After all, we are Africans

Holland, Amsterdam,
20 Oct. 2010.

This is luchroom and cafe Saloon, on the corner of Lijnbaansgracht and the Korte Leidsedwarsstraat near the famous Rijksmuseum, better known as the Rembrant Museum among the foreign visitors to Amsterdam because of the Nachtwacht - the Nightwatch in English - painted by Rembrant when Holland still controlled the spice trade in the Far East.

When I first arrived to Amsterdam in the mid eighties of the last century and was still selling my funny little Mandala games, my acrylic city paintings in glass frames and my handmade leather bracelets under the Rijksmuseum tunnel, I used to take my lunches in this cafe, sometimes alone and sometimes with illegal African ambulant vendors trying hard to sell fake gold and silver jewellery to the tourists passing through the tunnel on the way to the nearby Van Gogh Museum after admiring the handiwork of Dutch Masters from Holland's golden Age inside the Rijksmuseum...

I still vividly remember the many stories these young black fellows from that hopelessly impoverished continent told me about their homes in dust ruled African villages where their mothers used to do the laundry in the nearby rivers and their dreams of marrying Dutch s*xbombs - preferably blond - for the passport and good cooking, "never mind the sex, we can get that outside the marital bed plenty, plenty", "they told me repeatedly, after all we are Africans"....whatever that was supposed to mean...

In the end the Dutch Amsterdam police kicked them all out of the city.