Black Pete (Zwarte Piet) is an age-old character from Dutch and Belgian folklore that is currently being vilified by people who claim
that he embodies a racist tradition and a 'vestige of slavery'. They see in him 'Blackface', i.e. a racist depiction of a slave-like negro from the American South. In the ensuing debate, these critics blame Dutch people
that by attaching importance to their Black Pete tradition, they turn a blind eye to the evils of Dutch nineteenth-century colonialism.
However, a closer look into folkloric sources on customary annual celebrations demonstrates that the character's origins
predate European colonialism by many centuries. The sources furthermore demonstrate that Black Pete originates from a European, Germanic initiation rite which came around the winter solstice, where soot was applied to faces. Black Pete is, therefore, demonstrably not a negro. These findings invalidate the critics' claims on the custom's alledgedly nineteenth-century, racist origins. Indeed, through this custom, Dutch folklore paints a picture of a fascinating tradition that transcends modern complexes and European nation-states, and which is worth keeping.
What is Black Pete?
Black Pete appears in the run-up to Sinterklaasavond or Saint Nicholas' Eve on the 5th of december; a nation-wide celebration in the Netherlands and Belgium. People apply soot or black makeup on their faces, while they dress up in
seventeenth-century page's clothes. Thus they perform Pete, who is Saints Nicholas' shrewd helper and sidekick. The ones who state that this custom is a racist act rooted in colonial times, are themselves largely descendants of Caribbean and African immigrants.
The average indigenous Dutch and Belgian people, however, do not find the Black Pete tradition problematic.
They consider it a celebration for children where no racial discrimination is intended. The critics, however, continue to fuel the debate with emotions
and finger-pointing, where emotions prevail over facts.
A prototypical Black Pete
Moreover, for several years now, the critics have not just called for a debate on the issue; they have organised disruptive protests
in the streets during the
traditional festivities when Saint Nicholas and
his Black Petes arrive on their steamboat in Dutch and Belgian cities. As early as 2011, Black protesters have been arrested on a yearly basis: people from Ghana, the Antilles, Suriname, and the number of arrests rises as the protests intensify.
In 2014 and 2015, immigrant action groups filed complaints and lawsuits against Black
Pete and the organisers of the annual festivities. They ultimately went to the United Nations so as to have the international organisation investigate whether Black
Pete is indeed a racist practice (here you find a copy
of the UN's letter to the Dutch Government about Black Pete, in which the complaints are summarised). In 2015,
this resulted in the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of
Racial Discrimination calling on the Netherlands to
adjust the tradition, because
Black Pete
is a "negative stereotype" of people of African descent (here you find a copy
of the Committee's report and recommendations).
Slowly but surely, the mainstream media and local Saint Nicholas committees feel they should heed the critique. In 2013, the Dutch Prime Minister, Marc Rutte, was asked at a press conference what he thinks of Black Pete. Rutte, known to enjoy
performing Black Pete himself, suffised by saying that Black Pete
happens to be black, as his name indicates. "There is not much we can do about that", he concluded. The following year, Dutch documentary
maker Sunny Bergman launched her anti-Black Pete documentary entitled Our Colonial Hangover and, lastly, in 2015 CNN aired
Blackface; a documentary about Black Pete by the Afro-American documentary
maker Roger Ross Williams.
His message: "The Netherlands only has a short-term memory when it comes to its role in the history of slavery".
But lately, there are no more Black Petes to be found in the big cities, let alone on television. Some committees and mainstream media decided to ignore the will of the majority of the people. Even Facebook will ban users for a week when they dare place a photo of Black Pete on their profile.
"Racist"
The Dutch folkloric Saint Nicholas, popularly Sinterklaas, is the Dutch precursor of his obese American namesake Santa Claus. His helper, Pete, hands out
presents and goodies to the children,
he wears glossy, seventeenth-century page's clothes with an equally old-fashioned ruff around his neck and an ostrich feather in his hat.
Children love him to bits. But there is one problem: his face is black as soot, he wears lipstick, has black curly hair, he wears golden
earrings,
and to make things worse: his boss is this dignified, white, wise saint dressed in a red bishop's garment, wearing a red mitre. He is endowed with a
gracious,
'That's racist!'
hoar beard
and ditto hair hanging to his shoulders.
Critics, whose great-great-great-grandparents were often slaves, recognise in this joyful pair a black slave and a white master.
They also claim that Black Pete, by the side of Sinterklaas, is being depicted as a stereotypically dumb negro. His red lips, earrings and
oftentimes entertaining behaviour
are said to confirm racist prejudices. Some critics, especially people from America and individuals who strongly identify with that country, claim that Black
Pete is the same character as, what they call,
Blackface.
Millions of unsuspecting Dutch and Belgian people – who have been raised with Black Pete for generations and of whom tens of thousands of
people perform Black Pete each year
– are now being accused of having facilitated racism for generations. The debate is becoming more grim each year.
'Just how can they spoil such an innocent children's celebration??', most Dutch and Belgian people wondered. Most people view Sinterklaas as an innocent yet very important
celebration: for generations, when Dutch and Belgian children ask 'Why is Black Pete black?', they reply:
'It is soot that made Black Pete black. In order to leave the gifts in the people's houses
he had to descend through the chimney'.
Research and politics
A Dutch activist-ethnologist of the renowned Meertens Instituut, John Helsloot, claimed in 2011 and 2012 that Black Pete is only a "recent and essentially racist phenomenon". Indeed, the earliest source in which a black person is employed in the celebration came from the nineteenth century: in it, there is mention of a kroesharige neger (a frizzy-haired negro) by the side of Saint Nicholas. Helsloot's supports his claim by the fact that in eighteenth-century Amsterdam, having a black servant was a status symbol for well-to-do merchants. 'Therefore, Black Pete's face has nothing to do with a slide through the chimney', Helsloot remarks.
He thus proposes that people should impersonate Black Pete only by applying "some smudges of soot on the white skin". In 2012, the socialist Amsterdam City Council member
Andrée van Es repeated that Black Pete is a recent phenomenon, that he is racist and that he will have to disappear. She, too, proposes
a few 'soot smudges' (roetvegen) on Pete's face. A few years later, the Amsterdam City Council as well as the influential national Dutch broadcasting corporation started to consider a makeover for Black Pete by applying soot smudges.
Let us quickly summarise the points of critique: Black Pete is not more than a nineteenth-century phenomenon; what is more, he is a nineteenth-century
black slave; Saint Nicholas is his boss; in this hierarchy, combined with his behaviour, Black Pete corresponds to white prejudices against blacks.
What does folkloric literature say?
I like reading books about folklore and to me it was always clear that Black Pete is neither racist nor a recent phenomenon. I decided to write a book about Black Pete's folkloric background. While writing Zwarte Piet: discriminerend of
fascinerend ('Black Pete: discriminating of fascinating?') I conducted a literature research and I consulted sources which mention Saint Nicholas. Noteworthy are
Schrijnen (1915), Schwabe (1969), De Benoist (1996), Van der Ven (around 1950), Van de Graft (1978), Grolman (1931) and
Farwerck (1970). They describe a myriad of areas in Western and Central Europe where groups of men wear a soot disguise, as they operate at the side of
a Saint-Nicholas-type character.
"The folkloristic sources describe a myriad of areas in Western and Central Europe where groups of men wear a soot disguise, as they operate at the side of
a Saint-Nicholas-type character. "
These Sinterklaas companions sometimes look like a devil, or, in Germany, like a mysterious, obscure, bearded man wearing a burlap suit and a hood.
Other European soot-faced characters wear animals' hides, horns and chains. Sometimes it is the Sinterklaas who merged with these bogeymen, or in other cases he is simply missing.
Nowadays, the Belgian and Dutch representations of Sinterklaas and Black Pete are rather uniform: the 'official' version is that of the red-clad bishop with his black companions.
But this folkloric custom, too, is categorised as one of the many Nicholas masquerades found in Europe, and not a typical phenomenon in a post-colonial culture. In the old days, there were many types of Nicholas
masquerades to be found in the
Netherlands and Belgium. In December, people from the Dutch Veluwe region would impersonate Black Santa Clauses (Zwarte Sinterklazen); in the east of the Netherlands there was a
soot-faced Saint-Nick-Guy-in-women's-attire
(Sinterklaoskerl in
wieve-goed) who would cross-dress and playfully harass women; and on the Wadden Islands in the north we still find
Klozems and Sundrums, who sometimes have black faces. They would also terrorise young women, play disguise games with the villagers, and claim
all kinds of rights. Until recently, in Friesland, there were Sintroms, covered in white sheets, accompanied by black Pieters.
According to the folkloric sources, in sixteenth-, seventeenth- and nineteenth-century Amsterdam frightful black-faced Sunderklazen
would carry faggots (bundles of twigs, bound up) and terrorise the neighbourhoods, looking for bad children.
Outside the Netherlands, in Germany, Saint Nicholas' obscure, bearded and often soot-faced companion is called Knecht Ruprecht. In the French Alsace
he is known as Hans Trapp, in Luxembourg he is known as Houseker, and in Switzerland he is all black-faced and known as
A Swiss Schmutzli;
Black Pete's Helvetian brother, carrying a faggot and a sack
Schmutzli.
Schmutzli's speech is rather basic, similar to the way Black Pete in the Netherlands used to speak. But in the Dutch context that was considered racist, so his speech was adjusted, whereas the Swiss Schmutzli could retain his specific speech.
Today, the Dutch Black Pete's red lips are criticised for that same reason, whereas the Swiss Schmutzli's red lips are not considered racist (see photograph herebelow).
Just like Black Pete Schmutzli wears a faggot and a burlap sack, and he throws nuts and apples to the children. The Dutch and Belgian
Black Pete nowadays throws
'pepper nuts' (pepernoten), 'seasoned nuts' (kruidnoten) and sweets to the children.
In Austria Krampus and
Percht do not always have black faces. They have a devilish appearance, carry baskets and chase youngsters.
Elsewhere, in Wörgl and in the Inn Valley, Tyrol, at Saint Martin's Eve (10 November) there are black-faced, horned men in scary costumes with long necks, who rub soot
into the faces of any passers-by they can get their hands on.
In other places in Europe we see annual customs where masked, young men are chasing girls with the bundles of twigs, with which they beat them on the buttocks, so as to bestow them with fertility.
Yet other winter customs show young men strolling over the lands, while they crack their whips so as to bring fertility to the soil.
If all these popular customs have a common origin – ethnologists and historians think that this is indeed the case –
it is probable that, originally, Saint Nicholas' helpers did not have resemblance with negroes. Black Pete has too much in common with these European archetypes for him to be a watered-down imitation of an African slave.
They all carry faggots; they are often black- or dark-faced; just like Saint Nicholas they sometimes ride a grey horse; they carry a burlap sack or a basket;
The Swiss Schmutzli has red lips, too
they throw fruit and nuts to the children; they bring them gifts, and/or they frighten and hit youngsters with a faggot.
According to the sources, these customs point towards a pagan residue. Popular belief has it that Sinterklaas, on his grey horse, can fly over the roofs;
Sinterklaas is
a lanky, stately figure; Sinterklaas has a long, white beard; Sinterklaas and Black Pete visit the people's homes through the chimney; at the fire place people leave
carrots and hay for the horse's nightly visits. And Pete makes a lot of noise, gets into all kinds of mischief, bangs on the doors, and particularly in the olden days he would
hit children with the faggot.
Sinterklaas and Black Pete are probably remnants of a depraved, ancient, pre-Christian Germanic Wodan cult, performed by Männerbünde (secret, military-religious fraternities). Wodan was their warrior god (in the Anglo-Saxon world one would also
refer to Wodan as Odin). In the days of yore the faggot, nuts and fruit were
their fertility symbols. In Dutch, the word roe or roede, 'faggot', means both 'bundle of twigs' and 'penis'. In pre-Christian times, these groups of men would imitate – reenact if you will – Wodan's
Wild Hunt
in order to invite them to come closer to their earthly lives. The Wild Hunt would consist of warriors that had fallen in battle, whose faces were black
because now they were dwelling in the Netherworld. With Wodan's blessing the men would be able to call fertility and prosperity over their communities. In the belief system of our ancestors, death and new life were closely linked.
The cult would be held during the Holy Twelve Nights, in December; at Yuletide, when the shortest day of the year ushers in the longer days of spring.
In the Middle Ages, as part of a project to dismiss pagan cults, the Church attempted to introduce the holy Father Nicholas (and elwehere Saint Martin) as the headman of the Wild Hunt, in the place of
Wodan.
The German Sankt Nikolaus und
Knecht Ruprecht.
They are the same characters as Kleeschen
an Houseker and le Saint Nicolas et Père Fouettard.
The dark-dressed helper has a black beard, a sack and a faggot.
The Church was, however, unable to really do away with Wodan's eight-legged grey horse Sleipnir, and thus Saint Nicholas and Saint Martin were depicted on a grey. Now the people would refer to the saints
as the Schimmelruiters (in Dutch) and Schimmelreiter (in German). Wodan was also the god of fury and wind: in some legends of northern Teutonic and Dutch Europe the grey horse would still be
reported to be flying through the skies without a rider, haunt the villages, create storms, and cause floods.
Just like Sinterklaas, Wodan would fly over the rooftops;
Wodan was a stately, lanky appearance; he had a long beard; the chimney was the channel through which the home would be in touch with the other world; Wodan and his
army of the dead would come and get food, hay and other offerings. Organised in these Männerbünde, the pagan, soot-faced or masked reenactors would also receive food, offerings and they
would also make a lot of noise in their extatic processions and dances. They would steal things from their communities (this was their religious right), they would snatch youngsters for initiation into
the fraternity (Pete's sack, with which naughty children were erstwhile threatened
to be kidnapped in,
is thought to be a memory of this custom), they would punish unlawfully behaving community members, and they would bestow fertility on the community.
Black Pete is much older than the colonial era
The Sinterklaas and Black Pete custom is derived from a cult of a soot-faced, military-religious class. Does this still make Black Pete a nineteenth-century character?
Yes, partly. He is also from the fourteenth century, the tenth century, the fifth century... So what about the critique that claims that Black Pete is a nineteenth-century slave from Africa?
"That
critique is really a matter of projection by people whose ancestors were slaves themselves."
That
critique is really a matter of projection by people whose ancestors were slaves themselves. Whom the cap fits, let him wear it: their incessant references to slavery tell us more about the people
who claim this, than about history. We have seen that the hierarchy in the relations between Sinterklaas and his black companions
is not a consequence of racism or white supremacy. The hierarchy merely draws our attention to parallels with folk customs elsewhere in Europe, which remind us of the history of the Wild Hunt in which
the holy man's companions have all been coloured black in their own ways.
This critique is very modern. But the exotic appearance of the present-day Black Pete is modern, too. It was only in nineteenth-century Amsterdam when he was given this
tropical guise. The outwardly Moorish appearance may have been the result of nothing more than the inability of the people at the time, to make sense of this black shadow
from the pagan past. So people probably took the typical 'Moor' – a prototypical (not stereotypical!) black man in seventeenth-century
garment that one was used to see in books, in exotist images and as so-called yawners on pharmacies.
In the Middle Ages, the soot-faced companion was often thought of as a devil. This was probably the consequence of a process of demonisation initiated by the Church. Conforming to
the hagiography of Saint Nicholas (and today's akathist hymn of Saint Nicholas) it was Nicholas who had cast Satan into the abyss of Hades, and on icons of the saint we can see how he manages to resist
temptations of the devils around him. One of the devilish remnants that
Black Pete had retained well into the twentieth century, was his chain. The chain can also be found with
older, pre-colonial Sinterklaas characters, like the aforementioned ancient ones in Amsterdam. They appeared in Dutch rural areas, and nowadays one can find them with
many Saint Nicholas companions elswhere in Europe. They would rattle their chains as wild, noisy bogeymen should.
The German Knecht Ruprecht
is still wearing his chain the way his Dutch brother Black Pete used to do.
Hans Trapp in Alsace carries a chain, Père Fouettard in northern France is carrying one.
And in Germany, the abovementioned obscure Knecht Ruprecht not only carries a faggot and a sack, but also a chain. It may not surprise you that the opponents of Black Pete in present-day Holland ascribe
the chain to... yes, slavery.
Some of these racially conscious critics have – albeit superficially – taken cognisance of the devilish layer of Plack Pete. They would claim that this old
equation with the Devil demonstrates the way white people have regarded blacks. Anathema: now the taunted African is even being labeled with the name of the Devil.
However, the folkloric history illustrates that such critics do not have the chronology of Black Pete's stratified development in the right order: like the name Nick
in English, the name
Piet - Pete - was the Devil's medieval name in Dutch. Piet, the devilish creature, existed long before its successor, the alledgedly colonial Pete of the nineteenth century. And the origin of his blackened face, we know, chronologically precedes any form of Western colonialism.
Black Pete is not 'Blackface'
Even more modern is the critics' claim that Black Pete reminds them of Blackface. Blackface? Blackface was an American caricature, performed by white actors, of a black cotton picker or another type of black folk figure.
In the movie The Jazz Singer (1927) Al Jolson
occasionally plays a Blackface. This sort of entertainment and its inherent memories of typically American racial segregation are too foreign to our people in the Western European Lowlands to form part of our national collective conscience.
A white performer would paint his face black — except for the skin around his mouth, to prove he was actually white — and then he would sing Negro songs and perform funny, gawky acts. This resulted in to comic entertainment on the stages reserved for whites in the American South. Negroes were not allowed to enter those theaters; black-painted whites were. Have we experienced imposed racial segregation in Europe, as in the US?
No, we have not. Blackface forms an inseparable part of the American collective conscience. Here, in the European Lowlands Blackface is too unknown for Black Pete to be a hurtful reminiscence of this character. American folklore of this type has usually reached us piecemeal through American movies, and although it has been performed in nineteenth-century Netherlands, it will remain foreign. It may be too American for us to get familiar with.
As a refutation of my claim — which I also made in my aforementioned book — that Blackface, the American cotton picker, is alien to our collective conscience, historian Elisabeth Koning argues in her paper, with aplomb, that in the nineteenth century negro characters had indeed been performed on Dutch stages. They were portrayed as blackface dandies. And, Koning argues, it is this dandy that has become our Black Pete:
"The contrast between civility and barbarity, between humans and monkeys, and between me and the other, is apparent in both the blackface performances and the portrayal of Black Pete. When Marcel Bas claims that the 'moral and historical comparisons' between Zwarte Piet 'and the cheerful cotton-picker-minstrel of the tough nineteenth- and twentieth-century American plantations' are flawed, because Europeans simply share 'a different cultural history' and blackface is not part 'of the national collective conscience', then the blackface dandy character that was prominent on the Dutch stages has not been taken into account (Bas, Zwarte Piet, 63-64). The 'happy cotton-picker-minstrel' is just one of the many existing blackface characters – a character that was rarely brought to the fore in the blackface performances in the Netherlands. However, Zwarte Piet, a dandy type, did become popular, making blackface part of our national collective conscience."
(Elisabeth Koning, Zwarte Piet, een blackfacepersonage:
Een eeuw aan blackfacevermaak in Nederland, 2018)
Nineteenth-century dandies
Ergo, the existence of the Blackface dandy proves that Black Pete and Blackface are one and the same character. Therefore, Blackface has long been part of our national collective conscience.
I find this an unsatisfactory statement. After all, Black Pete does not represent a dandy (see image on the right). Although Blackface had indeed been performed as a curiosity on Dutch stages clad in dandy attire (especially as the liberated cotton pickers Dandy Jim and Zip Coon — see image below), Black Pete is in fact dressed as an early seventeenth century page. His clothing bears witness to this. He wears, among other things, a white, big ruff, colourful puffed trousers and a colourful beret with an ostrich feather. The appearance of Zwarte Piet is much older than dandyism, which only emerged after the French Revolution, i.e. in the late eighteenth century, early nineteenth century.
Dandies had their very own clothing line of linen blouses, waistcoats or jackets, long frock coats, high-waisted trousers, high collars, lavishly knotted cravates, top hats and more. In addition, the wild, mischievous behaviour of Black Pete with the sack, faggot and (spiced) '(pepper)nuts' (pepernoten), fits seamlessly with the wild roar of the Wild Hunt and the behaviour of Saint Nick's other companions from other parts of Europe. This behaviour is by no means befitting that of the dandy, who is known for his pompous delicacy, nor that of his (less fortunate) imitators.
The Blackface dandies Dandy Jim en Zip Coon
Probably Koning also feels that her statement is flawed, so for the occasion, throughout her publication, she defines a dandy as someone who wears 'refined clothing'. Just like Black Pete does. Sure, but that does not make Pete the dandy figure of nineteenth-century cities and Blackface stages. Koning will therefore have to come up with more concrete evidence to link Black Pete to this specific fashion phenomenon. Her contrived broadening of the definition of dandy will not provide this.
The 'dandy identity' of Black Pete is therefore defective, as are the redeemed Moors, the chimney-sweep Petes with the soot smudges and the colonial slave identity. Indeed, Blackface clearly does not form part of our national collective conscience.
Black Pete and Blackface are probably cases of convergent but mutually unrelated developments, performed with totally divergent intentions and having starkly divergent histories.
And they are not that similar: Blackface has frizzy hair, and Black Pete has curly hair;
Blackface has no makeup on and around his lips, Black Pete has lipstick and soot there; Blackface
does not have earrings in, Black Pete does; Blackface is wearing a rather modern suit, Black Pete is wearing a seventeenth-century page's costume. The sole similarity between the two is that they are being performed by whites. And ethnically white traditions happen to raise suspicions, nowadays.
Most Dutch people have never heard of Blackface. That is good, because to put Black Pete on a par with a character from the American days of Jim Crow would needlessly stigmatise this Dutch folklore.
Klaubauf in Matrei, Eastern Tyrol. Nikolaus the saint, vigourously waving his staff, is surrounded by a horde of
furry, masked bogeymen called Kleibeife. They appear in the beginning of December.
What we should acknowledge, however, is that critics will attempt to achieve just that: stigmatisation. Indeed, what matters today is image at the expense of knowledge. Why else would documentary maker Sunny Bergman take Black Pete out of his cultural context and have his rituals performed in public parks in England? In 2015, armed with cameras and microphones, she wanted to demonstrate how 'the outside world' would react to this custom. If she went into continental Europe, away from the Anglosphere, she would have encountered people who would recognise Black
Pete as the Winter Solstice figure they have known since childhood. And why else would the American documentary
maker Roger Ross Williams choose to entitle his film about Black Pete 'Blackface'? Bringing Blackface into the Black Pete debate is clearly a case of inoculating an imported 'memory' into our culture. Our culture and traditions are not rooted in the Anglosphere. Blackface is, literally, a far-fetched argument.
Conclusion: racially preoccupied critique
The contemporary critiques on Black Pete may be modern, but the arguments against him are narrow-minded and superficial. They also indicate a peculiar fixation on the days of colonialism
and intensified racial awareness on the part of the people that make these claims. This entire debate needlessly attracts attention to the ethnic minorities that have hitherto been on their
way to assimilation into the Dutch and Belgian societies.
"Bringing Blackface into the Black Pete debate is clearly a case of inoculating an imported 'memory' into our culture."
The claims are the result of a limited knowledge of history and folklore. Indeed, Black Pete is not black because of a chimney. But his subordinate position to Sinterklaas is not based on racism either. To apply only a few smudges of soot on Pete's face – as proposed by activists – is a bad solution for this alledgedly racist popular custom: people who perform Black Pete would be recognised by the children and the entire, centuries-old Nicholas masquerade would thus be broken up.
I really wonder why politicians and activists alike are making such radical proposals. Unfortunately, these 'solutions' receive a lot of support from
artists and writers, too, whereas in my opinion the solution lies in spreading the facts about the true character of Black Pete. He has nothing to do with colonialism. If people want recognition for the suffering their ancestors have gone through, they should start a debate about colonialism and slavery; not about a character from Dutch folklore.
Without Pete by his side, the popular Saint Nicholas character – an all too serious, somewhat naive bishop – would be lost. And children would lose their favourite Sinterklaas character.
Since the Sixties, Pete has stopped beating children with the faggot, and there is nothing that reminds us of the submissive negro that some people made him out to be in the past, let alone the slave his opponents wish to see in him today!
Some advertising companies do depict Black Pete with (exaggerated) negroid features. They should refrain from that. Do not give Pete swollen lips, and do not paint him with frizzy hair. They should rather give him the curls we see in the streets whenever there is a Sinterklaas parade. But whatever we do, let us keep Black Pete black-faced. Unnaturally black. Soot-black! Pete is a mythical character, not a negro.
Without a black Black Pete we would sever the continuation of an ancient tradition. Let us safeguard our precious celebration from modern, multicultural complexes and hand it down to our children in all its innocence and ancient awkwardness.
28/11/2015
14/11/2021
