The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi is an ingeniously constructed, ‘postcolonial’ novel based on historical documents. It recounts a little-known episode in the history of the Dutch empire.


When the novel opens it is 1900 and we are on a tea plantation on the island of Java, and the narrator, old Kwasi Boachi, is looking back on his life. In real life, Kwasi Boachi, whose portrait features on the cover, was an Ashanti prince from Ghana, who together with his cousin Kwame, was sent to Holland in 1837, when the Gold Coast (now Ghana) was still a Dutch colony, as part of a contract to recruit black African soldiers for the Dutch colonial army in the East Indies (present-day Indonesia). Through Kwasi’s wit and wisdom, we get a vivid picture of the culture of nineteenth-century Dutch colonialism.


In Holland, Kwasi and his cousin Kwame are educated intellectually, socially, morally and sexually. Being black, they find themselves turned into outsiders and curiosities. Kwame reacts to this by emphatically retaining his African identity. He returns to his native Elmina in 1847, only to be shunned by his own people. He commits suicide.


Kwame’s letters in the middle part of the novel form a moving counterpoint to the main narrative of Kwasi, who adapts as fully as possible to Dutch culture and society. Kwasi attends university, is presented at court, falls in love with Princess Sophie, visits her in Weimar, and in 1850 leaves for Java. In an interesting play on fiction and reality, there is a walk-on part here for Eduard Douwes Dekker (alias the writer Multatuli), whom Kwasi Boachi visits in Amboina in 1852.


The overall storyline is that of Kwasi’s slow discovery of the secret bureaucratic plot which kept him in exile in Java. However white his heart may have become, his skin was far too dark for him to be acceptable to the deeply racist Dutch establishment.

She turns them over and over.

‘Black, white, black, white,’ she laughs. ‘The outside is still African, and the inside is steadily turning Dutch. Don’t you agree?’ She lays my hands in my lap. Sits facing me. Reaches out her arm. Her fingers touch my lips. Pulls down my lower lip: ‘Pink, too!’

That’s how livestock is valued, I reflect, and try to banish the thought at once. She raises my upper lip with her fingers and stares at the gums. That’s how slaves are valued.

‘Indeed, yes! Your tongue, too!’

I clamp my mouth shut, grind my teeth. (p. 186, tr. Ina Rilke)