Zwarte Hollanders - Belanda Hitam (Indonesian)

This splendid portrait is of a KNIL - Royal Netherlands East Indies Army - NCO recruited from West Africa.

We found this in the KNIL Room of the Nijmegen Museum.

Between 1831 and 1872 over 3,000 West Africans were recruited through the Dutch Gold Coast to serve as soldiers in the Netherlands East Indies (modern Indonesia).

The Dutch had suffered major losses in the Java War and wanted the locally recruited soldiers to be only half of the total strength of the East Indies Army to ensure loyalty. They hoped that West Africans would be resistant to the tropical diseases that decimated soldiers recruited in Holland, and would be loyal to them.

The first soldiers were recruited from Elmina - the former Dutch slave port in the Gold Coast (today's Ghana) coast. They were so successful that in 1836 a mission was sent to the King Kwaku Dua of Ashanti inland at Kumasi and an agreement was made. A recruiting office was set up in Kumasi, and two princes Kwasi Boachi and Kwame Poku Boachi were sent to the Netherlands for training.

This continued until 1871 when under the Treaty of Sumatra the Netherlands possessions in the Gold Coast were transferred to the British.

The principal depot of the KNIL, which was separate from the Netherlands Army, was in Nijmegen; where some barracks and other reminders of the Dutch East Indies Empire remain.