This article attempts a comparison between the ideas of two important white intellectuals, respectively in Suriname and South Africa in the 1930s and 1940s, Kielstra and Cronjé. The ideas of both of them were important both for the process called verindisching or "Indianisation" in Suriname, in the case of Kielstra, and for thinking out apartheid policy in South Africa, in Cronjé’s case. The common Dutch colonial origin of both kinds of thinking allows for a comparison between them, in spite of the differences between the colonial histories of Suriname and South Africa (both are former Dutch colonies). This comparison shows that there are similarities in the thinking of both Kielstra (a former government official in the Netherlands Indies or Indonesia) and Cronjé (an Afrikaner sociologist who did his doctoral studies in the Netherlands). Therefore, in spite of the enormous differences between the diverse former Dutch colonies (in this case, Suriname, South Africa and Indonesia), there is a common basis to colonial thinking in all three of them. This shared thinking came up very sharply in the period just before, during and after the Second World War.
Suriname; South Africa; Indonesia; apartheid; Dutch colonialism