When discussing the abolition of slavery in the Netherlands, people often refer to the end of the brutal slave trade that took place from West Africa to the Americas, known as the Transatlantic Slave Trade. However, slavery in East Africa has sadly been present for a long time as well.
Keti Koti Festival
At the square where I used to live in Amsterdam East, the Keti Koti Festival is taking place today. This commemoration of the history of slavery primarily focuses on Suriname and the Caribbean. But slavery is as old as humanity itself, and unfortunately, it still exists to this day.Slavery in East Africa
On the East African coast, people have been captured and sold as slaves for a very long time. The Chinese recorded this as early as the ninth century in their travel stories to East Africa. They spoke of the immense hospitality of the people, but also how easily they were captured and enslaved by other African tribes. However, slavery here is different from the Transatlantic slavery that we commemorate with Keti Koti. While in West Africa, it often involved strong men who were needed for plantations in the Americas, in the east, it was often girls and women who were taken. From northern Kenya to the far south of Mozambique and present-day South Africa, many daughters disappeared via the slave markets in Zanzibar, where, during the peak period, around 300 women were sold every day.
A slave as a luxury item
The Arabs often took beautiful women with them and ended up in bed with them – and children were born from this. These children were free people, not slaves like their mothers. This was different in the Americas. The Indians also treated a dark beauty as a luxury item; they gained quite a bit of status by keeping a black woman as their companion, just like one would keep a poodle or a tame ibis.Sarah Baartman and The Hottentot Venus Show
Even the Europeans were notorious for this. Showing off such an ‘exotic woman’ went very far and was dehumanising. The famous Sarah Baartman was a Khoi woman, standing at 1.5 meters tall with a large backside. She was the property of the Dutchman Hendrick Cezar. In 1810, he took her to London to exhibit her at Piccadilly Circus in the Hottentot Venus Show. He capitalised on the early 19th-century trend for large backsides. He also flaunted her very dark skin, long labia, and full lips. Afterward, the 'Hottentot Venus Show' travelled to Paris, where Sarah died after a brief illness. Her brain and genitalia were preserved in formaldehyde in Paris, where they were on display in a museum until 1974. When Nelson Mandela became president, he brought Sarah Baartman back to South Africa, and she was buried in her birthplace. Her grave can be visited there.Kim Kardashian
The above paragraph reads like a dark chapter in Dutch and Western history, but oddly enough, Baartman’s body is still considered "hot." Kim Kardashian’s famous 2014 photo was inspired by Sarah Baartman. I’m not entirely sure how to feel about that…
