Children on the Fault Lines: A Historical-Anthropological Reconstruction of the Background of Children purchased by Dutch Missionaries between 1863 and 1898 in Dutch New Guinea

Author(s)

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.10876

Abstract

This case study aims at looking behind the construal of imperialism as ‘white people saving brown children from brown people’ by reconstructing the reasons why locally enslaved children became available for missionaries of the Utrechtsche Zendingsvereeniging (UZV) to purchase in Dutch New Guinea between 1863 and 1898. This analysis shows that, contrary to what the missionaries often claimed, children within local communities in the area of the Bird’s Head, Cenderawasih Bay and Biak-Numfoor islands were carefully raised to become part of the complex gift-kinship-systems of their people. However, some children, as well as adults, had the misfortune to live on the fault lines of competing or conflicting communities. Children were probably sold to repair systematic differences in power and wealth between inland and coastal peoples. Especially children who were already in a weak position – orphans, or children who became related to sorcery – were the first ones to be sold. Within local communities, after they were given away, sold or captured, children could be kindly adopted within another family, exploited to work the land, further traded or used in negotiations. Precisely during the first decades of the missionaries’ presence, the tensions and violence between inland and coastal communities raised, due to an uncontrolled boom in the hunt and trade of birds of paradise. This international market thus augmented those fault lines that ‘produced’ children for local slave markets, and, in the end, for missionaries to purchase. The missionaries themselves could only buy these children within the rationale of yet another ‘economy’: a western Christian-humanitarian economy in which the missionary ‘redemption’ of locally enslaved children raised money and support for the missions back home.

De Utrechtsche Zendingsvereeniging (UZV) rechtvaardigde haar aanwezigheid aan de noordkust van Nederlands Nieuw-Guinea tussen 1863 en 1898 onder andere door lokaal tot slaaf gemaakte kinderen vrij te kopen, oftewel, door ‘bruine kinderen te redden van bruine mensen’. Dit artikel probeert te reconstrueren wat er achter dat beeld schuilging: hoe kwam het dat kinderen aan de zending te koop werden aangeboden? Dit artikel toont eerst aan dat kinderen uit deze regio’s van Bird’s Head, Cenderawasih Bay en de Biak-Numfoor-eilanden, anders dan de missionarissen beweerden, zorgvuldig binnen hun lokale gemeenschappen werden opgevoed en in specifieke gift-verwantschapssystemen werden opgenomen. Vervolgens wordt gereconstrueerd hoe en waarom sommige kinderen, net als sommige volwassenen, terecht kwamen op de breuklijnen tussen verschillende gemeenschappen die met elkaar in competitie of in conflict waren. Kinderen werden wellicht door hun eigen gemeenschap verkocht om onevenwichtige machtsverhoudingen tussen groepen die in het binnenland en aan de kust leefden te herstellen. Met name kinderen die al in een zwakkere positie verkeerden – wezen of kinderen die in verband werden gebracht met tovenarij – werden het eerst verkocht. Nadat ze waren verkocht of geroofd werden kinderen soms in hun nieuwe gemeenschap geadopteerd, maar soms ook uitgebuit en vaak weer verhandeld. De zendelingen vestigden zich in Nieuw- Guinea juist op het moment dat de jacht op en de handel in paradijsvogels ongecontroleerd toenamen. Deze internationale markt versterkte de breuklijnen en de gewelddadige spanningen tussen de lokale gemeenschappen, waardoor er meer kinderen op de lokale markt voor slaven terecht kwamen, en er uiteindelijk ook meer kinderen aan de missionarissen te koop werden aangeboden. De missionarissen zelf konden deze kinderen alleen verwerven binnen de logica van een ander soort ‘economie’, namelijk een westerse, christelijk-humanitaire gifteconomie waarin het ‘vrijkopen’ van deze tot slaaf gemaakte kinderen waardevol bleek voor een toenemende Nederlandse fondsenwerving en steun voor de zending in Nieuw-Guinea.

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Author Biography

  • Geertje Mak
    Geertje Mak is professor Political History of Gender at the University of Amsterdam and researcher at the humanities research group NL-Lab of the Dutch Royal Academy of Science. Historicising categories of difference and identities form the core of her work. She published in Dutch and internationally on the Western European history of the relation between bodies and selves in cases of gender transgression and intersex (such as Doubting Sex: Inscriptions, bodies and selves in nineteenth century hermaphrodite case histories, Manchester 2012), as well as on scientific practices of racial anthropometry in the nineteenth and early twentieth century (most recently in the 2020 article ‘A Colonial-Scientific Interface: The Construction, Viewing, and Circulation of Faces via a 1906 German Racial Atlas’, American Anthropologist, Special Issue Race and Face, https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13386). In her Dutch work on migration history in the Netherlands, she focused on the practices of encounters rather than fixed categories. Currently, Mak writes a micro-history of Protestant missionaries in Dutch New Guinea from the perspective of the theoretical notion of ‘geslacht’. This Dutch word connotes and connects gender, sex, race and generation, which can be used as key to analyse processes of historical change over generations and the coming into being of (racialised) inherited differences. Together with Marit Monteiro she coordinates the COACC network (Children as Objects and Agents of (Post)Colonial Change). E-mail: geertje.mak@huc.knaw.nl.

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Published

2020-11-12

How to Cite

Children on the Fault Lines: A Historical-Anthropological Reconstruction of the Background of Children purchased by Dutch Missionaries between 1863 and 1898 in Dutch New Guinea. (2020). BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review, 135(3-4), 29-55. https://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.10876