I’ve been in the Netherlands for two weeks now and it’s still taking a bit of getting used to. I find it quite funny that I’ve spent the best part of the last 18 months crossing the US telling people all about the ‘civilisation’ of Europe and now I’m having to do some adapting to different cultural practices on my own doorstep.

take Christmas in the Netherlands for example. now, I’ve previously lived in Denmark for four and a half years and had to get used to the abomination of having Christmas presents opened on the evening of the 24th – now I discover that the main event here in Holland (and in Belgium, and probably elsewhere?) takes place on the 5th and is called Sinterklaas. this is the day when the kids get their presents, along with a poem from the gift-giver. so far, so good. what’s odd, however, is the fact that Sinterklaas (AKA Saint Nicolas AKA the basis for that fella who was invented to sell Coke or increase the sale of merchandise in the last few months of the year, Santa Claus), who in Holland takes a much more saintly form than jolly old US or UK Santa, has a helper who looks like he’s just jumped straight out of an old episode of the Black and White Minstrel Show.

yes, this helper is Zwarte Piet (Black Peter) and last week I saw hundreds of him. it was blackface time, an extremely strange thing for a Brit to witness – not only have you got barmaids and barmen dressed up behind the bars of the town, you’ve also got little kids blacked up and enjoying the festivities. I’m living opposite a nursery school and was actually woken up last Wednesday morning by about a hundred little Zwarte Piets all happiily chorusing along to what sounded suspiciously like Gabber Christmas Carols (i.e. Dutch Christmas carols backed by music at speeds of up to 220bpm. not a good way to wake).

soooo…this was all actually extremely strange for me to witness. it seemed a little…well, offensive I guess, and I had to make an effort to take it in its cultural context. Zwarte Piet is, depending on your take on it, either a moor from Spain captured sometime back in the day and is consequently a slave in thrall to Sinterklaas (he also steals naughty children and puts them in a bag at Christmas – be good kids!) or just a man who’s come down a chimney and has soot on his face. either way he’s a prankster and a comic, and the kids seem to love him (apparently this is the case – and it seems so – although my black English colleague has a small son at school here in the Netherlands and Zwarte Piet scares the hell out of him). this blog from the BBC explains a bit more…

it’s funny being a foreigner in a foreign land and then being confronted by something like this, something that could never happen in the UK because of, well, the PC brigade for one thing, but also because we cancelled the Black and White Minstrel Show in the 70s and ‘blacking up’ is seen as really rather offensive to the many black people, English and otherwise, we have in our country. cultural relativism…why should the Dutch not have Black Peter? why should the Brits not have a deeply embedded class system? why shouldn’t the Danes express themselves through cartoons? why shouldn’t the Saudis hands off? why loads of other things that can be construed as offensive to…well, someone is always going to be offended, right?

nah, what I found really intereesting about the Zwarte Piet thing is that the Netherlands, where I have resided for just over two weeks now, is extremely racially mixed these days – it’s certainly not an overwhelmingly white country judging by the look of Amsterdam and The Hague. it’s a country right on the forefront of the European intergration question – along with Denmark I think it’s one of the most interesting places in Europe right now in the way it is tackling/not tackling the ‘immigration issue’. Zwarte Piet I guess is an example of the sorts of cultural traditions we have over here that are going to have to adapt to Europe’s new immigrants, or be adapted by them. which way will it go…all I know is that the kids that were all blacked up at the nursery school across the road from my flat? there were only a couple of white kids among them, the rest coulda come from all over the world…

Stuart                               Have a comment? Please sign the guestbook