Efteling is just waking up from a corona crisis and is therefore not at all interested in a new racism discussion at the moment. The theme park responded in a personal reply by email to a petition to remove one of their attractions (Monsieur Cannibale) from the park.
Earlier, De Efteling already felt compelled to adjust caricatures in the Carnival Festival attraction, but now the amusement park is and will remain: Nothing wrong with the carnivalesque attraction Monsieur Cannibale!
According to angry activists, Monsieur Cannibale (a teacup attraction, but with ‘stereotyping cooking pots’) is said to be racist. This can be read in a petition on the online platform Avaaz.
Avaaz’s statement (almost like ‘alaf’, come on in Carnival Festival!) Reads as follows:
“Since we succeeded in ending the collaboration of several advertisers with Veronica Inside, I also thought it necessary to force Efteling to have this attraction removed.”
However, Efteling reacted laconically and wrote in an email:
In our park we make enlargements of characters from stories, myths and sages. Whether this is about the cannibals from Africa or about Little Red Riding Hood, we definitely don’t want to generalize. Efteling does not think that all stepmothers are bad people, all girls with red clothes have no sense of direction or all obese people eat a lot of paper.
