The Dutch Caribbean migration route

The route that made a Caribbean audience in the Netherlands runs from Paramaribo and the Antilles, not from Kingston. Suriname was a Dutch colony from 1667 to 1975, and the choice between Surinamese and Dutch citizenship in the years around independence produced a mass migration that continued through the military years of the 1980s and the economic 1990s; by 2013 the Surinamese community in the Netherlands numbered around 350,300.

Much of it landed in the new high-rise estates of Amsterdam Zuidoost, and Antillean migration from Curacao, Aruba and Bonaire settled heavily in Rotterdam and The Hague. That population, rather than any Jamaican settlement, is why Jamaican records found rooms, shops and festivals in Dutch cities.