Every year in mid-November, the Netherlands begins its extended round of Christmas season festivities which, unlike in many countries, peak not on 25 December but on 5 December, or Sinterklaas – Saint Nicholas’ Eve. In cities and towns across the country and via broadcasts on national television, the Dutch equivalent of Santa Claus makes his arrival (intocht), coming not from the North Pole by sleigh but from Spain by boat. He is publicly welcomed by millions of spectators who typically brave inclement weather to watch him disembark from his steamboat, mount his white horse, and begin his procession through the streets. This national ritual captivates not only children and their parents but seemingly much of Dutch society, whose citizens treasure fond memories of the seasonal fun bookended by the local arrival ceremonies and the evening of the fifth, a family occasion when children receive presents from Sinterklaas. Even more beloved than Sinterklaas himself, an austere, almost larger-than-life elderly man dressed more like the Pope than the jolly Santa familiar in English-speaking countries, are the many helpers that make up his entourage: the clownishly boisterous group of men who collectively go by the name of ‘Zwarte Piet’, Black Piet. And every year, Zwarte Piet grows more controversial than before for the racist and colonial connotations he holds for a substantial minority of people in the Netherlands, once the heart of an overseas empire and now a postcolonial, multicultural society transformed by migration, much of it from former colonies.

Although commonly described as if its contours were age-old, like many European traditions Sinterklaas as celebrated today has only acquired its most recognizable aspects since the mid-nineteenth century, a time when the Netherlands had yet to abolish slavery in its colonies. While Zwarte Piet is officially proclaimed to be a Moor dressed in Renaissance attire, his role and appearance bring forth connotations of slavery and the blackface traditions once widely found in many Western societies scarred by racial inequality. Black Piet's die-hard defenders – of which there are millions – deny that he is black because he is or once was a slave from the West Indies, where the Netherlands ruled plantation colonies such as Dutch Guiana (now Suriname) and islands in the Antilles (West Indies) for centuries.

‘All men are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’ Standing before his supporters in Hanoi on 2 September 1945, Ho Chi Minh delivered a Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam whose opening words invoked the United States’ Declaration of Independence from Britain of 1776. But his focus immediately shifted to the revolutionary ideology of France, which had gradually assumed control over Vietnam's three component territories of Tonkin, Annam, and Cochin China starting in the 1850s. ‘The Declaration of the French Revolution made in 1791 on the Rights of Man and Citizen also states: “All men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights”’, he continued. But the French systematically denied to their colonial subjects what they had claimed for themselves starting in 1789. For the better part of a century, ‘the French imperialists, abusing the standard of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, have violated our Fatherland and oppressed our fellow citizens. They have acted contrary to the ideals of humanity and justice’, Ho insisted. As colonizers, the French had long withheld democratic political liberties from the Vietnamese, blocked their national unity, and ‘built more prisons than schools’. Economically, they ‘robbed us of our rice fields, our mines, our forests, and our raw materials’, dominated the financial and export sectors, extracted extortionate taxes that impoverished the Vietnamese peasantry, and exploited workers. Dismissing France's claims to and policies in Vietnam as a hypocritical affront to its own revolutionary national pedigree all along, Ho simultaneously declared independence and insisted that as far as France was concerned Vietnam was already free. Japan's occupation of much of Southeast Asia during the Second World War had effectively dissolved French authority; Japan's surrender opened up a power vacuum comparable to that Sukarno stepped into in Indonesia that allowed the Viet Minh – the nationalist front Ho spearheaded – to seize the reins. If the Japanese had begun the process of removing the French, the Viet Minh completed it during the August Revolution of 1945. ‘The truth is’, Ho emphasized, ‘we have wrested our independence from the Japanese and not from the French’; by 2 September, French rule was already history.

Introduction

In its exhibit entitled Mwana Kitoko – Beautiful White Man, the Belgian Pavilion at the 2001 Venice Biennale staged ten new paintings by Luc Tuymans, one of Europe's leading contemporary artists. At the British Pavilion two years before, Chris Ofili's Union Black (discussed in the previous chapter) had engaged with British national symbols and a transnational black culture reflecting the multicultural aftermath of empire; Tuymans’ contribution to the next Biennale in turn probed his own country's deeply problematic colonial and decolonization history itself. His Mwana Kitoko series challenged many long-standing Belgian understandings and fantasies about the Congo, starting with those that had taken centre stage when King Baudouin toured the colony in 1955 (see Chapter 4). Tuymans excavated André Cauvin's state-approved Bwana Kitoko documentary project produced in commemoration of the king's visit, contesting its assumptions at the most fundamental level by renaming it. In replacing ‘Bwana Kitoko’ (‘noble lord’) with ‘Mwana Kitoko’ (‘beautiful boy’), Tuymans reinstated a Congolese way of describing Baudouin in 1955 that the colonial authorities, finding it overly irreverent, had modified at the time. Adding ‘white man’ underscored the role of race in the king's emergent persona as a twenty-five-year-old who had recently ascended the throne in divisive circumstances after Belgium emerged from the trauma of Nazi wartime occupation.

Throughout his series, Tuymans subjected still-dominant Belgian narratives and memories of the Congo to critical scrutiny, not least by confronting the less-than-‘beautiful’ part that the ‘white man’ (including King Baudouin himself) played in Central African history. Three paintings recast Cauvin's film footage from the 1955 tour, respectively depicting Baudouin's majestic descent from his aircraft, his trip into Léopoldville by motorcade (portrayed by featuring African spectators watching the procession from the upper-floor window of a building), and the leopard skin laid down for him when he reached his destination (an image showing African hands dutifully straightening the skin together with the king's feet after walking across it). Tuymans set out to represent the rituals and pageantry of power while emphasizing its shadowy and unsettling nature – a power replete with clearly recognizable ceremonial trappings and scripted performances but in which the individuals involved lack clear facial features, or even faces.

‘Portugal não é um país pequeno’ – ‘Portugal is not a small country’, read a poster advertising the 1934 Colonial Exhibition held in the city of Porto. This slogan accompanied a map of Europe upon which Angola, Mozambique, and other faraway Portuguese-ruled territories had been lifted out of Africa and Asia, placed side by side, and repositioned as a geographical extension of Portugal itself, superimposed so that they fanned out to cover much of Spain, France, Germany, and Eastern Europe, even extending into Russia. While literally distant and discontinuous, figuratively the colonies were amalgamated and moved towards home to transform Portugal – in reality dwarfed by larger, wealthier, and more politically powerful neighbours – into a European giant. Never mind that Portugal was just one of a number of European nations with an overseas empire: colonies were a source of national pride and aggrandisement, creating an impressive rose-coloured map and an affirmative story Portugal could tell itself, and others, as evidence of an importance that greatly exceeded limited European territorial confines and capabilities.

Not coincidentally, Portugal's insistent colonial propaganda of the 1930s came at a critical historic juncture as the Estado Novo, or ‘New State’, consolidated itself after a military coup in 1926 had ended a republic and ushered in nearly fifty years of dictatorship, mainly under the rule of António de Oliveira Salazar. This half century started with European overseas empires at their peak but gradually witnessed the intensification of international pressures that led to a protracted decolonization process after 1945. During that period, Portugal's experience attested to imperialism's fundamental impact not only on colonized peoples but also within Europe's colonizing nations themselves. In Portugal's case, the importance of overseas engagement to national identity dated back nearly five hundred years to the time when Prince Henry the Navigator and explorers like Vasco da Gama launched the era of the ‘Discoveries’ that made Portugal the pioneering maritime power it became in the early modern era. Assertions of the longevity of its history outside Europe were far more than mere statements of historical fact in the twentieth century: rather, they were politically-motivated pronouncements predicated upon at least as much myth as reality. Defending its global heritage and right to remain overseas was a crucial dimension of Portugal's national identity and culture, particularly in the face of growing challenges that both stemmed from and followed the Second World War.

In mid-1955, Belgium's media was abuzz with the story of a young man's first trip to Central Africa. Departures for the Congo were nothing new: ships sailed regularly between the ports of Antwerp and Matadi, carrying colonial administrators, missionaries, officers, businessmen, settlers, and their families between metropole and colony. Whether or not they themselves were part of the colonial community or personally knew others who were, by the 1950s many Belgians were familiar with the seaborne colonial rites of passage of European departures and African arrivals, if only through the comic book hero Tintin and his small white dog Milou (Snowy), whose global misadventures had famously taken them to the colony in Tintin au Congo in 1930. Subsequently reissued with some revision and new colour illustrations soon after the Second World War, Tintin's journeys as a 16-year-old ‘boy reporter’ grew even better known in the 1950s than when Georges Remi (known as Hergé) first drew him, enhancing his status as a national icon and cult figure – a position he maintains to this day despite recurrent controversies concerning the strips’ anti-Semitic and racist content. But in 1955, the traveller in question was neither the standard-issue colonial representative nor a figure as beloved as Tintin: he was none other than King Baudouin I, making his first royal tour of the Congo and Rwanda-Burundi at the age of 25. And unlike most ordinary Belgians setting off for Africa (and extraordinary ones like Tintin and Milou), King Baudouin went not by ship but on a state-of-the-art aircraft via Sabena, Belgium's national airline.

Baudouin's tour of his nation's Central African territories was intended to turn the page on one of the most challenging and divisive periods in Belgian history. Just as in 1914, Belgium suffered another wartime German invasion in 1940. King Léopold III (Baudouin's father) capitulated after only eighteen days, surrendering the army without the elected government's consent. Unlike the British royal family who famously toughed out the war years in London and unlike Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands who went into London exile when her country was occupied and later returned home in triumph, the Second World War did not ultimately emerge as Léopold III's finest hour or enhance his reputation.

Introduction

In 1965, The Times published a series of reports discussing Britain's ‘Dark Million’ – ‘immigrants’ from the nation's former colonies who had settled in large numbers, mainly after the Second World War. Rendering the link between Britain's imperial history and its current experiences of migration explicit, one segment launched with a stanza from Rudyard Kipling's 1899 poem ‘The White Man's Burden’, referring to the populations colonizers governed in the empire. The journalist reflected:

In this rendition, imperial decline followed former greatness as Britain proved unable to defend its shores against the arrival of Pakistanis and others, peoples now rhetorically reconfigured as ‘debris’ once they came too close to home and encroached upon neighbourhoods, streets, and private homes.

With the decline and loss of empire, postcolonial migration became imagined as the new ‘white man's burden’ and ‘heavy harness’ as venerable aging war veterans made valiant efforts to protect the value of their homes. Peoples long ruled by the British overseas arrived deeply imbued with the history of empire – a history white Britons remembered and misremembered in equal measure. While some commentators imagined empire as signifying both a burden and a source of greatness for Britain, others provided less affirmative assessments.

Britain, dominion ‘daughters’, and India's road to independence

At midnight on 31 December 1929, the Indian National Congress (INC) greeted the prospect of a new year and a new decade with a new set of political demands: purna swaraj. Urged on by incoming President Jawaharlal Nehru, the INC passed the Purna Swaraj Resolution and soon settled on 26 January as Independence Day. At meetings throughout the country, a pledge would be read out proclaiming that ‘[t]he British Government in India has not only deprived the Indian people of their freedom but has based itself on the exploitation of the masses, and has ruined India economically, politically, culturally and spiritually. We believe, therefore, that India must sever the British connection and attain Purna Swaraj or complete independence.’

Purna swaraj marked a watershed within a nationalist struggle against Britain that originated in the late nineteenth century but whose momentum and mass participation had increased exponentially since the First World War. The 1930 pledge emerged as a product of British imperial policymaking since 1917, the Indian political demands it failed to fulfil, and the mounting non-cooperation campaigns they provoked. For the first time, India demanded not simply swaraj (home rule or self-rule) within the British empire but rather the right to break away from it. In so doing, India committed itself to a path that diverged sharply from precedents offered by Britain's dominions, which in 1930 included Canada, Newfoundland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the Irish Free State.

It would take another seventeen years for Britain to grant India its independence. During the interim, the rulers of empire proved reluctant to abandon their stated assumption that any future political advance in the Indian subcontinent would take place according to patterns established in white settler–dominated territories in the nineteenth century. In fact, the British proved as stubbornly resistant to shedding this notion as they once had been to accepting that India might one day follow in dominion footsteps in the first place. From the late 1830s and 1840s on, the so-called ‘white’ settler colonies enjoyed increasing autonomy over their internal affairs. Over time, they achieved ‘responsible government’ – effectively equivalent to full self-government – although Britain maintained control over their external relations. Starting in 1907, colonies with responsible government became known as ‘dominions’, a term distinguishing them from the Indian empire and other colonies directly ruled by Britain.

In June 2004 on the Hobbemaplein, a small square in The Hague, members of the Netherlands’ Indo-Surinamese community proudly unveiled a two-part monument to their collective history of colonial and postcolonial migrations. Despite its chosen name, the National Hindustani Immigration Monument (Nationaal Hindustaans Immigratiemonument) was in fact much more than national. It commemorated a history of two uprootings and resettlements that stretched from indentured labourers’ departure from colonial British India for what was then Dutch Guiana (Suriname) starting in 1873 to the mass Indo-Surinamese migration to the Netherlands in the decolonization era a century later. Three decades on and with a substantial proportion having clustered in and around the city, the Indo-Surinamese had become ‘Hindoestaanse Hagenaars’, or ‘Hindustanis of The Hague’. One bronze sculpture designed by a Surinamese artist featured boats, airplanes, sacks, and suitcases on one side and people in transit on its reverse to depict the two phases of intercontinental migration. Several meters away stood a statue of Mohandas Gandhi, an inspirational migrant himself given his own journeys from Gujarat to Victorian London as a student, to South Africa as a lawyer and activist who fought for Indian diasporic rights, and back to India where he achieved global acclaim as the foremost Indian nationalist who campaigned for independence by non-violent means.

The monument's two components thereby invoked a heritage that greatly exceeded the confines of the Netherlands and its ex-colony in South America to incorporate British South Asia and South Africa, rendering it trans-imperial as much as it was emblematic of (ex-)metropolitan-colonial population flows. Designed by a Dutch artist of Portuguese descent, moreover, the Gandhi sculpture also provided indirect testament to the intra-European movements and diasporas that complemented those coming from Europe's former colonies. On The Hague's Hobbemaplein, the local, national, continental, and intercontinental converged, with the global not reducible to one former European empire alone. And as Indo-Surinamese celebrated their successful re-rooting, socio-economic progress, and cultural adaptation in the Netherlands without having forsaken their roots, their guests of honour endorsed their presence and transition. Together with the city's mayor, the Dutch Minister for Integration congratulated them with the words ‘U doet het goed’, or ‘You're doing well’ – a far cry from the relentless level of public concern then being expressed about other migrant groups who were Muslim as opposed to predominantly Hindu.

Throughout the Second World War, the Dutch Cabinet remained closely attuned to the fate of the Netherlands within Europe and as an imperial power alike. Two of its most prominent members, Prime Minister Pieter Gerbrandy and Foreign Minister Eelco van Kleffens, wrote passionately both during and after the war about one part of the empire in particular: the East Indies. Territorially, the Kingdom of the Netherlands encompassed a small European nation in conjunction with the East Indies as well as the West Indies (which included Suriname on the mainland of South America along with Curaçao and other smaller islands of the Antilles in the Caribbean). But like most leading policymakers and commentators, Gerbrandy and Van Kleffens virtually ignored the western hemisphere and focused on the extensive Southeast Asian archipelago, whose collective population approximated 70 million and where Dutch control had originated over 300 years before. Although the Netherlands had also been present in the West Indies for centuries, the similarities ended there: by the mid-twentieth century, Dutch reflections on their nation's imperial past, present, and future had long looked east and rarely west, and the 1940s proved no different. Late in 1942 Van Kleffens discussed ‘The Democratic Future of the Netherlands Indies’ – apparently considering it so obvious that he meant the ‘East Indies’ he did not even bother with exact specification – as part of Queen Wilhelmina's government-in-exile based in London, where the monarch and her ministers had retreated in May 1940 when the Nazis invaded and occupied their homeland; Gerbrandy's book Indonesia appeared in 1950. Between them fell a series of watershed events, the end of the war, the end of the Netherlands East Indies, and the emergence of the Republic of Indonesia foremost among them.

Though penned under radically different circumstances and looking towards vastly different imagined futures, Van Kleffens’ and Gerbrandy's accounts exhibited a high degree of consensus about the East Indies up until 1942. Van Kleffens was the more critical, contrasting Dutch rule after 1900 favourably with the preceding period. Previous eras may have seen ‘colonial domination and economic exploitation for the benefit, first of the Dutch East India Company, then of the Dutch exchequer, and finally, under the liberal system of laissez-faire, of Dutch and foreign capitalism’ – which, he hastened to add, was nonetheless of considerable advantage to indigenous peoples.

Introduction

‘Will we still be French in thirty years’ time?’ asked Jean Raspail in Le Figaro Magazine in 1985. By 2015, ‘France would no longer be a nation’ but rather ‘nothing more than a geographical space’, and his anxiety over the allegedly imperilled ‘fate of our civilization’ centred on the differential birth rate of two composite ‘communities’ into which he divided the nation's population. The first consisted of persons of French nationality together with those who had come to France from other European countries; the second of ‘non-European foreigners’ hailing primarily from south of the Mediterranean, 90 per cent being of the ‘Islamic culture or religion’. While the fecundity of the first was weak, that of the second was estimated as three times higher and showed no signs of abating. So many non-Europeans could never be assimilated, he stressed, not least because the groups in question possessed values that made them unlikely to want – or even be able – to integrate.

Raspail continually returned to Islam along with the identity and size of the next generation of ‘non-Europeans’ as constituting pivotal national threats. Moreover, after family reunification in France became increasingly common in the wake of what initially had been a predominantly male labour migration, Muslim women became as significant as their children within French public discussions of the threat ‘immigrants’ supposedly posed to the nation. Raspail's article was accompanied by a series of graphs and charts detailing population projections and a photograph depicting Marianne, the female allegorical symbol of the republic, wearing an Islamic headscarf. This visual image was intended to support his assertion that ‘darkness was falling on the old Christian country’; Islam, in other words, was descending to enshroud France's deep-rooted and cherished traditions. He predicted that by 2015 each school would have one ‘Maghrebi or African’ child for every two ‘Français de souche’, children of ‘French stock’. While the notion of the old classroom expression ‘our ancestors the Gauls’ being ‘imposed upon little Algerians or little Africans’ might seem risible, it could be no laughing matter: ‘The Gauls could be swept away and with them all that remains of our traditional cultural values’. In this understanding, children of North African or sub-Saharan African immigrants not only were not, and could never be, French themselves.

Introduction

In the last pages of Faded Portraits, a novel first published in 1954 under his pseudonym E. Breton de Nijs, Rob Nieuwenhuys provided a fictional portrayal of a Dutch East Indies family who had resettled in the Netherlands after Indonesia became independent in 1949. Nieuwenhuys’ account was decisively shaped by his Indies roots. Born in Java in 1908 and the son of a totok – or ‘pure Dutch’ – father and a mother of combined Dutch and Indonesian descent, his family had been linked to Southeast Asia for generations. Aside from his time in the Netherlands as a student, he had seldom lived anywhere else prior to his departure in the early 1950s. Faded Portraits fittingly concluded with a brief account of its transplanted characters’ new lives in cities like The Hague and Arnhem, both of which had traditions of attracting Indies people, totoks and those of mixed ancestry alike:

What awaited such Indies repatriates? At least at the outset, Nieuwenhuys suggested, they continued to rely on a network of fellow ex-colonials and subsisted largely on nostalgia and discontent: