The documenting approach is dominant in the Danish literature discussing the historical relation between Denmark and the USVI. It is moreover an account that assumes an objective position to historical narratives through the usage of written archival documents. In the following I introduce the Danish approach to the issue of the former colonies so as to present the historical context as it may be found in Danish (semi-)scholarly books and books for primary and secondary teaching. These sources of information present a possible explanation to the internalisation of racial stereotypes still predominant in Danish commonsense discourse. I will return to this reproduction of racial stereotypes in the following analyses, but before I embark on the analyses I want to introduce the history of Danish-USVI relations as it is commonly presented to students and laypersons who are interested in the subject.
Denmark colonised the West Indian islands of St Thomas and St John in (respectively) 1672 and 1718, and the island of St Croix was purchased from France in 1733. Slavery soon followed as the plantations expanded and it continued for between one hundred and two hundred years until Denmark, following England, Sweden and France, finally abolished the practice in 1848. The slave trade was officially given up in 1803.
Danish literature critical about the former colonies in the West Indies is scarce, though some popular volumes appeared throughout the last century. Anyone who wants to study the literature is usually referred to Thorkild Hansen’s illustrated trilogy; Coast of Slaves, Islands of Slaves and Ships of Slaves.71 These were first published in Danish between 1967 and 1970, and tell the gruesome story of lives lived in bondage and colonial consequences in the engaging, story-telling genre of the documenting novel. Publications during the later half of the twentieth century tended to be easily-read booklets meant for general education on the one hand, or scholarly historical overviews published by prominent historians on the other. Most of these publications72, however, support a romanticised national view of a ‘lost paradise’ and
‘our tropical colonies’ (Lauring 1978, Hornby 1980). The exoticisation reaches explicit racist pronunciations in, for instance, Hans Gregersen’s easy-to-read book for general education (1993). Gregersen writes about his visit to an old sugar-mill. The plantation connected to the mill is owned by a white woman, who lives there with her two dogs. The dogs do not bark at Gregersen and his wife when they arrive and asked about the reason for this the woman ‘smiles a sly smile: “They only bark at blacks”’
(Gregersen 1993: 33, my translation). Gregersen makes the point clear: ‘In other words, the dogs have learnt that it is the black inhabitants on the islands they have to beware of. It is first and foremost blacks who commit the crimes.’ (Gregersen 1993:
33, my translation). Also, quite a number of the books express more implicit and tuned down presentations of unchallenged exoticism (Hornby 1980; Døygaard 2002).
One of the more reputable historical accounts of the Danish colonial possessions is that by Ove Hornby (1980). Despite having been published over thirty years ago and relaying of some disputed facts (Gøbel 2002), it is still considered by fellow historians as one of the main sources for knowledge about the colonial history of Denmark. On relations between the colonisers and the colonised cultures, Hornby writes that after the Napoleonic Wars at the beginning of the nineteenth century the golden days were over. The profit that Denmark gained from the colonies before and during the wars turned into deficit and ‘the motherland’ was presented with demands for a capital flow
71 In 1971 Hansen was awarded the Nordic Council Prize for the trilogy Slavernes Kyst (Copenhagen:
Gyldendal 1967), Slavernes Skibe (Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1968) and Slavernes Øer (Copenhagen:
Gyldendal 1970). The titles were translated into English and published by Sub-Saharan Publishers in 2002 and 2006. They are now available from Michigan State University Press.
72 I conducted a research trip to the Copenhagen National Library in autumn 2007 in order to gain an overview of the publications available on the topic.
to the islands. All of this generated discussions about selling the islands.73 The reasons for this rather calculated attitude towards selling the islands are to be found in a cultural phenomenon, Hornby believes. He writes:
Contributing to the coolness which marked both the Danish and the West Indian debates about a potential sale was the fact that though the Danes – with more or less talent and luck – had administered the colony, they had never really managed to leave a national impression. The everyday language spoken from the beginning was Dutch and later Creole and English, while Danish was mainly spoken among the stationed officials. The large majority of the population were slaves or descendants of slaves who had been transported from Africa to the islands, but even among the white plantation owners and merchants the Danes were an absolute minority. (Hornby 1980: 10, my translation)
Hornby explains the lack of interest in the islands in the hybrid multiculturalism that structured the societies on the islands and he argues that because the Danes were a minority in numbers they must have had a relative minor cultural influence as well.
But this argument is only sustainable if culture is understood as a closed circuit impenetrable by other cultures in hybrid forms or as a quantitative whole disregarding minority cultures. Also Denmark is seen as not religious74 and so as not implementing socio-religious structures. I will return to the importance of the role played by religion in the colonial discourse shortly. The account seems to suggest that multiculturalism prevents and rejects a sense of societal belonging by virtue of its very hybridity.
History scholar Louise Sebro (2005) points to the colonies as not only multicultural but also a burgeoning capitalist society that differed markedly from the eighteenth- century Danish ‘motherland’. Social structures were redefined in the colonies through wealth and property rather than through heritage, which was the dominant form of status in Denmark at the time. And the categories of social classes saw ambiguities that were not present in the ‘motherland’. For instance, in the colonies colour defined social status, but also gender and certainly property played an enormous part in social
73 The possibility of a sale had been discussed for a number of years before then but the right price had not been named (Bastian 2003).
74 It seems to be of importance that it is national impressions rather than political or historical marks and consequences that would call for Danish and other colonisers’ accountability.
positioning and hence political power (Sebro 2005). The initial Danish disinterest in the slaves’ religious education and cultural lives enabled the cultivation of new creole societal and juridical roles, lifestyles and religious practices all carefully negotiated within the notions of gender, race and class (Simonsen 2004, Sebro 2005). The Caribbean colonial society was hierarchically stratified according to multilayered categories of skin colour, gender, wealth and occupation.
This all meant that the colonies were (and are) seen as a society culturally, socially and politically different from the European part of Denmark. Whereas European Denmark was in the midst of an enlightenment of liberal thoughts of freedom and humanism under the rule of autocracy,75 the plantation owners on the islands preferred the profits afforded by unpaid labour and the regulations from the King of Denmark were not necessarily adhered to. The colonies are portrayed as existing in a rather anarchistic sphere. Similarly, the description of the colonies as multicultural emphasises the idea that Denmark is a homogeneous country and population. This is an idea which persists today.
1.3.1 Religion and slavery in the Danish colonies
Denmark was and is Lutheran protestant in religion.76 Because of the Danes’ initial disinterest in the slaves’ religious affiliations the slaves were able to bring with them and subsequently develop their traditional religious traditions in the Caribbean. This fact has consequences for the later Christianisation and the development of potential Afro-Caribbean-Christian identities based on the slaves’ African ethnicities and belongings, as well as their newfound Christian identification (Sebro 2005). But this differentiation is not necessarily recognised by the Danish and USVI authors when it comes to the former Danish colonies.
Within the literature on the Danish West Indies there is an interesting schism between the arguments often held by scholars of African-American studies or ‘race’ studies and the viewpoint taken by Danish historians, such as Hornby, who is telling ‘the Danish story’. Whereas American scholar Neville Hall (1992) is certain that
75 Writers such as Oxholm (1797) and Alexander (1843) attest to this development.
76 Initially the colonies were Lutheran Protestant too, but as most Danes feared moving there, Denmark needed to attract to its colonies colonists of other nationalities (such as French and Dutch) who belonged to other faiths. This is why Denmark instigated freedom of religion in the colonies.
missionary practices were pervasive in the colonies and sustained the reasons for colonial expansion altogether, Hornby to the contrary finds that this was not the case with Danish colonial expansion. Moreover he argues that it was not the case with any other European colonial expansion either. Though Hornby does write (Hornby 1980:
176-80) about the work of the Moravian and the Lutheran Churches in their attempts to christen the slaves, he nevertheless focuses on the Lutheran Church’s failure to establish a church in the West Indies rather than on the controlling function of the Christian activities. Thus, Hornby is underlining his earlier statement about the lack of Danish cultural-religious imprints on the islands’ cultural developments. In contrast to Hornby, Hall (1992) writes specifically about the slaves’ perspective and perhaps more significantly from the perspective of the slaves. Hall learned Danish in order to find the African perspective in the sub-context of the Danish archives (Bastian 2003).
Hall argues firstly that, in order to subjugate slaves into (un)willing labour, the slave-owners developed an ideology that provided a ‘comforting and justificatory theoretical foundation for man’s inhumanity to fellow man’. Secondly it was hoped that the slaves would ‘internalize’ ‘such ideas and acceptance of their bondage’ (Hall 1992: 34). In this ideology Christianity played a dominant role. Hall argues that the connection between Christianity and racism lies in the ‘curse of Ham’, which in the eyes of the slave-owners tied the slaves to their subordinated position as labourers through ‘God and nature’. Their black skin was taken to signify evil, which in turn was connected to moral inferiority in the contemporary literature. However, since the Africans were seen to be inferior by nature it was not education and religion, which could restrain them, but fear of punishment alone, the argument went. I think that in the light of this, the Danish state’s unwillingness to impose Christianity upon the enslaved Africans can no longer be seen as a question of restraint and modesty shown by the quantitative minority on the islands, but rather a racist assumption of cultural and hereditary inferiority which made education superfluous and moral awakening unlikely.
Later the Moravian church77 and its activities came to play an important role in the lives of the slaves on the Danish colonial islands, but it simultaneously functioned as a social control over that part of their lives which was not already controlled through
77 In particular the Moravian church played a role in the lives of the enslaved Africans in the Danish colonies, but many other religious societies have a place on the islands today as well as then.
the restrictions and regimes of the plantations. Illustrative of Christianity’s double-edged sword in the colonies is that, through baptism and education in the Christian tradition of docile servitude, the Africans were urged to internalise ‘the precepts of humility, patience and willing obedience’ (Hall 1992: 46). Slaves did not attain their freedom upon converting to Christianity, however. Meanwhile, Christianity was also evoked as a reason to treat slaves better in the anti-slavery ideology. The slaves were seen to have ‘a natural aspiration to freedom’ as part of the human condition. This shift in Christian narratives, in which the biological racist arguments slowly took over from the religious arguments, is not a Danish narrative alone. As the philosophical foundations for the justification of slavery weakened in most European countries during the latter half of the nineteenth century, due to the Enlightenment’s denunciation of religious rule and the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species (1859), they were readily exchanged for racist ideologies argued with the support of biology (Hall 1992: 47). Religion was the tool by which slaves could become humanised. In this sense the Danish historical narrative follows the logic of nineteenth-century Europe in which the ‘white man’s burden’ was the burden of Christianising the other, along with civilising the other, in the first half of the century and less prominently in the later half. The religious argument was then exchanged for biological and evolutionary determinism (van der Veer 2001).
1.3.2 The colonial press
The contemporary and historical religious and cultural representation in scholarly and academic work presents a division between the Danish-focused and the Caribbean-focused literature. The divisions differ in shapes in the historically and disciplinary alternating contexts and times, but there is a constant disconnection between the two realms. In the historical literature this is blamed on the press. For instance, Oxholm (1797) asserts that he wants to rectify the slander that flourishes in Denmark about the colonies and the colonial lifestyle. Since he believes that freedom of the press is the most important form of freedom, because it leads to ‘the truth’, he makes a call for more information about the colonies in the press. This potential for reaching the truth through the press is nevertheless regrettably often ignored and neglected, and freedom of the press is instead used for satire, ridicule and suspicious slander (Oxholm 1797:
12), and thus is much writing on the colonies conducted, Oxholm asserts. One hundred years later the significance of the press in the role of the colonial structure is
still claimed (Fischer 1896). Fischer believed the reason for the lack of engagement in the ‘motherland’ was to be found especially in the fact that the editors of the local papers were reliant on the governors of the islands. It was, in effect, a state- or governor-controlled censorship. Fischer, then, makes an argument for democratic division of labour. Among the African descendants on the islands the press was used in the fight for freedom and for agency. In the early twentieth century, D. Hamilton Jackson travelled to Denmark to argue his case for freedom of speech of the black labouring population to the Danish king and government. Hamilton Jackson believed in the democratic system and in freedom of expression and he started the first independent newspaper, The Herald, as well as the labour movement on the islands.78
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the role of the news press and media in relation to cultural connections and mediations between people has been neglected in the Danish public debates on the USVI. When it comes to postcolonial relations between Denmark and the Caribbean, political debates are preferred realms and some issues are suspiciously lacking representation in the Danish press – I am thinking here of the Crucian movement which demands reparation in the form of a public apology and restitution from Denmark and which has contacted the Danish government directly on this issue.79 The following analysis will encompass a discussion on what the role of the press in this relation may look like today. This case study will also discuss how the press relays the transnational connection in terms of culturally mediated and archival accounts of the islands’ history and how the stereotypes of otherness are reproduced.
1.4 DOCUMENTING HERITAGE: THE NARRATIVES IN SLAVERNES SLÆGT80