Narcis, living in Maastricht

In December 1783, a young man stood before the congregation of the Protestant Janskerk in Maastricht, a city in the south of the Netherlands, ready to be baptized into the Christian faith. Nearly lost to history, he survives only in fragments. Born in the Wassa region of Ghana, his African name has disappeared from the records, yet his journey tells a story far richer than the scant traces suggest. At the age of twelve, Narcis was kidnapped by armed men—a common fate amid the chaotic power struggles in West Africa, fueled by colonial ambitions. His destiny could have taken him across the Atlantic to the plantations of the Americas—but it followed a different path.

Narcis was taken to Fort St. George d’Elmina, one of the most notorious slave trading posts on the Gold Coast, and transferred into the possession of Willem Sulyard van Leefdael, the fiscaal (public prosecutor) for the North and South Coasts of Africa and a slave trader. The fiscaal embodied law and justice under the authority of the Dutch West India Company in West Africa.

Sent to Europe as a “gift” for the fiscaal’s brother, Narcis entered a world where his origins marked him as both curiosity and status symbol. In 1778, likely only twelve or thirteen, he arrived in Maastricht, where Colonel Rogier Suljard de Leefdael (1725–1802) lived on Tongersestraat. In a city of about 11,000, Narcis was one of very few people of African descent. He likely received some education under the colonel, learning to read and write—probably in Dutch and French—and underwent religious instruction.

By 1783, five years after his arrival, Narcis was baptized and forced to adopt a new identity. The name “Christiaan” marked his new faith, while “Narcis,” the name he carried from Elmina, became his surname.

His baptism was more than a religious rite; it was a public event, noted in the Dutch press, showcasing the “civilizing” efforts of his owner, the Protestant minister A. M. de Rouville, and godmother Johanna van Heemskerck van Beest-Vitriari. Reverend Christiaan de Groot Stiffry preached on Simeon’s Hymn of Praise: “a light for revelation to the Gentiles” [Luke 2:32a]. Though these individuals lived far from the colonial trading centers of Holland, they were all connected to networks that facilitated colonial expansion.

Records of his later life are sparse. Military registers indicate that Christiaan Narcis served in the Dutch infantry during the Batavian and French periods (1795–1813). By 1806, he was married and had at least one child. What became of him after that remains unknown, a silence reflecting the countless gaps in the histories of enslaved people across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

We know Narcis was kidnapped and owned by a West India Company official, who later gave him to a relative in the Netherlands. His birth name was lost, changed first to Narcis, then again at baptism. Yet baptism did not guarantee freedom—only the owner’s will could grant manumission. His marriage, tied to his baptism (as only baptized individuals could marry), suggests he must have gained freedom before 1806.

Narcis’s life illustrates the harsh realities of slavery in the Dutch Republic. As an enslaved individual owned by prominent citizens, he was constrained by a web of legal and social barriers—barriers that shaped his trajectory and the lives of countless others subjected to slavery in the Netherlands.

(The data on Narcis, with footnotes etc., can be found in Bastiaan D. van der Velden – The Legal Framework of Slavery in the Dutch Republic and Its Colonies, 2026 )