Who Is Zwarte Piet?: A holiday tradition in the Netherlands involving blackface has sparked a debate about race, the legacy of slavery, and the vestiges of colonialism

The arrival of Sinterklaas (Saint Nicholas) and Zwarte Piet (Black Pete) in a Frisian village in the Netherlands on November 24, 2012.

(Patrick Post / Hollandse Hoogte)

Morning sickness served as my constant companion during the fall and winter I lived in Amsterdam. At times I would have to park my bicycle on a humpback bridge to vomit into a canal. Maybe a smell set me off: the fishy brine coming from a haringhandel, the poop of the sad swans in the red-light district, or the stink of some cheese at Noordermarkt. But it wasn’t just the smells pushing me toward nausea. Zwarte Piet was also making me sick. His boot-black minstrel face was everywhere in the run-up to Sinterklaasavond (Saint Nicholas’s Eve), which is the Netherlands’ biggest holiday and the gift-giving equivalent of Christmas. In the weeks before December 5, when the holiday is celebrated, he haunts the shop displays, repellent but mesmerizing, like the two sides of a magnet.

Who is Zwarte Piet? To understand, let’s start with jolly old Saint Nicholas.

Saint Nicholas is the red-robed, whitebearded prototype for our Santa Claus. There are a few important distinctions between the Santa who comes to town in the US and Sinterklaas, as he’s called in the Netherlands and former territories of the Dutch Empire including Aruba, Suriname, Curaçao, Sint Maarten, and Indonesia. For one thing, Sinterklaas is thin. For another, he’s far sterner than our man in the red suit: He’s a bishop from Turkey, as well as the patron saint of children, sailors, and the city of Amsterdam. He rides a white horse named Amerigo instead of a sleigh led by Rudolph and the other reindeer. He doesn’t fly in from the North Pole, but arrives from Spain by boat. And in the place of assistant elves, he has Black Pete, known to the Dutch as Zwarte Piet. Zwarte Piet is Sinterklaas’s shadow (persona non grata), his servant, his slave.

The locals kept insisting he wasn’t supposed to be a black man, despite his blackface guise. Instead they told me that he was Sinterklaas’s partner, or pal, and that he only appeared black because he’d come down the chimney and was covered in soot. This explanation was blatantly unconvincing because his clothes were pristine, his lips were clownishly big, and he had wooly hair. As Sandew Hira, a Surinamese Dutch historian I spoke to, put it, “How can a Dutch chimney be so different from all other chimneys that a white person can go down and come out the other end as an African?” Like many black Dutch who protest Zwarte Piet, Hira sees him as an annual irritation, a representation of the legacy of slavery without any form of shame. “They denigrate black people with this,” he said. My Dutch midwife disagreed. She saw Zwarte Piet as a reservoir of nostalgia and good feeling; a source, not an object, of fun. She allowed for the possibility that he had been a Moorish slave at one time, but if that was true, then he had freely chosen to be Sinterklaas’s faithful valet out of gratitude when the bishop purchased his freedom.

The Dutch are often fuzzy on the details of Zwarte Piet’s history. Many believe he originates in the nineteenth-century rhyming children’s book Saint Nicholas and His Servant, penned by schoolteacher Jan Schenkman. Published in 1850, thirteen years before the Netherlands became among the last European nations to abolish slavery, the book depicted Sinterklaas with a black servant for the first time. But Zwarte Piet existed in different form long before Schenkman’s story appeared. Most Dutch don’t connect Zwarte Piet to prior myths rooted in the Middle Ages that always have Saint Nicholas operating in tandem with a servant who, under different names and disguises according to time and place, personifies a tamed Satan. This...