The Recolonization of Bonaire
Bonaire is a Caribbean island in the Leeward Antilles. Along with Aruba and Curaçao, it forms the “ABC islands”, territories colonized by the dutch. along with the rest of europe, holland/the netherlands carried out genocide against the peoples living there before the white invasion, capturing and transporting uncountable numbers of slaves from Africa in their place and forcing them to work to enrich the colonizers. While slavery is commonly described as having legally ended in the 19th century, the ABC islands remain colonies, and the region’s Black population is systematically dehumanized so that white supremacy and imperialism may thrive.
In 21st-century Bonaire, this process has intensified. Since 2010, the population of the island has tripled due to massive, state-supported white “immigration” (really colonization) from the netherlands to Bonaire. The white invaders are given financial incentives to emigrate, and they establish an apartheid system upon their arrival, reinforcing the economic and cultural oppression of the island’s native population. Even Bonaire’s largely symbolic local government has been dismantled, replaced by direct rule from the hague.
The ultimate aim of this process is genocidal. And as Black people facing social death have come to realize in many times and places across the Earth, oppression cannot be defeated by moral appeals to the oppressor, but only through oppressed people taking matters into their own hands by force. If the struggle against dutch colonizers in the Caribbean can be linked to the global struggle against antiblackness and imperialism, the tables may turn not just in Bonaire, but everywhere.
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