JEAN LEONARD TOUADI talks to ALEN CUSTOVIC
“Since the Nineties Italy has been experiencing a real social creation of an enemy. The result is that, over time, a number of reflexes and slogans become sedimented in the collective imagination and in symbolic frameworks of daily life, contributing not only to social instability but also to the business of fear.” Jean Léonard Touadi, Congolese by birth and Italian by adoption, a university professor and a member of parliament for the PD, comments for Resetdoc on the “hunt for the black man” that took place in Rosarno, Calabria, at the beginning of January.
What do these events in Rosarno reveal?
As soon as I saw the tragic images from Rosarno, I caught the first available plane and went there. What I found were the same elements I had seen in Castel Volturno, the same dangerous mix of organised crime, illegal labor and serious unease. Personally, I have studied the history of blacks in the United States and what I saw in that town in Calabria looked like what happened in Alabama during the Twenties in the past century. I never expected to see anything similar in Italy in 2010.
Reports also showed immigrants, especially Africans, armed with bars and sticks, crossing the town and causing destruction and chaos. Why all this anger?
I was the first person to make an appeal against violence, trying to make people understand that even if they are totally in the right, violence puts them in the wrong, as well as them being cleverly manoeuvred and exploited. I tried to teach those young people that the history of black people, from the United States to South Africa, teaches us that then best results have been achieved thanks to non-violence.
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via Sign and Sight