I still remember the shock to my system when I landed at Zurich airport way back in 1971, a callow teenager striking out on his own into Europe for the first time from the safe certainties of the African continent. The excitement of the journey, the adventure, the strangeness, the empowerment of being 16 and trusted to look after yourself in a foreign environment were a kick in themselves.
OK, let me not overstate the case. I had already spent three critical years of my childhood in England, an exiled child of exile parents. Being overwhelmingly surrounded by white people was not exactly new.
But the rapidly expanding mind of a child forgets things as quickly as it learns them. Some things stick, others just disappear, or are logged away in some distant recess of the mind until you find some use for them again. Which is as good as forgetting about them, as far as you are concerned.
The shock to my system came when I was lugging my bags through the strange, noisy silence of Zurich airport, waiting to pick up my connecting flight, and was stopped dead in my tracks by a strange and inexplicable sight.
An elderly white man wearing overalls was on his knees, patiently polishing the marble floors with a faded rag.
I had to quickly pull myself together. I was the only person in the whole airport who was paying any attention to this sight. Everyone else was rushing about their business. I did not need to make a spectacle of myself.
But if you haven’t been there, and if you are not a black person coming from darkest Africa, you can’t explain the sensation.
You realise, for the first time in your life, that there is something wrong with the picture — either the picture you are seeing unfolding in front of you here in strange, odourless Europe, or the picture you are coming away from in hot, humid, sweat-filled, roaring Africa.
Because you suddenly realise that you have never seen a white person on their knees, exerting themselves in the exercise of an honest day’s work. It has always been the foreman who gives orders to the boss-boy, who then yells at the tattered ranks of sullen workers, who then get down on their knees and do as they are told. Or the madam who gives loud instructions to the maid and then goes off to play bridge for the rest of the day. Africa ticks over on the knees and buttocks and reluctant elbow grease of the black proletariat, a class created entirely to serve the interests of European colonialism. (Before that, of course, we were all strictly royalty and aristocrats.)
You get used to this picture again and again as the sense of historical inevitability is reinforced the more you travel the planet. In Africa, black people do the work. In England, black people and Indian people do the work. In France all the street sweepers are Africans or descendants of Africans who have been re-imported from the Caribbean, after being dumped there as menial slaves in the first place. In Germany all the hard labour, from the kitchens of the snootiest restaurants to the bowels of the most dangerous factories, is done by Turks, gypsies or Africans. You can be forgiven for wondering whether the only thing white people do is file their nails and wonder about the meaning of God.
These unwelcome reflections came flooding back when I was in the Finnish capital of Helsinki last week. Helsinki is a very special place. You get taken aback when you see a person of colour, because generally they avoid having them there. And you certainly don’t see black people, or Turks, or Indians, for that matter, loading the garbage into garbage disposal trucks or scrubbing the floors of the railway station. And, unlike in America, ”a country full of black men and strangers”, as Sean O’Faolin put it, you don’t find all the taxis being driven by Sikhs, Arabs and Greeks. The Finns prefer to do these things for themselves.
So there I was, once more, faced with the reality of the deep psychological disadvantage that we have internalised just by being born black in Africa. You stand there, rubbing your eyes in disbelief, simply because you see white people doing their own dirty work in their own country.
Yes, well, so what?
Well, you can’t help wondering whether there are not lessons in all of this. Not least because, as several very educated and intelligent Finns took the trouble to tell me during my time there, Finland was itself a poor country not very long ago, but has managed to pull itself up by the bootstraps over the past hundred years or so and become a pretty wealthy society. Finns were once the Niggers of Europe, colonised by the Swedes and the Russians in turn, before all that changed.
But just because they are now a wealthy society (you ache to see a beggar or a gaggle of street children huddling in a hallway, but no dice) it doesn’t mean that they have taken the route of other relatively wealthy countries and come to be utterly dependent on migrant labour. Labour is itself an honour, a service to society — and is very well paid, by the way. The working classes are now firmly established as part of the middle class, and everybody seems to like it that way.
Maybe there is no lesson. Every country’s path to growth and progress is unique. But, as an African, you do like to dream that one day we, too, will be able to hold our heads high, and live in a placid country that we can be proud of and genuinely feel part of — even when we are on our knees scrubbing the floors.