Utrecht ľϸӰ and Colonial Knowledge
Bio
For years, Henk van Rinsum was responsible for university development cooperation at Utrecht ľϸӰ. He obtained his PhD in 2001 with a dissertation entitled: Slaves of Definition; in Quest of the Unbeliever and the Ignoramus and published Sol Iustitae en de Kaap; een geschiedenis van de banden van de Utrechtse universiteit met Zuid-Afrika in 2006. He had ties to the ľϸӰ of Stellenbosch in South Africa as a research fellow. In 2023 he published the book Universiteit Utrecht en Koloniale Kennis; Bestuderen, Bemeten en Beleren sinds 1636. In this book, Henk van Rinsum describes in detail the colonial past of Utrecht ľϸӰ since its foundation in 1636. He describes the development of (academic) knowledge and knowledge transfer about and within the Dutch colonies, especially in the Dutch East Indies. This colonial past is also the framework in which Utrecht ľϸӰ became involved in slavery and the abolition of slavery. In this article, he takes you along the thread of his book.
Utrecht ľϸӰ was founded in 1636 and there were ties with the ‘colony’ from the start. It did not take long before preachers educated in Utrecht were sent to the ‘trade churches’ managed by the Dutch West India Company (WIC) and the Dutch East India Company (VOC). These preachers brought the theologies of Voetius (1589-1676) and Hoornbeeck (1617-1666) in particular to their new world. The theology of of Utrecht was the theology of the true Reformed faith and the public Reformed church.
Bringing in the new world
This new world was also a world of people with other religions, with other languages, a world of plants and animals which were unknown at the time. And this new world was also classified, collected, sketched, described and brought into our field of expertise by people from Utrecht ľϸӰ. And this knowledge was power.
From exploration to exploitation
With the growth of the colonial society, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, the desire for exploration turned into exploitation and experimentation, which were so essential to the new natural sciences. Thanks to the fact that the Netherlands was a colonial superpower, various disciplines were able to develop during this period.
The natural sciences, such as biology, geology and pharmacy, benefited enormously from the colonies in their academic development. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was a circular movement of Dutch academics, especially in the hard sciences, who had been educated in the Netherlands at Dutch universities. They found a job market in the colony. They did research in research stations or joined expeditions and collected samples (including samples from humans!). Back in the Netherlands, they returned to the academic world and continued their careers - academically enriched in and by the colony.
Especially biology under the inspirational leadership of F.A.F.C. Went (1863-1935), a Professor of Botany in Utrecht from 1896 to 1933, depicted on the panel, could develop itself as a modern experimental discipline, mainly thanks to research in the colonies. It was Went who encouraged his students to go to the East Indies because of the numerous opportunities for research there.
“I see Java in my imagination, surrounded by a halo of sunshine, exposing its treasures to you, beckoning you, calling for you to journey from your foggy homeland, to uphold the name of the Netherlands on the other side of the Equator!” - F.A.F.C. Went
Pure science in the colony x pure colonial science
It was Went who propagated pure scientific research as a dimension of civilisation in the colonies. Went claimed that “where the motherland here (thus also the university of Utrecht) has been left behind, the colonies have in a way acted as trailblazers.” And with the results of this research, the exploitation of the colony was enhanced too. Very gradually, Indonesian staff members and students were allowed to sample our science here and there.
The Oil Faculty
The colonial past of the university becomes very striking in the Indological Faculty, which started its operations in 1925. People spoke of the Oil Faculty, or sometimes the Sugar Faculty, because the oil and sugar barons made this degree programme financially possible for government officials in the East Indies. The ‘ideology’ of this faculty was cut from a very conservative cloth, with one professor openly writing that we had the ‘copyright’ over the colony as well as the right to the revenues. After all, ‘we’ had brought civilisation there.
“Brown-skinned but fair-souled”: superiority thinking, also from Utrecht
In this colonial past, the confrontation with slavery kept coming back. In 1669, the UU alumnus and missionary to Surinam Johan Basselier wrote:
“Light of justice” appears to be a direct reference to the motto of his alma mater in Utrecht Sol Iustitiae illustra nos.
In 1676, Adrianus de Meij (…. - 1699) studied theology in Utrecht. Adrianus was the son of a Dutch VOC official and a local woman in what was at the time Paleacatte, Coromandel, the south-eastern coast of the Indian subcontinent. After his degree programme in Utrecht, he went to Ceylon and in 1677, he became the rector of the so-called Malabaarsch seminary in Nallur, which focused on educating young local men. This UU alumn who had done well for himself, was a preacher, was rector of the seminary and… he possessed over thirty persons in slavery.
Around 1750, Willem Juriaan Ondati (father of the well-known patriot Pieter Philip Juriaan Quint Ondaatje) and Hendrik Philipz studied theology in Utrecht. They came from Ceylon. Upon their return, the newspaper spoke of them with great praise: “both from the Eastern Black Nation […] these brown-skinned but fair-souled Easterners”.
And then there is the example of Nicolaas Beets on slavery. Beets, a poet, writer, preacher and professor of church history and ethics since 1875, was certainly against slavery. He wrote poems about it and wrote the lines:
We may be blacks But we have hearts As good as thou. And if thine hearts are better, Then deliver ours from the pain!
“Foreign and native darklings”, “We may be blacks but we have hearts”, “brown-skinned but fair-souled Easterners”! This is the connecting thread throughout the Utrecht colonial past. Starting from Western-colonial superiority thinking, the university kept coming into contact with this Other, this not-yet-believer (of ‘our’ Christian faith, of course) and this ‘not-yet-developed’. This superiority thinking is rooted in the (Western) modernity, which has a necessary counterpart in the colonial status of the Other. And this superiority thinking and slavery are eerily close to each other.
From colony to decolonisation
After the Second World War, the colony became an ‘underdeveloped’ country, then a ‘developing country’, ‘the Third World’ or, as the countries called themselves, the ‘unbound’ countries. Utrecht, too, helped in the establishing of education and research in Africa, Asia and Latin America. At that time it was called university development cooperation. I myself have been involved in this kind of university development cooperation for many years. Perhaps I was one of those secular missionaries in Asia and Africa telling people what a ‘real’ university looked like and then offered to provide help (development aid).
Insight into our colonial past also provides us with suggestions on how we are to behave as a university in the discussions on ‘decolonisation’. ‘Decolonisation’ means that we as a university have close ties to universities in countries that we now regard as ‘former colonies’. So we should strive for genuine reciprocity and regularly face critical questions from colleagues there: have we lost our colonial preoccupation, have we lost our traces of that superiority?
