Look at Me

A friend was recently telling me how a guy she met in a bar in her hometown commended her for her exceptionally good spoken German. The guy was speechless when she explained her German was perhaps so good because it is her mother tongue – a black girl with dreadlocks, born to Ghanaian parents in Cologne, Germany.

People seem to be naturally predisposed to defend an inborn image they have of what their own fellow country men should look like. Sometimes it is a genuinely surprised reaction to the fast evolution their “home” is going through. Sometimes it is simply unjustified fear, almost panic, which turns into an absurd call to arms, to reject what is perceived as a threat to their system of values and norms.

In some countries, where intricate and unstable equilibria were borne out of complex milieus of ethnicities, this is also true of people who may look just like the “host community” itself but are perceived as different because of their language/dialect, religion, cultural practices, etc.

A good example is where I live – Nigeria (by the way, your name sounds Nigerian – an Igbo man?). Here the concept of the “indigenous community” is very dear to the 200+ ethnicities that trace their roots to specific areas of the country. Particularly after independence and the intensification of migration flows across the country, the idea that a separation should exist between the host/indigenous community and the communities migrating into a certain area became widespread. The indigenous community is the one recognised by the state or local government authority as that which originally settled in the particular place. The migrant community is that which may have settled in the same area and even have lived there for more than a hundred years but somehow is not formally “certified” as indigenous.

The indigenes of any area deem this distinction necessary to avoid becoming a numerical minority in their own land and to maintain their tribe’s cultural integrity and control over land and resources. The federal government, despite producing a constitution that formally guarantees freedom from discrimination, has actually fuelled divisions by conceding over the years to demands for the creation of new states and local area governments. The latter can dispense “certificates of inidgeneity” to whoever they consider fit. With the proliferation of states, the result has been that some peoples have gained control of a (often small) piece of land at the expense of others who now find it impossible to prove to be indigenes of any place at all. Widespread poverty, heavy population growth and rapidly advancing desertification exacerbate this distinction, which ultimately comes down to a resource control issue. This is especially true given the idea of politics that many Nigerians seem to have – if you don’t have one of your own people in some position of power, you get nothing. The important thing is to win, not to take part in the game.

Despite non-indigenes contributing immensely to local economies, they are often treated like second-class citizens and face all sorts of discrimination (e.g. they cannot be employed as civil servants in certain states; face tougher admission criteria into local universities or are denied admission at all; pay higher university fees, etc.). If they complain, they are told to “trace their roots and go back home” – as if their family hadn’t lived there for often more than a century! Some of them don’t even know where to trace back their origins. Others simply have no more ties to their original homeland. In the ensuing ethnic divide, Nigeria finds itself routinely struggling to maintain its manifold and delicate equilibria, while violent ethnic/religious clashes have multiplied over the past few years.

In the UK, where I used to live, I have friends who introduced themselves to me as Pakistanis, Palestinians, etc., despite being London-born, cockney-accented, English-only speakers, who have never even used their British passport to visit their parents’ country. And you wonder how much of this proudly asserted distinction from the “English indigenes” is actually the product of their own behaviour and how much is, instead, the product of the society that surrounds them and often labels them as “guests” in their own country. In her “White Teeth”, Zadie Smith says many of these youngsters find it hard to fully fit in British society but they are also “unsuitable to return” to their fathers’ homeland.

When the 7/7 2005 bombings happened I was in London. For a while, people were afraid of sitting next to a South-Asian-looking person on the tube or the bus. Forget about the fact that the suicide bombers were themselves British citizens. And forget about the fact that they killed fellow British citizens who looked just as “dodgy, terrorist-looking people” as they did, because they had a similar ethnic origin!

I once read that many Western metropolis are not true “melting pots”, rather they are “salad bowls” – every item maintains its own characteristics and coexists with the others but doesn’t blend in. That seems to be the case of London. Myriads of different communities jealously maintain their own customs, traditions, networks and ways of operating within the context of the British society. They genuinely try to cohabitate but not to mix in fully. In the poor east London neighbourhood of Tower Hamlets, many children enter primary school speaking only Bengali and often end up lagging behind their peers.

And the best recipe to follow is unfortunately not clear – do you go for the “all-round-assimilation” attempt of the French or the “let’s-all-respect-each-other’s-differences-and-cultural-space” of the British? Last year’s banlieue riots show that the former may not have worked so well after all. But the 7/7 attacks don’t say anything that different of the latter either.

In Italy, where I come from, immigration (differently from emigration) is a recent phenomenon. People have gross misconceptions about the new comers – all Asians are Chinese, all North-Africans are Moroccans and all Eastern Europeans are Romanians. Population ageing and economic stagnation make many label immigration as an outright negative incident that should be contained and resisted at all costs, instead of as a potential source of innovation.

Immigrants’ children have made primary education enrolment rates rise for the first time in more than a decade. They speak Italian as their native language and wear the same flashy brands of clothes their Italian peers wear. I am sure they, too, have sometimes to explain to a man at customs that they are tired and just want to get home, probably to some good home-cooked pasta! I wonder how long it will take before people stop questioning their “Italianness”…