In Frans Hals’s mid-17th century masterpiece, Family Group in Landscape, the gaze of a young black boy may be seen as a reflection of various emotions typically experienced by the victims of the slave trade, which formed the pillar of Europe’s wealth. The entire spectrum of sentiments, from anger and fear to despair and resignation, could be inferred from his piercing stare.
There were approximately 12.5 to 15 million Africans forcefully transported across the Atlantic during the colonial era. They were crammed onto ships like animals, leading to families being torn apart, with many succumbing to fatal conditions during the journey. Upon arrival, they were branded and clamped with metal collars to negate escape, with life expectancy averaging at 10 years once they reached a West Indies plantation.
Remarkably, the boy depicted by Hals seemed to lead a relatively fortunate existence. He is believed to have been given as a present by Jacob Ruychaver, head of a slave depot in Ghana, to his spouse. Parading a black boy as a companion became a display of status amongst the stylish European ladies at the time. Elegantly dressed in an upscale suit and white lace collar, Ruychaver confidently strikes a dance pose while making eye contact with his wife. The picture of tranquillity is completed by the unconcerned Dutch parents and their two white offspring. The servant, despite being dressed fashionably, contradicts the image of luxury and urbanity with the unmistakable distress visible in his eyes as he gazes at the viewer.
The artwork Family Group in Landscape was meticulously chosen as the hallmark painting of a thought-provoking exhibition named Colonial Memory, recently held at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. Juan Ángel López-Manzanares, the curator and project director of the event, mentioned that an overwhelming majority of the art represented at their museum was by male artists, primarily of European or North American origin. His intention was to scrutinise the museum’s collection from a cultural studies perspective.
The museum exhibition’s philosophy can be captured by a 1961 quote from Frantz Fanon, a Marxist philosopher from the West Indies: “We no longer choose to ignore how the prosperity and advancement of Europe were constructed upon the toil and the corpses of black people, Arabs, Indians, and other non-white ethnicities.”
The intention of López-Manzanares is to divert the museum attendees’ attention from the artistic merit of the artwork to the underlying reality within- an examination of the deep-rooted influence of colonialism on our contemporary world.
Europe had reaped a plethora of benefits from the onset of globalisation in the 16th century, primarily due to the conquest of the Americas and exploration of Asia. López-Manzanares states, “We extracted silk, spices and tea from Asia; cotton, cacao, gold, silver, sugar and tobacco from the Americas.” Evidence lies in Dutch still life paintings of the Golden Age that are abound with oriental porcelain and carpets to seashell goblets from the Caribbean.
David Lyon, a British slave-owner who features in an 1825 portrait by Thomas Lawrence, was among the 46,000 families to be remunerated £50,000 by the British government following the abolition of slavery in 1833 – a significant amount for that time. It wasn’t until 2015 that British taxpayers finished paying the interest on the debt created as a result of this compensation.
Colonialism is noted for its victims being frequently asked to pay reparations. In 1825, for example, King Charles X demanded that Haiti – the first independent state founded by former slaves – pay France reparations for the loss of highly productive sugar plantations. Both France and the US, who oversaw Haiti between 1915 and 1934, continued to incur interest on this debt until 1952. The impact of this plunged the once wealthy colony into impoverishment. It was only later that France acknowledged a ‘moral’ debt after the then President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, demanded $21 billion in reparations in 2003.
Israel, on multiple occasions, has opted to withhold taxes it collects for the Palestinian Authority as a form of retribution: for the Intifada in 2000, the election of Hamas in 2006, Palestine’s application for recognition by the UN General Assembly in 2011, its intent to join the International Criminal Court in 2015, and throughout the recent year of conflict in Gaza.
In 2011, a photograph was captured by Rashid Johnson, an American artist. This picture portrays an elegantly attired African American gentleman contemplating his own reflection, thereby demonstrating the dual identity of African Americans in the US, a central concept put forth by WEB Du Bois, as indicated by López-Manzanares. The notion addresses African Americans’ distinct identity drawn from both African and European roots. Du Bois, who passed away in 1963, greatly influenced present-day thinkers such as Paul Gilroy, a British academic who frequently influences social science discussions.
Gilroy has thoroughly examined the connection between colonialism and the extensive immigration from third world countries to previous colonial powers. The colonial era is far from over with Israel’s extreme right-wing government persisting in their colonisation of the West Bank and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine representing a colonial reconquest.
The exhibition came to a close with a piece by Taysir Batniji, a Palestinian artist, named GH0809 from 2009-2010. Batniji used estate agents’ signs to highlight homes that were destroyed in the 2009 Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip. These signs, bearing sarcastic phrases infused with images of flattened buildings, enumerate the counting of rooms, total space and additional features like gardens and olive trees, while deliberately neglecting to mention their devastated state.