There have been two worthwhile events towards the end of the week. One has been the launch of the transnational radical party in the European parliament, in which Maurizio Turco, a rather cool Italian MEP, gave the keynote speech. Policies such as legalising drugs are part of his box of ideas. Fifteen minute speeches by the Esperanto Radical Association, the Antiprohibitionist International League and the anticlericale.net organisation give some flavour of its ideas. I didn’t stay too long. It will be interesting how it follows up.
Another was a conference on Human Rights featuring – here is a sample – one senior adviser of the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy. The United Nations People’s stateless organisation secretary general, the Lao Movement for Human Rights. I will be writing about this elsewhere; but I want to tell a little story.
At lunch, I left the meeting and went to a bar café in the area of Matonge. It has a high Congolese population. Congo is Belgium’s former colony. A president, the first freely elected in 40 years, Laurent Kabila, whose father was assassinated a few years back, had just been sworn in. Kabila is very popular in the east, which is Swahili-speaking and under the influence of the English-speaking neighbours to the east. He is less popular in the west, which is French and Lingala-speaking. The fact that Congo has been the battleground for “Africa’s World War” between Rwanda and Uganda on the one hand, and Angola, Nambia and Zimbabwe, which killed up to three million people, is less well known than it should be in the West. The war ended in 2003, a threat of renewed conflict still lingers.
I bought a group of about five people beers. Then one leaned over and said: “English is the language of barbarians.”
I felt a bit uncomfortable about this, given the accusations of complicity to genocide flung back and forth between the French government and the Rwandan government.
I had a sense that language, supremacism and mass murder could well be linked in Africa. The French government supported the French-speaking Rwandan Hutu militias withdrawing to Congyo in 1994. In turn, the French say the guerrillas who went on to form the Rwandan government who came from Uganda where they had been reared and trained in rebel camps in an Anglophone environment also committed butchery, English is now the de facto language of Rwanda.
There is no doubt that British commercial culture can sometimes grate when you have come from the continent, the P&O ferries forming an introduction to this. But I felt a rare twinge of pride, coming back on the coach. (The trains had hiked their prices to a level even newspapers wouldn’t pay for.)
We were searched by French customs officers, who asked quite intrusive questions, and stopped everyone. My experience of British customs is that they only stop people on suspicion. And they have to write up a note, which you have to sign, after the search is completed. The French officers snapped their rubber gloves in a loud and rather juvenile way.
When we got back on the bus, there were several Belgian Moroccans with whom I struck up conversation, each saying that Britain was a much less racist than the continent, more fair, more open. Shortly after, British passport officers in civilian suits welcomed us into the UK with a smile.
