The organisation behind the Kick Out Zwarte Piet movement, which campaigns against racist stereotyping during the Sinterklaas festivities, is closing down on December 5, 2025. 

The organisation Nederland Wordt Beter will hold a rally on March 9 in Amsterdam “for a last push to achieve our aims” but will stop for good in 18 months time.

Frontman Jerry Afriyie, who founded the group in 2010, said the plan was always to stop in 2025. “People who preceeded us in the fight against racism without a deadline burned out,” he said. 

The organisation was set up with three main aims: more education and awareness of slavery; a national day to remember the abolition of slavery, and the end of the racist Zwarte Piet stereotype. 

“In 2010 you could get away with racism more easily than you can now,” Afriyie told the AD. “At that time, 99% of the country was not aware of the slavery commemorations on July 1. Now they are shown live on television.”

The group’s aims, he said, were realistic. “We never said we wanted to eradicate racism in 15 years. We wanted to stimulate people to develop an anti-racist position.”

Afriyie told television talk show Op1 on Monday that when the group started, most people had no idea that Zwarte Piet was a problem for many people.

“Now they know this, and if they still opt for [the traditional Zwarte Piet] then, well, you can wake up people who are sleeping but you cannot wake up people who are pretending to sleep.”  

Last year the police were forced to intervene when anti-blackface Piet demonstrators were pelted with fireworks, eggs and tomatoes by pro-blackface campaigners during the Sinterklaas parade in the Zuid Holland town of De Lier.

Blackface Piets are nowadays mainly found in rural and traditionalist areas.