Indignant protesters in Cape City have confronted the king and queen of the Netherlands as they visited a museum that traces a part of their nation’s 150-year involvement in slavery in South Africa
ByGERALD IMRAY Related Press
October 20, 2023, 9:19 AM
Khoisan protesters encompass King Willem Alexander and Queen Maxima of the Netherlands on the Iziko Slave Lodge museum in Cape City throughout their state go to to South Africa Friday, Oct. 20, 2023. The king and queen of the Netherlands have been confronted by indignant protesters in South Africa on a go to Friday to a monument that traces a part of their nation’s involvement in slavery as a colonial energy 300 years in the past. (AP Photograph/Nardus Engelbrecht)
The Related Press
CAPE TOWN, South Africa — Indignant protesters in Cape City confronted the king and queen of the Netherlands on Friday as they visited a museum that traces a part of their nation’s 150-year involvement in slavery in South Africa.
King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima have been leaving the Slave Lodge constructing in central Cape City when a small group of protesters representing South Africa’s First Nations teams — the earliest inhabitants of the area round Cape City — surrounded the royal couple and shouted slogans about Dutch colonizers stealing land from their ancestors.
The king and queen have been put right into a automotive by safety personnel and shortly pushed away as among the protesters, who have been sporting conventional animal-skin gown, jostled with police.
The Dutch colonized the southwestern a part of South Africa in 1652 by way of the Dutch East India buying and selling firm. They managed the Dutch Cape Colony for greater than 150 years earlier than British occupation. Fashionable-day South Africa nonetheless displays that difficult Dutch historical past, most notably within the Afrikaans language, which is derived from Dutch and is broadly spoken as an official language of the nation, together with by First Nations descendants.
King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima made no speeches throughout their go to to the Slave Lodge however frolicked strolling by way of rooms the place slaves have been stored underneath Dutch colonial rule. The Slave Lodge was inbuilt 1679, making it one of many oldest buildings in Cape City. It was used to maintain slaves — males, girls and youngsters — till 1811. Slavery in South Africa was abolished by the English colonizers in 1834.
Garth Erasmus, a First Nations consultant who accompanied the king and queen on their stroll by way of the Slave Lodge, mentioned their go to ought to serve to “exorcise some ghosts.”
The Dutch East India Firm established Cape City as a settlement for buying and selling ships to select up provides on their technique to and from Asia. Slaves have been dropped at work on the colony from Asian and different African international locations, however First Nations inhabitants of South Africa have been additionally enslaved and compelled off their land. Historians estimate there have been almost 40,000 slaves within the Cape Colony when slavery ended.
First Nations teams have usually lobbied the South African authorities to acknowledge their historic oppression. They are saying their story has largely been forgotten in South Africa, which as a substitute is commonly outlined by the apartheid period of brutal pressured racial segregation that was in place between 1948 and 1994.
First Nations folks have a special ethnic background from South Africa’s Black majority.
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AP Africa information: https://apnews.com/hub/africa