At twenty years old, Petra Hoost, born January 16, 1976, in the city of Enkhuizen, Netherlands, became the first Afro-Dutch woman to win the Miss Netherlands pageant in 1996.  She went on to represent Netherlands at the Miss World pageant held in Bangalore, India, but didnt place. Hoost’s father is from Suriname, a former Dutch colony, and her mother is Dutch. Although the first visible minority woman to win a national beauty award in Netherlands, there appears to be no documented race related controversy as had plagued Miss Italy Denny Méndez the same year (1996).

Hoost, along with Lola Odusoga, Miss Finland, 1996 and Méndez, have since been followed by other notable Afro-European pageant winners such as Tonja Silva (Miss Netherland, 1997), Sonia Rolland (Miss France, 2000), Malou Hansson (Miss Sweden, 2002), Chloe Mortand (Miss France, 2009), Rachel Christie (Miss England, 2009), Witney Toyloy (Miss Switzerland, 2009) and Iman Kerigo (Miss Norway, 2011).

Since winning the title, Hoost has enjoyed a career as a fashion model and from 2000 to 2004 attended Fotovakschool, a Dutch photography school in Apeldoorn, Netherlands. She now runs her own photo shop in the city of Enkhuizen, where she was born.

Hoost was born one year after Suriname (also known as Dutch Guiana) achieved independence from Netherlands (1995). Suriname is now the smallest independent country in South America. It is also one of the most racially and ethnically diverse with a population of Creoles (people of African and European ancestry), Maroons (West African escaped slaves), Arawaks, who were the indigenous people of the region, as well as Javanese (from Indonesia), and Hindustanis (from India). The conflicts between the Creoles (culturally dominant) and Hindus (politically dominant) fostered large scale immigration to the Netherlands by both groups as civil war between them was feared after independence in 1995.  It was this possibility of violence that led Hoost’s father to emigrate to Netherlands.

Also, at this time of independence,