Itâ??s a photograph taken a lifetime ago: two little white girls in flowery dresses in a tropical country called Netherlands East Indies. One of the girls, Alice Duif, liked the picture so much that she thought, â??I must keep this a long time.â? So she wrote an accompanying caption, in Dutch, in her best childâ??s handwriting: â??Noor Hajema, 13 years old. Lies Duif, 12 years old. Bandoeng, 1938.â? She then stuck it in her first-ever photograph album.
But soon after that picture, the album ends abruptly. The remaining pages were never used. Thatâ??s because in 1942 Japanese troops invaded the Indies and put Duif and other Dutch residents into camps. Duif recalls, â??We had to hand in our albums. I thought, â??Well, Iâ??ll never get that back again.â?? That was 70 years ago.â?
In 1948 the Indies became independent Indonesia. Last year, aged 86 and living in South Africa, Duif heard that the Dutch Tropenmuseum (Tropical Museum) in Amsterdam had her album. â??I called at once,â? she told me over the phone from Johannesburg. â??I said, â??I am that girl.â??â?
Pictures from the Tropenmuseumâ??s albums, some reprinted on these pages, beautifully retell a familiar story: the colonial era as lost white paradise. White-clad children lounge beside native nannies on sunny lawns. Men ride or shoot elephants. Leafing through the albums one morning at the Amsterdam museum, I was unwillingly seized by colonial nostalgia. That â??warm, sepia-tinted glowâ? (as the British historian of Africa, David Anderson, calls it) suffuses many British, Dutch and French memories of empire. However, colonial nostalgia may finally be receding. Stories of colonial atrocities, long familiar to academic historians, are now reaching the general European public. The western emotional memory of colonialism is changing.
