Lost White Tribes: Journeys Amongst the Forgotten [Hardcover]

History, with its loose ends, rough edges, strange anomalies and surreal quirks, is rarely neat. The quirky and anomalous leftover colonial communities described in Lost White Tribes are a case in point. As Milanese journalist Riccardo Orizio puts it in the introduction, the European emigrants left stranded by the retreating tides of imperialism are among today's "forgotten people".

One such tribe is the Burghers of Sri Lanka, an enclave of Netherlanders who stayed East after the Dutch Empire was overrun by the British around 1800. As Orizio wanders among the Burghers' crumbling bungalows and pre-war ballrooms, he finds a half-assimilated people fond of operatic melancholy and short-wave radio, prone to singing a national anthem that sums up their linguistic and ethnic confusion: "We subjects of great England's King, From Ceylon's distant strand, To thee our loving tribute bring, Het Lieve Vaterland". Other tribes Orizio encounters are equally obscure. In Brazil he meets Confederate Americans. In Guadaloupe he uncovers incestuous Normans. In Haiti, he holes up with Poles.

But perhaps most remarkable is the last community he encounters: the Basters of Namibia. A miraculous hybrid of Bushman and Afrikaaner, these green-eyed, pale-faced, somehow "Oriental-looking" people, fled the British imperialists of the Cape Colony to settle in the deserts of South West Africa. There they survived, and even thrived: they became known for their devout ways, as well as the beauty of their uniquely petite women. Orizio's eloquent descriptions of the offbeat Basters--their tenacity, integrity, and bravery--stand comparison with some of the best travel writing of recent years, and are a fitting end to a profoundly intriguing book. --Sean Thomas

"Like Chatwin, Orizio has a knack of following hunches and finding good people to talk to. He also does his research and provides a history, as well as a social anthropology, of those he visits...sensitively observed, vividly told and irresistibly exotic." -"Sunday Times

"From the Trade Paperback edition.

Over three hundred years ago the first European colonialists set foot in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean to found permanent outposts of the great empires. This epic migration continued until after World War II when these tropical outposts became independent black nations, and the white colonials were forced, or chose, to return home. Some of these colonial descendants, however, had become outcasts in the poorest stratas of the society of which they were now a part. Ignored by both the former slaves and the modern privileged white immigrants, and unable to afford the long journey home, they still hold out today, hiding in remote valleys and hills, 'lost white tribes' living in poverty with the proud myth of their colonial ancestors. Forced to marry within the tribe to retain their fair-skinned purity, they are torn between the memory of past privileges and the present need to integrate into the surrounding society. The tribes investigated in this book share much besides the colour of their skin: all are decreasing in number, many are on the verge of extinction, fighting to survive in countries that alienate them because of the colour of their skin.

Journeys among the forgotten
INTRODUCTION

He was a year or two older than me. About 20, naked to the waist, with long hair tied back in a pony-tail. He was serving drinks and dishes of rice and dried fish in the restaurant of a small hotel on a nondescript road in Sri Lanka. Like nearly everyone else in the place, he wore a red or purple sarong tight around his hips. The trees outside dripped with warm humidity.

Sitting at a table, the De Silva family were noisily giving me the latest gossip about the acquaintances we were on our way to visit in a small town at the end of the road. The boy brought some tea and walked quickly away without a word. But I had felt the rapid look of curiosity he had shot in my direction. As a white foreigner in a tropical country you soon learn to recognise this special look. To begin with, it disturbs you. Then, realising that you do the same when you come across anyone markedly different from yourself, you cease to notice it. But there was something strange about that glance. A young European or American spinning out a holiday by working in a restaurant in Sri Lanka was much more likely to be struck, if at all, by my Sinhalese friend dressed as he was in immaculate cricket whites and looking as if he had just stepped out of a picture postcard of the colonial era.

"Who is he?" I asked.

"Him? A waiter," Dilsham replied.

But my curiosity was aroused.

"What nationality, would you say? German? English?"

; -

"Him?" he repeated. "I told you, he's a waiter. Local chap."

I was still mystified. "But he's white, Dilsham."

Ignoring me, Dilsham continued his account of a group of friends from the Lions Club who had recently thrown a memorable party where the arrack had flowed like water and only Subash Fernando, who never touched alcohol and "He can't be local." -

"He can and he is," said Dilsham at last. "He's a Srilankan like me. Hear how he speaks the language? He's only a Dutch Burgher. Don't bother your head about them. Strange people. Dutch, or something of the sort. Maybe Portuguese. Some of them live in crumbling old houses. Nothing to cook with, roof falling in, but that's where they like to live. As if this was still the eighteenth century. Perhaps, although they're trash, they think they're better than we are."

That was how I found my first White Tribe. By the side of a tropical road. More exotic than all the exotica around me. Like other tribes I would meet in the next few years, walking a thin line between privilege and discrimination. Poor. 'Lost' because reduced to being a historical fossil, little more than a genetic anomaly for whom no one wants to claim paternity. Too white for some. Too native for others. Their society a closed, incestuous microcosm. I am conscious of the fact that if, a couple of hundred years ago, an ancestor of mine had decided to join the Dutch East India Company – as did many respectable Europeans in search of adventure or simply intent on landing a good job as their counterparts today might opt for a British merchant bank – today I could have been that white boy in a sarong. A white Srilankan. And when, years later, I saw a photograph in Tim Page's great book Sri Lanka of a house dating from the Dutch colonial period, a pathetically dilapidated old house, I couldn't help thinking of it as the waiter's home.

The Dutch Burghers are not alone in their predicament. In Windhoek, in Namibia, I queued to use the public telephone with a group of Baster builders whose green eyes regarded me with the look I had come to recognise. Their great-great-great-grandfathers belonged to the same generation of colonists as those who conquered Ceylon. The ships that berthed in Capetown were, after all, the same ships that sailed to Colombo. Many countries have left lost tribes of their own nationals in one-time colonies, and have now forgotten them. Napoleon's Poles in Haiti, the Blancs Matignons in Guadeloupe, the fair-haired Norman fishermen in Les Saintes, the Germans of Seaford Town in Jamaica, the last Confederates in Brazil's sugar cane plantations. The list could go on. There are the Griquas of Griquatown in South Africa, to say nothing of the Souza, Theseriras, Alcantra and Monteiros families and a further 4500 in Melaka, the Portuguese enclave in Malaysia formerly known as Malacca. There are the French in Pondicherry, in India, who cherish the memory of De Gaulle and have been French since 1664. I saw the German Mennonites in Belize, dressed like the Pennsylvanian Amish people but without the comforts of modern American life. The West, rightly concerned about the fate of Afghanistan, seldom remembers that the Gavurs, the last descendants of Alexander the Great and his armies, with Greek blood and white skin, still live there. And how could we forget, not least on account of their extreme geographical isolation, the Scottish and Genovese sailors who populated Tristan da Cunha, an island lying 1,800 nautical miles west by south of Cape Town. Or (even if too individualistic to constitute a tribe) the "insabbiati", the Italians who went native in Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia.

In some cases the lost tribe is white not because of old ties with Europe but for some genetic reason. The White Indios living in the forest of Darien, Panama, aroused the curiosity of travellers in the nineteenth century. And only recently an indigenous white-skinned tribe that uses parrots to sound the alarm when strangers are about was discovered in Irian Jaya (Indonesia). The tribe's home is the Bird's Head Peninsula. Anomalous cases? Irrelevant? Perhaps. But all of us, beneath our apparent normality, belong to a lost tribe. We can all become minorities. We are all potentially irrelevant. The whites living among Jamaican banana plantations are not basically different from the Jamaican immigrants living on the outskirts of western cities. Both are frequently losers. Both have the 'wrong' skin colour. Different.

The places I normally visit in the course of my work are those where events make news, if not history. The journeys described here went in the opposite

Over three hundred years ago the first European colonies set foot in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean to found permanent outposts of the great empires. This epic migration continued after World War II when these tropical outposts became independent black nations, and the white colonials were forced, or chose, to return home.

Some of these colonial descendants, however, had become outcasts in the poorest strata of the society of which they were now a part. Ignored by both the former slaves and modern privileged white immigrants, and unable to afford the long journey home, they still hold out today, 'lost white tribes' living in poverty with the proud myth of their colonial ancestors. Forced to marry within the tribe to retain their fair-skinned 'purity' they are torn between the memory of past privileges and the present need to integrate into the surrounding society.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.