Introduction

Every year, the Zomercarnaval Rotterdam (Rotterdam Summer Carnival) attracts one million visitors, almost the same number as the famous Notting Hill Carnival in London. Both festivals are organised by Afro- Caribbean immigrants from former Dutch respectively British colonies. Meanwhile, Indian immigrants from South Asia or the Caribbean have their own gatherings, known as mela, in the Netherlands. These festivals and others like it, offer immigrants venues where they can assert and renew their collective identities, based on ethnic, religious or national commonalities. Festivals play an important role in the process of bonding. However, these large public gatherings also offer opportunities to build ties with the receiving society, a process that is known as bridging (Putnam 2002). And this takes the phenomenon of ethnic festivals right to the heart of the political agendas of various participants in both local and national politics, as was the case with the internationally renown Notting Hill Carnival. This chapter presents the results of my field research on Dutch ethnic festivals in the context of the Dutch multicultural society that developed from the 1980s onwards.

The arrival of post-colonial immigrants in the Netherlands introduced four nationally renowned festivals to the country: the Pasar Malam Besar, recently renamed into Tong Tong Fair, and the Milan Festival, the Kwakoe Festival and the Zomercarnaval (‘Summer Carnival’) Rotterdam. The Pasar Malam Besar, organised by The Hague's Indische community, celebrated its 50th edition in 2008 and attracted approximately 133,000 visitors. The Milan Festival is an event organised by the Hindustani community in The Hague and attracts approximately 70,000 visitors, mainly Hindustani themselves. The Kwakoe Festival is an event that lasts for six weekends and is organised by the Afro-Surinamese community in the Bijlmer, a predominantly ethnic-minority quarter in the borough of Amsterdam Zuidoost (‘south-east’). The festival attracts around 400,000 visitors, most of whom visit it more than once. Finally, the Summer Carnival, which started in 1984 as the annual Antillean festival, attracts approximately one million spectators. These festivals are a reflection of the multicultural society that the Netherlands has become over the past decades.

Since the introduction in the early 1980s of the new minorities’ policy, which was mildly multicultural, municipal authorities began to see these festivals as a useful vehicle for bridging between immigrants and the receiving society.