Jill Rees: Welcome Press

  In the train on the way to Vienna the waiter reached into my tea and hooked the tea bag over the mug handle. ‘It’s meant to be like this’, he said. Of course it’s outrageous, but he was only trying to help. And in the cafe, the waitress flicked ash off the table, pushing my newspaper to the floor. Everything has to be right, even if a human being is in the way. I had difficulty imagining anyone in Africa putting their fingers into your drink.It probably isn’t generally known, but Africans coming to Europe notice straight away that Europeans, with the exception of Italians, don’t wash their nether regions after using the toilet. The more you have to shake European hands the more you think about this. Many Europeans, especially the men, also don’t bother to wash their hands either. This makes the idea of the waiter putting his fingers in my tea even more disturbing.

It was with great delight and some relief that I’d found a bottle filled with water near a toilet bowl in the internet cafe in Bregenz. Aha, I thought, there are Africans nearby with clean bottoms. It turns out the cafe was manned by a group of enthusiastic Turkish boys and they had made it very friendly and homely. The money was someone else’s, but all the migrant workers in the town seemed to congregate here in the evening, emailing home and googling pictures of their home regions.

‘It’s hard living here,’ the young man told me. ‘The people have a strange attitude and don’t want to talk to you’.

It has always amused me that when there is xenophobia in a northern country about immigrants, the natives are completely unaware that the immigrant communities are also observing them and drawing conclusions. There is an assumption that the west is the best, so there is no need to consider the opinions of foreigners.  This is the underlying arrogance we sometimes think of as imperialism. But of course the advantage of being a non-native is that you see a society, albeit superficially at first, from the outside, and can draw some fairly objective observations. Surely these observations can be useful and interesting to the home nation?

Unfortunately when someone is racist, sexist and any other -ist, they are unable to understand that the person with the objective, outsider’s viewpoint is worth listening to. Racism, as well as sexism, is precisely a failure to see the other person as fully human. The human attributes of reason and opinion aren’t attributed to the object of racism, and so their thoughts and opinions are ignored.

In Vienna, a taxi driver backed into a crowd of people waiting for a crossing light to change outside the Opera House. One lady in high heels had to jump back and nearly was run over as the taxi failed to stop. What upset her husband, however, was the taxi driver’s complete oblivion to the concept of regret. As the husband went round to remonstrate with the driver, a Nigerian who was driving the cab in front also got out of his cab in support.

‘What do you think you are doing?’ he said. In this country, the system is what counts, and if human beings get in the way, they are swept aside, like the ashes on the table.

What is so noticeable about all of Africa, Nigeria included, is the humanity of the people. If you are without all of the correct papers, or you have found yourself in a bit of a situation, it is negotiable. It is understood that things happen, and human beings are not always exactly prepared for everything.

‘In Africa, everything is possible,’ says my friend. You can talk your way round things. Sometimes this devalues the veracity of what an African might be actually saying, but what is not devalued is the human capacity for judgement.

In Europe now, judgement has become obsolete. Car GPS devices tell you which turning to take, and if you decide to take a better route, the emotionless voice is unable to cope with the change.  I found myself with a speeding ticket having been photographed driving at less than 60mph on an empty motorway on New Year’s Day, when they had already moved the speed signs in preparation for the next day! The camera doesn’t lie, nor does it negotiate. If you cross the road in Austria when the pedestrian light is not on green, you are fined 50 Euros, even if there are no cars and the road is clear. Nigerians who have come to Europe will I am sure have many tales of trying to change the minds of various authority figures during their travels. I say this because I have often seen Nigerians as I travel, arguing with the police or at airports. When I last travelled to Nigeria, the plane was held up because a Nigerian chap had left his packet at an airport shop, and we had to wait till he went back for it. Why should a plane be held up for one person? Because he is a human being, and this kind of behaviour is what makes us human: flexibility, judgement, not having to follow rules to the letter when circumstances differ.

So at Vienna’s primary tourist sight, the Stefansdom Cathedral, I failed to notice for a moment that two armed police were in the process of arresting a lone Roma woman with her small child. It was systematic, and cold, and it was cruel, and she should have just been asked to move on. As they took her papers and I took photographs my Jewish friend said,

‘But it’s normal that they’re cleaning the streets of people who are messing it up.’ And once, I thought they cleaned your people up, because to them they had become nothing but a mess, like the ash on the table, not human at all.

©   Jill Rees

997 words

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