THE OTHER COLOMBIA
So far Susie and I have experience only the biggest city, Bogata, and have seen both sides of the city, the bustling main street where I have been robbed twice but which is bursting with life and the quieter more elegant parts of town with beautiful shops and museums where we have lived the high life at very little cost.
But on the bus trip from Villa de Layva to Barichara, both heritage towns with lovely shops and restaurants, which are crowded with rich Bogata residents on weekends, we drove miles and miles dotted by little mountain towns that were definitely skipped by tourists. Here the shops sell ordinary practical things with huge store signs and narrow interiors. And as we passed mountain farms with small herds of black and white cows and fields of sugar cane I realized that these people work hard just to get by and don’t have money or time for the luxury shops that we have been having such a great time in. I realized that these people, if they can, while not desperate or threatened by violence must be tempted by relatives who have emigrated to the United States to want to emigrate themselves to a place where the same hard work would bring a much more comfortable way of life. These people would be economic migrants if they emigrated, not refugees from terror or dire poverty which I referred to earlier.
I wonder about my own experience of colonization. I wonder for myself about the period of Western colonization that started in the 1500’s and peaked in the early 1900’s and is now waning as colonized countries have become independent. I know this period of colonization, which still continues with economic imperialism by the great powers including the interference in South America by American economic imperialism, is more complicated than my personal experience, but it is my own experience that I want to deal with. I am a citizen of a once colonized country, the United States, and I grew up in India, another colony, during the time before and after independence from the British Raj. I lived in an American missionary (a form of imperialism) high ceilinged house with many servants.
How is it that when in 1600 the Moguls were more powerful and civilized rulers than the English kings that in a couple of centuries India became a colony of England?
In my mind it is technology, what became the Industrial Revolution, that gradually made, first the industrialists and then the common man, have a much higher standard of living than non industrialized colonies. Why industrialization happened in England and Western Europe and not in China or India I don’t know. But because it did, and because it led to the domination of colonized parts of the world, I am now privileged and comparatively well to do. I have visited parts of India recently where many people in cities live a very hard life and visited villages where people have very little. In neither case, their’s or mine, do we deserve to live as we do. It was an accident of history and is nothing to be proud of or feel superior about. And in neither case, their’s or mine, are we, personally, at fault. There is no reason to feel either pride or guilt. We just happened to be born in different circumstances.
But that said, the fact remains that the world we were born into is a very unequal and unjust place.
Here in Bogata and Ville de Leyva and Barichara I have been living the high life when most people don’t. Guiltless or not, it just doesn’t feel right.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 