The look in the eyes of the black boy in Frans Hals’s mid-17th century painting, Family Group in Landscape, could signify despair, anger, fear, resignation or any mix of emotions felt by victims of the slave trade upon which Europe built its fortunes.
An estimated 12.5 to 15 million Africans were packed like livestock into ships and transported across the Atlantic during the colonial period. Husbands were separated from wives, children from parents. An untold number died on the journey. Slaves were branded like cattle and wore metal collars so they could not escape. A slave lived an average of 10 years after arriving at a West Indies plantation.
The boy in Hals’s painting was comparatively lucky. He is thought to have been a gift from Jacob Ruychaver, the director of a slave depot in Ghana, to his wife. It was a status symbol for fashionable European ladies to possess a black boy as a companion. In his expensive suit with white lace collar, Ruychaver jauntily extends a foot in a dance step as he looks into the eyes of his wife. The Dutch parents and their two white children have not a care in the world. The servant, too, wears elegant clothing, but the distressed look in his eyes as he gazes at the viewer seems to refute the happy portrayal of Ruychaver’s wealth and family life.
Family Group in Landscape was the signature painting of a thought-provoking exhibition entitled Colonial Memory held recently at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. “Ninety-five per cent of the artists in our collections are male, and almost 99 per cent are European or North American,” the curator and project director, Juan Ángel López-Manzanares, told me. He wanted to reassess the museum’s collection from a cultural studies point of view.
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A 1961 quotation from the West Indian Marxist philosopher Frantz Fanon sums up the philosophy of the exhibition: “The well-being and the progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races. We have decided not to overlook this any longer.”
López-Manzanares wanted museum-goers to look not at the artistry of the paintings, but to perceive what lies beneath them, to understand how profoundly colonialism has shaped today’s world.
From the 16th century on, the conquest of the Americas and the exploration of Asia marked the beginning of globalisation, to the benefit of European powers. “From Asia we took silk, spices and tea; from the Americas cotton and cacao, gold and silver, sugar and tobacco,” says López-Manzanares. Golden Age Dutch still lifes are filled with carpets and porcelain from the orient, sea-shell chalices from the Caribbean.
In Thomas Lawrence’s 1825 portrait of David Lyon, the British slave-owner dandy wears a fur-lined coat and brandishes a walking stick. His family was one of 46,000 who received compensation from the British government when it abolished slavery in 1833. Lyon was paid £50,000, a substantial sum then. British taxpayers continued to pay interest on the debt incurred by the government to compensate slave owners until 2015.
Victims of colonialism have frequently been forced to pay reparations. Haiti was the world’s first independent state founded by former slaves, but in 1825 King Charles X demanded that Haiti compensate France for having lost the most productive sugar plantations in the New World. France and the US (which occupied Haiti from 1915-34) continued to charge interest on the debt until 1952, impoverishing the once rich colony. In 2003, then President Jean-Bertrand Aristide asked Paris for $21 billion in damages. France later recognised a “moral” debt only.
Israel has repeatedly withheld as punishment the taxes it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority: for the second Intifada in 2000; when Hamas won legislative elections in 2006; when Palestine applied for recognition by the UN General Assembly in 2011; when it applied to join the International Criminal Court in 2015 and over the past year of war in Gaza.
A 2011 photograph by the US artist Rashid Johnson portrays a well-dressed African American man facing his own reflection. “Johnson is showing the double consciousness of black people in the US, a major theme of WEB Du Bois,” says López-Manzanares. Dubois, who died in 1963, said African Americans have a unique identity as heirs of both European and African heritage.
[ Links to slave trade evident across IrelandOpens in new window ]
Du Bois’s ideas were developed by contemporary thinkers such as Paul Gilroy, the English academic who is one of the most frequently cited black scholars in social sciences. Gilroy has explored the link between colonialism and mass migration from the developing world to former colonial powers.
Colonialism has not ended. Israel’s far right-wing government continues to colonise the West Bank. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a war of colonial reconquest.
The exhibition ended with a work by the Palestinian artist Taysir Batniji, entitled GH0809, 2009-2010, in which Batniji made estate agent’s placards of homes destroyed in Israel’s 2009 assault on the Gaza Strip. The ironic texts, interspersed with photographs of pancaked buildings, list the number of rooms, square footage and amenities such as gardens and olive trees without mentioning their ruined condition.