Racism is probably the belief that one race is superior to another. There is also a contemporary belief that race is a mental construct, in other words that race does not even exist. Yet we can see that there are different skin colours, different shapes of eyes, cheekbones and jaws, and so on.
I must admit I have not travelled much outside Europe. But wherever I have been, I have always felt among brothers and sisters in the worldwide family of Man. There are no superior or inferior human beings - when you talk to individuals you find that we all share the same emotions, we all love our parents and children, we all want to have a decent partner (or partners) in life, we all want to be treated fairly. (Darwin would quickly add that (other) animals too share those emotions, but to various degrees.)
And yet only a blinkered ideologue would fail to realise that there are stark differences on a cultural level. I recently spent a week in Senegal, and I must say the experience was a revelation. The people are friendly, even though they haggle about the price of everything, which gets tiresome after the first 10 minutes. My travelling companion, a Lithuanian friend, and I now laugh about it, but when we were there, it was stressful.
Essentially, it's a country of vucumprà. Thinking I was Italian, many of these street vendors spoke to me in Italian to tell me about their experience as vucumprà in Italy. They are extraordinarily versatile - whereas they spoke to me in Italian, they would ask my friend about his nationality and immediately switch to Russian with him! So much for the racists who think that Africans are inferior! The vucumprà could switch from Italian to Russian to Spanish to English in a Francophone country with indigenous languages (such as Uolof) to boot. Inferior my foot! They are highly intelligent people who have learnt to survive in a difficult environment.
Senegal's environment is indeed difficult and this is the big problem I have seen with my own eyes. It is difficult because the State is weak, thus chaos reigns. I don't know if life there is nasty, brutish and short, but it is certainly hectic. Perhaps this is what philosophers meant when they referred to this "state of nature". One guy at the airport told me, "It's because of the heat. Come in December, it will be less chaotic." But I was not convinced then, and I am not convinced now.
Construction is uncontrolled - Dakar is like an enormous Buġibba; the architecture is almost identical, and the chaotic sprawling as well.
Their driving is out of control, life endangering I would say - we travelled from Dakar to the former capital, Saint Louis, which is some 300 km north of Dakar and 30 km south of the border with Mauritania. The driving is Neapolitan to the nth degree. It's simply crazy. To overtake a van, the driver of our makeshift taxi moved to the other lane when a bus was speeding in our direction, and a two-lane road had to accommodate three vehicles. We risked our lives in similar fashion some three or four more times during that crazy six-hour trip. But the driver, who was listening intently to a Muslim preacher on the radio, was unperturbed. Despite the stifling heat, he kept his cool.
On the way to Saint Louis, we were stopped by the Customs police (we did not cross any international border, but still). It took the driver some 90 minutes to negotiate his "release", possibly thanks to a bribe (which we did not witness). These people have no notion of time: you don't know when you leave, you don't know when you will arrive, and when all is said and done, they couldn't care less.
Saint Louis, Dakar, and pretty much everywhere else is dirty beyond imagination. Piles of plastic bottles and other trash litter the streets, the neighbourhoods, the riverbanks where men and birds fish... everywhere. It's one big dumping site.
Unlike Saint Louis, Dakar is full of police officers and gendarmes. You see a couple of members of either force on every other corner. But despite the heavy police presence, the State is conspicuously absent. Thus it is a society based on honour. You read about this in books, but you're still overwhelmed when you see it in practice.
Customer care, for instance, is based on the unwritten code of honour - essentially shame. If you shame your service provider, they give you a good service or a refund. If you refer to the law, they think you're another silly toubab.
Toubab is the Uolof word for "white man". I presume it applies to women too, but I cannot really say if it's gender-specific. Despite their denials, I think they use toubab in a derogatory way. In the sense that they think being "white" means you are by definition some sort of dimwit whom they can easily take for a ride. Literally. The taxi drivers are experts at this. You have to negotiate every single ride, and they try to outsmart you no end.
One of them told us he is married to four wives, because he's a man and one wife cannot satisfy a real man. I retorted, Charles-Clews-like, "Ah, my friend, four wives, four mothers-in-law!" He couldn't stop laughing but he assured me that a real man imposes his will on his women (and their mothers). What to say? Perhaps that's why they complain they're poor - they have to support four wives and the multiple children each bears. Everybody, except the richest, would be poor in such a situation.
We visited a couple of families, one in Saint Louis and another in Dakar, the latter in the "aggressive" neighbourhood of Pikine. That it's aggressive is what we were told by the "middle-class" locals. I didn't find it particularly "aggressive", but then to survive in this country you have to smile, joke, shake hands, pat on shoulders, and then they tell you that you're smart. It reminded me of the Iene journalist telling our Prime Minister that he's furbo like Renzi, and Dr Muscat replying, "No, no, Renzi is more cunning than me". Same mentality - if you're furbo, the Senegalese will like you and spontaneously tell you that you're smart.
Housing in Pikine is substandard. The family we visited - composed of a mother, four daughters (two of whom have two children each - one of them was breastfeeding her baby boy all the time, and his face looked sticky with her milk splashed all over), and a son - share a house with two goats, which live in the entrance "hall". The cockroach-infested dwelling is made up of three rooms downstairs, and two rooms upstairs (with corrugated metal roof), all cuddled round an internal courtyard where the mother spends her day washing clothes and cooking, and her nights sleeping on a rag on the floor. They have one tap in the courtyard, and I could not locate the bathroom.
We ate typical Senegalese food which is delicious - couscous, spices, and fresh fish from one big dish without the aid of cutlery, and we all drank water from the same glass. They had another guest: a Dutch student who was in Dakar to research the expression of female same-sex love in Senegal. The only male in this family is gay and also a fine artist. His sister, a fantastically beautiful 20-year-old girl who poses as a model for Russian and Ukrainian photographers, owns an extremely expensive camera, as she too is into photography. Her other sister sings and plays in a band, and owns a few electronic instruments. They have a powerful computer on which she showed me videos of her performances.
They asked us to accompany them to a fashion show, where their artist brother presented two of his paintings to the designer who won the competition. I had never been to a fashion show in my life - those who know me personally know that my relationship with clothes is functional at best - but it reminded me of those I sometimes watch, willy-nilly, on Italian TV news. The level of the event was European, and the female models definitely not uneasy on the eye.
We also visited the island of Ngor. To cross to it, you have to take a boat. Not a ferry, but a traditional boat, and you wear life jackets for the 1 km trip. There were so many of us on this boat, that its edges touched the surface of the water! It reminded me of the boat people who cross the Mediterranean in similar fashion, and I understood a little bit more the difference in meaning of the words "courage", "fearlessness", and "recklessness".
We also visited another island, Goree, where there's a church run by the Order of Malta. It's the westernmost point of the Old World. In other words, the closest point to the New World and was a minor point of departure for slaves. Visiting the slave house was heart-rending. When the guide told us that Pope John Paul II had been there in the doorway, through which the slaves walked to embark on the ships, begging for forgiveness for the utter disregard of humanity shown over 300 years when more than 20 million Africans were shipped to the Americas, I wept. Seeing the conditions in which the slaves were kept was too much. Even now that I remember, I get emotional.
At the moment, I'm reading a book about epigenetics, the study of how we pass to the next generations the traumas we've been through. I think the Africans have passed on the traumas of slavery to their descendants. They still kowtow to the toubab, the white man, particularly when the toubab gets angry.
Perhaps that's why the neoliberal forces which dominate Europe don't do anything effective to discourage irregular immigration. Perhaps they want to introduce the slave mentality in the workforce at home.
And perhaps, apart from anthropology and history, there is really not much one can learn from Africa. So much for multiculturalism.