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Thread on rasism in #Eritrea
My mother who is half Italian and half Eritrean who is light skinned, all her children are very light skinned except me, as much as I loved spending time with my mum I also hated being seen outside with my mum or siblings.
My mother who is half Italian and half Eritrean who is light skinned, all her children are very light skinned except me, as much as I loved spending time with my mum I also hated being seen outside with my mum or siblings.
On the days that my mum had the time to spend with her kids she would take us to cinemas or ice cream on Sundays, when we run into people on the street whose knew my mum often they would kiss and give compliments to my siblings & stop when it comes to me and ask who is this girl
When my mum says this is my daughter Meron, their normal response always was “how can this barya (slave) be a daughter of a beautiful woman like you, you must have found her in the garbage or something “. I went to all female catholic daycare/school as a child and
the nuns that was supposed to take care of us would tell me and few other dark skinned children how dirty we were & they would check our uniforms every day to see if there was any dark stain on our white uniform, we were the list favored by all nuns and teachers for being dark.
My own siblings used to bully me and tell me that they found me on the street, my older sister once scraped my body with steel wool to take a way the dirt in my body. I was called Barya (slave), Kunama, Gambela darker skinned (tribes in Eritrea and Ethiopia) over 100 times a day
I had a fight with siblings or children in our area, if you were dark skinned you were viewed as a thief, lier or very ugly. A teacher once told me “ oh we were hoping never to see your barya face” when I came to school after being sick for days.
Later after I came to Sweden I was not allowed to be friends with my Gambian and Ugandan friends by my father, uncles, friends and our community. You shouldn’t hang with black people, I would ask aren’t we blacks, they would say “you know what I mean, I mean Africans “
and I would ask aren’t we Africans? My dad would just get mad and say you know exactly what I mean without explaining anything I would just be told just don’t hang with them they are criminals, they are drug dealers or they are not good influence.
Dating a non Eritrean will make you an outcast in our community especially if you are within those they consider blacks or Africans, my Eritrean friend who married a Congolese was disowned by her parents and our community for embarrassing them.
