Driven to the dark for being black

NEW DELHI: In the basement of a nondescript building facing a park, a wooden door opens to a staircase covered in red carpet, and leads to a Congolese church in Sant Nagar. The church caters to the expatriate community of Nigerians, Congolese and Sudanese, who live nearby in ghettoes. They feel they aren’t welcome in other churches. Forget churches, they aren’t welcome in the country itself, they point out.
“That hurts,” Sonny Eluwa, 38, says. “We want dignity.” The Nigerian came to live in Delhi in 2013, and is in the business of exporting marble tiles. A quiet man, he wonders why they taunt and abuse him. “Indians are dark too,” he says.
But he doesn’t respond. “They think Nigerians are drug dealers and eat human flesh, and so on. But not all of us are the same,” he says. “I keep my gaze down. I don’t want to be beaten up or killed because I am dark and from Africa.”
The stripping and parading of a 21-year-old Tanzanian woman in Bengaluru has reopened old wounds among black expats in the capital.
In March last year, the issue of racism was raked up when the then law minister Somnath Bharti allegedly pulled out foreigners from their homes at midnight in Khirki Extension, which is home to Nigerians, Algerians, Congolese and Ugandan expats. Four Ugandan women complained of being groped.
A Congolese man, on condition of anonymity, says he is sad things are this way. “It is sad that we are the victims of such debasing racism in a country we love and there are so many of us here,” he says. In 2014, after the attacks on the Ugandan women in Delhi, American Kim Barrington Narisetti, who worked in the publishing industry, wrote a personal column on her own tryst with racism in India. “A young boy of about eight was riding on the back of his bike with his father. As they passed us, he hurled a huge rock the size of a fist at me. It landed with a thud on my sunglasses and my head snapped back. If I weren’t wearing huge aviator sunglasses, I likely would have lost my eye,” she wrote, adding the boy conceded that he threw the stone because he thought she was African and that somehow was justified.
Black expats say they are unable to rent apartments in posh neighbourhoods in the capital and only find rooms in places like Lal Dora or urban ghettoes like Sant Nagar, Khirki Extension and Shahpur Jat. But here too housing comes with humiliation and discrimination.
They discuss their experiences in India on several online forums—from betrayals in love, to being called whores, drug dealers and cannibals. They talk about the racism and look for ways to deal with it in a country that has been home for years.
“The parents of my Indian female friend agreed to my marrying their daughter. But I backed out after careful consideration. I felt sad about it but I knew that I made the right decision,” shared one expat on the forum.
He continued: “The first word I learnt in India was ‘kala’. I kept hearing that word everywhere I went in Delhi. I then asked the hoteliers what it meant and they told me. In the UK, the Asians (Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis) suffer more racism than the blacks. Yet it is they (the Asians) who discriminate against you more than the whites. I finished the relationship because I got sick of the stares.”
The Congolese expat says in exasperation, “Nowhere in Africa were we made so conscious of the colour we were born with. We are colour-coded here where they are not even white.”