The Argentinians are frightfully nice people. I was kissed on the cheek by every woman I met, and hugged by all the men. Some of the men will even kiss you as well, if they get to know you a bit. It’s all warm and wonderful and very Latin. You are made to feel immediately at home.
In spite of the fact that it is dangling several
thousand miles down in the South Atlantic Ocean, Buenos Aires, their capital city, is the quintessential European urban sprawl. Imposing 19th- and early 20th-century facades vie for space with the more brash glass-and-steel look of the latter part of the 20th century along the city’s wide boulevards. Statues of heroic-looking white men on horses are dotted around the street corners and the sumptuous parks. You could be in Madrid or Barcelona, or even in Paris.
The only thing is Barcelona, Paris and Madrid are swarming with black people these days, and have been for quite some time. In Buenos Aires you will not see a single black face, unless you really work on it, which means going to a rundown area in an outlying southern part of the city and hunting the elusive little fellows down.
The Argentinians have out-Europeaned the Europeans in their elegant capital. They have even bested the stoic but doomed attempts of the Afrikaner establishment to keep South Africa’s cities white — at least at night. Yes, Buenos Aires in 2002 is determinedly white and middle class –which does not stop it from being one of the friendliest cities in the world — at least on the surface.
The warmth and friendliness is there in spite of the calamities of the last year, when Argentina’s swaggering, confident economy went crashing through the floor. It was an economy built on trade, industry, agricultural exports and, lately, useful deposits of petroleum. But, as if foreshadowing the crisis that would grip more powerful economies to the north, relentless debt and insidious corruption undermined its precarious capitalist foundations. Breezy middle-class families without a care in the world one day found themselves literally out on the streets the next.
It was a catastrophe of truly biblical proportions, arriving with the awful suddenness of a biblical pronouncement from a vengeful Old Testament God. With the difference that the charming, wealthy Buenos Aireans, unlike the naughty people of Sodom and Gomorrah, to this day have no idea what they have done to deserve it.
One would not wish this kind of disaster on such nice people. But there are contradictions in the carefully constructed character of Buenos Aires society that make you wonder whether there is not a certain wilful blindness about a lot of issues that contributed to making them ignore the growing signs of impending doom.
Apart from believing that they had an invincible economy, that Juan Peron is God, and Eva Peron is an even higher deity, angel of mercy and fairy godmother all rolled into one, Argentinians also believe that theirs is the only country in the world that does not have a race problem — because there simply are no other races around to create one. Official statistics show that even the indigenous Indian population stands at an unthreatening 4,5% — most of whom are of mixed Euro-Indian blood anyway. Only 0,5% of the population is of “pure indigenous” blood.
Many people would argue that these statistics are dubious, to say the least, and that the indigenous population is far more robust than the figures suggest. But at least there is an admission that some sort of indigenous population exists.
But consider this. Argentina, like every other state in the New World, had an agricultural economy that was built on the labour of millions of African slaves and their descendants at one time. When slavery was finally abolished in the 1830s Argentina was the only country in the world to decide that, if they couldn’t have darkies as chattel labour, they didn’t want to have them at all.
The Argentinian aristocracy proceeded to deal with the problem by either deporting their former slaves or sending them off to fight in the country’s many border wars with Paraguay and Brazil, in the hope that they would all be killed off in the process. And that, as far as the people of Argentina were concerned, was that.
Now consider this story from a Buenos Aires newspaper two weeks ago: Maria Magdalena Lamadrid, a 57-year-old black woman, is instituting criminal proceedings against state officials of the Immigration Service and the Air Force because they prevented her from leaving the country to attend an important meeting in Panama. The woman was detained at the airport for six hours because the officials claimed that the passport she was attempting to travel on was forged. Why? Because it was an Argentinian passport and, according to the officials, there is no such thing as a black Argentinian. By the time they released her, her plane had left.
This incident, though not widely reported, finally throws light on a terrible truth. There are, indeed, many Afro-Argentinians — about two million, by some accounts. In a terrible conspiracy of silence, their white compatriots deny their existence, the government leaves them out of the official census — and the Afro-Argentinians themselves by and large play along by doing their best to stay out of sight. Which is why I couldn’t find any sisters or brothers hanging out on the streets of Buenos Aires.
As I say, the Buenos Aireans I did meet are a warm and friendly lot. As a foreigner I was more than welcome to explore the charms of their city.
It just gives me a little shiver of uneasiness to think that they might not have been so friendly if they had thought that I was actually a local.
John Matshikiza was hosted by the South African embassy in Buenos Aires as an official adjudicator for the Three Continents International Documentary Film Festival
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