Your France is no better than our Mts !

To my dear expatriate brother Francois ,

Recently here, while the licence of democracy was being used to subvert our democracy, i had to bear silently your patronising and condescending attitude towards these events ; I felt a bit embarrassed ; more than that, deep down your comments were really hurtful and appeared to hold some kind of deep-seated feelings of cultural superiority over us the struggling lot of the relatively poorer developing world .

It is difficult for me to really pin you down because you are always so subtle about it , I’ll say even devious, when sometimes you hint that you were right when you emigrated to greener pastures, so fortunate to have broken free of the low standards, small-minded, ethnocentric , mistakenly labelled “parasidiac” island locked in a time warp.

Indeed you always refer to us as being so entrenched in our backwards ideals and values, still stuck in the 70s when V.S Naipaul, in his travel piece, gave us the contemptuous title of “The Overcrowded Barracoon” . “Stuck in time”, you would say, then it was Gae Gae exhibiting its black power politics , which has matured over time into more of the same “identity politics” ! you would always run us down and deprecate us as “a Nation, trapped in a time warp.”

As the recent events unfurl in France following the police killing of teenager Nahel , I do not know whether I am right or wrong, but my small-island, small-mind mentality compels me to hit back at you. “Your France is no better than our Mts !” . FT main headlines today are “Police killing of teenager Nahel reopens old wounds for France’s minorities”

FT added” On the same day that a 17-year-old of North African descent was killed by police outside Paris, teenagers attending a workshop at a youth centre in another of the city’s low-income neighbourhoods said his fate was a fresh reminder of the discrimination they faced in French society, “ especially those from the banlieues, as the deprived suburbs are called.

Mon Cher Francois, what is even more damning are these observations “ For many in France, a profound sense of déjà vu prevails, …..underscoring deep divisions in society, …..and the inability of successive governments to improve conditions despite 40 years of plans for the banlieues. It is supposed to be a fundamental French value. But here, égalité (equality) is now an ambition.” Nahel’s shoot­ing has tapped into anger over per­ceived police bru­tal­ity and racial dis­crim­in­a­tion. It is also reviv­ing indig­na­tion over marked inequal­ity from hous­ing to jobs in some low-income areas home to many immig­rants and their des­cend­ants. Indeed, the latest protests demon­strate that impov­er­ished, eth­nic­ally mixed dis­tricts remain a powder keg riven with a feel­ing of injustice, racial dis­crim­in­a­tion and aban­don­ment by the state.

Dear Francois, it’s not my intention to distribute blame in much the same way that a muck spreader disperses manure in all directions. It is just a reminder that we have to disentangle from our own carefully fashioned political and cultural myths and the polarised accounts of contemporaries, who either regard…….a reminder that we are all in it together , a reminder of the challenges of the deep-seated social and eco­nomic prob­lems in poorer areas and the long leg­acy of neg­lect and that entrenched poverty, unemployment, crime, racial dis­crim­in­a­tion and edu­ca­tional under­per­form­ance are the failures of our present unfair economic system. Rgds