The Empire project

COLONIAL COCKTAILS! (part 1)

Discussions about colonialism can get tense—especially in the Netherlands, where certain aspects of the country’s colonial past remain very touchy. Since liquor loosens tongues, we’re starting an every-now-and-again series called “Colonial Cocktails,” where we’ll sit down with historians, journalists and filmmakers, make them drinks of our own devising, and ask them for their take on colonialism.

The cocktail

This week’s cocktail is called The Jodensavanne. We named it after a 17^th Jewish settlement in northern Suriname. Destroyed in a slave revolt in the 19^th century, then converted into a camp for Nazi sympathizers during WWII, Jodensavanne is really worth a wiki.

The cocktail is basically a variation on an Old Fashioned, except with the addition of sugar cane juice—to symbolize Jodensavanne’s history as a sugar plantation manned by West African slaves—and burnt orange peel infused bourbon. Bourbon, being corn-based, is meant to evoke the New World, while the burnt orange represents the Dutch houses that went up in flames when local slaves got fed up with being forced to work the fields and decided to torch the place. Drink up, kids!

The Jodensavanne

• One orange
• 50 ml bourbon infused with burnt orange peel
• 50 ml freshly squeezed sugar cane juice
• pinch of sugar
• 3 dashes of angostura bitters

Infusing the bourbon

Peel an orange, then tear the peel into small strips. Toast 2/3rds of the peels in a frying pan until their edges are black. Put these peels into a bottle of bourbon, and let it sit overnight. Save the rest of the peel.

Squeezing the sugar cane

Get someone to squeeze your sugar cane for you. It sucks doing it yourself without the proper tools, as we found out.

Making the drink

Pour the cane juice into a glass. Throw in the sugar and the bitters, and mix thoroughly.

Next, add half the bourbon and stir. Follow up with a handful of ice, then add the rest of the bourbon. Stir again, then add more ice. The key here is to stir so much that the ice melts, allowing the water to serve as a mixer.

Squeeze a bit of the leftover orange peel and rub it’s oil around the lip of the glass. Toss the peel in the drink and serve.

Next up: sampling the merchandise with Tristan Mostert, junior curator at the Rijksmuseum

Continental drift

The beach in front of Elmina Castle has been taken over by gold seekers. Young men looking for a quick buck build gold sluices in the shadow of West Africa’s most famous slave fort. They pile the sluices high with beach sand, then drown the sand with buckets of seawater laced with mercury.

We arrived in Ghana four days ago, but we can’t shake the feeling that we’re still in Suriname. The streets are full of faces that wouldn’t be out of place in the gold camps of Brokopondo. Even the language triggers a sense of deja vu—Akan, a local tongue spoken in Ghana, somehow became “Aukan” on its way across the Atlantic, and is still the lingua franca of Suriname’s Ndyuka Maroons.

But the countries share more than a common ethnic heritage. 225 million years ago, during the time of the Pangea megacontinent, there was no division between West Africa and the Guyanas. The soil here is the same as the soil in Suriname. It nurtures similar crops, and holds similar treasures.

But we’re not here to look for gold. We’re here to look for people in power.