Cola Debrot

Who is Cola Debrot?

Nicolaas "Cola" Debrot was born on 4 May 1902 in Kralendijk, Bonaire, the son of a plantation owner, and moved to Curaçao with his family as a young child before leaving at fourteen to attend school in the Netherlands. He studied law and later medicine at Utrecht University, and it was during these student years that his literary career began; his 1935 debut novella Mijn zuster de negerin (My Sister the Negro Woman) remains his best-known work and an early landmark of Dutch Caribbean fiction. In the late 1940s he returned to live on Curaçao, where he helped lay the foundations of a distinct Dutch Antillean literary tradition and mentored younger Papiamentu-language writers. In 1952 he became the Netherlands Antilles' Minister Plenipotentiary in The Hague, helping reshape the constitutional relationship between the Netherlands, the Antilles, and Suriname, and from 1962 to 1970 he served as Governor of the Netherlands Antilles, the first person born in the islands to hold that office. He died on 3 December 1981. The Cola Debrot Prize, the highest cultural award given on Curaçao, is presented annually on his birthday in recognition of his lasting influence on Antillean letters and public life.

Sources: Wikipedia, "Cola Debrot" · Babel Web Anthology, biography of Cola Debrot · Oxford African American Studies Center, "Debrot, Cola (Nicolaas)"