[3] In 2019, it gained renewed popularity due to the events in Ankara: Islamist and activist organizations used the riots of 1972 as an example to create empathy for the Syrian refugees in Turkey.

[6] Dutch natives became increasingly financially able to move to the suburbs, leaving behind disadvantaged lower class households, dissatisfied with the lack of social-cultural homogeneity in the neighbourhood.

[8] According to Marc Schuilenburg, Professor of Digital Surveillance at the Erasmus School of Law, there was a housing crisis in the neighbourhood, the feeling that the municipality neglected the situation and had no interest in the complaints of the residents, combined with racism and xenophobia.

Things escalated on Thursday, 9 August, when a Dutch woman got into a dispute over her rent arrears and was illegally evicted, without court order, from a building owned by a Turkish guesthouse owner,[6] called the 'King of the Turks'.

In October 1972, another 200 boarding houses were closed[6] The riots received media attention from the Dutch and Turkish press.

The riots draw national attention to the problem of housing for foreign workers, who between 1968 and 1974 were recruited by the Dutch government to do mostly dirty and unpleasant work.

[16] According to him:The work revolves around a forgotten event: the 1972 riots directed against guest workers in Afrikaanderwijk, a neighbourhood of Rotterdam.

It poses questions such as how we remember, the role of subjectivity in shaping our collective memory, and the transformative potential of re-enactment as a means of reawakening the past.

The aim of the work is to highlight contrasting shades and nuances that exist among various individual remembrances of the Afrikaanderwijk riots, allowing for a diverse range of perspectives to be acknowledged and woven together.