Introduction

The era of decolonisation coincided with Europe's changing status from a continent of emigration to a destination for immigrants. At least five to seven million post-colonial immigrants came to Europe. In today's Portugal, the Netherlands, France and the United Kingdom, first- and second- generation post-colonial immigrants comprise up to 6 to 8 per cent of the population. These countries differ, however, markedly with respect to how they deal with their colonial pasts. In the Netherlands, traces of the colonial past are everywhere, but rarely in an explicit post-colonial context. The flourishing cultural market for ethnic literature and cuisine, the wellvisited post-colonial ethnic festivals and the serious attempts to integrate the history of slavery into the Dutch historical canon, all these phenomena are just fragments of a consciousness that the Netherlands was once an important colonial power, with all its moral implications. Moreover, in comparison to France and the UK, the Netherlands was, for example, relatively late in acknowledging its role and responsibility in the international slave trade, nor has it yet come to terms with its colonial war against the Republic of Indonesia shortly after 1945.

And this is not a matter of colonial amnesia; the facts of the Dutch colonial wars are openly exposed in television series. What is missing is moral indignation. There is no sense of continuity with the colonial past and the concepts of post-colonialism and multiculturalism are hardly connected. This applies both to literature and to academia. Of course, as Pattynama has made clear in the previous chapter, second-generation Indo-Dutch authors like Alfred Birney and Marion Bloem clearly position their work in multiculturalism, but this does not change the general pattern, as observed by Boehmer and Gouda (2009: 39).

The lack of resonance explains why colonial amnesia was unnecessary. There were national stirrings concerning atrocities during the colonial war in Indonesia in 1969, not by coincidence during the Vietnam War. It was already forgotten the day after, disappearing into the margins, and could never become a central theme in post-colonial Netherlands, as was the Algerian War of Liberation in France.