Ruth Leon recommends…Slavery – Rijksmuseum
Ruth Leon recommendsSlavery – Rijksmuseum
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Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, whose videos are always worth watching, has an exhibition detailing the history of slavery perpetrated by the Dutch in Africa, in Brazil and in the Netherlands themselves. They have made a series of short videos based on this exhibition, most are about individual slaves. This one is about a slave-owner, Oopjen, and is narrated by the Rijksmuseum’s Director, Taco Dibbits.
Slavery, he tells us, is not only about the people who were enslaved or the slave owners, but also about people who benefited from the system in many ways, whether consciously or not. Oopjen was such a person. This is her story. There are ten more stories which you can access via the Rijksmuseum’s website.
Are they planning videos of American west coast natives enslaving their brothers tribes too or is it only to shame the white man?
It’s about time that the “civilised” world woke up to what was done to subjugated people’s the world over by European and other nations. If the Dutch are self-flagellating over their colonial past, in fact their neighbour the King of the Belgiums, and Queen Victoria’s first cousin, carried out far, far worse atrocities in the Congo and Rwanda. Now where have I heard that name recently?
Yeah, the history in Belgium is pretty bad and they continue to lack much introspection about it.
A few years ago the government did a massive report about all of the stolen African objects in their museums. While they acknowledged that they were not “gifted” to the monarchs over the years, they argued that they couldn’t be returned or at least not yet because African nations lacked proper museums.
I couldn’t find the Ottoman Slavery Museum last time I was in Istanbul.
I could have asked around but I suspect it wouldn’t have gone down too well.
Westerners tend to think of slavery as confined to their own nations. It was virtually a ghastly worldwide phenomenon. In Doha there is an excellent small museum illustrating the disastrous effects of African/middle Eastern slavery,