Anton de Kom

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Anton de Kom (around 1930)

Cornelis Gerard Anton de Kom (born February 22, 1898 in Paramaribo , Suriname , † April 24, 1945 in the so-called Sandbostel concentration camp reception camp ) was a Surinamese nationalist and resistance fighter against the German occupation of the Netherlands during World War II . He is considered the "founding father" of Surinamese nationalism and a pioneer of anti-colonial historiography.

biography

Anton de Kom's childhood home in Paramaribo

Youth and education

Anton de Kom was Afro-Surinamer and was born in Paramaribo as the son of the farmer and gold prospector Adolf Damon de Kom and Judith Jacoba Dulder. His father, who was barely a year old at the time of the abolition of slavery on July 1, 1863, was born into slavery. The family comes from the Molhoop plantation on the Cottica (river) , where sugar cane was last planted. His mother was the daughter of ransomed slaves. Anton de Kom had five siblings. The surname is a reminder of the family's slave past. Kom is the reverse of Mok , the name of the slave owner.

De Kom attended elementary school and then the Paulus School. He graduated from the school with a diploma in accounting . He then worked from 1916 to 1920 as an office worker at the Balata Compagnieën Suriname en Guyana . Soon he began to get involved in the interests of the uneducated balata bleeders (rubber cutters ), he was nicknamed Papa De Kom .

In the Netherlands

De Kom with his wife Petronella

In 1920 Anton de Kom traveled to the Netherlands . Here he did a year of voluntary service with the Second Hussar Regiment in The Hague , where he was the first and only black. A former comrade recalled that he was popular but quickly became angry when it came to Suriname or his skin color. De Kom was a good athlete, always dressed perfectly and made an impression on women; In the nightlife of The Hague, he made a name for himself as a tap dancer .

After the end of his service, de Kom stayed in The Hague and took on various office activities, including at Reuser en Smulders in the areas of coffee , tea and tobacco . There he met Petronella Catharina “Nel” Borsboom from the Netherlands, whom he married on January 6, 1926. The couple had three sons and a daughter. In February 1927 he took part in the International Congress against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism in Brussels . There the League against Imperialism and Colonial Rule was founded, which was under the aegis of the Communist Party and of which de Kom became a member. De Kom was arrested for the first time in September 1927 for "seditious communist activities". He wrote articles for De Tribune and the De Communist Gids under the pseudonym Adek and was a member of the Authors' collective Links Richten , which sympathized with communism. In 1931 he was dismissed from Reuser en Smulders , which was also due to his increasing political activities, which became more and more decisive and radical .

Return to Suriname

After Anton de Kom had received approval from the colonial administration to return to Suriname, he embarked with his family on December 20, 1932 for Paramaribo, where he arrived on January 4, 1933. One of the alleged reasons for the trip to Suriname was the serious illness of his mother, who had however died before his arrival. When he arrived in Paramaribo on January 4th, 1933, a large crowd of Surinamese police officers were waiting for De Kom to keep an eye on him. He and his wife were appalled by the great poverty that prevailed in Suriname. Shortly afterwards he opened an advice office for workers seeking help in his parents' house on the Pontewerfstraat in Paramaribo; sometimes hundreds came in a day. His political goal was a broad consensus among the ethnically divided Surinamers consisting of Afro-Surinamers , Hindustans , indigenous Surinamers and Javanese . The office became the point of contact for the anti-colonial movement.

On February 1, 1933, Anton de Kom was arrested on the way to an audience with Governor Bram Rutgers . A large crowd gathered on February 3rd and 4th to demand the release of de Koms, and again on February 7th, believing the release was imminent. When the people did not comply with the request to disperse, the police fired at them; there were two dead and 22 wounded. After three months of imprisonment, Anton de Kom was released from Fort Zeelandia on May 10, 1933 and deported with his family to Amsterdam by ship.

De Kom was under constant surveillance in the Netherlands by the police and the Central Inlichtingendienst , which is why he could not find a job. Therefore he continued to write on his book Wij slaven van Suriname . He had been collecting material for this anti-colonial standard work since around 1926. It was the first publication that presented the history of slaves from the perspective of enslaved people. It appeared in a censored edition in the Netherlands in 1934, although the authorities tried to prevent its publication. For example, police dug up the family's garden believing the manuscript was buried there. To protect Anton de Kom from reprisals, the book's editor, Jef Last , claimed he wrote the book.

The book sold well - also because of the actions taken by the authorities - and brought him into contact with the artistic circles of the time; so he made friends with the actor Simon Carmiggelt . After the German armed forces invaded the Netherlands, the book was banned immediately. A translation into German by Augusta de Wit entitled Wir Sklaven von Suriname was published in Moscow in 1935 and in Zurich in 1936 . It was not until 1971 that an uncensored Dutch edition of Wij slaven van Suriname appeared , the 17th edition of which was published in 2020. In 1981 a Spanish edition was published in Havana and in 1987 an English edition in London . A French translation came about through the mediation of Jef Last, who was friends with André Gide . De Kom also wrote novels, poems, short stories, scripts and other political writings, most of which were not published. In 2008 literary manuscripts that were believed to be lost were found and are now in the Nederlands Letterkundig Museum in The Hague .

Resistance and death

Because of his unemployment, Anton de Kom and his family, who were exposed to undisguised racism , lived in poor conditions and increasingly suffered from depression and paranoia . In 1939 he had to spend three months in a clinic. After the German occupation of the Netherlands in May 1940, de Kom decided to actively participate in the resistance, although he was known to the Gestapo because of his skin color and his political commitment. He became an employee of the underground newspaper De Vonk . On August 7, 1944, Anton de Kom was arrested by the Gestapo on the street. He was first held in the Oranjehotel in Scheveningen and then deported to Vught concentration camp in the Netherlands . From there he was taken to Oranienburg on September 6 and later to the so-called reception camp for the Neuengamme concentration camp in Sandbostel near Bremervörde (between Bremen and Hamburg ). Officially died Anton de Kom on 24 April 1945 in the main camp Stalag XB to tuberculosis . He was 47 years old.

It was not until 1960 that his family found out where Anton de Kom had died when his body was discovered in a mass grave near Sandbostel. She was brought to the Netherlands and buried on the Erebegraafplaats of Loenen . His wife Nel died in 1983 at the age of 85. She is again buried in Suriname, where she died while visiting her son Cees, who lived there.

family

Anton de Kom's daughter Judith is known in the Netherlands for giving lectures on colonialism. A grandson of Anton de Kom is the Dutch psychiatrist and author Antoine de Kom . He is married to the Surinamese-Dutch lawyer and human rights activist Lilian Gonçalves-Ho Kang You , whose first husband, Kenneth Gonçalves , was murdered in Suriname in 1982 together with 14 other opposition activists ( December murders ).

Honors and memories

Still of Anton de Kom in Amsterdam (2017)
The Anton de Komstraat in Paramaribo

In 1982 Anton de Kom was posthumously honored with the Verzetsherdenkingskruis . In 1983 the University of Paramaribo was named after Anton de Kom (short name: Adek). On the Amsterdam Anton de Komplein in Amsterdam Southeast was one of the 24 November 1990 Guillaume Lo A Njoe designed plaque in honor of Anton de Kom revealed. On April 24, 2006, a statue of Anton de Kom was unveiled in the same place. The statue by the artist Jikke van Loon depicts a half-naked man. This type of representation is felt to be discriminatory, especially by many Dutch Afro-Surinamese. The former Pontewerfstraat in Paramaribo was named after him.

For many years there have been plans to renovate Anton de Kom's childhood home in Paramaribo and to open it as a museum. The house is owned by a foundation headed by de Kom's grandson Jules. The municipality of Amsterdam planned a budget for this as early as 2002, and the Mooi Suriname Foundation was committed to this from 2007 . However, the project was not implemented until 2020, mainly because the state of Suriname was not prepared to accept funds from the former colonial power Netherlands. Another problem for the implementation of the plans is the fact that Anton de Kom was appropriated as a figurehead by the military dictator Desi Bouterse . His regime had the portrait of Anton de Kom depicted on banknotes , and a large portrait of de Kom hangs in the headquarters of Bouterse's National Democratic Party . In 2012, Bouterse requested that the remains of de Kom be transferred to Suriname, which was also the wish of the family corresponded.

In 2012 filmmaker Ida Does released the documentary Peace. Memories of Anton de Kom about the life of Anton de Kom.

In the revised educational guideline for the subject of Dutch history in school lessons, Canon van Nederland , presented to the public on June 22, 2020 , Anton de Kom was included as one of a total of 50 thematic threads.

Works

  • Wij slaven van Suriname, Amsterdam 1934 (2nd edition 1971; 9th edition 1999)
  • We Slaves of Suriname, Moscow 1935 (Foreign Workers Publishing Cooperative in the USSR)
  • We Slaves of Suriname, Zurich 1936 (Ring Verlag)
  • Nosotros esclavos de Surinam, Ciudad de La Habana 1981 (Casa de las Americas)
  • We Slaves of Surinam, London 1987 (Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan)

literature

  • Rudolf van Lier: Seed leaving in a grensgebied. Een sociaal-historical study van Suriname , Van Loghum Slaterus, Deventer 1971, ISBN 90-6001-154-6 , pp. 278-282.
  • CFA Bruijning and J. Voorhoeve (main editors): Encyclopedie van Suriname. Elsevier , Amsterdam and Brussel 1977, ISBN 90-1001842-3 , pp. 351-354.
  • Sandew Hira: Van Priary tot en met De Kom. De geschiedenis van het verzet in Suriname 1630-1940 , Rotterdam 1984, ISBN 90-63230400 , pp. 273-321 (Blok & Flohr).
  • Anton de Kom-Abraham Behr Instituut (ed.): Anton de Kom, zijn strijd en ideeën , Amsterdam 1989 (Sranan Buku), ISBN 90-72955-01-3 .
  • Rheinisches Journalistinnenbüro (Ed.): Our victims don't count. The Third World in World War II. Berlin / Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-935936-26-5 .
  • Alice Boots, Rob Woortman: Anton de Kom. Biography , Amsterdam en Antwerpen 2009 (Uitgeverij Contact), ISBN 978-90-254-3248-5 .
  • Karin Amatmoekrim: De man van veel . Prometheus, Amsterdam 2013, ISBN 978-90-446-2126-6 (novel).

Web links

Commons : Anton de Kom  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Kom, Cornelis Gerhard Anton de. In: socialhistory.org. Retrieved August 21, 2020 (Dutch).
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l Kom, Cornelis Gerhard Anton de (1898-1945). In: resources.huygens.knaw.nl. Accessed August 21, 2020 .
  3. ^ John Riddell: The League Against Imperialism (1927-37): An early attempt at global anti-colonial unity. In: mronline.org. July 19, 2018, accessed on August 22, 2020 .
  4. ↑ a b c d e Een surinaamse messias. In: groene.nl. September 2, 1998, accessed August 22, 2020 (Dutch).
  5. ^ Enne Koops: Anton de Kom - Surinaamse vrijheidsstrijder. In: historiek.net. July 6, 2020, accessed August 22, 2020 (Dutch).
  6. ^ Anton de Kom: We slaves of Suriname . Ring-Verlag, Zurich 1936, p. 205.
  7. ^ Anton de Kom: We slaves of Suriname . Ring-Verlag, Zurich 1936, p. 208.
  8. ^ Anton de Kom: We slaves of Suriname . Ring-Verlag, Zurich 1936, p. 210.
  9. ↑ Home: Activist - Anton de Kom. In: antondekom.humanities.uva.nl. Retrieved on August 23, 2020 (English).
  10. ↑ a b c Anton de Kom: 'Strijden ga ik!' In: amsterdam.nl. November 25, 1975. Retrieved August 22, 2020 .
  11. ↑ Stuart Kensenhuis: Anton de Kom: Surinaamse folk hero in De Laatste Getuigen. In: ad.nl. Retrieved August 22, 2020 (Dutch).
  12. ↑ Author: Laatste rustplaats van weduwe Anton de Kom. In: parbode.com. January 8, 2016, accessed August 22, 2020 (Dutch).
  13. ^ Anton de Kom, een korte inleiding. In: ncpn.nl. April 24, 1945, accessed August 23, 2020 .
  14. ^ Piet Gerbrandy: Bruine tantes. In: groene.nl. October 16, 2013, accessed August 21, 2020 (Dutch).
  15. ^ Anton de Kom. In: publicart.amsterdam. June 13, 2018, accessed August 22, 2020 (Dutch).
  16. ↑ Patrick Meershoek: Het huis van verzetsheld Anton de Kom valt bijna om. In: parool.nl. Retrieved August 22, 2020 (Dutch).
  17. ↑ Patrick Meershoek: Desi Bouterse wil resten Anton de Kom naar Suriname. In: parool.nl. February 28, 2012, accessed August 22, 2020 (Dutch).
  18. ↑ Peace. Memories of Anton de Kom. In: idadoes.nl. Retrieved August 22, 2020 (English).
  19. ^ Anton de Kom in Canon van Nederland Dutch, accessed on June 23, 2020.
personal data
SURNAME Kom, Anton de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kom, Cornelis Gerard Anton de (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Surinamese nationalist, resistance fighter and anti-colonial author
DATE OF BIRTH February 22, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Paramaribo , Suriname
DATE OF DEATH April 24, 1945
Place of death Sandbostel