Thread by @LoveWilmot

I am only the fourth generation of my family to carry the last name Gordijk. bbc.com/news/world-eur…

"Between 1596 and 1829 the Dutch shipped more than half a million Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to work on plantations. They were treated as objects and possessions and their names were erased, part of what Linda Nooitmeer describes as the "dehumanising" process."

"'Everything is stripped. You were part of the cargo, like cattle. It's not only the name, but rituals, language, your identity, all evidence that you were African was taken away.'"

"The Netherlands was one of the last countries to abolish slavery in 1863, 30 years after British abolition. Even then slaves in Suriname, on the north-east coast of South America, had to wait 10 years to be fully free."

My great-great-grandmother bought her own freedom in 1862.