A tale of Africa

As a seafarer I came to South and West Africa, during the 1970s. To be honest, at the time I saw Africa mainly from a European perspective, although even then I wondered what was the matter with apartheid in South Africa. We transported Western products to Africa, and the return cargo was mostly tree trunks and some tropical products. Thus, I did my share in the destruction of the rain forest.

loading tropical trees at Campo, Cameroon, 1978

Africa has been cruelly exploited for centuries - it was a source of raw materials, tropical products and cheap labour. Local rulers were bribed by unscrupulous traders and actively participated - you only have to read about the slave trade to understand. The consequences are still there: Africa is a rich continent with an enormous potential, but it is torn by war and the people are bad off. Three out of four people in Africa have no permanent job and no fixed income, they are mostly day labourers who cannot feed their children at the least setback.

Jamestown, Accra, Ghana, 2012

The problem is that almost no one invests in Africa - the exploitation continues as before, large Western and Chinese multinationals being the main perpetrators. A new colonization, which we in the West still benefit from. The corruption and collusion of African governments is often alluded to as the cause. But I think it is a vicious circle of despicable dealing involving outside parties that has still not been broken.

An example

Recently, my newspaper featured an article by a South African professor about vaccines for infectious diseases no longer being developed in Africa. Some initiatives have failed due to "financing problems". Even now, during the Covid-19 epidemic, Africa is only used as a testing ground for vaccines that are being developed elsewhere. Everything is made outside Africa and sold in Africa on our terms. Medicines and vaccines are expensive. This applies not only to medical applications, but to almost all achievements of the contemporary world.

Small wonder that the continent is so impoverished and young men are sent to Europe by their families, hoping to find work there and money to send home. To Europe, where they come up against fences and refugee camps, remaining in permanent poverty and insecurity. It is too easy to explain away the African migration as their own fault.

fish market in Elmina, Ghana, 2012

Fortunately, there are exceptions, where the local population gets a better chance. A friend of ours worked in Ghana for a long time. He managed to save an area of rainforest in the Atewa range, which a Chinese company was after because there is a 20 metres thick vein of bauxite underneath. The forest serves as a water extraction area for Accra and the local economy benefits from ecotourism. Our friend presented the local ‘chief’ with calculations proving that in the long run the income out of the forest would be more than the proceeds of selling it to the Chinese. There is an ongoing drive to declare the area a national park, which is better than it being pillaged by a Chinese mining company.

Africa in 1976

I remember a thief being caught on board my ship in Cape Town. Naturally you don’t want thieves on board your ship, but all the poor sod had stolen was an alarm clock from the first mate's cabin. I had the dubious pleasure of receiving the South African police on board, two big white-skinned cops in pale blue uniforms, shorts and flat caps. The thief looked rather innocent compared to them. He was a Cape Coloured, a descendant of the original San population and Dutch settlers. The first thing the policemen did was slam the thief’s head against the steel bulkhead. I stopped that, saying I did not tolerate that on board a Dutch ship. The men spoke Afrikaans (a form of Dutch) and understood me perfectly. The detainee was handcuffed and taken away. I don't know what they did to him later. They probably beat him senseless.

French colonial church in Kribi, Cameroon, 1978

At the time, Colonial influence was still strongly present in West Africa, in some cases probably still is. In 1978 I sailed to Senegal, Ivory Coast and Cameroon. The French connection showed in hotels and apartment buildings for the scores of French expats who lived there. Dakar (Senegal) looked like a French city on the Côte d´Azur. In Abidjan, Ivory Coast, the city center was a collection of tall tower blocks, surrounded by shabby slums.
 

Fort Elmina, Ghana 2012

Fort Elmina

I returned to Africa once more in 2012. In Ghana we were driven around by a local driver named Emmanuel, in a rented minivan. I still remember the visit to the slave fortresses at Cape Coast and Elmina. Elmina in particular made a deep impression on me. The fort was originally Portuguese (São Jorge da Mina) and was conquered by the Dutch in the 17th century. Ultimately, the Dutch West India Company controlled a large part of the overseas slave trade from what was then called the 'Gold Coast'.

the church in Fort Elmina, Ghana

The Netherlands was almost the last country to ban slavery (1863, remembered on Keti Koti day, the Broken Bonds, July 1st), although in the colony of Suriname the former slaves were obliged by law to continue working on the plantations for 10 more years. It was institutionalized human trafficking.

dungeon in Fort Elmina

The church at Fort Elmina is located directly above the dungeons, where for many years people were locked up, waiting for the next ship to take them to the Caribbean and the American mainland. Centuries later the dungeons still smell of excrement - there was a drain in the centre, but the stench is too deeply sunk in the floor and walls. The Dutch slave traders were singing psalms in the church upstairs, turning a blind eye to the ocean of misery underfoot.

I couldn’t meet the Ghanaian guide’s eyes for shame.

The Cargo

Almost three months have gone by, turbulent months in which the world had to deal with a continuing epidemic, which currently mainly rages in India, Latin America, Africa and the US.

Inevitably, the restrictions imposed on group meetings have also had repercussions on the book presentations featuring The Batavian, which I had planned during the spring and summer. These were all suspended.

This takes me to my new book Het Transport (The Cargo), publication of the Dutch version of which is expected in early October. The method of presentation of this book will strongly depend on the conditions of the moment. However, publication will not be postponed.

Cover by Palmslag Publishers

The Cargo is actually my first novel. Two years ago I had two manuscripts completed when Hanneke Tinor-Centi, my agent, put me in touch with my publisher (Palmslag). At the time, I chose to publish The Batavian first. That proved to be a good choice, so now it is the turn of The Cargo.

The Wadden Sea seen from the isle of Vlieland

The Cargo is a thriller rather than an adventure story such as The Batavian. It starts with a gruesome discovery by two yachtsmen on the Wadden Sea. The Wadden Sea has sometimes been described as our last real wilderness, a tangle of sandbanks and tidal channels in the North of our country, which is constantly in motion.

Sailing to Vlieland

The Wadden Sea is an ideal setting for anything that will not bear close scrutiny, in this case overseas women trafficking from the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic. The main protagonists get caught in a web of crime and murder. Originally, the title of the manuscript was 'The Directive', which refers to the Human Trafficking Directive (probably a poor translation from Dutch), which plays an important role in the book.

A sinister encounter in the fog

The Human Trafficking Directive at first sight appears to be meant to protect victims of human trafficking. Reality is very different however: the Directive is aimed at providing the Justice Department with witnesses for the prosecution of human traffickers. In itself a good goal, but the victims’ safety often takes second place. That isn’t wild guessing on my part - I read the critical reports of the National Reporter on Human Trafficking in the Netherlands.

Using these ingredients I wrote a thrilling tale set in both the Netherlands and Russia, and inevitably also at sea. There is a fair English translation available of both The Batavian and The Cargo, which needs to be further edited before publication in the English language domain should be attempted. Sample extracts are available from my website.

Liberation

I will put out the flag at half mast once more on Monday 4 May, our Remembrance Day for WW2, which is 75 years in the past now. I mainly do so to honour my father’s classmates who were shot by the occupying German forces, because they were part of a resistance group that was betrayed. Theo Polet, my Dad, barely managed to escape with his life.

Theo Polet, my father, in 1946

I have never been properly able to understand what it must have been like for my parents to live under a foreign occupation. Until the spring 2020 pandemic hit us, killing thousands and completely disrupting life.

The Corona lockdown is not comparable to a state of war, because the tyranny and gross violence of the German occupiers was many times worse than the threat of the virus. But it probably feels about the same - aged people, who have experienced 1940-45, recognize it: powerlessness, grief, fear and anger, but also a suddenly rediscovered communal spirit.

Long ago, my father wrote his war memoirs. They fill many pages of a closely typed text, in which I found familiar, but also surprising new anecdotes. He was almost 17 years old, when he saw the German bombers fly over his (then) hometown of Waalwijk, to hit Rotterdam, exactly 80 years ago. He writes the following:

"... There was a brown-yellow smoke high in the air, which passed over us with the prevailing west wind. A few weeks after the bombing I saw Rotterdam myself. The rubble still smoked, a large department store was a distorted skeleton. The shipwrecks lay in the harbour, the same ships in which I would have sailed if there had been no war. My future changed drastically ... "

The latter was a surprise to me. I never realized that he wanted to go to sea as well as I years later. Fortunately he didn’t go to sea: seafaring was a life-threatening business in WW2.
 

Burning ships in Rotterdam, May 1940

What followed after May 1940 was five years of ever-increasing restrictions, persecutions and massacres by the occupying forces. A hundred thousand of my countrymen were put on the train, first to the Westerbork camp, then to the gas chambers. My mother told the story of the “evacuation” of the Jewish nursing home in Apeldoorn, which she was forced to watch at gunpoint by the black-uniformed thugs, a 15-year-old girl on her way to school. The memory remained with her until her death.

As a 19-year-old, my father sat up nights with an elderly Jewish neighbour, after the Germans had taken away his family and left him, because he wasn’t yet on their deportation list. He wouldn’t leave him alone. Later they also took the old man away. My father was active in a student’s resistance group in Amsterdam and joined the Underground Army after its establishment by proclamation of Queen Wilhelmina in September 1944. He never said much about that, but it can be read in his memoirs.

The Monument in Westerbork Camp

What May 2020 has in common with May 1940 is our total lack of preparation for a catastrophe. The disarmament drive of the 1930s was prompted by the same lack of vision that has left our economy and health care so vulnerable in 2020. Precautions apparently were no longer necessary.

There is not only a parallel in lack of foresight, but also in the unfeeling attitude of those in power - apparently that goes hand in hand. During the occupation, the Dutch authorities cooperated, at least in part, nicely with the Germans. As a result, a hundred thousand people could be taken away with the greatest ease.

In 2020, our Cabinet abandons displaced refugee children to their fate in Greek camps, where they lead a destitute life and are prone to disease or exploitation. And the Alderman for Welfare closes the municipal shelter for illegal refugees in Leiden, in the midst of the epidemic, nicely according to plan. Seven people walked into the rain with their suitcases, into homelessness. Apparently it couldn’t wait. It is of a different order than actually participating in a pogrom, but the harshness is the same.

The experts seem to agree that this will not be the last pandemic. The future of our young people could also change drastically. How will we prepare better and make our society more robust, less dependent on scarce resources and scarce health care? Some kind of Pandemic Marshall Plan? Have we learned from it, and above all, have our politicians learned from it?

I fear the worst. The first thing those in power lose is the ability to listen.

Edited 28 June.

The world turned upside down

Last week I sent the Dutch manuscript for The Cargo to my publisher, Palmslag.

The Cargo, like The Batavian, my first book, is set in the years before the Corona pandemic.

It is too early to say if and when we will return to a normal world as we knew it. It can only be expected that many things will change. Hopefully for the better, although I am not so certain. Freedom, civil rights, privacy and health are all at risk.

Unlimited travel, dirt cheap subsidized air traffic, round trips to the Seychelles, Peru or Thailand will also feel the consequences of this crisis. Far worse is the situation of countless people, who lose their income and run into great trouble.

I know a poor family in Ghana. Due to the lockdown, which also applies there, they can hardly leave the house, and the six of them are in a small house. A day laborer cannot make money to feed his family in such a situation. They were a little ashamed to ask if I could help out financially. You can do little else, can you?

Jamestown, Accra, Ghana

What bothers me as an author? Personally, of course, the same as everyone in the Netherlands: less freedom of movement, hardly seeing your children, family and friends, not going to the movies or the museum. And the tiny chance that you will get the virus too.

But if you've written a manuscript set in this day and age, you need to take extra care. Such as Two Fathoms Down, some of which takes place on a yacht, partly in the Wadden Sea, and partly on the English east coast. I do not yet know whether what I wrote will ever be possible again. So the manuscript may very well have to be revised once the future becomes clear.

Another idea, which was still in an embryonic stage, was a story about social disruption after a different kind of disaster (not an epidemic). Well, we are now experiencing that ourselves, so I no longer have to come up with fiction about it ...

An author's concerns are negligible compared to those of families with small children living in a tiny Council flat. This, in turn, cannot be compared to what happens in refugee camps in Greece, to poor residents of the United States and poverty-stricken day laborers in developing countries - India, Africa, Latin America.

They are the real losers of this crisis.

SOS Moria

A month ago, no one predicted the magnitude of the virus epidemic that is now gripping the world. I wrote about breaking the silence around Idlib in Syria, and about Greece, which has been turned into the European dumping ground for unwanted refugees.

We are now seeing a consequence of the European aversion to refugees: a potential source of contamination has been created that is unparalleled. As everyone in Europe is being urged to self-isolate and practice social distancing, tens of thousands of people locked up in Greek refugee camps waiting for an epidemic that will endanger not only them, but us as well.

Social distancing in Camp Moria? Forget it.

A horrifying example is Camp Moria on the isle of Lesbos, where 20,000 people are penned like cattle instead of the 3,000 for which the camp is intended. Yesterday I learned of SOS Moria, an initiative of thousands of doctors, who are urging Europe's rulers to evacuate Moria and other camps, get them out of there and give them a safe refuge:

Join these doctors and sign the SOS Moria appeal

Something needs to be done urgently, yet Europe still chooses to look the other way, hiding behind EUR 2 or 3 billion in emergency aid already given to Greece to solve the European problem.

The refugee drama plays a leading role in my novel De Batavier (The Batavian). As an author and as a person, I cannot and will not stay silent about European heartlessness and xenophobia. 

Something - must - be - done.

Break silence over Idlib

Writing a politically motivated post should not become a habit, that is not what I intended with my author's blog. 

However, I cannot keep my mouth shut, because history repeats itself and in the superlative. A few years ago, the siege of Eastern Aleppo and the resulting refugee flow was one of the reasons for me to write The Batavian, published last year in Dutch as De Batavier.

Now the same disaster is happening all over again in the Syrian province of Idlib. Two Syrian refugees write in the Dutch newspaper NRC Next on Monday 2 March that the silence around Idlib must be broken. They are called Mohammad Kanfash and Ali al Jasem and have worked for humanitarian organizations such as UNHCR and AzG.

I recently saw the heartbreaking documentary For Sama, made from film images by Waad al-Kateab from Aleppo. In her documentary you see the Russian fighter jets with their adjustable wings (see below) fire rockets at civilian targets in Aleppo and the result of missiles and bombs hitting a hospital. I can tell you, half the audience was in tears and so was I.

The same is happening again at the moment in Idlib, where hundreds of thousands of ordinary people like you and myelf are trapped between the troops of Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies, and the Turkish invasion force that supports other groups in the civil war.

The UNHCR is sounding the alarm about the disaster that is taking place.

The silence mentioned by the authors of the article in NRC Next refers to the icy silence prevalent in the Western world. A genocide is taking place, there are a million people on the run from the violence. It is winter in the mountains and the refugees live in miserable conditions, stuck at the Turkish-Syrian border, which is cordoned off against the new flow of human misery.

Turkey may already have taken in 4 million refugees, but is now playing a cat and mouse game with the unwilling EU, which offers no help. The Turkish government claims that the border with Greece is open, which is incorrect as the Greeks block it. Thousands of people are now trapped there in no man's land, in winter, devoid of help, but being bombarded with Greek tear gas.

As regards refugees, Greece has become the dumping ground of the EU, who let the Greeks struggle with the refugee crisis. That includes the Netherlands, where Government is sitting on its hands instead of acting and in a diplomatic and practical sense try put an end to the violence and lend a helping hand in relieving the refugees' misery.

The disinterest not only applies to politicians, but to all of us. The authors of the NRC Next article rightly ask why a nation-wide appeal was was launched in Holland for the victims of forest fires in Australia, a rich country that itself has sufficient resources, but nothing is done for the humanitarian disaster in Idlib. Instead, we are busy with the daily sensation about Corona, as children freeze to death in the winter cold on the borders of the EU.


As I wrote in my postscript to The Batavian three years ago: I am afraid history will judge the EU and our generation for what we have done.