Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Netherlands
fellow
Leendert van der Valk
Home institution
University of Amsterdam
Country of origin (home institution)
Netherlands
Discipline(s)
Colonial and postcolonial history
Modern history
Theme(s)
Human Rights
Identity
Post-colonialism
Fellowship dates
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Biography
Leendert was a Journalist-in-Residence-Fellow at NIAS during 2024-2025.
As a freelance journalist, I specialize in narrative journalism. For the Groene Amsterdammer I write a lot about the impact of the colonial past and I do research in the archives. For NRC I am mainly active as a music journalist. In my pieces, the music is secretly always a stepping stone to a larger story. That larger story sometimes leads to a book.
I am currently working on a book with the working title 'Atlas of the slavery past' that will be published in spring 2025. In it you can read about thirty countries and millions of people that we often forget in the Dutch slavery debate. The book is partly based on research into the early slavery past that I did for the Groene Amsterdammer. That's how I discovered the story of Lourens and Madagascar, the first Africans to be enslaved by the Dutch, and I went to the Ramapo Mountains near New York, where Native Americans live with Dutch surnames.
I previously wrote two music books. For Devil's Music I cycled through the Mississippi Delta to New Orleans. For Voudou, I traveled from there to the Caribbean and West Africa and explored the relationship between voodoo, music and slavery. My most recent book is not about music. For De Correspondent in Amerika story, I followed the founding of The Correspondent, the international platform for 'radically different news' in New York and Amsterdam.
In addition to my own writing, I enjoy training new journalists as a journalism teacher at the Media and Journalism master's programme at the UvA.
Research Project
Atlas of the Dutch History of Slavery
Research question: How many people were enslaved under Dutch colonial rule? Who were they and where did they live?
Over the last few years the Netherlands is finally having a national debate about its history of slavery. The government and the royal family have apologized for the Dutch role in slavery.
Surprisingly we still don’t have a good view on the true size and extend of the Dutch slavery over the centuries and around the globe. The official number that is constantly referred to is 600.000 Africans who were traded under the Dutch flag. But this geographical bias and the focus on official trade leaves out more than two third of the actual history of Dutch slavery. At least one million, and likely more, enslaved people are left out of the history books, as are dozens of former colonies and trading posts.
At NIAS Leendert van der Valk will work on the ‘Atlas of the Dutch History of Slavery’. The core of the book is the 30 ‘overlooked’ colonies and trading posts, shedding light on the one million or more ‘forgotten’ children, women and men enslaved by Dutch traders. As a journalist who has finally embraced the history nerd within himself, he will work in the tradition of narrative non-fiction. Each chapter will have a main character or story line that tells about the overlooked aspects of slavery.