WHAT IS ARCHIVO BONEIRU?
Journalist and author Boi Antoin has built up an extensive collection of Bonairean cultural heritage on Bonaire in recent years. The material is stored in a room measuring about six by four metres. The collection includes 20th-century photographs, video tapes, audio tapes, objects, books and documents. Although the material is not very old, storage conditions in Bonaire are far from ideal, so the deterioration in its material condition is easy to see.

Plataforma Kultural and Fundashon Historiko Kultural Boneriano have taken the initiative to have the existing material digitised and made accessible. They are collaborating with Regionaal Archief Dordrecht in the process. The National Archives advised and the Institute for Sound and Vision will include part of the collection in its catalogue.

Programme category:

Boneiru Ayera i Awe (Bonaire past and present): 460
Documentaries: 70
Herensia (Heritage): 1385
Herensia di Siglo (Heritage of the Ages): 85
Aki Boneiru: 446 (1981- )
Aktualidat: 38 (oug 2021- )
Beku (weekly radio programme): ±1000 (2007- )

On Aruba in the 1960s and 1970s, Mr. Hubert Lio Booi and Mr. Ito Tromp collected the oral history of the Aruban people, mainly of the Mestizo (indigenous) Aruban people. Their collection is kept in the National Library of Aruba under the name G.F. ‘Ito’ Tromp Collection.

Booi and Tromp have collected much valuable information about Aruban traditional culture.

Ito Tromp

On Curaçao, Paul Brenneker and Elis Juliana collected a large amount of oral data beginning in 1958.

Their oldest informant was born about 1853, ten years before the abolition of slavery.

Most of the information collected by Juliana and Brenneker is stored in the Zikinzá Collection, a database consisting of 1,400 songs, stories, and life histories. Anecdotes, childhood memories, rituals and folk songs were taped from 267 informants.

Content-wise, Brenneker and Juliana were concerned with capturing the knowledge and wisdom of the older, rural population, who still lived isolated from the city and encroaching modernization on Banda’bou or Band’riba.

www.elisjuliana.org

Rose Mary Allen used the Zikinzá collection for her dissertation, “Di ki manera,” on the Afro-Curaçaoan population in the period after the abolition of slavery.

Rose Mary Allen:

In this study I will present the key factors determining the social and cultural life of Afro-Curaçaoans during the first fifty years after the abolition of slavery in 1863. I will do so through a socio-cultural analysis of the social system of which they formed part. Their position within slave society will be the starting point, followed by an evaluation of the two principle elements of social control after emancipation: the State and the Roman Catholic Church. Rather than viewing Afro-Curaçaoans as mere objects to be acted upon, in this analysis I cite them as resilient agents, rising to – and often resisting in a variety of ways – the challenges and restrictions they faced in a free society. Their resilience and resistance are best demonstrated through the factors from which they drew their sustenance; these being mainly their social networks – such as families, peer groups, co-workers, local communities – and their culture, brought to the fore, for example, in their songs, stories and rituals. 

Rene Vicente Rosalia (b. 1948) received his doctorate from the University of Amsterdam on the legal and ecclesiastical repression of tambu, the multifarious and rich Afro-Antillean cultural expression that recalls the slave past. In addition to being the word for felling drum, tambu is also a collective term for polyrhythmic music, played in twelve-eighths time, dance, symbolism, sacred and everyday rituals, entertainment, community building, conflict resolution, information provision, social protest and courting.

He used the Zikinzá collection in addition to his own interviews.

See: Article Bernadette de Wit in the Groene Amsterdammer: https://www.groene.nl/artikel/duivelsdans