We Slaves of Suriname by Anton de Kom (review)

The Netherlands, in June 2020, added Anton de Kom's searing indictment of colonialism and slavery in his home country of Suriname into the Dutch national core curriculum for history education. It is easy to see why this happened. De Kom's book fits three requirements for a high school text. First, it is relatively short and easy to read. De Kom was an arresting writer with a gift for the telling phrase and who wrote with the sort of passion and determined conviction that translates perfectly to adolescent tastes. The English author who comes to mind as a comparison in regard to the pithiness of style and the moral clarity of vision is George Orwell. It offers, moreover, an account of slavery in the Dutch colony of Suriname, concentrated in the eighteenth century but with links to the era of freedom for ex-slaves which was still very firm in the memory of the Surinamese in the early 1930s when De Kom wrote. This highlights in dramatic and accessible fashion both how horrible slavery in the Dutch Caribbean was and how much responsibility the Dutch had for making slavery horrible. Thus, it provides a convincing if polemical riposte to those voices in the Netherlands who see Dutch involvement in transatlantic slavery as minimal by showing how the Dutch government, in the form of its colonial governors in particular, were completely involved in the implementation of an especially brutal form of slavery in its colonies. Finally, De Kom links slavery directly to colonialism and ventures into areas—the psychology of slavery and the lasting effects of colonialism and racial discrimination—that scholars of slavery often shy away from. He makes an impassioned case for the legacies of colonialism and slavery in the very minds (as of 1934) of the modern-day descendants of the enslaved Surinamese, making this as much an anti-colonial text as an explication of slavery and a treatment of a Dutch colony that readers know little about.

It is a book that is a very welcome addition to a relatively sparse literature on what Orlando Patterson calls doulotic studies, which are studies of slavery that focus on the lives of the enslaved, as seen from the enslaved's perspective. It is full of arresting anecdotes about how traumatic slavery was from the viewpoint of the enslaved, such as a long and horrific account of how, in a 1711 campaign by the Dutch against Maroons, two rebel enslaved women—Séry and Flora—with Séry's daughter, were beaten (Séry) and murdered (Flora) because they refused to disclose information about Maroon whereabouts. De Kom is remarkable for a man writing when he did for the attention he paid to enslaved women and for emphasizing how different their lives were under slavery from those of enslaved men. In many ways, in its focus on gender and on resistance particularly, it was a work written well ahead of its time.

Yet in some ways this is a curious book to give to schoolchildren as an account of Suriname, of Dutch slavery and of the evils of colonialism. It is neither a primary source nor an up-to-date contemporary study. Even though it is in many ways very up to date in its treatment of the enslaved and of Suriname in general, it is a book that is 88 years old and speaks to the 1930s more than to 2022. When used as a school text, it would require quite a lot of contextualization about anticolonialism in the 1930s and about De Kom's heroic opposition to German fascism, opposition which led to his death in a concentration camp, aged 47 in April 1945. The main problem with this reprint is therefore its contextualization (or lack thereof) as a book of its time which occasionally speaks to modern readers. The translation by David McKay, as far as I can tell without knowledge of Dutch, is very good. His glossary and additional notes of clarification are illuminating. But the book lacks...