Photo: Peter Dejong | AP Photo
During the annual Keti Koti, or Chains Broken, ceremony marking the abolition of slavery in Dutch colonies in Suriname and the Dutch Antilles on July 1, 1863, the mayor of Amsterdam apologized for the role in the global slave trade played by the Dutch capital's former governors. Mayor Femke Halsema said history casts a shadow that reaches into the present. The city officials and the ruling elite who, in their hunger for profit and power, participated in the trade in enslaved people, in doing so entrenched a system of oppression based on skin color and race.
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