Ten Ten Ten - Netherlands Antilles Has The X-Factor?

It might be a score on the X Factor… er no, actually Simon Cowell would surely never give ten. As it turns out 10 October 2010 is a key date in the Dutch Caribbean calendar, as it is the moment when political changes will take place in several of the Netherlands Antilles.

Two of the islands – Curacao and St Maarten - will be following the lead of Aruba and will take ‘Status Aparte’. While they will remain within the Kingdom of the Netherlands they will have more autonomy and become responsible for their own internal affairs. The three remaining islands, Bonaire and the tiny islands of Saba and St Eustatius, or BES as they are currently known, will actually go the other way, and will become more integrated into the Dutch system. Well, that’s if Bonaire actually goes through with it – having agreed to, they were looking for a referendum on the subject recently.

So, what does it all mean? It means that the BES states will become members of the European Union (this is already the case with Martinique and Guadeloupe, so it is not actually that extraordinary, despite their 4000 or so miles from Europe). The Netherlands Antilles Florin will probably cease to exist – St Maarten is undecided, but Saba will be taking the US Dollar as its currency. And last and most importantly, Mt Scenery on Saba, which has historically been the highest point in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, will now actually be the highest point in Holland.

Nigel Tisdall Goes Dutch - A travel writer's exploration of St Maarten, Saba and Statia.

Papiaments - Chatter in Curaçao, Babble in Bonaire, Anything in Aruba?

Of all the creoles you hear in the Caribbean the oddest is surely the one which comes from the ABC islands - the cluster of three Netherlands Antilles off the coast of Venezuela - Papiamento, as it is known in Aruba (in Curaçao it is called Papiamentu and in Bonaire, Papiamen.

As the great traders of the Caribbean, the Dutch were most concerned most with ports. And in Curaçao, a generally low-lying and barren island, they found a truly magnificent harbour (Bonaire and Aruba they took to protect the approaches from seaborne invasion). Willemstad worked very successfully as a port for centuries, and it gathered, as you would expect, an immense number of different types of people - Europeans, Latin Americans and Africans, even a few Indonesians from the Dutch East Indies. The different strains baked into an extraordinary creole mix. There is even a (culinary) dish that mixes oriental rice and Edam cheese. Very odd.

And you can imagine what happened with the language. A hundred different strains intermingled, to create sounds that are more than the sum of their parts. As an anglo outsider, you think momentarily that it might be Spanish, but then you hear unaccustomed and wayward sounds, as though the words have got out of control. There is the background staccato of Spanish – a taca-taca-taca – with an occasional interloping, possibly Portuguese vowel – a taca-taca-taca-wow – and then the oddest Dutch interjection – a taca-taca-taca-wow-taca-plömpf!

Interestingly, the word Papiament, which - logically at least - means ‘chatter’ or ‘spoken language’, can have the sense of both ‘Parliament’ and ‘babble’. A reassuring thought for all voters...