Amsterdam once stood as one of the world’s great capitals, the place from which large ships left to go as far off as the Americas and the islands of Indonesia to trade and conquer. There are reminders all over the city of that history, residues of its imperial past. But what grandeur exists now looks slightly shabby, the city marked by a decline in investments in its public services and widespread disappointment with its political leaders.
There is graffiti across Amsterdam that also calls to mind last year’s massive demonstration of 250,000 people against the Dutch government’s support for Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians and then of the hooliganism of Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters who rampaged the city chanting for the death of Arabs.
These marks — painted on walls or indicated by fraying posters — tell the story of a city that is anxious about its place in the world. There are still large ships in the harbor, but they are not controlled by the Netherlands; these are ships that are driven by the winds of trade blown from other places — eastern Asia certainly, but also North America. Amsterdam is still a port city, but now it is mostly a tourist city: a municipality of less than one million people that draws in over twenty million tourists each year.
Chris Kaspar de Ploeg was born here in 1994, a few years after the Soviet Union had collapsed and after the ships in the harbor loaded with manufactured goods had begun making more trips to Asia than to European consumers. He was so impatient to enter the world that it took his mother only a few minutes of labor to give birth to him in a tall apartment building beside one of Amsterdam’s many canals.
We are in this building three decades later, and he runs about in an apartment that had once been the home of a close friend, talking energetically about his childhood. It was a happy one, surrounded by migrants from the old Dutch colonies of Indonesia and Suriname as well as migrant laborers…
Auteur: Vijay Prashad
