ABSTRACT
Many Dutch people with a Surinamese or Caribbean background are in the process of coping with the colonial past. Generally, they emphasise the effects of the slave trade rather than of the loss of cultural heritage. There has always been less wrangling over colonial collections between the Netherlands, Suriname and the Caribbean islands than between the Netherlands and Indonesia. Is that not remarkable? What do we know about the cultural and historical treasures that came to the Netherlands from these countries? Do these former colonies also have wishes for restitution? Certainly, some collections have already gone back. Thousands of pre-Columbian potsherds went back to Aruba with barely a word. The transfer of colonial archives to Suriname is well known in the archival world but hardly at all outside it. And for the return of an eighteenth-century ceremonial chair to Suriname, a special solution was found.
