The Repatriation of Surinamese Archives from the Netherlands

Abstract

What if a country asks its archives back from its former colonizer? What if there are doubts regarding the capability of this country to manage these archives in a proper way? What if researchers strongly oppose even the thought of repatriating these archives? What if there is a written statement of 1916 proclaiming that moving these archives would be temporal? From the year 1916 on 800 metres of archives of the Dutch colonial government in Suriname were transported to the Netherlands because no facilities were available there to store these archives in a professional way. The National Archives in The Hague became the new keeper. In 2006, Suriname let the Netherlands know that they were ready to welcome these archives back. This chapter describes the story of these archives, starting with the first transport from Suriname to the Netherlands in 1916 and ending with the last return transport in 2017. What happened in this period of more than a century? What problems had to be solved? A Success Story it would eventually become: the physical archives are again in the country where they belong, their condition is better than before and digital copies are available on the internet, for everybody and for free.

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