial categories. In 1854 the colonial administration began dividing the population into three groups: Europeans (especially the white Dutch, but also those legally recognized Indo-Europeans of mixed Indonesian and European origin), ‘Foreign Orientals’ (especially Chinese and Arabs) and ‘Natives’ (i.e. the Indonesians). In 1892 that distinction served as the basis for the exclusion of the last group, on racial grounds, from full Dutch citizenship. Rules and regulations for the European colonial upper class, amounting to about 300,000 people, were different from those for the 60 million Indonesians. According to Dutch government criteria, the extent to which a person was Dutch was determined by whether he or she had gained access, through education, training, employment, promotion, marriage, social contacts and status, to the European elite and its privileges. The boundaries between the racial groups could be crossed, but with no effect on the colonial structures and Dutch sovereignty over Indonesia. The colonial government thought that assimilation into Dutch culture and provision of equal rights for all inhabitants of the colony might jeopardize the Dutch hegemony. The colonial authorities justified this duality by citing ‘respect for the difference between population groups’ in the colony. The result was that influential positions in the colonial bureaucracy were mainly filled by the European elite class. Not until after the First World War was the ‘dual system’ based on racial categories even seriously debated.27
In Suriname, until the abolition of slavery in 1863, there were two ‘legal communities’, slaves and free citizens, to which different laws applied. The whole white population, the colonial socio-economic and political elite, as well as a sizeable section of the population regarded as ‘coloured’, the descendants of white men and black women, were classed as free citizens. In certain circumstances, black people, manumitted (freed) slaves and their children, could also be free citizens. The legal category of slaves was composed largely of black people and a smaller group who were coloured. Needless to say, there were no whites in this category. The whites were in charge, socially and politically,28 and the European way of life, culture and religion were the norm. The black slaves remained subordinate, and until abolition the colonial government showed little interest in their language, culture or religion. But in contrast to Indonesia, after 1863 there occurred a radical change as the colonial government decided that the whole of the Surinamese population, regardless of race, should become a single linguistic and cultural community, with Dutch as its official language. This assimilation policy began as a mission to ‘civilize’ the blacks in order to transform them into ‘good Dutch citizens’. Christianity, Western education and the Dutch language were actively propagated. The Afro-Surinamese language, culture and religion, on the other hand, were actively suppressed, for instance by making any use of the black language an offence.29 In this cultural policy, what was European was presented as the successful norm, while the Afro-Surinamese culture was branded deficient.30 From 1895 to 1933, the same policy of assimilation applied to the Indian and Javanese indentured labourers who had replaced slaves on the plantations. According to Governor Rutgers (1928–33), the aim of colonial policy in Suriname was for ‘the whole population, white and brown, black and yellow, regardless of whether they were European or American, African or Asian, to merge together into a single linguistic and cultural community, with a single legal system comprehending both family and inheritance law. Suriname should thus become the Netherlands’ twelfth province’. The Dutch colonial authorities were conscious of the differences between their approaches in West and East. Van Lier quotes the Dutch minister for the colonies, Koningsberger, who, speaking in 1928 to young Javanese in Suriname, said that the purpose of education was ‘different from that in the Dutch East Indies, in that whereas for the latter the maintenance and development of its own language, manners and customs is an overriding principle of upbringing and education, in Suriname the consistent aim is the merging together of all races, including the Javanese, into a Dutch linguistic and cultural community’.31
In the 1930s, however, there occurred a radical change in colonial policy. Governor Kielstra, who took office in 1933, backed by Dutch Minister for the Colonies Welter, encouraged the preservation of Hindustani and Javanese culture through the establishment of village communities on the East Indies model, separate ‘Asian family law’ and separate schools. Kielstra ignored the fierce objections from the Creole elite that had emerged in Suriname and now protested in parliament. The colonial government believed that the new policy did justice to the Javanese and Hindustani indentured workers on whose labour the Surinamese economy depended. At the same time, however, the policy had a ‘divide and rule’ function. All the same, the Indians and Javanese in Suriname did not escape the legacy of the assimilationist policy even after its heyday was over. As the historian Hans Ramsoedh wrote in 1995: ‘For the descendants of the indentured labourers, too, assimilation into the Dutch language and culture was a sine qua non for upward social mobility.’
Although, after the abolition of slavery, racial inequality in Suriname was no longer enshrined in law, Surinamese society long remained racially stratified. In the years immediately after the Second World War, the Javanese mainly worked on the plantations, the Indians were small farmers, the blacks did non-agricultural work, the coloureds were low-grade civil servants, and the Europeans occupied senior positions.32
The impact of Dutch colonialism differed between East and West. Whereas the Dutch influence on Indonesia is considered by some to have been only minor, Suriname is regarded as a wholly Dutch creation.33 In Suriname, Dutch became the official language and Christianity still enjoys a prominent place. In the East Indies, the Netherlands found not an ‘empty country’, as in Suriname, but a sizeable population, made up of a large number of ethnic groups and polities with their own legal systems. The Dutch language and Christianity gained virtually no hold over most of the population, nor, after independence, did the language and religion of the colonizers retain a significant role in Indonesian society – the official language now is Bahasa Indonesia, not Dutch, and Islam remains the dominant religion. In 1998, Gert Oostindie summed up the contrasting experiences: ‘In the West, and only in the West, the Dutch ruled over a large majority of colonized people whom they had brought there themselves, whereas in Asia… they were interlopers of whom it was later said that they only left behind “krassen op een rots” [scratches on a rock], [while] in the Caribbean they created their own subjects.’34
While this judgment is certainly true in some respects, it requires qualification. The response of the colonized people of Suriname was not simply accommodation of the Dutch colonial administration. There was also resistance to and transformation of the Dutch influence. Indigenous peoples and Maroons (escaped slaves and their descendants) waged a guerrilla war against slavery which was sometimes so successful that it seriously threatened the colonial system.35 Javanese and Indian indentured labourers protested against their exploitation on plantations.36 Surinamese Creole cultural nationalists rebelled against the assimilation policy.37 The stigma attached to the Surinamese lingua franca, Sranan Tongo, regarded as an ‘inferior’ language in the colonial period, was removed only through its persistent use – Trefossa, pseudonym of the teacher and distinguished poet Henny de Ziel, brilliantly demonstrated that Sranan Tongo could express the most subtle and profound thoughts and emotions.
Dutch cultural influence in Suriname was also ‘Creolized’ over the years. A syncretic form of religion evolved, combining elements of Christianity and other faiths.38 The official language39 developed its own variant, Surinamese Dutch, which has recently been recognized by the Dutch Language Union (consisting of the Netherlands, Belgium, Suriname and South Africa) as a distinct dialect spoken in Suriname.
To see the Dutch influence on its colony in the East as simply one of ‘minor impact’ also pays too little attention to some aspects of the Dutch colonial experience there. The colonial hierarchy attached to skin colour obtained in the East Indies is still present in Indonesia, though now only as an unofficial categorization. ‘Natives’ had no access to the benefits that colonial society offered Europeans, such as a European education or senior positions in the colonial bureaucracy. As J.C. Baud, governor-general of the Dutch East Indies and later minister for the colonies, baldly stated in the late nineteenth century: ‘Language, colour, religion, customs, origin, historical memories: in all those respects the Dutch and the Javanese are different. We are the rulers, they the ruled!’40
The Eurasian intellectual Guus Cleintuar experienced such discrimination when, in 1952, the Dutch government withdrew his Dutch passport. An official explained that since Cleintuar’s Dutch great-grandfather had failed to legally recognize his son before 1892, Cleintuar had never been a Dutch national. Thus, his Dutch citizenship, which had ‘been experienced for generations’, as Cleintuar put it, simply ceased to exist. In 1992, Cleintuar referred to this incident as representing the ‘far-reaching legalism of the Dutch state, which tried to get rid of unfortunate legacies from its colonial past’.41
It is clear from Cleintuar’s personal experience, however, that there was no strict dichotomy between colonizers and colonized. In both East and West, the two groups often crossed boundaries, although such transgression was in principle at odds with the colonial system. For the system to survive, a clear distinction had to be made between ‘free citizens’ and ‘slaves’ (in Suriname) or between Europeans and ‘Natives’ (in Indonesia). However, theory and practice were different, both in East and West.42 The mixed-race offspring of European men and ‘native’ or ‘black’ women were called ‘Indo-Europeans’ in the East Indies and ‘coloureds’ in Suriname.43 Over the years, many gained legal equality with the white colonials (as Europeans in the East Indies and as free citizens in Suriname), even though they still occupied an intermediate position in the social hierarchy. Around 1900, the colonial government explicitly termed interracial relations a threat to European supremacy, and the establishment of white ‘Dutch’ families in the colonies became the ideal.44
Another way in which boundaries were crossed was the ‘vertical’ social and legal mobility of individuals from groups at the bottom of the colonial hierarchy. In some circumstances, ‘native’ Indonesians could achieve equality with Europeans in the East Indies. ‘Free blacks’ who had managed to escape from slavery in Suriname during the slave period could occasionally rise to prominent positions in colonial society. One example is Elisabeth Samson, the daughter of a freed slave woman who worked her way up to become the wealthy owner of coffee plantations. Samson herself employed slave labour.45 Another is Jan Ernst Matzeliger, born in Suriname in 1852 to a black enslaved woman and a white German engineer. Matzeliger, a freeman, travelled to the United States in 1871, where eight years later he invented the shoe lasting machine, which revolutionized the shoemaking industry.46
After the Second World War, the decolonization processes were very different in Indonesia and Suriname. The handover of sovereignty to Indonesia in 1949 followed two bloody wars of independence, whereas in Suriname – where, ironically enough, the Dutch influence was to remain most evident – independence was won in 1975 without a struggle. The difference in the importance the Netherlands attached to the East Indies and Suriname, and changes in national and international attitudes to colonial relations over the period separating the two dates of independence, played a part in the varying trajectories.
In the East Indies, which had long been the Netherlands’ most prized possession, Indonesian nationalism had a long history. Indo-European and Indonesian nationalists, sometimes with the same demands and sometimes with conflicting interests,47 had been fighting for greater internal autonomy for the archipelago long before the handover of sovereignty in 1949.48 In 1936 a motion for internal self-government was passed by the Volksraad but rejected by the Netherlands.
The Japanese invasion and occupation of the Dutch East Indies from 1942 to 1945 brought an end to European dominance. The wartime diaries and memoirs of Europeans show that for them the Japanese occupation meant a complete ‘reversal of the colonial hierarchy’.49 Meanwhile, however, radical Indonesian nationalism, ideologically overlapping with the Japanese bid to rid Asia of its Western occupiers, gained strength. In a radio address on 6 December 1942, Queen Wilhelmina held out the prospect of autonomy for the colonies in both the East and West Indies,50 but the promise was considered meaningless by the Indonesian nationalists.51 Two days after the Japanese surrender on 15 August 1945,52 the nationalists, led by Sukarno and Hatto, declared Indonesia independent.53
The Netherlands then went to great lengths to hold on to its ‘Gordel van Smaragd’ (‘Emerald Belt’), as the Indonesian archipelago was called. When the Dutch government and the nationalists were unable to agree on the content of post-war agreements that would give the country greater autonomy, armed warfare broke out. The fighting that took place in July 1947 and December 1948 are euphemistically referred to in the Netherlands as ‘police action’, while in Indonesian historiography they are called Dutch military aggression.54 The Netherlands eventually handed over sovereignty to Indonesia on 27 December 1949, but only after lengthy debates in the Dutch parliament in which the transfer was presented as nothing less than a traumatic national event. Gerbrandy, a member of the Lower House, expressed the general feeling: ‘We are shockingly abandoning the magnificent country of Insulinde [the East Indies], which winds along the equator like an emerald belt, since we can do nothing more there now to restore law and order.’55
Such emotional statements typified the politicians’ attitude to Indonesian independence. Dutch rule there was seen as a natural state of affairs, and independence as an abrupt end to the civilizing mission. However, Dutch politicians saw the Indo-European and Moluccan migrants to the Netherlands (numbering 200,000 and 12,500, respectively) as a less ‘natural’ part of the Dutch nation. Initially political reaction to their arrival was defensive;56 setting aside economic considerations linked to job and housing shortages in the 1950s, they were believed to be ‘psychologically and physically’ unsuited to life in the Netherlands.
The journalist and writer Jan Boon, better known by his pseudonyms Tjalie Robinson and Vincent Mahieu, as a Eurasian faced major difficulties in securing a loan for his passage to the Netherlands. It took him more than four years of writing requests and pleading with politicians before he and his family could leave Indonesia, even though he had actually been born in the Netherlands during a visit there by his parents. In 1955, a year after his arrival there, he wrote: ‘I am a Dutch citizen because my father was one. If my father had been an Indonesian citizen, I would have been one too. But I have remained myself. The passport doesn’t determine me as a person, but (sadly) determines some kind of power of control over me. But the state doesn’t possess me.’57
Suriname’s progress towards independence was quite different from that of Indonesia. Ironically, the radio address by Queen Wilhelmina about greater autonomy was made with a view to ‘holding on to’ the East Indies, but in fact it would turn out to be relevant to the relationship with the colonies in the West Indies, since in 1954 those colonies, including Suriname, won autonomy.58 Under a statute of 9 September 1954 governing the new relationship between the Netherlands, Suriname and the Antilles, Suriname was granted home rule within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The Netherlands had responded more favourably to moderate Surinamese nationalism59 than to the Indonesian version in the 1930s. Circumstances had changed after the crisis in relations with the Indonesian nationalists and the subsequent transfer of sovereignty in 1949.60 After the traumatic Indonesian decolonization process, the 1954 statute came as a relief.61 Dutch members of parliament welcomed the successful visit to Suriname by Queen Wilhelmina’s daughter, Queen Juliana, the following year,62 which they saw as strengthening the ‘idea of the kingdom’: i.e. close relations between the Netherlands and its former possession in South America.63
Although under the new constitutional provisions Suriname and the Netherlands were, in formal terms, equal within the kingdom, economically and constitutionally the Netherlands was by far the stronger party. A radical Surinamese nationalist group, under the leadership of the lawyer Eddy Bruma, demanded an end to that disparity. His movement, begun as a cultural and nationalistic response to Dutch cultural dominance and its legacy in Suriname, would eventually lead to a plea for Surinamese independence, partly because Suriname wanted its own voice in international bodies. Under self-government this was not possible since foreign policy remained a ‘national matter’; Suriname was thus particularly frustrated when the Netherlands abstained in a vote on a United Nations resolution condemning apartheid in 1959.64
In the 1970s, the struggle of the Surinamese nationalists coincided with moves towards decolonization by the Dutch political majority. The Nationalist Republican Party (the Surinamese nationalists) led by Bruma joined a coalition that came to power in 1973. Since most European colonies in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean had now become independent, the Netherlands appeared in danger of falling out of step with the rest of the world. In 1969 the Netherlands had provided military support for suppressing the biggest insurrection so far on Curaçao (Netherlands Antilles). Pictures in the international press of Dutch soldiers going into action ‘overseas’ had damaged the Netherlands’ reputation as a progressive country, both nationally and internationally, and the Netherlands now wanted to cast off its colonial image. With readiness for ‘full political independence’ in Suriname and with a left-wing government in power in the Netherlands, the way ahead was clear. The increase in the numbers of Surinamese immigrants, whose presence in the Netherlands became a political question in the 1970s, made Dutch politicians even more willing to move towards independence for Suriname as quickly as possible. With independence, the Surinamese would formally become foreigners with restricted access to the Netherlands. Thus the progressive political agenda of decolonization went hand in hand with a desire to exclude the Surinamese population from the Dutch nation-state.65 Ironically, the legacy of Surinamese independence was just what it had been designed to avoid: a large influx of (former) fellow citizens into the mother country. In the late 1960s and up to 1975, ‘rumours’ about the imminent declaration of independence led to an exodus to the Netherlands unequalled in the history of migration from the colony to the mother country.66
As it turned out, the political decolonization of Indonesia and Suriname did not put an end to the colonial mentality. The ideas about differences between white people and people of colour that had been characteristic of colonial society were – in a weakened form – partly at the root of the defensive attitude to the immigrants coming to the Netherlands from the two colonies after independence. However, Dutch society seems to have come to terms with that legacy; Indo-Europeans and Surinamese in the Netherlands are now declared to be integrated, though the state of mind of these Dutch citizens from former colonies may remain that of travellers between ‘there’ and ‘here’, between ‘now’ and ‘then’, between ‘black’ and ‘white’, and between ‘us’ and ‘them’.