A Problem in the Indies, an Answer on the Gold Coast
By the 1830s the Netherlands had a manpower problem in its East Indies colonies. The colonial army needed soldiers, European recruits were expensive, hard to obtain and died in large numbers of tropical disease, and the wars in Java had shown how quickly a garrison could be consumed. Officials in The Hague and Batavia looked for another source, and settled on West Africa, where the Netherlands still held Elmina and a string of smaller forts.
There was an obstacle. The Netherlands had abolished its participation in the transatlantic slave trade in 1814. Whatever was done on the Gold Coast had to take the legal form of voluntary enlistment. That meant an agreement with the power that actually controlled the supply of men in the interior: the Asantehene.
The Mission
The man sent to obtain it was Major-General Jan Verveer, a Dutch officer given the standing of a formal envoy for the purpose. He arrived on the coast and travelled inland to Kumasi, reaching the capital and concluding an agreement with Asantehene Kwaku Dua I in 1837.
The journey itself was not a small undertaking. The route from Elmina to Kumasi ran some two hundred kilometres through forest, and a formal embassy moved slowly, with carriers, gifts and an escort. Verveer's mission travelled with substantial presents, since gift exchange was the expected medium of diplomacy at the Asante court, and firearms and manufactured goods featured among them.
What Was Agreed
The agreement provided for Asante to supply men who would be enlisted at Elmina for service in the Netherlands East Indies Army, in return for payment and goods. A recruitment depot was established at Elmina, and over the following decades roughly three thousand West African men were sent to Java and Sumatra under this and successor arrangements — the soldiers who became known in Indonesia as the Belanda Hitam, the "Black Dutchmen".
Two young members of the Asante royal house, Kwasi Boakye and Kwame Poku, travelled to the Netherlands in connection with the mission to be educated there. Their subsequent lives — Boakye trained as a mining engineer and spent much of his life in the Indies, Poku's return proved deeply unhappy — have become one of the best-known strands of Dutch-Asante history, partly through later fiction based on their story.
The Uncomfortable Part
The mechanism by which men were obtained is the heart of the difficulty. In practice the Asante state supplied people who were unfree: captives, pawns and enslaved persons, who were manumitted at the moment of enlistment so that the paperwork would show a free man volunteering for the Dutch service. The Dutch authorities were aware of this; the legal fiction was designed precisely to accommodate it.
Historians differ over how to characterise the arrangement. Some regard it as slave trading conducted under an administrative disguise; others emphasise that the men did serve as soldiers, received pay and pensions, could complete their engagements and in some cases returned or settled with their families in Java. Both descriptions capture something real, and the honest position is that the arrangement sat in a genuinely ambiguous space between enlistment and purchase, and that the ambiguity was deliberate.
What Verveer's Papers Record
Verveer's reports and correspondence from the mission survive in the Dutch archives and are a substantive source on the Asante court in the 1830s: on the reception of the embassy, on the negotiations, on the ceremonial and the organisation of the capital. Like all European accounts of Kumasi they were written by a man who was there briefly, who did not speak Twi, and who had a specific transaction to conclude. Read alongside Bowdich, Dupuis and the Asante oral record, they are valuable; read alone, they are the account of an interested party.
Judging the Mission
In its own time Verveer's embassy was regarded in the Netherlands as a competent piece of colonial business: a difficult journey completed, an agreement obtained, a manpower problem addressed. It is judged very differently now. Dutch public discussion of the colonial past since the 2000s has brought the Belanda Hitam recruitment into view as an episode that abolition did not end but reshaped, and Verveer's mission is where that reshaping was negotiated. He was not an unusual man for his profession and his century; the mission he completed is one of the clearest examples of what the abolition of the slave trade did and did not change.
