Autobiography, critical fabulation, and African voices in the Archive of Dutch Slavery: John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative (1790;1796) and Joachim Nettelbeck’s Ein Mann (1910)

In this article, I examine the print ‘A Group of Africans’ from John Gabriel’s Stedman’s Narrative, one the most iconic images of Surinamese slavery and the transatlantic slave-trade. Inspired by Hartman’s research methodology of critical fabulation, I explore archival sources, autobiographies, and other texts depicting African voices to provide the people depicted in the painting with context and specificity about their capture and appearance now on the shore of Suriname. Via the identification of the vessel in the background (de Vrouwe Elisabeth), we can trace its journey, identify captain Jan Harmel and the Rotterdam owners. First-mate Joachim Nettelbeck narrates part of this journey in his German autobiography, Ein Mann. The first-person narrative archival texts discussed here (Stedman, Nettelbeck, Equiano, Newton, Du Bois) differ markedly in reliability, their moments of writing, and participation in the action and reflection (Genette’s diegetic and non-diegetic narrator). The navigation of these texts and archives leads to a clearer portrait of Surinamese slavery, transatlantic slavery, and the people depicted by Stedman in this painting.