Afterlives of Slavery

A page from an old ship captain’s logbook, with a simple, handwritten sentence on it: one girl, twelve years old, 125 guilders. A dry line hiding an unfathomable sea of pain and sorrow. On view at the Zeeuws Museum, as part of the exhibition on the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.

When the Wereldmuseum made this exhibition in 2007, it was to make visible how the effects of slavery still resonate in the present. The Zeeuws Museum wanted to highlight this fact again, explains Maaike Ritsema: ‘The story about Zeeland cannot be told without sharing something about the history of slavery.’ After all, Zeeland made big money from the slave trade; in fact, Middelburg and Vlissingen were the most important slave-trading cities in the Netherlands.

The Zeeuws Museum added some elements, such as cardboard signs with slogans from a BLM protest on Abdijplein. Work by artists such as Remy Jungerman is also on display. Ritsema: “Many personal stories are told, including by Gloria Wekker and Dorothy Blokland. And many parts are surprisingly topical. It’s not just a historical exhibition. You are constantly being shown how it carries through into the present.