By Maina wa Njuguna
This week, The Netherlands (Dutch) 🇳🇱 Prime Minister Mark Rutte offered an apology to descendants of African Slaves that saw over 600,000 men, women and children ripped from the continent and shipped like cattle across the globe by Dutch slave traders among others.
Rutte apologized “for the actions of the Dutch state in the past: posthumously to all enslaved people worldwide who have suffered from those actions, to their daughters and sons, and to all their descendants into the here and now.”
Mark Rutte
Prime Minister Rutte described that history often is “ugly, painful, and even downright shameful.”
“For centuries, the Dutch state and its representatives facilitated, stimulated, preserved and profited from slavery,” Rutte added, labeling it a “crime against humanity.”
Mark Rutte
The Prime Minister made it clear that his government was not offering any monetary compensation to descendants of African Slaves but would establish a $212 million fund for initiatives to help tackle the legacy of slavery in the Netherlands and its former colonies and to boost education about the issue.
Image: /New Urban Collective website/
Notably an invited guest but absent was the Director Mitchell Esajas of The Black Archives because of what he called the “almost insulting” lack of consultations with the Black community.
“Reparation wasn’t even mentioned,” Esajas said. “So, beautiful words, but it’s not clear what the next concrete steps will be.”
Mitchell Esajas
Since the brutal murder of George Floyd in broad daylight of May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis, MN – many Western governments and institutions have been forced to look at their ugly past and are coming to different places to contend with it.
In October, The Dutch Parliament majority supported making an official apology after a working group reported on a research trip to some former colonies.
Recently the mayors of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht and The Hague, as well as the management of the central bank of the Netherlands, have apologized for their institutions’ role in slavery, and enrichment from it.
