Voices of the Enslaved

How are we to understand the past if it is recounted only through the words of the dominant and if the voices of victims are not heard? While there is a wealth of archival material on the Dutch transatlantic slave trade, testimonials by the enslaved are conspicuously absent, resulting in a skewed image of the past. Karwan Fatah-Black and Camilla de Koning attempt to access the reality behind the colonisers' vision by reading between the lines, filling in the gaps in the documents we have and recreating the everyday experiences of the enslaved. Following the historical lives of enslaved men, women and children, the authors reconstruct the journey from abduction and sale in West Africa, through the harrowing passage and life on the plantations in the Caribbean, to the fates of those who fled into the jungle or rebelled, and finally the fraught road to freedom through manumission. In the process, they show how the enslaved carved out worlds of their own. Smaller individual and greater collective acts of resistance return time and again, testifying to courage in the face of horrific oppression. Through their careful reconstruction of the lives and voices of the enslaved, Fatah-Black and De Koning bring us one step closer to telling the whole story of Dutch transatlantic slavery.