Anton de Kom
Cornelis Gerhard Anton de Kom
Anti-Colonial Author and Resistance Fighter · 1898–1945
Who is Anton de Kom?
Cornelis Gerhard Anton de Kom was born in Paramaribo, Suriname, in 1898, the son of a formerly enslaved father who had gained freedom after the abolition of slavery in the Dutch colony in 1863. He moved to the Netherlands as a young man and worked as a clerk, but grew increasingly active in anti-colonial and labor politics. In 1933 he returned to Suriname, where his outspoken criticism of Dutch colonial rule and plantation labor conditions drew large crowds and alarmed the authorities; he was arrested without trial and deported back to the Netherlands, an event that provoked a protest in which two demonstrators were killed. In exile, he wrote "Wij slaven van Suriname" ("We Slaves of Suriname"), a groundbreaking history of Suriname told from the perspective of the enslaved and colonized rather than the colonizer, first published in a censored edition in 1934. During the Second World War he joined the Dutch resistance against the Nazi occupation, was captured by the Gestapo, and died of tuberculosis in 1945 in the Sandbostel satellite camp of the Neuengamme concentration camp, only days before liberation. He is honored today as Suriname's foremost national hero, with the country's university, streets, and currency bearing his name.
Sources: Anton de Kom, Wij slaven van Suriname (1934) · BlackPast.org, "Anton de Kom (1898-1945)" · Wikipedia, "Anton de Kom"