If history is a wilderness, then the canon is a road map. Next year, the Netherlands will receive a new historical canon: the Black Canon, which focuses on the history of slavery and its legacy. What can and cannot be included will be the subject of a major conference on Saturday, attended by Minister of Education, Culture and Science Eppo Bruins (NSC).
The canon is an initiative of the National Institute for the History and Heritage of Dutch Slavery (NiNsee) and will be drawn up next year. NiNsee’s goal is not to pit the black canon against the white national canon, says director Urwin Vyent. According to him, the new canon is primarily intended as a complement.
Controversial
What’s the point of this new canon? For although road maps through the past are a popular instrument for making history digestible, the phenomenon of the canon is also controversial. Anyone who constructs a canon creates a dominant narrative, creates a hierarchy in history and excludes something, is a critic of historians.
“A canon is important because it helps people understand their needs is, to fully understand their past. And to understand each other well,” said Vyent. This is a tool to help you talk about that past. He gave the example of a guest lecture he delivered some time ago in Amsterdam-West, in a class attended by Moroccan and Surinamese youth.
“When the Moroccan kids in class found out that I was Surinamese, they called me a few words in Surinamese. Just slang for them.” Not for Vyent: he took the opportunity to explain how much struggle had been undertaken to ensure the survival of the Surinamese people.
He himself was not allowed to speak the language at school. “If I do that, I have to wash my mouth.” This is also something new for Suriname’s younger generation. “This creates more respect and understanding in the classroom,” Vyent said.
According to him, the recognition of the Sranan (Surinamese) language and also Papiamento (a creole language spoken in Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao) will nevertheless be included in the Black Canon. “It is precisely that struggle that is tied to the struggle to recognize the past of slavery.”
A canon as a compass
Ruben Severina, who has been fighting for the recognition of Papiamentu as a minority language in the Netherlands since the 1990s, also agrees. He will give a talk at the conference on Saturday. The fact that Papiamentu has held the same status as Frisian in the Netherlands since the beginning of this year makes him proud. He believes the black community needs that pride.
“One of the consequences of the history of slavery is that descendants have a sense of inferiority. Therefore, the Black Canon must first focus on ourselves and secondly be an inspiration for the national canon. Let us unite our heroes and events as a compass.”
Spiced nuts
Specialized professor and anthropologist Francio Guadeloupe sees the black canon ‘not just another canon, but a completely different way of seeing’. He would propose at the conference to include not only the people and events in the canon, but also ‘what the Dutch smelled and sounded like’ as a result of slavery.
Take the seasoned nuts, which are already on the shelf. In the eighteenth century, peanut sauce got its current composition thanks to spices from the East: cinnamon, ginger, cloves, pepper. Guadeloupe wants the canon to show that the Netherlands has always been a very diverse country.
Esther Captain, historian and researcher at the Royal Institute for Language, Geography and Ethnology, believes in the motto: let a thousand canons flourish. “The more, the better. Black canons can signal, complement and correct national canons that have long been static. These canons do not conflict with each other, they coexist.”
He himself gave a lecture on apologizing for slavery – an important historical moment that should not be missed in the canon. “But there are also a lot of dilemmas associated with it. Because who in canon gets the credit? Was it the Prime Minister who delivered the apology, the king who delivered it a year later, or his descendants who fought for the apology for years?”
What he finds difficult in a canon is that ‘every inclusion also means an exclusion’. Like Urwin Vyent, he hopes for necessary discussions. Which heroes are raised to the shield and which are not? Vyent wasn’t that afraid of that. “The discussion was actually good. Of course you can’t fit three hundred years into a canon like that.”
Also read:
How the discussion of the history of slavery shifted from the letters section to the front page
The fact that the government apologized for its history of slavery cannot be seen in isolation from years of social debate on the matter. A reconstruction: how ‘their’ history becomes ‘our’ history.