Section:GDN 1N PaGe:26 Edition Date:190821 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 20/8/2019 18:48 cYanmaGentaYellowb
- The Guardian Wednesday 21 Au g u st 2019
(^26) World
Fol k lore pa rade acc u se d
of fuelling racism by
using blackface ‘savage’
Jennifer Rankin
Brussels
Anti-racism campaigners have called
on Unesco to remove a Belgian folklore
festival from its cultural heritage list
unless the parade’s organisers stop
using characters in blackface.
The four-day carnival in the Belgian
town of Ath, which starts on Friday,
will include “the savage”, a white
man in blackface who wears a chain
around his neck and a ring through his
nose. According to the offi cial festival
website this character “ chained and
agitated, testifi es to the taste for the
exotic of the 19th century”.
In a letter to Unesco an anti-rac-
ist group, the Brussels Panthers, said
the character was “adorned with all
the humiliating signs that our racist
societies have projected on to black
people throughout history”. The
runs Ath’s House of Giants museum,
which has models and costumes,
rejected the charge of racism. “The
whole town, they have been a little
surprised by the polemic, because this
personage, the savage, is the most pop-
ular. This character is a real star of the
Ath festival.”
In an interview he said there
was “huge aff ection” for the savage
character, who typically embraces
festival-goers, leaving black marks
on their faces. “The make up has
enormous importance, it is a mark of
aff ection. To end blackface breaks a
little how this [ritual] works.”
The blackface characters, he said,
were unchanged since the Ath festival
was inscribed on the Unesco heritage
list in 2005. “The devil and the sav-
age are part of the heritage, in the
same way that in a Catholic church or
museum you see works of art of art cre-
ated 200, 300 or 500 years ago that are
shocking for our current mentality.”
Campaigners say they do not want
to stop the enjoyment but are ask-
ing organisers to think again about
blackface. “The intangible heritage of
humanity, the Ducasse [Ath parade],
belongs to us as well – certainly less
than [to] the Athois [people of Ath] but
as much as [to] the rest of the Belgian
population, of humanity, which we are
part of,” Reghif told Le Soir.
letter, co-signed by 13 other anti-
racism groups, as well as dozens of
activists and academics across Europe,
describes blackface at Ath and other
folkloric events as “acts of symbolic
violence towards the black communi-
ties of Belgium – acts that are mirrored
by the acts of real physical violence
and material discrimination that the
same communities also encounter”.
Mouhad Reghif , spokesman for the
Brussels Panthers, said the blackface
tradition had very serious conse-
quences on the daily lives of black
people in Belgium and elsewhere in
Europe. Reghif, who has received doz-
ens of threatening messages since
launching the campaign, said black-
face helped preserve discrimination
and racist attitudes.
“There remain the attitudes of
the 1950s and 60s – that Belgium
brought civilisation to the Congo [its
former colony] and that colonialism
red horns. Less controversial fi gures
include David and Goliath, and a giant
horse carried by 16 people.
The centuries-old festival traces
its roots to a late mediaeval parade
to consecrate a church, but the sav-
age character did not appear until
- The event was listed as part of
the “intangible cultural heritage of
humanity” by Unesco, the UN’s cul-
tural agency, in 2005, along with other
folklore parades involving dragons
and giants in Belgium and France.
Laurent D ubuisson , a historian who
Emma Graham-HarrisonChina and Russia have accused the US
of stoking a new arms race by testing a
cruise missile, just weeks after Wash-
ington withdrew from a cold war era
missile control treaty that would have
barred the test launch.
The ground-launched missile, a
conventionally confi gured version of
the nuclear-capable Tomahawk cruise
missile, hit its target after more than
500 km (300 miles) of fl ight during
Monday’s test, the Pentagon said.
Ground-launched versions of the
missile were removed from service
after the signing of the Intermediate-
range Nuclear Forces treaty by Ronald
Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987.
The treaty’s ban on ground-
launched missiles with ranges
between 500km and 5,500km aimed to
reduce the ability of both countries to
launch a nuclear strike at short notice.
Russia ’s deputy foreign minister,
Sergei Ryabkov , condemned the lat-
est US missile launch, but said Moscow
was not looking to start a new arms
race, and would not deploy new mis-
siles unless the US did fi rst.
“All this elicits regret, the United
States has obviously taken the course
of escalating military tensions. We
will not succumb to provocations,”
the Tass news agency quoted him say-
ing. “We won’t allow ourselves to be
pulled into a costly arms race.”
Beijing also attacked the US for pro-
vocative behaviour, warning that themissile test could lead to “another
round of the arms race”, and have a
“serious negative impact” on inter-
national and regional security.
“We counsel the US side to abandon
their outdated concepts of a cold war
mentality and zero-sum games, and
exercise restraint in developing weap-
ons,” the foreign ministry spokesman,
Geng Shuang , told a news briefi ng.
The US president, Donald Trump,
made the decision to leave the INF
treaty in February, giving six months
notice, and blaming Russia for devel-
oping a weapon that it said violated
the treaty’s terms. Russia initially
denied the missile existed, but more
recently said its range did not violate
those limits.
The end of the INF leaves just
one major treaty providing formal
restraint on the world’s major arse-
nals – the New Start treaty – and it too
is in jeopardy. It limits strategic nuclear
warheads deployed by the US and Rus-
sia to 1,550 each , but is due to expire in- It could be extended, but the US
national security advis er, John Bolton,
has said that is “unlikely”.
Trump has expressed interest in
a new arms control agreement that
includes Beijing. Concerns about
China’s missile arsenal, which is not
subject to international treaties, may
have contributed to US administration
hawks’ push to leave the INF treaty.
“I think we are going to end up mak-
ing a deal with Russia where we have
some kind of arms control because all
we are doing is adding on to what we
don’t need and they are too. And China
is trying to catch us both,” Trump told
C-Span television.
Russia and
China warn US
cruise missile
test could revive
global arms race
‘The US has taken the
course of escalating
military tensions’Sergei Ryabkov Russia’s
deputy foreign minister▲ The ‘savage’ character who appears
in the Ath festival, Belgium, preserves
white colonialist views, say critics
PHOTOGRAPH: RTBFwas something good. With this we
maintain negrophobia and the white
supremacy born in colonial times.”
The “savage ” character appears on
one of 22 fl oats that process through
the small town of Ath on the last
Sunday of August. The carnival also
usually includes a blackface devil
character, dressed in black cloak withRELEASED BY "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws