The object embodies Dutch colonial power. On its underside, letters forming ‘AFRICA’ are written in gold following the outline of the West African coastline. The aforementioned forts are represented on some of the sides of the box. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam holds a small box (5.8 x 18.11.9 cm) made entirely of gold and tortoiseshell, dated from 1749, and commissioned by the Dutch West India Company as a gift for Governor William IV, Prince of Orange. Gold and tortoise shell, 5,8 x 18, 11, 9 cm. Lid for Box of the Dutch West India Company, 1749. Around 1611 the Dutch built their first fort, which they later named Nassau after a medal-winning soldier.įig. In addition to gold and ivory, it was the enslavement of African men and women, and their deportation to the Americas, that greatly enriched the beneficiaries. Between 15, two hundred Dutch vessels were recorded as having made merchant voyages to the Gold Coast and the adjacent African coasts. 130 years after the fort was built, the Dutch settled on the shores of the Gold Coast. In 1482, barely ten years after their arrival, the Portuguese built a fort – São Jorge da Mina – to protect their trade. For example, the coasts of present-day Ghana underwent colonial occupation, first by the Portuguese, then by the Dutch and finally by the English. The long history of gold and slavery runs parallel to a chronology punctuated by European geopolitical domination. Box of the Dutch West India Company, 1749, Gold and tortoise shell, 5,8 x 18, 11, 9 cmĪmsterdam, Rijksmuseum (NG-NM-824). In the contemporary period, the study of certain artistic practices stemming from performance and popular culture such as soul or hip-hop music confirms that gold worn to excess is an expression of power.įig. Their agency acts as a source of social critique and political emancipation from racial discrimination. Let us consider a reversal: that of the reappropriation of their objectified bodies by women and men, releasing themselves from this devaluation by wearing gold jewelry. 47.īetween the gold chains, bracelets, and necklaces, signs of a lowered social status for More, and gold as a source of “degradation” for Hartman, another, complementary, hypothesis, can be put forward, one that treads a parallel yet different path. Hartman continues: “What better illustration of the degradation of gold than its capacity to transform persons into things, what better example of its offensive character than the excremental conditions of the barracoon what better sign of its mutability than the “black gold” of the slave trade.” 3 Saidiya Hartman, op. Devalued and degraded, gold is given the same status as slaves. In More’s story, the island of Utopia is a place where people live without money and the values of contemporary society are overturned: gold follows this narrative. Moreover they employ the same metals to make the chain and solid fetters which they put on their slaves » 2 T. «, from gold and silver they make chamber pots and all the humblest vessels for use everywhere, not only in the common halls but in private homes also. Not mentioned by Hartman, the beginning of More’s sentence is important to understand the larger context of this quote: Hartman, Loose Your Mother, A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007, p. She underlines the contradiction of a utopian society replicating the subjugations of slavery and quotes an extract from the “Second Book” of Utopia 1 S. In the first chapter, entitled ‘Afrotopia’, she refers to Thomas More’s Utopia, published in 1516, contrasting the term ‘utopia’ with ‘afrotopia’. Her book intertwines personal (some of her ancestors were slaves from Suriname deported there by the Dutch) and collective memory. In her 2007 book, Lose your mother, A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, Saidiya Hartman, a professor at Columbia University, recounts her journey to Ghana in search of the sources and vestiges of African slavery. People enslaved in gold mines from the 15 th century onwards, first on the western coasts of Africa, and then in the Americas (notably in Brazil, Panama, Colombia and the United States), were referred to as “black gold”. A precious, coveted, metal, it is inseparable from the economic exploitation of the bodies involved in its mining. It will focus on the history and memory of slavery as a political tool, as well as its use for thinking through contemporary art. This text is made of fragments of a manuscript to be published in 2023 by B42, in their series “Culture”, edited by Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc.
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