All victims of racism have been urged to report to the authorities and to publicly narrate their experiences.
The appeal came from Richard de Nooy, a novelist based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands following a racial attack on a Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina in Berlin, Germany.
Mr Wainaina, who is currently on a prestigious Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) Fellowship in Berlin, wrote that on 1st June 2016 he was beaten up on the way to a pharmacy by a taxi driver but nobody come to his aid.
“I urge my black friends, particularly those who have a voice, to keep reporting their encounters with the beast openly, as Binyavanga Wainaina has done, so that we can make more people aware of the beast’s growing strength and can take steps – legal, political, educational and artistic – to ensure that no one can ever claim that we did not know, that we were powerless against the beast, that we stood by and watched it grow, thinking that the darkest chapters in human history would never be repeated,” Mr de Nooy wrote on Richarddenooy.bookslive.co.za.
Revealing that he left South Africa 30 years ago because he “refused to fight for a grossly unjust system”, Mr de Nooy said: “Racism has always lurked just under the surface of our societies. We kept it in check by creating laws to curtail its effects, but we knew it was there, know it is there, an ever-present threat.”
Mr de Nooy warned that racism was spreading in Europe at an alarming. He said: “Today, I see and hear more and more people and parties in Europe voicing grotesquely familiar sentiments and espousing similarly unjust systems, inviting the beast out into the open. We must gather our wits before it is too late.”
Click here to read Mr Richard de Nooy’s article – A WARNING prompted by the attack on Binyavanga Wainaina in Berlin
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