Statia: Relentless, Unending, Blackness

[Dit verhaal is een buitengewoon mooie persoonlijke reflectie op het Faro-project "Betrokkenheid erfgoedgemeenschap bij bedreigd erfgoed slavernijverleden Sint Eustatius" uitgevoerd in 2024 door de St. Eustatius Afrikan Burial Ground Alliance]

The global campaign to save and preserve Afrikan burial grounds: Memory finds its voice

In the name of development, Afrikan burial grounds along the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Route are under threat but a movement of local campaigners and global solidarity is rising to protect them.

By Annina van Neel (July 2, 2025)

The first time I ever heard of the island of St. Eustatius was in 2021, when I received an email from a founding member of the St. Eustatius Afrikan Burial Grounds Alliance. Back then, I was living on the British Overseas Territory of Saint Helena in the middle of the South Atlantic. Through an online search they came across the campaign to preserve the Afrikan Burial Grounds of Saint Helena. The Alliance immediately made contact upon realising the uncanny relationship between our campaigns for protecting culturally significant sites tied to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.

The island of Saint Helena holds the ancestral remains and history of thousands of enslaved Afrikan people, who towards the end of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade had been “rescued” by the British from Portuguese vessels illegally operating the horrific Middle Passage. In 2008, one of the larger Afrikan Burial Grounds in Ruperts Valley, had been archaeologically excavated to make way for the island’s first airport and the promise of economic development. In 2012 I boarded the last royal mail ship and migrated to the island as part of the airport construction team. Completely ignorant of how the island’s past would shape my future.

On the other end of the deep Atlantic thousands of kilometres away, lies the island of St. Eustatius. Renowned in the Caribbean for its historical significance as one of the most important logistical ports for Dutch trade and auctions of goods and enslaved Afrikans. In June 2021, a team of international archaeologists carried out excavations on an Afrikan 18th century burial ground of the Golden Rock Plantation, to make way for an airport expansion. This resulted in protests by the St. Eustatius community and the formation of the grassroots organisation, the St. Eustatius Afrikan Burial Ground Alliance.

The threat to Afrikan burial grounds posed by development projects is not unique to St. Helena or St. Eustatius. From my own country of Namibia, across the Middle Passage to New York, the memorialization of Afrikan burial sites is in danger of being erased in the name of progress. These sacred spaces and their histories hold deep cultural and historical meaning, telling the stories of those who endured unimaginable suffering.

I first met Kenneth Cuvalay, the President of the St. Eustatius Afrikan Burial Ground Alliance, through a series of distressful virtual meetings during 2021. Kenneth is a rare individual, an average sized black man, with knee length ‘dreadlocks’ who addresses everyone that he draws into his circle of revolutionary trust, as ‘sister’ or ‘brother’. He is by far the most Afrikan-centered person I’ve met, born on or off the continent. He fully embodies his ‘Afrikanness’, which he unashamedly, and sometimes jealously, defends to whomever or whatever threatens it. This embodiment is expressed through sharing his infinite knowledge and hunger for Afrikan (and her diaspora’s) history, philosophies, traditions, stories, food, music, people and places. This combination of constantly needing to both defend and (re)build his Afrikan identity is often mischaracterised by society’s relentless pursuit to ‘develop’, forget and erase.

Our first meeting in person was at the Berlin Human Rights Film Festival 2022, where Kenneth witnessed the journey of our struggle on the island of Saint Helena chronicled in the documentary film, A Story of Bones. I knew our paths were woven together when seeing Kenneth fragmented, exposed and vulnerable after watching the film. It was as if he had absorbed the entire weight of a generational struggle on Saint Helena, in 96 min.

Now in 2024, as part of a larger project called The Faro Project addressing marginalised and endangered Afrikan heritage, we join in pilgrimage to his place of birth in the Dutch Caribbean, to visit and honor a sacred ancestral resting place.

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Our first landing since departing Amsterdam is on St. Maarten-a place that feels like a complete revelation to me. The sun is bright, the island a paradise for many. Thousands of tourists flock here for weddings, weekend getaways, family holidays-and investors come, too, chasing business opportunities. But I’m here for a different reason. After a few hours in transit, we are on a 20-minute flight to our final destination.

Long journeys always leave me feeling malaligned-all the layers of myself, my bones, soul, mind, and heart, stacked in what feels like the wrong order. Nina is deconstructed, scattered in sound and memory. I’m reminded of a Khoisan saying: “We have to rest in order to give our souls time to catch up with our bodies.” It takes me a week to recover physically. Quietly, I begin to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead.

We have to rest in order to give our souls time to catch up with our bodies. ~Khoisan saying

The Golden Rock

Our team has less than three weeks to engage the Statia community. The Golden Rock burial ground represents a deeply marginalised Afrikan ancestral heritage, shaped by nearly 500 years of colonialism and enslavement. Much like the struggles in the British Overseas Territory of St. Helena, this sacred site has endured serious harm. In 2021, the airport construction on St. Eustatius destroyed part of the burial ground. Archaeologists excavated 69 ancestral remains without the local community’s consent-sparking outrage and profound grief. Samples of the remains of the ancestors were sent to the Netherlands for DNA testing, even though this was vigorously disputed at the time.

In response to the unethical excavations, a grassroots campaign was launched to protect the sacred burial grounds. Now, three years later, our visit is a pilgrimage-an act of solidarity to support, bear witness, and join the islanders in their ongoing fight to honour Afrikan ancestors.

Two of the sites, located on private property, are inaccessible—blocked by locks, fences and gates. It becomes harder to normalise how accessing these sacred stories and spaces demands so much. It’s now clear that the burial ground has historically been left in the institutional hands of politicians, developers, and archaeologists none of whom carry the cultural or ancestral weight of what this ground represents.

We remain with just enough to fertilise our collective will to not accept what the system has tried to reduce us to for more than 400 years. Subhuman and exploitable for profit. We are overwhelmed by the systemic and institutionalised gravitational pull to fail, to accept the status quo, the comfortable. It is here, in a society constructed for competing against each other, that we choose instead, to gather.

Reclaiming Our Stories, Restoring Our Ties

We gathered with the descendant community for a series of events beginning with an exhibition of 12 art pieces by artist-in-residence Fre Calmes, created for the project "Remember Statia: Tracing Our Origins". This initiative was a unique collaboration between the Foundation Bigi Bon and The Alliance with support by the Mondriaan Fund. Guided by ancestral memory, a dozen participants of Statian descent traced and documented their Afrikan heritage using records from the island’s Slavery Registry and archival resources from many other islands and countries.

We gather at the radio station to share reclaimed stories and ancestral narratives of Afrikan descendants. We discuss, deliberate, and listen to priceless strands of knowledge-long unheard, forgotten, or erased. Through a 9-episode podcast series, Reclaiming Our Stories, Restoring Our Ties, we explore the birth of The Alliance and the purpose of our on-island visit during a month dedicated to remembering what it means to be a Statian. It’s a powerful reminder of storytelling’s role in a community where oral history lives on-and radio remains a treasured vessel for it.

In the final week of our visit, following Statia’s cultural celebrations, we witness the First Salute-a re-enactment that foreshadows the Dutch Kingdom’s 2026 commemoration of a colonial event rooted in a time when people of Afrikan descent were viewed as subhuman.

A Story of Bones and The Heritage House

In the emotional aftermath of an elaborate colonial banquet of official delegates from the Dutch Kingdom and the United States of America, we gather under the clear night sky, in the inner courtyard of the building temporarily housing ancestral remains to watch the documentary A Story of Bones. The film tells the story of Peggy King Jorde and Annina van Neel, working with the local community to reclaim and honor St. Helena’s neglected history and the remains of thousands of formerly enslaved Afrikans. It reignites our hunger for the memory of who we once were and were always destined to be. When the film ends, we move to the main exhibition hall of the Heritage House.

Laid before us is a carefully curated collection of items found with the 69 ancestral remains. The words of The Alliance archaeologist, marjolijn kok, and Statia Heritage Inspector and local historian, Raime Richardson, add depth to each object, revealing their hidden significance. [You can watch our YouTube movie for an impression] Bodies uncovered with white dinner plates on their chests, along with buttons and cloth rare and intriguing finds. Theories about the dinner plates swirl through the room, yet with missing archaeological reports, we are left in the dark, more uncertain than before.

Next we enter the cool quiet room with the background hum of air-conditioning, holding the 69 ancestral remains that were archaeologically excavated in 2021 and finally returned to the island. Clear plastic boxes labelled with dates, numbers and words, stacked to the ceiling on steel storage shelves. It is clear they were brought into this room by a force that strips humanity and replaces it with order. Order with a top and a bottom. With a beginning and an end. Order that aborts from the mother, the earth and places in boxes with labels.

We all listen with hungry hearts as our messenger embellishes the labels, the boxes, the shelves and the walls with returned stolen stories. Histories of who they were and who we are. Few of us manage to speak, others leave as the energy is too much to bear. An ancestral peace-worker from Suriname (Manuwi C. Tokai), conducts a ceremony to honour them. Songs and prayers fill the night, the room, the air, the boxes, the bones and our hearts.

As we return to the courtyard, we sit in a circle 40 strong and full, facing each other under the night sky. Here we share our hopes, dreams and fears for ourselves, the community, and the ancestors. By the end of the evening, we are content, yet don’t want this gathering to end. Huddling in groups, the conversations are dark, rich and sweet like molasses. We retreat homewards with a deep sense of belonging, rooting, still seeking.

The Godet Plantation

A few days later at the end of our visit to the island, The Alliance, weary from our struggle to connect with and protect our heritage, staggered to the ancestral grounds.

We accessed the Godet Afrikan Burial Ground Plantation first. Together we climbed over a fence, weaving our way through a thicket of invasives before arriving in a clearing surrounded by trees.

This is where our ancestors would first set foot on the island. This place marks where most enslaved Afrikans were trafficked across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, would stagger on to the earth after surviving the horrific middle passage. Here they would be broken further and distributed to the rest of the Caribbean and the Americas. This is what Statia was prized for by the Dutch Kingdom. The Golden Rock of the Caribbean. A free port to trade by any and all means necessary.

We descend towards the beach, maneuvering slowly over loose boulders and cobbles before landing on the soft beach sand. It’s after four in the afternoon, my favorite time of day, the light is perfect on the water and the cobbled beach. I am here with kindred spirits, and fully aware of the presence of our ancestors. I feel loved and accepted by all the forces surrounding me: the wet beach sand beneath my feet and between my toes, the deep Atlantic Ocean to the left of me, the full blue sky punctuated with stretched cotton ball clouds above me and to the right of me, the ancestors’ sacred resting place.

I feel completely overwhelmed by the immense feeling of having arrived, belonging. I weep at the unexpected beauty of this place. At the unexpected beauty in spite of great trauma. I feel instantly connected to their humanity and love for one another. We lay our flowers and join hands to honour those who once laid here, and for those who still do.

We celebrate with them one of our victories. Prior to our visit to St. Eustatius, the Godet Plantation and the Golden Rock Plantation were granted UNESCO Routes of Enslaved Peoples recognition. This international recognition is due to our 3 year-long campaign for the protection and preservation of the Afrikan heritage on Statia led by the St. Eustatius Afrikan Burial Ground Alliance.

By the end of my visit to Statia, we have achieved what the ancestors had laid out before us. We shared and reminded the community and each other of what we forgot to remember. As I say my goodbyes, we acknowledge the beauty and the difficulties of our struggle. How crucial it is for us to gather, when equipped with limited resources and in facing active and often violent resistance and attack by the system that only exists to sustain itself, as it always has. When we gather, we are reminded of the greatest strength our ancestors had and what we have, is each other.

© All photos provided by the St. Eustatius Afrikan Burial Ground Alliance. Please visit our website for all the output of our project: https://steustatiusafrikanburialground.org/activities/reclaiming-our-stories/

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To remember is to occupy space, reflect, and bear witness. Through our collective fight to preserve African burial grounds, we reclaim our connection to land, memory and our humanity.

Memorialization need not be defined by buildings or statues but by how people choose to occupy a place, bearing witness to its cultural and historical significance. People give meaning to places. Gathering to be at rest and reflect in a place where ancestors once worked, suffered and perished is a profound act of remembrance and memorialization.

Peggy King Jorde, St. Eustatius 2024