Harvest Festival Parade Seu

Curacao's Easter Monday harvest parade, with roots in eighteenth-century plantation thanksgiving traditions and a name traced to a West African word for sky, drawing more than three thousand participants in traditional dress carrying sorghum and other harvest produce along this stretch of the route. Family plots called kunuku traditionally grew the same sorghum, pumpkins, peanuts and watermelons celebrated in the parade itself.

Sorghum, called maishi chiki or small corn in Papiamentu, anchors Seu, Curacao's Easter Monday harvest parade and one of the Caribbean's largest cultural celebrations, with roots tracing to the eighteenth century, when enslaved people on Curacao's plantations marked a successful harvest with a day of thanksgiving and rare respite from forced labour.