If you aren’t Dutch, and don’t know any Dutch people, your first interaction with the stereotype that the Dutch are brutally honest might have been Jan Maas. A tertiary character on the Apple TV show Ted Lasso, his one role, always played for comic relief, is his willingness to speak with no filter.
Jan: Goldfish?
Colin: Oh, it means to forget our mistakes and failures and just move on.
Jan: But I didn't make any mistakes. Only you played poorly.
Sam: Hey, guys, Jan Maas is not being rude. He's just being Dutch.-Ted Lasso S02E01
My own introduction to this characterization was when British pundits talked about the antics of the legendary Dutch manager Luis Van Gaal and his overzealous commitment to honesty.
I’m not Dutch so I can’t say how funny they find this and I’m not here to analyze that stereotype, I just wanted to put it in your head, like it was in my head, when I read the case of the lawyer Albert Delenda and his fight with Heineken Brewery.
“That’s cold, even for the Dutch,” was what I thought when I read the multi-national brewery proved unwilling to pay LE 3000 Albert Delenda asked for—he claimed it was for his work for the brewery during their nationalization in Egypt during the years 1961-3—even after he died and his window and daughter pursued the decade-old case.
The two intrepid women, one of whom, the daughter Nicole, was a lawyer, continued the case and enlisted the help of the Egyptian Bar Association(Niqabat al-Muhamin). When I first read this detail, I couldn’t help but imagine the widow and daughter making irregular trips to Niqabat al-Muhamin building in downtown Cairo in the 1970s. They would wait outside the office, nervous and expectant of some development. And then, most of the time, when they finally met the lawyer, he would end their dispiriting conversation with, “these things take time, but the law is on our side.” And each time they would perform this ritual they would bring back the memory of their deceased and every feeling associated with it. And then they would have to resolve to keep doing it. They did all of this to try to squeeze out a mere pittance for Heineken.
From the little I was able to find on Delenda’s lawyer, Labib Moawad, he cared deeply about his clients and was a damn good lawyer, and so I’m sure he did his very best for them. The Bar itself believed the law was on the Delenda’s side and the body ruled, with all the power it had, that Heineken must pay.
Heineken’s response, as cold as green Stella bottle on a fiery day, was total dismissal of the ruling. They figured that the Bar couldn’t do anything. First, because they were in Holland, and the Bar only had jurisdiction in Egypt. Second, the Egyptian government controlled the Bar, and the government was doing everything they could to get back on the good side of foreign investors.
To this very day, I have no idea if the Delenda’s saw any of the money. The only thing more I know about the case is that Nicole was the third wife of Egyptian movie star Ahmed Ramzy and lived in England.
I first saw this case when I was writing my dissertation and the way it hit me, I knew I would write a separate piece about it. I did and it ended up being my last academic article. I know there are benefits to the academic form, but when I finished presenting the story, I felt supremely dissatisfied. Primarily because there was no space for me to say that while having no evidence other than the fact than that is what corporations always do, I’m pretty sure Heineken were trying to stiff Delenda
And that is a limitation of the current academic form, it demands one obscure the fact all your thinking, research, and writing is shaped by your opinions. In this case my sense of Heineken’s guilt. I bet a few historians reading this are happy to discard all my work because it is biased. For, you see, they believe they only produce work that maintains the required dispassionate distance. They are true historians, which means they are liars. Every choice they make in their writing, just like mine and every other historian, is a stage for their bias to act. The bias determines why they chose this source not that, why they read this bit of evidence this way, not that way.
Before I get too abstract, here is the case of Delenda in as few words as I can manage. See what you think. But know that the facts I’m presenting have been chosen by me. Also, try to grasp that everything you have just read has influenced the way you are going to read the following
The disagreement started in 1970 when Albert Delenda approached Heineken asking them to pay legal fees for services rendered. He claimed that he helped them settle a dispute with the Egyptian government. The dispute was a more than a decade long fight between Heineken and the Egyptian government over remuneration for the government’s 1963 nationalization of Crown and Al-Ahram Brewery—the two main breweries in Egypt. Heineken was the biggest shareholder in each and used them to sell to the Egyptian market.1 That the process was so long and contentions says a lot about Egyptian history [if you are interested I wrote an article on it called “Stella vs Sadat”] but here it’s only essential to know Heineken and the Egyptian government did come to an agreement around the same time that Delenda began asking for payment for his services.
He argued that he was more than deserving because he had done all the paperwork required to ensure that Heineken received a settlement, and he did so at Heineken’s request. As proof, he reproduced a note he was sent by Wittert Van Hoogland, the top manager in Egypt:
Mr. Delenda,
Mr. van der Werf, Managing Director of Heineken International will be in Cairo next week. I have asked him to visit you and to give you my best regards. No need to tell you that Mr. van der Werf has my full confidence. I would be very grateful if you could give him your opinion on a number of issues. I have received your letter of August 6. Unfortunately I will be on vacation in the second half of September. At the beginning of October I will be back in Amsterdam.
Please accept, dear Mr. Delenda, the expression of my best wishes.”
Heineken found the request ridiculous since Delenda was the third biggest shareholder in the beer companies, behind Heineken and Farghaly Pasha [author’s note: this guy will be getting multiple future posts] so any legal work he did was for his own good and did not need to be compensated. They said the following about Delenda’s proof:
You quote a letter and a cable which you allege to have received from us. As a lawyer you will understand that we reserve all our rights in respect of these quotations. This said we failed to see any evidence… This is not surprising, as—we repeat—these allegations are completely unfounded.2
From there, things descended into an acrimonious legal debate with Delenda even threatening to stop Heineken from receiving their settlement payment from the Egyptian government [author’s note: he had no ability to do that.] Delenda, and later his wife and daughter, went to the Egyptian Bar to see if they could help break the impasse. And the Bar ruled in Delenda’s favor. Heineken blew them off. And that, as they say, was that.
From my standpoint, it’s a classic case of “he said, they said, ” and I could not find independent confirmation of what either side said. That’s why I hedged in the article.
Identifying the aggrieved in this case is not as important as the fact that the amount argued over was significantly smaller than the value of the Egyptian government’s indemnity to Heineken, 3,000 as against roughly 250,000 Egyptian pounds3
But deep down, I believed, especially with the callous way Heineken had dealt with many other locals, that Heineken was screwing Delenda. That surely came out in other parts of the article.
What do you think? Have you decided?
Great! Here’s a little bit more information to make things a little more difficult:
The case came back into my mind when I happened to see Albert Delenda’s name recorded as the lawyer in the land purchases and seizures of the Imperial Chemical Industries. This British chemical conglomerate had a big role to play in Egypt’s reliance on industrial fertilizer and also happened to have their office in Mr. Delenda’s office. This was not Delenda’s only corporate entanglement. He worked with British Petroleum and Assicurazioni Generali. When you couple those realities with his large shareholding in the beer companies, it is pretty clear that he was a corporate lawyer who had strong ties to Egyptian capital and the elite. He probably was just as likely as Heineken to argue any cruelty in the name of money was “just business.” You could imagine him filing a frivolous lawsuit to make more money out of bad situation; using his advantages to strike back at Heineken. I bet there were times in his career where he was as cold or if not colder than the Dutch were to him.
Does any of that change your opinion of Delenda?
Honestly, I’m not sure how it shapes my opinion and that is why I am writing this now.
In America in the past few weeks, we have seen non-historians using history to justify the denial of rights to millions. And I hope this little exercise—trying to show how after years thinking it over, I still have conflicted feelings about a historical spat between a multinational beer interest and a corporate lawyer—demonstrates how dangerous that is. My decision has little to no effect. What if it was to determine the rights of the Dutch? Or another group?
I am a big believer in democratizing history writing, because cordoning it off in the academy, just like the academy itself, is a dead end. Yet that does not mean that writing history is easy and requires no training. It's a fraught process that demands serious thought, self-reflection, and honesty. Not anyone can and should do it, especially when it has real-world consequences.
Bibliography
2.2.10.3-1187, Archives of Heineken NV, Stadsarchief Amsterdam
‘Delenda Au Nom de la Nation Conseil De l’Ordre Subsidiaire Des Avocats Du Caire’ [Delenda in the Name
of the Cairo Bar Association]
Omar Foda, Egypt’s Beer: Stella, Identity and the Modern State (Austin: university of Texas Press, 2019)
Journal Des Tribunes Mixtes, 15/16 March 1937, pp. 12, 20-21, 35
Nick Miller, “Louis van Gaal has always delivered direct, unsentimental honesty,” The Athletic, https://theathletic.com/3228882/2022/04/05/louis-van-gaal-always-delivered-direct-unsentimental-honesty/
Omar Foda, “Stella vs. Sadat or how beer helps explain post-1970 Egypt, Middle Eastern Studies, 58:2 (2022): 310-323, DOI: 10.1080/00263206.2021.2007086
Gamal Nkrumah, “Labib Moawad: Keeper of secrets” Al-Ahram English, 23 - 29 October 2003 https://web.archive.org/web/20121025225756/http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/661/profile.htm
For more info on that see my book Egypt’s Beer
25th January 1971, Letter from H.A. Meijer to A. Delenda
“Stella vs. Sadat” p. 320
You really took us on a merry-go-round there. Thank you for a thought-provoking post.