In the past, educated, well-standing native Dutch people traveled to colonized regions to report on the hardships, plights, and bright spots in the lives of local peoples. Most of the native Dutch experts were, in keeping with the times, men. They were the go-to experts on the mores and cultures of the Indonesians, Arubans, Bonaireans, Curaçaoans, Sabans, Statians, Papuans, and Surinamers. The experts from the Netherlands interviewed in the Dutch colonies were never their equals. In fact, while they were interviewing them, the colonized natives were rendering them services, for instance cooking a meal, being a guide, doing translation work, or driving them around. Audiences in the Netherlands were told that there were simply no objective experts in the colonies.
After colonialism lost its cache in the Netherlands, because people in the former colonies and dependencies more forcefully began to exhibit their ‘somebodiness’, and mostly youths in the Netherlands found imperialism suspect, this form of reporting or rather travelogue lost some of its aura. The diaspora of the former colonies, who gained formal tertiary education, must be explicitly credited for pushing the public in the Netherlands to recognize that brains and knowledge, expertise, also exist in the former colonies. Given these internal and external forces, the idea of the Western expert has had to be reformed and repackaged.
Nowadays experts hailing from the Netherlands come in different shades, genders, and sexes. Native Dutch with education and standing are still around. In fact, they remain the majority. But as the empire struck back with e.g. Surinamese and Curaçaoan children being born and bred in the Netherlands, and as DEI made headways with the call for a politics of representation, leading diasporic voices today lay claim to speak for and about the people who reside in Suriname, Indonesia, Papua, and the Caribbean isles.
Note the sleight of hand: the diaspora becomes the brain and knowledge of the former colonies. The recently published article ‘De kennis over Saba ontbreekt in Europees Nederland’/Knowledge of Saba is lacking in the European Netherlands’ by Milouska Meulens unwittingly fits that bill. We cannot shrug off the feeling, reading that piece, that the very specific realities of Saba get equated with the struggles of the Black Caribbeans in the Netherlands and the big stories of the USA that make Antilleans and Surinamese diasporas feel good about themselves, often at the expense of history and events occurring in the former colonies.
We offer here the necessary nuance: far from being an exception, Black Sabans, to stay in the terminology of Milouska Muelens, have occupied positions of leadership for generations. Before the appointment of Joceyln Levenstone as the new governor—who Muelens likens to Obama—Saba had already been led by two Black Lieutenant Governors, Wycliffe Smith and Sydney Sorton. Smith served as Lieutenant Governor from 1983 to 1989. He was succeeded by Sydney Sorton, who served from 1989 to 1998 and again from 2006 to 2008. Franklin Wilson, Shamara Nicholson-Linzey, and the same Sydney Sorton have all also served as acting Lieutenant Governor in recent years. Their tenures reflect an era in which educated Black Sabans increasingly occupied the island's most senior public offices, including serving as division and later department heads; this development is part of the wider history of Emancipation of the downtrodden in the Caribbean and the Dutch world. And the emancipation of white Sabans, most of whom were poor and destitute, is also part of this history.
In the second installment new week we will continue to set the record straight.
Authors:
Prof. dr. Francio Guadeloupe - University of Amsterdam/Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian & Caribbean studies
Lysanne Charles - poet and PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam
