iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Mayaki Kimba @mkimba.bsky.social · 18/07/2025

Just visited the Erfgoedcentrum Nederlands Kloosterleven, an archive preserving the collections of over 100 Dutch monastic orders & congregations. The archive itself is housed in a monastery that has been occupied since 1371! Certainly the prettiest and most unique archive I’ve visited thus far.

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Mayaki Kimba @mkimba.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

Joyce Moore Turner passed away last year at the age of 104. To commemorate her and to reflect on the conversation I was able to have with her, I wrote this post on SX Blog: smallaxe.net/content/1304.

smallaxe.net

An Archive in Memories: Remembering Joyce Moore Turner

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Mayaki Kimba @mkimba.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

My article was aided enormously by a conversation I was able to have with Joyce Moore Turner in May last year. Turner was close friends with Hermina Huiswoud and wrote the indispensable book "Caribbean Crusaders and the Harlem Renaissance." aalbc.com/books/978025...

aalbc.com

Caribbean Crusaders and the Harlem Renaissance, a book by Joyce Moore Turner

Caribbean Crusaders and the Harlem Renaissance (Nonfiction, Paperback) by Joyce Moore Turner (University of Illinois Press, Oct 31, 2005)

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Mayaki Kimba @mkimba.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

The Huiswouds not only knew, but also had partnerships, friendships, and at times feuds with none other than W. E. B. Du Bois, George Padmore, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Marcus Garvey and many others.

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Mayaki Kimba @mkimba.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

Next to reconsidering the relationship between international Communism and anticolonial nationalism, I stress the rather extraordinary number of luminaries in the orbit of the Otto and Hermina Huiswoud.

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Mayaki Kimba @mkimba.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

I thus propose to think of international Communism and anticolonial nationalism as two registers in which Black radicals speak. That is, while the Huiswouds spoke in different registers in different historical moments, their substantive beliefs remained remarkably consistent.

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Mayaki Kimba @mkimba.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

Rather than exchanging an economic focus for a cultural one, the Huiswouds continued to address economic exploitation and emphasize international solidarity, even as their organizing took the form of Surinamese anticolonial nationalism.

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Mayaki Kimba @mkimba.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

Rather than being wedded to economic determinism, the Huiswouds were already concerned with anticolonialism and anti-racism during their time with the Communist International.

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Mayaki Kimba @mkimba.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

Faced with the difficulties of overt Communist organizing after World War II, the Huiswouds increasingly adopted an anticolonial nationalist discourse. Their overall activist objectives and outlook never substantively changed, however.

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Mayaki Kimba @mkimba.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

Anti-communist measures taken during the Cold War resulted in the detainment of Otto Huiswoud during WWII, and immigration difficulties for Hermina Huiswoud as a naturalized US citizen.

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Mayaki Kimba @mkimba.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

While international Communism and anticolonial nationalism may appear to be mutually exclusive, the trajectory of Otto and Hermina Huiswoud shows such an antithesis to be false.

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