Kwaku Summer Festival

The Surinamese Dutch community's summer festival, running in Amsterdam Zuidoost since 1975 and now the largest Caribbean gathering in the Netherlands. It began as a football tournament staged by the Kwakoe youth centre foundation during Amsterdam's 700th anniversary, on the pitches of SV Bijlmer, and moved in 1983 to the park now named for Nelson Mandela.

The name carries its own history: Kwaku is the Akan day-name for a boy born on a Wednesday, and slavery in Suriname was abolished on Wednesday 1 July 1863. From a festival for Surinamese families in the Bijlmer high-rises who could not afford a holiday it grew into a multicultural event addressing Antillean and African communities too, went bankrupt in 2008, restarted in 2009, missed 2011 for lack of money and took its present name in 2013.

Dutch press reporting in 1995 put its attendance that year at half a million across six weekends, sixty thousand of them on the closing day, and dated its beginning twenty years earlier to a football tournament between teams from different blocks in the Bijlmermeer.