‘Neocolonial belch’: what can Britain learn from backlash to Dutch slavery apology?

In the Netherlands many felt the move, while welcome, was mishandled and exclusionary, mirroring past inequality

Andy Burnham’s pledge to seek a “structured dialogue” with former colonies to help shape Britain’s first formal state apology for slavery marks the UK’s first tentative step down a path the Netherlands set out on five years ago.

The prime minister’s attempts to initiate a historic shift alongside the royal family – whose customary expressions of “profound personal sorrow”, falling short of an apology, was repeated by King Charles this week – echo a process begun by the Dutch state in 2021.

As London weighs its words, while firmly ruling out any support for reparations, the Dutch experience may provide a preview: in the Netherlands, apologising did not draw a line under the past for everyone, and prompted a political backlash, disillusion among many descendants, and a row over what justice really means.

That is not to say it was not the right thing to do. The apologies were “sensitive, the right words, the right gestures … You could feel the sincerity,” said Linda Nooitmeer, the then chair of the National Institute for the Study of Dutch Slavery and its Legacy (NiNsee).

It was about “restoring the humanity of the ancestors”, because a key historical element had been “the dehumanisation of people of African descent”, she said. “But when it comes to real change, the rights of people of African descent, we have another issue.”

Merchants of the so-called Dutch Golden Age trafficked an estimated 600,000 enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to brutal plantations in Suriname and Curaçao, as well as between 660,000 and 1 million across the Indian Ocean and East Indies.

By the 1770s, slavery-derived wealth generated more than 10% of the GDP of the province of Holland. Even the crown was enriched: Willems III, IV and IV made what equates to €545m (£465m) in modern money from the trade between 1675 and 1770 alone.

The Netherlands was among the last European colonial powers to outlaw the practice, legally abolishing it in Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean on 1 July 1863, 30 years after Britain and 15 after France. The actual end – freedom – came in 1873.

Afro-Surinamese and Afro-Caribbean community campaigners started demanding accountability in the 1980s. NiNsee was founded in 2002, and slavery entered the school curriculum in 2006.

The political trigger came in 2020, with the wave of protests that followed George Floyd’s murder in the US. If many had tried to ignore Dutch history, said the activist Patrick Mathurin at the time, “through our activism, we forced them to look”.

On 1 July 2021, Amsterdam’s mayor, Femke Halsema, broke ranks during the annual Dutch Keti Koti (“breaking the chains”) commemorations marking the anniversary of abolition, delivering a direct apology on behalf of the municipality.

Amsterdam’s involvement, Halsema said, had been “direct, worldwide, large-scale, multifaceted and protracted”, and the city’s immense past wealth and commercial legacy were “indivisible from persistent racism that still festers”.

Amsterdam’s apology was followed by those of Rotterdam, Utrecht and The Hague, and by the Dutch central bank. The then prime minister, Mark Rutte, who had insisted as late as 2020 that a national apology would only “polarise society”, began to waver.

In December 2022, Rutte delivered a landmark speech at the Dutch National Archives recognising slavery as a “crime against humanity” and admitting the Dutch state had “enabled, encouraged, and profited from slavery” for more than 250 years.

“Today, on behalf of the Dutch government, I apologise for the past actions of the Dutch state: posthumously to all enslaved people worldwide who suffered from those actions, to their daughters and sons, and to all their descendants down to the present day,” he said.

Six months later, on 1 July 2023, in Amsterdam’s Oosterpark, King Willem-Alexander also asked forgiveness: “As your king, and as a member of the government, I make this apology myself. And I feel the weight of the words in my heart and my soul.”

Afterwards, however, there was anger among activists, advocacy groups and descendants, who criticised Rutte’s apology in particular as hasty, paternalistic and made without real consultation.

Roy Kaikusi Groenberg, of the Honour and Recovery Foundation, called the prime minister’s declaration a “neocolonial belch”. Caribbean intellectuals pointed out the obvious and painful irony of European politicians dictating the terms and timing of reconciliation.

While the Dutch government explicitly ruled out direct financial reparations to individuals or former colonies, it did back its apology with a €200m fund and an initial commitment towards a National Slavery Museum.

The money was divided between state-led educational and awareness programmes, such as overhauling school curriculums, funding historical research and preserving colonial heritage, and social initiatives and community grants to grassroots groups.

Nooitmeer, who has since set up Deeeni, a grassroots organisation focusing on economic initiatives in the African-origin community, said at the time there was a danger of apologies becoming the “mirrors and crystals of the 21st century”.

Mirrors and crystals, she noted, were the symbolic, empty trinkets with which enslaved people were once bought and sold. “Slavery was an economic system,” she says now. “If you say all this was wrong, when are you ready to talk about the economic side: reparations in the broader sense?”

Community ownership of the whole process “was completely lacking”, she said. While apologies might be made, “as long as the community is excluded from the decision-making process, the old mechanisms of inequality simply remain”.

A key lesson from the Dutch experience, Nooitmeer said, was that people of African descent today need some kind of “agency over what reparations should look like – and when they are considered sufficient”.

The Netherlands also witnessed a conservative political backlash. In 2021, only 31% of the Dutch public said they supported the idea of a national apology for slavery, said Sjoerd van Heck of Ipsos I&O, while 55% opposed it.

The numbers converged somewhat, reaching 38% in favour and 49% opposed in 2022 and, after the Rutte and Willem-Alexander apologies, 40% for versus 46% against, Van Heck said, but added: “It’s clear that the subject remained one that sharply divided the population.”

That was grist to the mill for Geert Wilders, who, like Europe’s other populist far-right leaders, has long ridiculed state apologies for past wrongs and pledged to rewrite school textbooks to emphasise their nation’s achievements. His Freedom party (PVV) won a shock victory in 2023 elections.

The National Slavery Museum, conceived with Surinamese, Caribbean and Dutch community participation and backed by €80m from Amsterdam city hall and the national government, is due to open in 2030.

But for Britain, the Dutch experience suggests that state apologies, while plainly welcome, may prove not so much a neat final settlement with colonial history as the opening of a new and almost certainly contested phase of reckoning.