How the Kwaku festival in the Bijlmer ‘a masterpiece integration’

With a large bottle of parbo beer, Jules Lieveld (71) shuffles on Saturday afternoon through the smoke of a three -meter -long barbecue full of tilapia’s. The dance floor of Tent La Spang is full. Everyone dances together on the rolling Kaseko music of the Surinamese formation Amantare. Every year Jules Lieveld comes from Spijkenisse to the Kwaku Summer Festival in the Bijlmer. Kwaku started a football tournament fifty years ago. He played football from the first edition in 1975, with his Amsterdam cousins: “We were the Lieveld Boys”.

In the meantime, in the four weekends of the festival, a total of between 120,000 and 150,000 visitors. Kwaku is the place where Surinamese Antilian Netherlands meets. Jules Lieveld can’t walk twenty meters or he meets someone. Between the dozens of eating stalls with flutter (the stomach of a cow in spicy broth), meat sausage and shavings sounds music everywhere. “Cozy, cozy, cozy!” The MC at Tent Waterkant calls through the speaker that is at a maximum volume. The football slowly disappeared from the program. At the back of the Nelson Mandelapark is still a football field where the youth plays matches of four to four up to the age of sixteen.

Allan Sedney (51) came to Kwaku every weekend as a little boy. It has changed in those years, he says: “It is better arranged now and you also see ultra Dutch families here good food and enjoyment, I like that.” Today he is encouraging his son Yves (11) at the field. The Rotterdam Yves loses a shoe but still scores twice. He did not yet know his three teammates from Krommenie, Hoofddorp and Amsterdam. “We make a team here and then we become friends, that’s how it goes every year,” says Yves.

We make a team here and then we become friends, that’s how it goes every year

Pillars as changing rooms

“To understand how Kwaku originated, you must understand the history of the Bijlmer,” says co-founder Roy Groenberg (72). In 1963 the municipality started the construction of the new, promising district Bijlmermeer. Ten years later, a large part of the 18,000 homes were empty, the white middle class families for which the neighborhood was intended remained away. In the run -up to the independence of Suriname in 1975, many Surinamese people come to the Netherlands and to the Amsterdam Bijlmer.

Among them Groenberg, who came to Amsterdam in 1973: “There was nothing to do in the Bijlmer, we were closed off from the rest of Amsterdam.” The promised metro was not yet laid out, there were no supermarkets. This is how evening shops and hairdressing shops were created from basement boxes.

Groenberg, who then follows a training as a socio-cultural worker, founded the Kwakoe Jongerencentrum Foundation in 1975. In the summer most children go out of the city, the Surinamese children do not go on holiday. Together with the late Dennis Rust, he organizes the first six -week football tournament on the lawn for those who stay behind, where the Amsterdamse Poort shopping center now stands.

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Guilly Koster (71) is then twenty, lives in the Bijlmer and looking for his place in the Netherlands. In the center of Amsterdam he is often refused at cafés. “It was a time when people” Surinamese away! ” on the asphalt langs, “says Koster. He felt at home on the football tournament. “After playing football, we talked to each other how you stayed out of the box where your work could find.” The pillars of the Bijlmerdreef were the changing rooms, heaps of clothes were the goal posts. Aunts sold peeled oranges on ice and roti from trunk bins.

Someone came with a guitar and then someone with a ghettoblaster. Within a few years, Kwaku grew into a meeting place for migrants from all over the Netherlands. “It is a masterpiece integration,” said Koster.

Kwaku is still the basis for the Surinamese community in the Netherlands and beyond

A fence around it

At the beginning of 2000 the lawn in Amsterdam-Zuidoost bursts out of its seams. The free tournament then attracts so many people that safety can no longer be guaranteed. After a few disturbances and payment arrears, the municipality will pull the plug in 2010. Kwaku returns in 2013 via a public tender. “There had to be a fence around and entrance fee,” says current organizer Ivette Forster, who won the tender at the time. The two euro fifty entrance fees put bad blood with many permanent Kwaku goers. “The beginning was just as difficult, but when people realized that there were now toilets and gangways, it all turned out to be not too bad,” said Forster.

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Festival visitors Allan and Yves Sedney, Nikia Saunders and Jules Lieveld and organizer Ivette Forster

Photos Simon Lenkens

In the meantime, a ticket costs fifteen euros a day, and that is actually too little to keep the entire site running for a month, says Forster. Since 2017, there have been concerts with big names such as Earth, Wind and Fire and Frenna on Fridays, who attract other audiences and the rest of the festival. “The nature of Kwaku has not changed,” says Ivette Forster. “It is still the basis for the Surinamese community in the Netherlands and beyond.” A TV team from the Surinamese channel STVS is walking around in red T-shirts on the site. They broadcast the party in the Bijlmer live in Suriname throughout the month.

With four official stages, clean toilets and countless self -proclaimed dance floors at eateries, Kwaku is not inferior to other festivals. Nikia Saunders (17) from Arnhem agrees that the ticket prices are better than expected. She performs today at Tha Block, the stage programmed by young people. “Other festivals are at least seventy euros, I can’t afford that.” On the infectious beats of young talent Kleine John and Chavanté, Nikia dances with a group of girls from Almere. “We have just met, that is very easy here.”

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