A window display featuring Zwarte Piets in a random bakery in Amsterdam in November 2018, when such scenes were still fairly typical. By 2025, such displays had become vanishingly rare.
Zwarte Piet, “Black Pete”, Saint Nicholas’s controversial blackface helper, seems to be disappearing from the Netherlands. St Nicholas’s Day, 5 December, has long been the day when St Nicholas – Santa Claus but thinner and he’s a bishop on a white horse – brings Dutch children presents. For generations, he’s been accompanied by a gang of Black Petes – mischivious helpers in blackface. Black Pete wears the elaborate livery of a Renaissance servant boy and until recently sported large fake gold earrings, a curly black wig and spoke in a "silly" voice. (While St Nicholas has been in business for at least 1500 years, Black Pete was invented by schoolteacher and children’s book author Jan Schenkman in 1850.)
Mid-November sees the “arrival of St Nicholas” in a boat, from Spain. Towns and villages have their own local “arrivals of St Nicholas” parades with a national, televised “arrival of St Nicholas” as well. It is during these parades that trouble usually kicks off. Since 2015, peaceful protests against “Zwarte Piet” have occured, usually organised by pressure group Kick Out Zwarte Piet (KOZP). Trouble would usually start when KOZP protesters were attacked by crowds that often included “firms” of football fans.
Starting in the late 2010s, Black Pete has gradually been replaced with Rootveeg Piet, Sooty Pete. While retaining the Renaissance costume, Sooty Pete’s face has only a light dusting of soot, as if he'd just come down the chimney. Dutch parade organisers gradually switched from Black Pete to Sooty Pete. In 2022 Instagram and Facebook banned images of Zwarte Piet.
In 2025, though... nothing. KOZP had planned a protest at the “national” arrival of St Nicholas on the island of Texel, as there had been Black Petes in blackface on the parades there previously. The national St Nicholas parade was briefly cancelled as its organisers couldn’t guarantee security, then there were talks between KOZP and Texel Council, and between KOZP and ten other local councils whose parades had Black Petes on show in recent years.
The result was that KOZP called off its protest after Texel’s assurances it would prevent any Black Petes appearing. The national St Nicholas parade at the time of writing was set to go ahead. A similar outcome was achieved in the town of Middelharnis in South Holland, which had also seen trouble in its 2024 parade, with four arrests.
In 2024, the village of Yeserke in Zeeland held a parade with Black Petes, some 20 people attending a KOZP protest there were pelted with stones, apples, eggs and fireworks until many police officers intervened. Yeserke Council said it would still allow blackface in its 2025 parade, so KOZP announced it would proceed with its protests. The parade was cancelled due to security concerns over “risks to children,” although an unofficial parade reportedly took place through the village on 15 November with some 100 Black Petes in attendance – without the Council’s knowledge and apparently arranged by word of mouth.
KOZP announced that it was celebrating St Nicholas’s Day 2025 by winding itself up, with a farewell party, as all its “aims had been achieved,” one of which was that Black Pete has “disappeared.” Jerry Afriyie, KOZP’s founder, appealed to Dutch people to “continue our work.” A columnist in the broadsheet newspaper De Volkskrant noted on 18 November 2025 that “Black Pete has become an obscurity, a clandestine phenomenon.”
©️ Matt Salusbury 2025
2021 Zwarte Piet update from the Freelance.
An even earlier Zwarte Piet update from 2020.
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