In commemoration of the International Day of Commemoration of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, an exhibition named Slavery: Ten Real Tales of Dutch Colonial Slavery debuted at United Nations Headquarters one week ago (Tuesday, February 28).
The exhibition was made possible by a collaboration between the United Nations Outreach Programme on Transatlantic Slave Trade and Slavery, the Rijksmuseum, and the Permanent Mission of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to the United Nations.
The Head of History at the Rijksmuseum, Dr. Valika Smeulders said, “we wanted to show through this exhibition that this history belongs to all of us. It’s national history. It’s about your ancestors. My ancestors. It’s about a people who were part of the system, the people who were enslaved and the people who fought against it. ”Smeulders said, “we’re hoping that these ten stories that we gathered will be the beginning of a larger conversation with millions of stories, because we understand that this is at least 250 years of history and a large, large region that we have to speak about. So, by bringing this out in the open, we are building a common future.”
The adapted version of the Rijksmuseum’s Slavery exhibition, which was originally curated and displayed in 2021 by Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, the Netherlands’ national museum of art and history, will be open to the public from 27 February to 30 March in the Visitors’ Lobby of the United Nations Headquarters.
Smeulders said, “when George Floyd died and all of the Black Lives Matter movements around the world showed that we need to take a harder and more critical look at slavery, that this really pushed us forward to bring this to the fore.”
Slavery was prevalent in the Dutch colonial era, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, in Brazil, Suriname, and the Caribbean, as well as South Africa, Asia, and the Netherlands itself. It tells ten actual personal experiences of those who were enslaved, people who profited from the slavery system, and people who spoke out against it.