My mother was a remarkable woman. She spent her entire adult life working for women, helping women in distress, providing legal advice, a shoulder to weep on, help in dealing with the police and so much more.
In the course of her life, as women like her often do, she acquired many (adult) ‘children’ who remained loyal and grateful and who arrived at our home in numbers when she died. One of her ‘children’ was from overseas, a Ghanaian woman she met when she was looking for funds for her NGO. M (that’s what I’ll call her) was working at the time with a Canadian funding organisation and she came to India to look at my mother’s NGO.
Several years of working together turned them into friends and then family. Long after the organisation had stopped funding the NGO, M would come home, stay with my mother, spend long days chatting with her about her son in Ghana, and about life in general. These visits became a part of my mother’s annual calendar.
When she died, M was devastated. She had been over a few months ago but now she wanted to return, though she knew that by the time she arrived, my mother’s physical form would be gone. “I have to come,” she told me, ‘there are certain rituals we have to do.”
She had a visa, but at the time there was a sort of rule — no one knew whether it had been withdrawn or not — that foreigners could make repeat visits only two months after the previous one. M went to the embassy in Accra, they told her the rule had been withdrawn and she could fly. She took a flight and arrived at Delhi airport.
The immigration authorities did not let her in. At two in the morning my phone rang. She was in tears: “They’re refusing to let me in. I’ve told them I’ve come to do the last rites for my mother, but they are adamant. They refuse to believe the embassy gave me permission…”
I was helpless. I tried to call people who might have been able to help. Nothing. Meanwhile, they kept her standing for two hours, refused to let her get a drink of water, treated her like a criminal, were rude and turned her around to send her home. At her expense.
Worse, at Istanbul airport, where she had to connect to a flight to Ghana, they alerted the authorities and two gunmen took her off the plane and kept her in their sights, lest she escape. Unlike the Indians, they were polite and regretted that they had to humiliate her, but they were just following orders.
It will come as no surprise to anyone reading this that M is black. A large, black, African woman from Ghana, dressed in bright colours, with her traditional headdress. Enough reason to treat her like shit.
This wasn’t the first time I witnessed such racism in our country (no matter how much our minister and the ministry of external affairs denies that the recent attacks on Africans were not xenophobic or racist, the African heads of Missions are justified in saying they were). For many years I taught in a Delhi University college, one of the early colleges to try the experiment of offering vocational courses.
The college had many foreign students, mostly from Africa, or, to be more precise, mostly from black Africa: Uganda, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Kenya. None of the Indians ever befriended them. They were treated indifferently, or with active derision, not only by the students but also by pretty much everyone around, including the auto drivers who drove them to college.
The same thing was in evidence in Africa — in their continent , on their turf. I recall being in Lusaka once. At dinner in a restaurant, local Indians were loud and aggressive, treating the African waiters with contempt.
No matter how much we hide this ugly reality about ourselves, racism is not something we can deny. Whitening creams testify to this, just as last week’s incidents in Greater Noida do: an Indian boy disappears, tragically he later dies, and his family assumes the Africans living nearby are responsible and so they are attacked. Other Africans nearby going about their daily business are also brutally attacked.
And there is hardly any outrage. No politician speaks up, they do not express regret, they do not even admit that a wrong has been committed. And this is how impunity is created, how racism is legitimised. Strange that our politicians can express regret over the violence in Westminster in London but not in their own backyard.
The Africans took out a march of protest. Perhaps it’s time we took out a march of solidarity. Lives matter. Black ones too.
Urvashi Butalia is an editor, publisher and director of Zubaan; blink@thehindu.co.in