one day a boss from Villa Literno a very small fish in that pond by the way he decided that it was necessary to expel from the area all the African immigrants and in order to bring this about instead of doing it directly himself and getting his hands dirty with the Africans with the negroes as he calls them and therefore maybe killing one or two himself instead he preferred to call on the landlords renting to them he goes to all of them and intimidates them clearly conveying the idea that they have to get rid of these negroes they are renting rooms to he doesn’t want to see them around anymore doesn’t want to have to look at them you have to understand that all of this is linked to the clan’s determination to preserve law and order so to speak in their own territory so the issue of immigration had become a real and fairly serious problem in this region where most of the economic activity has to do with farming here over the course of the past few years a growing number of African immigrants especially from countries such as Nigeria Ghana thousands of Africans had come to Italy especially in the summer for the tomato harvest
here anyone who has even a patch of land plants tomatoes because tomatoes are the product that is most profitable and down here everything revolves around the tomato crop a constant cycle of small factories spring up to crush tomatoes and process them and then sell them to major food groups like Cirio as a result all these Africans come here to spend the summer working and what they find is very harsh living conditions because they work all day long and then at night many of them are forced to sleep in the countryside in abandoned houses without running water or electric power or any conveniences at all but it’s still an economic opportunity for them because if they work hard like this for a couple of years they think that they’ll be able to set aside a little savings and when they go back home it will allow them to rescue their families from starvation and poverty so the first ones to arrive here send for their compatriots from Ghana and Nigeria their neighbors and relatives and friends until in our region there are many thousands of Africans which is something that greatly disrupts the mindset of these small towns
in these towns for the most part the people hate blacks they revile them they can’t stand them because they consider them inferior beings in practical terms animal beasts even though those same people who hate immigrants so ferociously as a group and can’t stand to have them around if they happen to have a neighbor who is an African who comes to ask to borrow a cup of sugar a little water or some bread they’ll help them enthusiastically I’ve personally seen people who hated blacks and truly considered them to be animals make unexpectedly generous gestures for instance when one of the few husband and wife African couples around these parts had a baby the neighbors the very same neighbors who had always hated and despised black people now fell all over themselves to give them hand me downs that no longer fit their children car seats strollers and all the rest of that sort of stuff
which is to say while immigrants taken collectively are seen as an enemy immigrants taken individually are accepted and don’t bother anyone and soon everyone finds that they’re fine people it might happen that one evening at dinner at home you hear someone talk about a young man of color whom you know by sight and your mother tells the family that she heard from the neighbor who rented him a little room along with four other Nigerians that this young man back home where he comes from took a degree in electronic engineering and everyone murmurs poor boy what a misfortune even though he studied and took a degree he’s forced to do stoop labor in the fields then however it’s astonishing to see that the poor boys who work seven or eight or ten of them on your neighbor’s farm really are worked like animals and you see that those same people who were talking about them as unfortunate victims afterward on the job exploit them and mistreat them and sometimes even beat them and really do treat them like slaves
and so this boss in Villa Literno one day decides that the immigrants have to go away because they are seen as a threat because for the most part immigrants are single men they have no women they have no amusements so after work the only thing that nearly all of them do is to get drunk and then they become a problem an annoyance they make noise and become disorderly and maybe they get into fights with one another and so they have to go they all have to leave the town and the surrounding area there can’t be even one of them left behind and then there’s a problem that nobody talks about but that all the men have in the back of their minds which is the issue of women because in our towns an immigrant is seen as someone who arrives here and after a while might even take your woman away it’s a product of cultural backwardness or fear of the negro who is widely imagined to be someone who has a bigger tool than you or I might so in any case blacks are always seen as a threat as a danger in your territory
it’s no surprise that problems develop with the immigrants because three or four thousand men transplanted from other countries forced to live on the street forced to work like beasts in the fields it’s only natural that at night they drink an extra beer or two that they start to get depressed because they’re missing their faraway homes and so maybe they get into a fight cause a brawl in a bar but all this is unacceptable to the so called respectable people of the town the blacks have to be expelled chased away and this responsibility is taken up by none other than the clan which goes around to all the landlords that have rented rooms to the Africans and orders them to evict them all but there are those who suspect that the real reason for the mass eviction of the Africans is that the clan wants to replace them with people from eastern Europe people who are more like us in part because they have the same skin color as us in fact they often have even lighter skin than us so they can be better tolerated if not exactly accepted and they are considered to be brothers unfortunate handsome intelligent and capable
and so it’s the usual thing if you’re black you’re never going to be seen as anything but black even if you’re smart and capable even if you’re an electronic engineer whoever you are whatever you do you’re still just a negro and a negro is accepted with hostility to say nothing of Moroccans and other North Africans who belong to another race they’re drunks they never want to work who go into the countryside at five in the morning and already at five in the afternoon they’re tired nothing could be more normal of course the employer would be tired as well but different rules apply to Moroccans if after twelve hours of hard labor they’re tired then it just means that they don’t really want to work so you replace them all en masse with people from eastern Europe apparently much more tractable much more submissive but in reality they are simply much more cunning and clever because they are very careful to avoid coming here to do the same shitty work as the blacks and the Moroccans
but the campaign fails because in that period with Collettivo Zero we were offering free evening courses in Italian for immigrants and these courses were attended by young men and also a few young woman from every ethnic group imaginable ranging from Nigerians to Algerians Albanians and Colombians one evening the students all came in concerned and upset and one of them who was named Yussef a young Tunisian who I’ve known for many years he’s a young man who only needs to take a few more exams to get his degree in medicine he works in the fields every summer to get enough money to keep going he lives across the street from a friend of mine and speaks dialect better than he speaks Italian when he talks with us he normally speaks dialect and he attends the Italian classes because he wants to learn to speak proper Italian so this Yussef arrives that evening and says dimana me n’aggia i’ which is dialect for tomorrow I have to go away when I ask him why he says that his landlord explained to him that his presence is no longer welcome that he has to give up his room and it would be better if he leaves entirely and so that evening that’s all everybody talks about
the matter strikes me and my friends as serious and scary we feel violated all of the work we’ve done is about to be ruined as well as the danger of serious consequences for us because we are offering these Italian lessons in the church in a town near my town where that priest was killed Don Peppino a priest who always opposed the clans and who along with a few other priests in the area took considerable risks with his sermons and had taken part in all the demonstrations it was thought that he had been killed because he had refused to officiate at a funeral because all of the bosses were planning to attend that funeral it was the funeral of a clan member and he had just preached a sermon against them he was killed in his rectory on his own saint’s day St. Joseph San Giuseppe the nickname for Giuseppe being Peppino March nineteenth early that morning while he was putting on his vestments they came into the rectory and shot him in the head
after the lesson which actually never took place because the hour that we usually spent teaching Italian grammar this time we spent talking about what had happened other friends showed up who teach Italian courses for immigrants on other evenings because we divided up the week among us there were two people who teach that course so these friends showed up we told them about what had happened but they already knew they’d heard about it people were talking about it in the towns and villages in the streets where the immigrants lived no one knew what to do how to react fortunately we have relationships with Luigi and Chiara who are a point of reference for us not only in political terms but also socially because Chiara is also in charge of contacts with a variety of antiracist associations on a national level like Neroenonsolo and so Chiara had a good idea a smart idea that the only way to put a halt to this thing was to make a national case of it and so we all decided to organize a conference here involving all the antiracist associations with a presence in our area and the national ones as well
we couldn’t organize the conference ourselves officially because that would expose us to considerable physical danger in the best hypothesis we’d be likely to find a pile of manure dumped outside our front door and so the conference was organized by the people from Neroenonsolo which means Black but Not Only a pro immigrant support group and so we decided to hold the demonstration in the little piazza in front of the main church of Casale di Principe which is also the market square and the piazza where local boys and girls hang out in the evenings then Chiara got in touch with the press and the television stations and all the news media that you could think of and on the day of the conference the little piazza was filled with television news crews and reporters from various national dailies as well as from the local press and each group made a speech from a little stage set up in the piazza in front of a big crowd that clapped and cheered and listened for the two or three hours that the conference lasted and each group read messages and the immigrants spoke as well
the publicity that the mass media gave to the demonstration forced the authorities to take an interest in what was happening so the Africans were able to return home but not that same day that is they had to leave town for a couple of days so that matters could settle down then luckily they were all allowed to return to their apartments and they did except for those few who once they left town decided they would be happier somewhere else and decided not to come back still though the atmosphere remained hostile toward the Africans in fact if anything it got worse more ferocious for instance one time they caught a Nigerian friend of mine in the street and poured gasoline on him but luckily they didn’t manage to set him on fire but I have to say that during this period in our area the Africans began to take part in criminal activities as well that is some of them started dealing strange substances peddling a drug to other immigrants a terrible drug called cobret which is a sort of chemical byproduct that induces the same effects as heroin or almost the same but is much cheaper and also much more dangerous
this cobret is produced in Africa and it gets here by the usual system that is concealed inside capsules made of a plastic strong enough to withstand stomach acid the immigrants swallows the capsules before leaving their country and then once they reach their destination they recover them by shitting them out and this traffic was invented by the Africans they run it on their own but the clan doesn’t like this traffic that’s not under its control and in fact the clan members start to kill a few African drug dealers and smugglers the Africans that the clan has identified as responsible for the traffic in cobret and the clan members start carrying out acts of reprisal in the streets against Africans in general that is they pick up a random African and beat him brutally or pour gasoline on him and try to set him on fire like that Nigerian friend of mine other Africans get the front doors of the buildings where they live burned as a form of intimidation and so on