It had frozen a bit, a lot of wind, it was early in the morning, and the man who screamed against Air France’s desk worker sounded like a Caribbean hurricane. “This is a monkey country, you hear me. A little frost, and immediately two hours of delay. In Canada they laugh about it. An A-Pen-Land, that’s it. “
You hear from his Dutch that it has a slightly foreign accent, Dutch is probably native language but also rusty, the fog uses daily.
The desk women is trained to deal with these types of customers. She just doesn’t say yet ‘Thank you for your feedback‘, she slips for a moment. It is not advisable to give APENANDSpEECH in Suriname, whether you are a brown, white or black Dutchman. You make old upset with it. Here in the Netherlands, the monkey removal yields at most a frozen smile.
He flies to Paris, just like me, and then you should actually go by train, but he does not continue to Canada where the Apenlandman has to go, and also not to Martinique, where I hope to land. We will both miss our connecting flights, and spend the night near the fairy -tied airport Charles de Gaulle – but nobody knows that yet.
The Caribbean islands that I then visit are none of all ‘monkey countries’: you have to have a very grim look to screen with those terms. I am surprised in Trinidad by the ongoing, Uni Sono pronounced greetings, ”Good Morning“afternoon‘, When I climb the local vans. Walk into a bus in the Netherlands, the attendees greet, and the shock is good. But the cliché is true: the Netherlands-Trinidad, a world of difference, where the capital Port of Spain scores fantastically high in crime figures. Forty murders a year or more, in the hundred thousand people, while in large parts of Europe that is 1 in one hundred thousand. But cordially greetings, those Trinidadans, perhaps to tackle the public insecurity with private existence.
In the hotel room in Port of Spain, I see at least 20 private security guards walking up and down when it drops, separately. If their service is on it, they change their cars parked in the street. The monopoly violence is outsourced, because they all carry a holster with a gun casually, who ends up in the back seat with a leisure swing. If real police drive through the street, with roaring pick-up truck, you certainly do not get the idea that safety is increasing. Spirals-wise, the crime, the police and the private security guards maintain each other. Upon arrival at the hotel, the employee complains that the booked room is still occupied, unpaid, long after check-out time. Then police arrive. “Aha, salvation,” I call. “No, those are precisely those people I try to get out of it.” To whom will you turn if the police are the problem?
It makes no sense to compare Trinidad with Western Europe, because nobody gets up from a much worse example, far away. But that is not a license for carefree hysteria. This month there are elections in Germany, once Merkel-Land, who promise to be a settlement with the completely untenable crime figures there: 0.83 murders in 100,000 people.
They commit a murder for that in Trinidad.
Stephan Sanders is an essayist.