Dear
ex-colonies of the world,
In
days gone by, we did bad things to you. We catalogued you with our cameras,
made you dance at our dinner parties and made human zoos at our exhibitions.
For all those things, we are sorry. We won’t do it again. I suppose you could
say that we deserve the same treatment in return, but haven’t we got past the
whole eye for an eye thing?
Love,
‘the West’
Avid
followers of this scintillating publication may remember that a while ago I
talked a bit about staring, and how you just have to develop a thick skin and
ignore it. Well it turns out that no skin is impermeable. I recently went to distribute
medication in a flood-hit village that had literally never seen a white person
before and now almost see the appeal of the burkha. I spent four hours under
close scrutiny, and I mean close – people were drawing up chairs,
Abramovitch-style, in order get a really good, long look. A man with a stick
was employed to herd children away from me. I was paraded around the local
school, where I was asked if the reason for my whiteness was horrific burns.
After three hours of this, I had been driven into a dark corner with my
companions Quasimodo and the Phantom of the Opera, either about to deck someone
or burst into tears, until I was rescued by the village president bearing
samosas. Now, being stared at by a group of middle aged men isn’t actually much
of an improvement on hordes of children, but fresh street food and sugary
treats did do something to improve my mood.
I’ve
always been unsure about my standpoint on zoos (provided their doing important
conservation work, I’m anti-zoos for entertainment), but now my mind is made
up. Nobody wants to feel like that. And should I ever pass a celebrity in the
street, I shall look pointedly in the other direction and hope I don’t walk
into a lamppost.
No comments:
Post a Comment