The Swiss National Museum and a group of historians have documented and are working to raise awareness about Switzerland’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, slavery, and colonialism—topics long absent from discussions about the country’s development and role in the global order.
At the political level, Switzerland’s success is often linked to its high level of decentralisation, its practice of direct democracy, and its age-old policy of neutrality in foreign affairs. Lacking raw materials and abundant labour, its economic transformation and incredibly high standard of living have been associated with its specialisation in high-margin, precision-engineered exports, such as pharmaceuticals, medical devices, luxury watchmaking, and specialised machinery. The role of the Swiss franc as a global safe-haven currency, backed by low inflation, prudent fiscal policies, and a robust, secret banking system which hides the riches of the wealthy from all corners of the world, also often enters the debate on the Swiss miracle.
Switzerland’s involvement in the violent and exploitative foundations of the modern global economy—from the 16th to the 19th century—often escapes scrutiny. Conventional wisdom holds that the country was not a frontline state in the creation of that order—it had no colonies compared to Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and Germany, and lacked the resources and power to buy, raid, and export enslaved people from Africa or establish settler slave-owning colonies in the Americas. As a small nation, it largely benefited from world trade after the system was established by practicing an open trade policy. The guilty states were largely the great powers.
This rosy picture of Switzerland’s benign participation in the global order has been put under the microscope in an engrossing exhibition titled Colonialisme: Une Suisse Impliquée (Colonialism: Switzerland’s Involvement) at the Château de Prangins in Prangins, about two kilometres from where we live in Nyon. The collection of artifacts—photos, paintings, letters, books, historical testimonies, regalia, objects of torture, currencies, carvings, agricultural products, etc.—as well as numerous background illustrations, is extraordinarily rich. The use of audio recordings, short videos, and video lectures by experts further enriches the experience. We spent more than four hours at the museum over two visits. It was an eye-opener, and simply irresistible.
The museum does a great job of providing texts in Switzerland’s three official languages—German, French, and Italian—and English. Opportunities for feedback are also available, asking viewers to answer four vital questions: ‘What does colonialism have to do with me?’, ‘What things in my surroundings remind me of colonialism?’, ‘What forms of racism do I encounter?’, and ‘What should not be forgotten?’ There is also a panel discussion of experts on lessons learned and how to move the project forward.
Refreshingly, the organisers do not compromise on moral clarity or defend what is clearly the greatest crime against humanity—as the UN General Assembly recently described that horrible chapter in world history. We were left with a clear impression that the organisers are committed to exposing the truth about slavery and colonialism, and encouraging the public to reflect deeply on this aspect of Swiss history and end racism. The exhibition seems well attended—there were many organised group visits, including schoolchildren, on the two occasions we visited.
Profiting from the Slave Trade and Slavery
The exhibition highlights four main ways the Swiss participated in the slave trade and slavery: as actual traders and financiers; as land-grabbers who created highly repressive slave colonies in Brazil, the Caribbean, and America; as founders of textile and financial companies that benefited greatly from slave labour; and as opponents of demands for reparations. Swiss historian Hans Fasslër estimates that in per capita terms, Switzerland was more involved in slavery than France, a much bigger colonial power.
The slave trade, spanning over 360 years, involved the violent deportation of 12 million Africans to the Americas, with 10 to 15 percent perishing during the journey. Together, the slave trade and slavery represented the cruellest form of the capitalisation of the human body in world history. Swiss individuals and companies were heavily involved in this trade. Enslaved Africans were sold like commodities and forced to endure grossly inhuman conditions as slave labour in the Americas, producing sugarcane, cotton, cocoa, tobacco, and rice, which were then shipped to Europe to boost local demand and industrialisation.
Swiss financial institutions, city treasuries, and private merchant banks were deeply involved in financing and profiting from the trade and the slave-based plantation economy. Historians estimate that Swiss capital helped finance the forced transportation of over 170,000 enslaved Africans. During the 18th century, private Swiss banks, wealthy aristocratic families, and city governments purchased significant equity stakes and sovereign bonds in European trading companies. Zurich’s oldest private bank (Bank Leu), founded in 1755, held substantial shares in the French Compagnie des Indes, which operated slave-trading ships across the Atlantic. In addition, city governments in Bern and Zurich invested substantial sums of money into Britain’s South Sea Company, which held a Spanish Crown monopoly to supply tens of thousands of enslaved Africans to South America.
In the exhibition, we followed the stories of two prominent Swiss figures who established slave colonies in Brazil and America, as well as a textile magnate whose products were used as barter in the slave trade, making him the richest man in Europe.
The first individual was Christoph von Graffenried. Born into a wealthy family in Bern and holding degrees in law, history, and mathematics, he became a member of the Bernese Grand Council and subsequently asked the British crown to support his plans to establish a settler colony in North America. With the help of John Lawson, a surveyor working for the British colonial government, he laid claim to Tuscarora (Skarure) lands in present-day North Carolina, where he established New Bern and settled hundreds of Swiss and German colonists. Swiss settlers emigrated to the Americas to escape poverty. However, most never became rich in their new homeland, but shared the same racist attitudes towards enslaved Africans as their wealthy compatriots. A breakthrough to prosperity usually occurred with the second or third generation. The indigenous people resisted the colonisation project, capturing von Graffenried and killing Lawson along with sixty settlers in a conflict historians refer to as the Tuscarora War. With the intervention of the Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, von Graffenried was released after six weeks of captivity. The main Skarure settlement, Nooherooka, was subsequently destroyed, and the survivors were sold into slavery or fled north to New York. Today, New Bern has an estimated population of over 31,000.
Swiss colonists also established a slave-based colony in the north-east of Brazil: the village of Helvécia (formerly known as Leopoldina), which specialised in coffee production. Many enslaved people worked on its plantations, including one named Helvétia, owned by the Swiss national Johann Martin Flach. Following the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888, it is estimated that approximately 2,000 enslaved people gained their freedom in Helvécia.
The story of Johann Ulrich Zellweger, a 19th-century Swiss merchant and banker from Appenzell, further sheds light on Switzerland’s historical connections to slavery. Living in Cuba for a decade, Zellweger held a management role at Drake Brothers & Co., where he issued credit to plantation owners relying on enslaved labour for sugar and coffee. By trading and exporting these commodities, he accumulated substantial capital. This wealth enabled him to establish the private bank Ulrich Zellweger & Cie in 1848 and later find the Bank für Appenzell Ausserrhoden in 1866—institutions that formed part of the historical roots of modern Swiss banking, including UBS. Later, he founded the Basel Mission Trading Company (Basler Missions-Handlungs-Gesellschaft) to support the financial and commercial operations of the Basel Mission, an organisation dedicated to spreading Christianity in India and West Africa.
Perhaps the most compelling story of Switzerland’s links with slavery is told through the activities of Jacques-Louis de Pourtalès, an industrialist who lived in the 18th and early 19th centuries and earned the reputation as Europe’s richest man. Pourtalès was born in Neuchâtel in the early 18th century and established a huge business empire that specialised in chintz—a widely popular fabric across Europe for interior upholstery, curtains, and apparel that traditionally featured detailed flowers, trailing vines, exotic birds, or botanical motifs printed on light backgrounds. Chintz is believed to have revolutionised global trade and technological breakthroughs in the Industrial Revolution. Switzerland played a central role in the chintz trade during the 17th and 18th centuries when thousands of skilled French Huguenot textile workers and printers fled to Switzerland after France banned the fabric. The fabric served as one of the primary commercial currencies used to buy and enslave humans. European ships loaded with the product sailed to West Africa and used it as barter currency to purchase enslaved Africans from local traders. Apart from his chintz trade, Pourtalès bought plantations in the Antilles, including several hundred enslaved persons, and grew coffee, cacao, and cotton crops. He used part of his fortune to build a hospital in Neuchâtel.
A timeline on the museum’s wall of the section dealing with the anti-slavery resistance demonstrates how long it took for slavery to be proscribed and declared a crime against humanity. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was made in France after a bloody revolution for equality, freedom, and justice in 1789. That declaration, which stipulated that “all Men are born and remain free and equal in rights,” sat oddly with the fact of slavery operating at the time in the American colonies. Even the Haitian Revolution of 1791—the first sustained resistance against slavery and subsequent founding of a black republic—did not end slavery in the Americas, as Napoleon Bonaparte sent troops to Haiti to put down the rebellion and reintroduce slavery in the French colonies.
Even when the greatest power at the time, Britain, banned the slave trade in 1807, and the U.S. followed suit in 1808, it was not until 1948 that a universal declaration was made stating that “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.” Furthermore, it took another 53 years—in 2001—before the United Nations recognised slavery and the slave trade as a crime against humanity. What is more, it was only in March 2026 that the United Nations summoned the courage to declare that the transatlantic slave trade and slavery constituted the greatest crime against humanity. The U.S., Israel, and Argentina voted against the resolution, and 52 countries, mostly from Europe, including Switzerland, abstained.
In one of the short video lectures provided by the museum, Swiss historian Hans Fässler exposed the shocking declaration of the Swiss Federal Council in the 1860s that attempts to force Swiss slaveowners in Brazil to free enslaved Africans were a violent crime against the slaveowners. He also noted that when the slaveowners failed to have their way, the authorities paid reparations to them rather than the victims. The legal and humanitarian ramifications of slavery also played out in Switzerland when an enslaved woman in Haiti, Pauline Buisson, was exported to Yverdon to serve the household of a rich Swiss couple who had lived in Haiti. She gave birth to a son, Samuel Hyppolite Buisson, but the Bern authorities rejected his application for citizenship because of his colour and died stateless.
Profiting from Colonialism, Scientific Racism, and Missionary Work
While slavery was dismantled in the 19th century, it was immediately followed by an era of aggressive European territorial domination across Africa and Asia—a system of colonialism that relied on systemic economic coercion, forced labour, and resource extraction. Swiss individuals and companies played significant roles in this new order, despite Switzerland holding no colonies of its own. This involvement took four primary forms: participating in unequal trade relations that extracted raw materials from Africa at extremely low prices in exchange for highly priced manufactured goods; propounding pseudo-scientific theories on race that denigrated Africans as genetically inferior to Europeans; providing mercenaries to help colonial powers impose their will on African and Asian peoples; and spreading Christianity, which categorised African belief systems as heathen.
Swiss private enterprises, trading houses, banks, and technical specialists deeply integrated themselves into European colonial structures. They participated in an unequal economic system focused on raw material extraction, cash-crop dominance, and financial flight. Trading houses in Basel and Geneva and private banks acted as the clearinghouses for colonial wealth. This laid the groundwork for Switzerland’s current dominance in global commodity trading. In what has been referred to as “colonialism without colonies”, Swiss and other European businesses integrated African smallholders into European industrial supply chains by converting subsistence farmland into cash-crop plantations (predominantly cocoa and palm oil).
African farmers grew the commodities under pressure from colonial structures, while Swiss and other European trading firms controlled the purchasing prices, shipping logistics, and resale values on world markets. Furthermore, Swiss engineers, agronomists, and geologists were hired by major colonial powers (Britain, France, Belgium) because of Switzerland’s technical reputation. These specialists mapped mineral deposits and built railways to transport raw materials from the interior to coastal ports. The museum recounts the horrors of Belgium’s King Leopold in Congo and the role of Swiss workers in that brutal enterprise. It is estimated that about 200 Swiss nationals—geologists, engineers, military officers, and administrators—worked directly in King Leopold II’s brutal private colony, the Congo Free State (1885–1908). They surveyed land, mapped resources, and managed colonial infrastructure that facilitated the violent rubber and ivory extraction regimes. The picture of the son born out of a mixed relationship between a Swiss officer and a Congolese mother, Albert Béguin, is displayed in the exhibition. His father brought him to Switzerland, but without his mother. He became the first Black or mixed-race person to serve in the Swiss army.
Swiss mercenaries also served European powers and commercial trading companies, waging war against native populations in Africa and Asia. Starting in the late 16th century, thousands of young Swiss men turned to colonial soldiering to escape poverty and pursue adventure. Many joined the French Foreign Legion and the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army, becoming complicit in colonial atrocities. Between 1815 and 1914 alone, roughly 7,600 Swiss mercenaries served the Dutch in the Malay Archipelago. Others were central to French imperial expansions—garrisoning outposts, suppressing indigenous revolts across North Africa, especially in Morocco, and aiding in the conquest of Algeria and Madagascar.
The exhibition also throws considerable light on the heavy involvement of Swiss nationals in missionary work, which, as historical research has shown, worked in tandem with colonialism—with colonial powers conquering and administering territories, colonial companies extracting resources, and missionaries preaching the Bible, building schools and hospitals, and pacifying the natives. The biggest and most famous of the Swiss missions was the Basel Mission, which was founded in 1815 and started sending missionaries to present-day Ghana in 1828 and to India in 1834. As the exhibition points out, although they occasionally initiated positive social change, missionaries saw the cultures and belief systems of their converts as inferior to those of Europeans. One of the museum walls features a large photo of a smiling female missionary carried in a wooden chair by African men, escorted by others carrying heavy loads on their heads.
A defining feature of the work of the Basel Mission was its involvement not only in missionary work but also, like colonial trading companies, in colonial trade and other businesses, blurring the line between religion and colonial extraction of surplus. In West Africa, Basel missionaries established cash-crop agriculture, promoting cocoa, coffee, and palm oil cultivation. The Mission established a trading and manufacturing company, the Basler Handelsgesellschaft, which generated massive profits while integrating local economies into global trade routes controlled by European empires. Christian paternalism and colonial extraction became inextricably intertwined. Profits were systematically transferred to Switzerland to fund its mission operations and pay capped annual dividends to investors. Between 1916 and 1928, it evolved into an independent trading company, which further metamorphosed in the mid-20th century into a major Swiss multinational, generating billions in revenue.
Perhaps the most damaging effect of the colonial enterprise—in which Swiss individuals played a frontline role—was the propagation of pseudo-scientific theories asserting African racial inferiority. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, scientific racism, polygenism, and physical anthropology were widely accepted in Western universities. Researchers measured human bodies and skulls, claiming physical metrics correlated with intelligence, morality, and civilisational potential. These studies fuelled notions of racial purity, Social Darwinism, and species survival that demanded the elimination of “inferior” groups—ultimately spawning eugenics, structural racism, and genocide.
The world’s leading scholar in scientific racism was Louis Agassiz, who was a professor of glaciology, paleontology, and natural history at Neuchâtel, but later moved to Harvard in the US. The Universities of Zurich and Geneva were leading centres in the study of scientific racism. Aggasiz denounced Darwin’s theory of evolution, asserting that Africans and Europeans were different species, in which Africans occupied the lowest rung in his hierarchy of races. He commissioned slave daguerreotypes—15 photographs of seven enslaved individuals in 1850–identifued as Renty, Delia, Hack, Drama, Fassens, Alfred, and Jena—on plantations in South Carolina. These individuals were photographed bare-chested or completely stripped, viewed from the front, profile, and back. They were, cruelly, reduced to biological specimens, stripping away their personal identity and dignity for the purpose of racial classification.
In 1896, local event organisers and scientists at a Swiss National Exhibition constructed a massive Village Noir (Black Village) in the heart of the city of Geneva. More than 200 Senegalese men, women, and children were brought to Geneva and put in a gated enclosure like animals, and more than two million people paid to observe them perform daily tasks. Swiss physical anthropologists used the Village Noir as a living laboratory to conduct physiological and cranial studies on the Senegalese participants.
The exhibition has a special wall, which can be described as a Wall of Infamy, displaying the faces of the twelve most prominent Swiss scholars who propagated the obscene theories of scientific racism. These are Louis Agassiz, Paul Eugen Bleuler, Carl Vogt, Émile Yung, Ernst Rüdin, Otto Schlaginhaufen, George Montandon, Julius Klaus, Auguste Forel, and Marc Rodolphe Sauter.
Conclusion
The Prangins exhibition on Switzerland’s role in the slave trade, slavery, and colonialism is a masterpiece. I’m aware that the biggest museum on the slave trade and slavery (the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture), which I have yet to visit, is in Washington. However, this is the first museum we’ve visited in which the spotlight is put on a country’s role in the trifecta of the slave trade, slavery, and colonialism. It’s different from museums we’ve visited in Africa that address the tragic experience of Africans in the Euro-American global order. The Anti-Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg tells a powerful and profound story of apartheid and the courageous resistance against it. The National Museum in Namibia offers gripping insights into the horrors of colonialism, the world’s first genocide by German colonists, and the heroic struggle for independence. Kenya’s National Museum in Nairobi also does a great job of documenting the evils of colonialism, land appropriation, and the struggle for freedom. The historic defeat of a European power, Italy, in Africa—the Battle of Adwa in 1896—is also heroically celebrated in an imposing museum with rich illustrations in Addis Ababa.
These initiatives, including the Prangins exhibition on the slave trade, slavery, and colonialism, challenge and stand in stark contrast to recent efforts by the U.S. government under Donald Trump to roll back public education and critical reflection on slavery and racism. This comes in a country long considered a heartland of racial prejudice, institutional racism, and violence.
This article was first published in the Yusuf Bangura Substack.