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I am in the Frimangron district of Paramaribo, standing in front of the birthplace of Anton de Kom. It’s a corner building. On the sidewalk in front of the house is a memorial stone with a quotation from the famed Surinamese resistance leader: “Sranan, my fatherland, one day I hope to see you again. The day all your misery has been wiped away.” Less than fifteen feet behind the stone, the two-story wooden house looks broken down. Drab vertical beams hang askew from nails, and part of the zinc roof has caved in. One window shutter is open, a curtain pulled aside; this is still someone’s home. Beside it, a plantain tree half-conceals the low house next door. Down the walkway between the two homes, a skinny black man comes out of the backyard. His hair and beard are gray. His T-shirt is too big for him; so are his flip-flops. Holding a flower rolled up in newspaper, he sits down on the stoop in front of the former De Kom family home. I’m curious who the flower is for. He pays no attention to me – so many people take photos here.

In the 1930s, hundreds of people stood waiting here to speak to Anton de Kom. Many were unemployed; others were workers struggling to survive on meager wages. After the abolition of slavery in 1863, the Dutch authorities had rounded up indentured workers in what were then British India and the Dutch East Indies to work on the plantations of Suriname. Later, when the agricultural economy went into decline, those workers had followed in the footsteps of the once-enslaved people, flooding into the city to find work. But Paramaribo, too, was riddled with poverty. They hoped for a chance to sit down at the little table in the back garden with the man who had returned from Holland with a fresh wind of resistance.

Cornelis Gerhard Anton de Kom was born in Paramaribo in 1898. He earned a degree in bookkeeping and worked for a while at the offices of the Balata Compagnie, which was in the business of harvesting balata, a kind of natural rubber. De Kom was struck by the difficult lives of the balata bleeders: laborers, mostly creoles (the term then in common use in Suriname for the descendants of freed slaves), who tapped the rubber trees in the stifling heat of the rainforest. He resigned and, in 1920, left for the Netherlands, where he married a Dutch woman, Petronella Borsboom.

As one of the few people of color in the country, De Kom came into contact with Javanese nationalists who were fighting for an independent Dutch East Indies: in other words, for Indonesia. That was when he first felt the winds of freedom blowing. He began to write articles for the Dutch Communist Party magazine; at the time, that was the only party with a clear anti-colonial stance. His articles and the revolutionary thrust of his arguments caught the attention of the Surinamese labor movement. He was especially popular with that group for criticizing wage reductions for indentured workers.

In late 1932, De Kom and his wife and children, four by then, returned to Suriname by ship to look after his ailing mother – who died during their voyage. Like-minded Surinamers were eagerly looking forward to De Kom’s visit. In the backyard of his childhood home, he set up an advisory agency and took meticulous notes on his visitors’ grievances. The Javanese, who felt disadvantaged relative to other ethnic groups, were the most likely to turn to “Papa De Kom,” as they soon began to call him. Their heartfelt wish was that De Kom would lead them back to Java like a messiah. He wrote about them in We Slaves of Suriname: “Under the tree, past my table, files a parade of misery. Pariahs with deep, sunken cheeks. Starving people. People with no resistance to disease. Open books in which to read the story, haltingly told, of oppression and deprivation” (p. 203). De Kom promised to submit their grievances to the colonial authorities, but the unrest he caused was anything but welcome to Governor Abraham Rutgers.

On February 1, 1933, Anton de Kom led a group of supporters to the offices of the administration. He was arrested on suspicion of attempting to overthrow the regime.

From the street, none of the backyard is visible. The sidewall of the house is completely covered with zinc, and a large mango tree leans on the roof. In front of the neighboring house on that side, a woman is raking the fallen leaves and fruit into a pile. She is wearing a pink skirt, a tight sweater, a cap, and dark glasses. Like many people here, she probably bought her outfit from one of the cheap Chinese clothing shops found all over Paramaribo. The few with more to spend buy their clothes abroad or online. In some respects, today’s city remains much like the Paramaribo in which De Kom grew up in the early twentieth century – even if the rich no longer live in the white-and-green mansions in the historic center, but in modern stone villas in leafy suburbs with names like Mon Plaisir and Elisabeths Hof.

It is not surprising that a revolutionary such as De Kom had his roots in a working-class district like Frimangron. In the days of slavery, enslaved people who had managed to purchase their freedom settled on the undeveloped outskirts of the city. Before then, emancipated house servants had made temporary homes in slave hovels in the backyards of Paramaribo’s mansions. Frimangron literally means “freed people’s land.” On the long sand roads, the new citizens built simple dwellings and practiced trades. The main traffic artery was Pontewerfstraat. From its small workshops came the sounds of carpenters sawing and cobblers pounding and tapping, of tanners and tinsmiths. The women there did laundry or ironing for the white and light-skinned elite who held the power in the Dutch colony. This street, renamed after Anton de Kom in the early 1980s, is the location of the house where he was born.

De Kom must have spent a good deal of time as a child on the very stoop where the elderly man is now sitting. His father had been enslaved, and his grandmother taught her grandchildren about “the sufferings of slavery,” in the words of De Kom’s fierce indictment We Slaves of Suriname. He published the book in 1934, a year after the colonial authorities banished him from Suriname.

De Kom was a quick student and must have learned from a young age not to take injustice for granted. Many children in his neighborhood went barefoot, wore rags, and roamed the streets after dark. Education was compulsory, but few parents could afford the school fees, let alone decent shoes and school clothes. They had a hard enough time giving their children a simple meal, such as rice and salt fish, every day. If they could, they sent their children to work as kweekjes, sweeping, raking, and lugging pails of water for a wealthy family in return for room and board. Child labor was rife.

Anton de Kom’s own childhood was probably easier. His father scraped together a living from his patch of soil and also worked as a gold miner. Young Anton must now and then have passed through Oranjeplein, a stately square in the alien realm of the city center, where the statue of Queen Wilhelmina stood in front of the governor’s magnificent palace, although the monarch never visited her colony. Under the tamarind trees around the square, the upper middle class promenaded in their walking suits and long white dresses. In Frimangron, everyone was black. That is still mostly true today.

One Sunday morning, I drive down Anton Dragtenweg, along which handsome houses overlook the Suriname River. My destination is the district of Clevia: tight rows of Bruynzeel houses, mass-produced modular wooden dwellings with front and backyards. I park beside a recently sanded fence. “I’m painting the gate,” Cees de Kom told me on the telephone, sounding a little breathless. Anton de Kom’s son is now ninety-one years old but still looks sprightly. He invites me to walk up the stairs to the balcony ahead of him. His wife, one year younger, shakes my hand just as energetically.

Cees de Kom and I have something in common: we’re both what used to be called “halfbloedjes,” multiracial people with a black father and a white mother. The accepted term these days is “dubbelbloeden,” not half but double bloods, and no longer in the childish diminutive form. When I speak to Cees at events – most recently at a screening of a film about his father’s life – he never fails to point out this similarity between us. If anything in his life has left scars, it is being described as “half.”

Cees, born in 1928, was four years old when the family arrived in Suriname. After his father’s arrest, a crowd of protesters gathered in front of the administration offices to demand his release. The police opened fire. Two people were killed and twenty-two wounded. For more than three months, De Kom was held prisoner in Fort Zeelandia. By historical irony this was the very fort, built by the Dutch, where slaveholders could pay to have their so-called “disobedient slaves” disciplined. The Dutch colonists outdid both the English and the French in corporal and capital punishment; their methods included whipping, the cruel torture known as the “Spanish billy goat,” the breaking wheel, and death by burning. De Kom’s imprisonment must have added fuel to the fire of protest within him.

After he was exiled to the Netherlands, the intelligence service kept an eye on him. De Kom was seen as a communist, even though he never joined the Communist Party. He had tremendous difficulty finding work. “I remember my father was always writing,” Cees tells me, “wearing his pencil down to a stub to save money. When World War II broke out, he joined the resistance and wrote for the illegal press. On August 7, 1944, he was arrested by the Germans. My mother sat looking out of the window for hours, hoping he would come back. But he never came. My brother and I were deported to Germany, where we worked on a farm.

“After we returned, we were told we had to leave again, this time to the Dutch East Indies. Restoring law and order there, that was our mission. And my father had sympathized with the Indonesian freedom fighters! I wrote a letter to the minister of defense asking for an exemption. My mother hadn’t heard from my father since the liberation of the Netherlands. The most recent news we had was that he was being held in the German concentration camp Neuengamme. I didn’t want to leave my mother until we found out what had happened to him, but that argument cut no ice with the Dutch authorities. Not until 1950 were we officially informed that my father had died in a camp on April 24, 1945.” Cees points into the living room. “And my mother died in that chair right there – just gave up the ghost. We’d been living in Suriname for years by then, and she was visiting on vacation.” A while ago, he decided the time had come to write his own memoirs: “All the dead weight you carry around.” He hands me a thick manuscript in a ring binder. Two Cultures, One Heart is the title; underneath is a drawing of two overlapping circles, his parents’ wedding rings.

“In the Netherlands, my name was written the usual Dutch way, with a K. I changed the spelling to Cees, which seemed more elegant to me, less Dutch, because in the Netherlands I could find no trace of my Surinamese culture.”

As a boy, he was once on a tram with his father when a woman pointed out Anton to her child with a nod of the head and said, “Look, that’s the bogeyman. Watch out, or he’ll come and get you.” There were also children who taunted Cees: “You don’t have to buy soap, ’cause you’ll always be dirty anyway.” Later, still in the Netherlands, he worked for the PTT – the state postal, telegraph, and telephone service. One day he was discussing cultural differences with his co-workers, and a Dutch co-worker made the clumsy remark, “To people in Groningen I speak with an accent too, you know.” On August 18, 1960, when his father’s remains were reinterred in Loenen, the field of honor for those who died as a result of the war, all the names of the dead were read aloud except De Kom’s. They were later told this had been a technical problem.

“One dirty trick after another,” Cees says with a sigh. Always inferior, always misunderstood – he was sick and tired of it. Six years later, he and his family departed for his father’s country on the ship Oranje Nassau. It was the same voyage his parents had made some thirty years earlier. But even in Suriname, as he discovered, the country’s unique identity is often underappreciated. “Almost all the books read here come from the Netherlands.” The family, through a non-profit, owns the house where Anton de Kom was born, but they do not have the money to restore it. The government has neglected it altogether.

To throw off the yoke of Dutch rule – that was De Kom’s aspiration when he wrote the book that has now become a classic: “No people can reach full maturity as long as it remains burdened with an inherited sense of inferiority. That is why this book endeavors to rouse the self-respect of the Surinamese people” (p. 85). In 2020, the forty-fifth anniversary of Surinamese independence, those words are as true as ever. In We Slaves of Suriname, De Kom was far ahead of his contemporaries – not only in Suriname, but also in the Netherlands. The land that the Netherlands had ruled for more than three hundred years would long remain a colonial blind spot. Only in the past few years has Suriname gained a modest place in Dutch collective awareness. This change is taking place in fits and starts, and the historical narrative coming into the spotlight is not always a pretty one.

When I was growing up in Amsterdam in the 1970s, I wrote a letter to the editors of my favorite girls’ magazine, Tina. I was twelve years old. In my childish handwriting, I complimented them on their work and asked, “Why isn’t there ever a colored girl on the cover?” Every day, I checked my mailbox for a reply. The fact that I never received one wounded me deeply.

Anton de Kom’s work stands out both for its profound eloquence and for the courage with which he points out injustices. It is a tirade against the pragmatic spirit of commerce, the small shopkeeper’s mindset that underlay the exploitation of a country and its people. Though its story is not by any means heartwarming, it is the story we share. The Dutch fathers of the colony boozed, fucked, and flogged with abandon, partly out of boredom and frustration with the tedium of plantation life. Such decadence would have been unthinkable in their own strait-laced homeland.

As a Surinamese schoolboy, De Kom had learned about Dutch sea rovers such as Piet Hein and Michiel de Ruyter and been required to memorize chronological lists of the colony’s governors, the very men who had imported his African forefathers in the holds of slave ships. In his own book, he delves deep into the psyche of the slaveholders. He is hot on their trail, breathing down their necks, not letting up for a moment. You can practically see De Kom writing: perched on the edge of his chair, craning forward, pressing his stubby pencil to the paper. His style is supple, essayistic, and now and then lyrical, with unexpected imagery. Using the writer’s toolkit, he infuses his work with color and emotion. And not once does he forget his own background, so aptly expressed by his use of an odo, a Surinamese proverb: the cockroach cannot stand up for its rights in the bird’s beak.

When did the cover-up of this history really begin? For many years, anyone who brought it up could count on a patronizing response, something along the lines of “But look what the French or the British did, or the Africans themselves!” It’s like the excuses made by buyers of stolen goods when caught red-handed. They point an insistent finger at the thief and the fence: it was them, not me! Yet without demand, there would be no supply. In a few places, monuments are being erected to commemorate the suffering, and explanatory labels are being placed next to statues of disgraced role models. But turning around and looking your own monster straight in the eyes still takes some effort.

We Slaves of Suriname still holds a mirror up to us today. The book delivers a message about might versus minority, capital versus poverty. Finding present-day parallels is easy enough; just look at the wretched circumstances of refugees in the Netherlands and other Western countries. Or Chinese shopkeepers working from early in the morning until late at night, in the clutches of a cartel. Or the drug rings in Latin America that extort money from ordinary citizens, or trafficking in women, or child labor in Asian textile factories. It is always systems that create the framework, and within them there are individuals who profit.

Oppression also depends crucially on stereotyping: us against the strange, unknown other. The rise of right-wing leaders around the world is, in large part, based on this us-and-them thinking. The Other is lazy or criminal, or both. “Do we want more or fewer Moroccans?” Dutch populist politician Geert Wilders has asked. Even firmer language was used in the Dutch campaign slogan “Act normal or go away.”¹ “America First,” but who does America really belong to? All these sound bites suggest a presumed right of ownership. De Kom was only too able to see through this type of spin. He followed the anonymous word “slaves” with the phrase “our fathers.” Our fathers, not mere nameless creatures.

In the world after Anton de Kom, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, and Nelson Mandela, where are the human rights activists who will stand up to fight for rights that seem self-evident? Are the voices of opposition loud enough? Anton de Kom exposed the mechanisms of unfreedom. And of poverty. Therein lies the enduring power of his work.

On the sidewalk in front of Paramaribo’s most famous hovel, the old man’s flower is drooping in the heat. He stands and shuffles out into the street in his oversized slippers.