The Cape of Guinea, more fully the Dutch Guinea Coast (Dutch: Kust van Guinée), was the ensemble of Dutch forts and factories on the West African littoral — roughly corresponding to parts of modern Ghana — that the Netherlands had held since the seventeenth century. In Van der Kemp’s account of the Atjeh question the Guinea Coast is invoked as the price the Netherlands paid to Britain in 1871 for the lifting of the Acheh reservation embedded in the London treaty of 1824.
Van der Kemp observes that the solemn Dutch declaration that “no part of the island of Sumatra should be ceded to any other Power” — the substance of what the Dutch plenipotentiaries had endeavoured to extract from their British counterparts at the time of the treaty of 17 March 1824 — became bound up, half a century later, with the fate of the Guinea possessions. “It has been said,” he writes, “that this declaration cost us the Coast of Guinea, which Dutch possession was lost to us by another treaty in the same year 1871” (Van der Kemp, 1900, p. 212).
The accusation was that De Waal (the author of Onze Indische Financiën) — then Minister of Colonies — had, “without any particular occasion,” simply offered the Coast to England so as to put an end to the fighting between the Negroes; only afterwards had England demanded that the two treaties “stand or fall together.” De Waal himself rejected this characterisation as “a historical inaccuracy.” Yet the perception took hold that Britain would not release the Acheh reservation unless the Guinea Coast were ceded, and the public — Van der Kemp argues — failed to grasp the full weight of the concession.
Van der Kemp directs the reader to J. P. Schoemaker’s article, “Laatste bladzijde onzer Nederlandsche West-Afrikaansche historie” (Indische Gids, January 1900, p. 1), for the full melancholy history of the abandonment. The Guinea Coast thus figures in his monograph not as a colony in its own right but as a casualty of the long afterlife of the treaty of 1819 — a striking example of how a “dead letter” in a London treaty could, fifty years on, exact its price in West African blood and treasure.
See Also
- Netherlands
- Sumatra Treaty of 1871
- Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London 1824
- Isaac Dignus Fransen van de Putte
- E. de Waal
- Acheh Treaty of 1819
Source
Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819, by P. H. van der Kemp, in Bijdragen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië, 6e Volgr., Deel VII (1900), pp. 159-239. Universiteitsbibliotheek Vrije Universiteit, LS.08781.