The relationship with the Dutch, he says, has always been complicated. Dutch friars once arrived to educate the Afro-Curaçaoan population — men who, back home, sat near the bottom of their own society. On the island, they were treated almost as gods, carriers of Dutch knowledge and status. He doesn't believe their intentions were malicious. But their method was telling: the best education, in their eyes, meant turning a Curaçaoan into as close a copy of a Dutchman as possible.
The trap in that approach was structural. Dutch society back home would never actually accept these newly ‘Dutchified’ Curaçaoans as Dutch. You were raised to become something you could never fully become — a closed loop with no real exit.
You are not Dutch, and you cannot do it as well as a Dutchman. It goes beyond slavery.
The lasting residue, he argues, is cultural alienation and quiet competition among Antilleans themselves, everyone reaching for a little more Dutch approval than the next person. The stereotype of laziness that still clings to the island, he insists, isn't true — it's an inherited idea, not an observed fact, and one that does real damage to people's self-confidence.
Race, oddly, is one of the easier subjects to raise with tourists. Curaçaoans are used to living among mixed backgrounds and don't tend to think in strict racial categories. Prosperity and values are the touchier terrain — ground where a visitor bragging about wealth can do real damage to how a conversation lands.
What's shifted the dynamic most, in his view, is simply the growing diversity of who visits at all. As fewer of the white faces on the island are specifically Dutch, the old colonial weight starts to lift a little, replaced by a more general openness to other cultures. Attitudes toward Americans, he's noticed, are markedly warmer than toward the Dutch — a legacy partly traceable to the Second World War, when American forces arrived as protectors rather than colonisers.
Tourism's effect on women's economic position is one of the clearer wins, in his eyes. Most tourism jobs — cleaning, food service, hotel reception — go to women, giving many a level of independence they wouldn't otherwise have. Prostitution, meanwhile, is legal and regulated rather than tied to sex tourism specifically, which he sees as a structural fact of the industry that simply needs careful ongoing management.
His bigger worry is cultural, not colonial — the flattening influence of global media. MTV, he says, shapes how young people everywhere dress and behave far more than any tourist does, and that homogenising pull is worth watching closely, because it isn't native to the culture it's replacing.
What he'd like tourists to see is simple: the Marchi Bieu, the Kas di Pal'i Maishi museum, Jaanchi's, the windmills at Westpunt — the island itself, not just the hotel around it.