'Can Africans be considered as Swiss?': Dilemmas of Dutchmilitary recruitment in 19th century West Africa - ASC Research Seminar

Ineke van Kessel is a researcher at the African Studies Centre in Leiden, where her work focuses on contemporary South Africa and on the history of Dutch-Ghanaian relations. Her book on the African soldiers in the Dutch colonial army entitled ‘De Zwarte Hollanders’: Afrikaanse soldaten in Nederlands Indië (‘The Black Dutchmen’: African soldiers in the Netherlands East Indies) will be published by KIT Publishers this summer. An exhibition on the subject will open on 12 May at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam.

Discussant: Prof.dr. P.C.Emmer.

Between 1831 and 1872, the Dutch colonial army recruited over 3,000 men from West Africa (present-day Ghana and Burkina Faso) for military service in the Netherlands East Indies. The vast majority of the recruits were of slave descent, although the Dutch initially aimed to recruit free volunteers only. When only a few came forward, the Dutch drew up a treaty with the King of Ashanti, who agreed to deliver 1,000 men in exchange for guns. The soldiers paid for their own manumission with an advance on their army pay. The British government protested that the African recruitment scheme amounted to a form of covert slave trading even though Britain and the Netherlands had signed a treaty in 1818 to ban the Atlantic slave trade. The Dutch government argued that the recruitment scheme in fact served a humanitarian cause, as it allowed slaves to purchase their manumission. It was also argued that soldiers could not be slaves; soldiers had the option of returning to Africa after their army contracts expired; the men were much better off as soldiers in the Dutch army than as slaves in Ashanti; and that the English were not entitled to complain about slave trading since the British West India regiments were engaging in similar practices. Moreover, if the Dutch army could obtain entire regiments from Swiss cantons, then why not from the King of Ashanti?