On a very sunny Wednesday afternoon, we did a city walk through the city
centre of Groningen on traces of slavery for our bachelor course on cultural
heritage. Our guide led us to many spots in Groningen which we pass by on a
daily basis, but of all these spots, we did not know their history at all. We
decided to find out what the heritage sites, or the heritagescapes are like for
traces of slavery in Groningen. We would like to find this out, to think of ways
how there could be more attention for the slavery traces and to make it more
visible.
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The tour started at the Groninger
Museum, where our guide showed us a picture of the painting of Elsebeth
Schaij, by Hermannus Collenius. On the painting, you can see a black servant
on the side of Elsebeth, in stylish clothes. “In that time (the 18th
century),” our guide Barbara told us, “being painted with a servant on your
side, oftentimes smaller pictured and at the
edge of the painting, was some kind of figure of speech. Also, pictured like this, the white skin of
the woman on the painting should look better.”
This painting is in the Groninger Museum, but we think over there it
is only one of the many paintings, so it doesn’t really stand out. So we
concluded that this first site is only a little visible.
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| St Anthony Guest House (mappingslavery.nl) |
Our tour continued and we walked in the direction of the Gedempte
Zuiderdiep. The Gedempte
Zuiderdiep is a street now, but before 1880 it apparently was the spot
in Groningen where the ships, sometimes with slaves on it but also with goods,
arrived. On the Zuiderdiep a lot of beer breweries established. The water was
not suitable for long journeys, because it would rot easily. Beer was the
perfect solution, because it doesn’t rot that easily, so the WIC ships were
packed with a lot of beer for the crew to drink on their journeys, the crew
members must have enjoyed themselves a lot during these journeys and it is a
miracle that so many ships made it without suffering shipwreck. However, there
were no traces to be found at the Zuiderdiep either.
Our tour continued, and we walked from the Zuiderdiep through the
Oosterstraat to the Grote Markt. We stopped at Hotel de Doelen, where in 1841 a
bold opponent of slavery, John Scoble, stayed. He pleaded for the abolition of slavery
in the Dutch colonies. In the first half of the nineteenth century, a growing
number of organizations turned against slavery. Together they formed the
abolitionist movement. The Netherlands were rather late with the abolition of
slavery, it was only in 1863 that slavery was officially forbidden. The people
who owned slaves got thirty florin compensation for every ‘lost’ slave they had
to give up after the abolition of slavery.
After Hotel de Doelen we walked to the city hall and we ended the tour
at a house where a slave owner had lived. What stroke us during the city walk,
was that our guide showed us mainly sites and spots where the slave owners had
lived or where slave owners had worked. There was not much to see or tell about
the slaves themselves, we barely saw any concrete traces. This is also because
there is little material of the slaves being preserved, which shows how little
people cared about the slaves.
We ended the day in style with a beer on a terrace at the Zuiderdiep and
discussed the city walk and the traces of slavery, or especially the lack of
traces. Some of the sites provided you with a little information on a
small tourism plaque, but that’s it. We had our tour guide to provide us with
information and she told us about the website of mappingslavery.nl, on
which more information on slavery traces can be found, but it is not visible at
all when you walk through the city. In our opinion, it should be made more
visible, and in this way it will also be better known. We missed the visibility
of the heritagescape for the slavery traces. There were no boundaries that mark
a heritage site, no actual cohesion to tell the stories of the slaves and only
very little visibility of the traces, mostly on plaques. Some of the buildings
were still more or less the same, but when you did not know about its past, you
would not have any clue about it. We concluded that it would be a good solution
if the Groninger Museum became responsible of this, and that they should set up
some kind city tour in the weekends and holidays through the city centre and an
additional audio tour through all the traces of slavery, providing you with
more information about the spots. Also the tourism plaques should be more
extended or they should provide you with a QR code, linking you to a website on
which you can find more information about the specific site. Furthermore, the
municipality should set up some kind of path, with visible and recognizable
signposts, covering all the traces of slavery in Groningen. Without these
tours, plaques and signs, nobody will notice the hidden traces of slavery in
the city of Groningen.
Sources:
Garden, Mary-Catherine E. “The Heritagescape: Looking at Landscapes of the Past.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 12, no. 5 (2006): 394-411.
Written by
MB, SL
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