01/07/2026
Today the Netherlands marks Keti Koti, “the chain broken”: the abolition of slavery in Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean on 1 July 1863. Freedom came hedged — the formerly enslaved were held 10 further years under unpaid “state supervision,” and fully released only in 1873.
In our collection is a framed porcelain plaque depicting Plantage Badenstein, on the Warappa Creek in eastern Suriname. Probably Paris, early 19th century, 19.5 × 23 cm. On the back, in ink: “Plantagie Badenstein auf der Colonie Suriname / gemalt auf Porzellain von de Germain.” A genteel object — porcelain, glazed, framed — made to hang on a European wall and portray a place built on cotton, coffee, sugar and forced labour.
The painted scene is a pastoral: a stately house among palm, a covered ‘tentboot’ under the Dutch flag rowed by enslaved men. An idyll. What it does not show is what made it run: people whose labour built every building on that porcelain, and who, until 1863, could be traded and mortgaged as common goods.
Badenstein was one of the largest plantations in Suriname. Among many white owners was for instance Friedrich Gustav Vogt of Weimar mortgaged the estate in 1839 and, so far as the archive knows, never once set foot in Suriname.
Badenstein appears on a map of one small river district. Bodenburg. Goosen. Twistrust. Barbados. Annaszorg. Corneliasburg. Ponthieu. Vaderzorg. Block after block, each rectangle a plantation, each a ledger of enslaved lives. The names are Dutch pastoral fantasies — Vaderzorg, “Father’s Care”; Twistrust, “Rest from Strife” — laid over a machine of bo***ge: not one estate but a whole country parcelled out for profit, as neatly as tiles on a floor.
This plaque was a trophy, hung in a drawing room so a family could point and say ‘that is ours’. It never showed the barracks, the whip, the unmarked graves. Which is why it must be looked at now — read against the silence where a hundred thousand names should stand. Porcelain outlasted the place, and the system, as it was made to flatter.
We sell stories, not fairytales. On Keti Koti, we choose to tell this one.
