The Lessons of D'Oliveira

This week teaching English in the Czech Republic I have heard the terms ‘nigger’ and ‘gypsy bastard’ used in my classroom. This is not unusual and both, and in particular the latter, get fairly generous airings from some of my students. It is not a language barrier or some sort of elaborate cultural misunderstanding on my part. It’s just tremendously unrefined and unapologetic racism and it is, sad to say, pretty rife in life over here as I have experienced it in the past four and a half years.

Ignoring, discussing, resigning from lessons, temporarily flouncing out, attempted reasoning, and desk thumping have thus far been my reactions to hearing that sort of thing. Astonishment at why I’m complaining, reaffirmations of the casual racism and, I should acknowledge in some very few cases, genuine expressions of horror and regret are the reactions to hearing about that sort of thing from people within my language schools, both from managerial staff and other teachers alike. Possibly not terribly constructive responses from any of us and I certainly regret not getting off my leaden behind and trying to provide some free lessons or other assistance to the marginalised Roma community in my adopted city of Brno. I could easily have done so.

Basil D'Oliveira

I travel through the Roma district here in the Czech Republic’s second city every day and I am not blind to the problems I witness, namely a desperate cycle of poverty, unemployment and welfare dependency, the latter of which serves only to be used as a very nasty stick to beat its recipients with by blaming them for the current economic crisis. Yet, after a prolonged period of living here, there is now little doubt in my mind that this cycle is powered and maintained by an acidic stream of racial denigration and the results are hard to interpret as anything else but a tacit apartheid.

In four and a half years I have never seen, let alone taught, a single Romani student in any of the language schools I work in, which provide courses for both the general public and teenagers and young adults within the state education system, though this is not surprising given how children from this community are still arbitrarily sent to ‘special schools’ at an early age on the dubious whim of an ECHR-condemned system of selection. Roma are labelled lazy and work-shy yet if you ask a white Czech if they would give a Romani person a job they look at you with incredulity. When I was told that all they do is steal and remarked that I had never had any problem or felt threatened on my daily commute, the reply came that it was probably because I looked like I had nothing worth stealing, a tremendous double whammy of insult and racism in one hit. Similarly, restaurants, pubs, clubs and cafes are all pretty much divided along racial lines, both in terms of clientèle and staff. It is a huge white supremacist elephant in the room in Czech society and one that is made to loom even larger by the craven, gutless and incendiary remarks made by politicians from within the mainstream parties.

This may be a wearily familiar scenario for anyone with a passing knowledge of the ‘ Love Thy Neighbour ‘ Britain of what we might tentatively claim is yesteryear, though I’m not suggesting today’s Britain and its own Romani community’s relationship is an example to other nations, nor that there are not greater efforts to integration and improvement that could be made from within those Roma communities both here and in my own home country. The key difference here in the Czech Republic is that the community has been forcefully settled in an urban environment having been bused in by the Communists. Thousands were, of course, previously also bused out for extermination by the Nazis, and I have heard jokey remarks about how the jackboots should return on more than one occasion.

If you think some of the above is largely anecdotal hyperbole, I’m afraid this NGO report makes for an utterly depressing confirmation, even before you get to the parts on unpunished neo-Nazi Molotov cocktail arson attacks and forced sterilisation. The most explicit and personal example I can offer, however, to support my claim that a tacit apartheid exists takes place at the sports club 50m from my flat. On Saturdays, families get together to drink and watch their sons and daughters play football. Every Sunday, you can see exactly the same. Exactly the same except that on Saturdays everyone is Romani and on Sundays everyone is white, a scenario at which even Sepp Blatter would surely have to baulk. This is to me worse than even the epithets, still holding out as I do on the wet, dreamy ideal that sport is there to bind a community rather than divide it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=88WyxKcsTy0

This week has seen the death of a cricketer whose life exposed both racism’s power but also its powerlessness. For all the intolerable prejudice and setbacks that Basil D’Oliveira had to face, he was, in an odd sense, a fortunate man. He was gifted with exceptional talent and, in the journalist John Arlott and others, had supporters who were prepared to risk their own reputation to rescue the great all rounder from his South African homeland and its apartheid induced obscurity. Even then, though, his chance to travel to England from South Africa did not occur until D’Oliveira was officially 29 and, in all likelihood, several years older. That he went on to achieve so much so relatively late in the average cricketing life – a hugely impressive Test career played out between the conservatively estimated ages of 34 and 42 – is both incredible and infuriating.

D'Oliveira was a living inspiration to all racially hit communities

D’Oliveira’s life was about as far from being a waste as is humanly possible, but whilst we can revel in his accomplishments it is difficult, though by all accounts not for the man himself, not to feel regret at what greater feats he might have knocked off had he not been castrated by segregation for the first thirty years of his existence. His non-selection for the 1968 tour of South Africa, its subsequent cancellation and that nation’s ultimate sporting ostracism will all understandably rank above references to his early years in history’s annals, but for me it is those thirty years of diminished life chances that are the best representation of racism’s ugly injustice. Whether you’re Basil D’Oliveira in an apartheid hit South Africa longing to play professional cricket or a Romani person in Brno today longing for the chance to do any job or just complete your education, opportunity delayed is always opportunity denied, whether manifested through laws, actions or just silly old words.