Black Pete: Not a usual X-mas story

The Jakarta Post, Agnes Titi Kusumandari, Jakarta | Wed, 12/23/2009 8:53 AM | Opinion

With the onset of Christmas, those who celebrate it are getting into the festive season with Christmas songs and decorations. It’s also the time of year when people see Christmas’ best known icon, Santa Claus around and about along with his black helper, Black Pete or in Indonesian, Pit Hitam.

Even though Christmas is a Christians celebration commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ, it is also closely associated with the arrival of Father Christmas, a jolly old man carrying gifts for well-behaved children worldwide. Known around the world, this image has been adapted by each local culture. The North Americans for example, perceive him as a fat, jovial old man with a thick white beard and a red suite — introduced in the Coca-Cola advertisements from the 1930s — while in Europe, Santa comes with a long coat and travels by horse or boat.

This figure also never comes alone. In Austria, Bavaria, Croatia, Slovenia and Hungary for example, he is accompanied by Krampus, a horned devil, while in the German tradition he is with Knecht Ruprecht. Servant Rupert is Santa’s dark skinned helper who carried a rod or broom as well as a sack to scare the naughty kids.

The Knecht Ruprecht is interpreted as Zwarte Piet or Black Pete in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. He arrives not in form of a devil, but as a black African man — influenced by Holland’s trade with Spain, which back traded in African slaves — carrying a whip to lash naughty children, as well as helping Santa Claus carry his big sack of gifts.

The idea of a white Santa and his black helper disseminated out of Holland with Dutch colonialism. In Indonesia and Suriname, for example, the figure of Black Pete or Pit Hitam remains close people’s minds. I remember being terrified of being whipped by the curly-haired black guy.

My father also told me that he still remembers how his father was sometimes asked to play the role of Black Pete in his days, “as he was black and small, not like Santa Claus,” my father recalled. He also remembers that Santa Claus was always pictured as a londo — a Javanese term to call the Westerners — while Black Pete would more or less look like an Indonesian.

The development and transformation of ideas is called ideoscape, a term coined by Appadurai. He says that ideas — as part of globalization — will merge themselves into new-born ideas. This is helped by the augmentation of technology, distribution of money, as well as the migration of people. It would supposedly diffuse the original ideas and social functions into new ideas and meanings.

In the case of the Black Pete and the White Santa though, we can still grasp the grand discourse behind it and feel that the powers behind this distribution of ideas are not equal. Even though this Christmas tale has been adapted to our local understanding, we still fail to escape the grand idea about the position of black and white as well as to attach new meanings to these symbols.

The Santa-Pete duet imply in itself a binary opposition between the inferior and superior, the wise and the tribal. Black Pete being the antagonist may create a false consciousness of feeling inferior and wicked for those who may associate themselves due to the physical similarities with Black Pete – or in the other words, those who are dark skinned — while Santa Claus represents the strong, good, white and wise other.

Although this opposition may not appear in extreme gestures in Indonesia, we can still trace this inequality of color. The rush of women to buy cosmetics to make them feel as white as the good and jolly Santa, is one example of this. It shows the idea of aesthetics and beauty accepted today are indeed influenced by symbols such as these, which existed since the colonial era.

This fact has been noticed by Frantz Fanon in his book Black Skin White Mask where he documented black people’s inferiority and their eternal longing to be white. This longing to be white — not only as a color, but also as a symbol — are implied in the living symbols in society. In Indonesia we can witness the half American Miss Indonesia who’s more fluent in English than Indonesian, television shows like bule-gila (crazy bule), Facebook groups such as “buleholics”, dozens of advertisements, and even books on “how to get a bule” that entails an unspoken declaration of the native’s amazement to their white “superiors”.

This unequal image of black and white has been reproduced through culture for decades. The superiority of the West is an idea that stayed even after the departure of the Dutch 65 years ago. Even though in the low lands, an innovative Black Santa and a White Pete has been introduced to deconstruct the image of black and white, the idea of the superior white man proved to stay in the lives of the ex-Dutch colonial descendents.

It is an inequality that still lives on — more vividly felt when we see the different digits of salary between a native and expatriates in Jakarta — and is often overlooked and seen merely as a given fact. But I do believe that by first admitting this situation, we can come closer to the liberation of mind that may lead to a different perspective in how we value ourselves.

So, this Christmas, know that you don’t have to put thick white powder on your face to dress up as Santa. Being colored is not such a sin.

The writer is an alumnus of Cultures and Development Program in Kuleuven, Belgium

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