King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands announced today that he will no longer use the golden royal chariot, which has been at the center of a debate around the country’s colonial past, as it features images of black slaves kneeling in front of them. of their white owners.
The luxury horse-drawn carriage has not been used since 2015. Once fully maintained, a process that took five years is now the main attraction of an exhibition in Amsterdam on Dutch colonial history.
The king considers that the Dutch society is “not ready” to see the carriage, the so-called “Gooden Koets”, to be on the streets again, in the official ceremonies. “We can not rewrite the past. We can try to accept it. “This also applies to the colonial past,” the king said in a video message. “Gooden Koets will not be used until the Netherlands is ready for it. And this is not happening now. “As long as there are people living in the Netherlands who feel the pain of discrimination on a daily basis, the past will cast its shadow over our time.”
The royal family used the carriage for baptisms, weddings and other ceremonies. It is an object that has divided society, because on its left side are depicted black men, kneeling in front of their white owners – among them a young woman, sitting on a throne, symbolizing the Netherlands, to which slaves offer cocoa and cane. Also, a white man gives a book to a black boy, a scene that the painter Nicholas van der Vei had declared in 1896 to symbolize “culture”.
In the Netherlands, as in other European countries, the debate over the colonial past and slavery was rekindled by the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States.
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