Rotterdam’s Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb has issued a formal apology for his city’s role in the slave trade of the 16th century and onward, which helped form the basis of the city’s economy and prosperity over those years.
The mayor in particular apologized for the role of city officials, the predecessors of today’s Council, saying “They were partly responsible for colonial oppression, from the Caribbean and Africa to Indonesia. Traces of this past are visible in contemporary culture, architecture and society and tangible for Rotterdammers with roots in the former colonies. The atrocities and gross violations of human rights that took place there have left deep wounds.”
The city’s action was based on research it commissioned in 2017 to explore the city’s relationship to the slave trade; among its findings were that from 1602 to 1795 most of the directors of the two Dutch companies that directed colonization and the slave trade, the West India Company and the Dutch East India Company, also sat on the city’s Council.
The action follows by a few months a similar apology by Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema during an annual Keti Koti ceremony which commemorates the end of the slavery era.
Image: Rotterdam’s waterfront slavery memorial, a 2013 work by Alex da Silva
