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Date Published: 22/06/00
Author: Jake Bowers Romani writer Jake Bowers believes that a land without gypsies is a land without freedom. |
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Few people would recognise the Romani flag if they saw it. Let me describe it for you, so that you’ll recognise it should you ever see it flapping alongside the Union Jack or Stars and Stripes. The bottom half is green to represent grass, the blue top half represents the sky, and a red wheel in the foreground represents the journey we made from India 1,000 years ago.
Our flag represents a romantic picture of Romani life. It’s a hopeful image of the freedom we – the gypsies – are often perceived to have, but have rarely found. In today’s Europe, it could just as well consist of a barbed wire fence with a concrete background. For fences, restrictions and borders are a greater part of our reality than the blue sky above and the green grass below.
Less than 10 per cent of the world’s eight million Romanies remain nomadic. We have been ‘sedentarised’, assimilated and persecuted by communists and capitalists alike. The personal autonomy we favour, and the freedom it represents, has sometimes provoked romantic wonder, but all too often has resulted in hostility and genocide, ranging from the gas chambers of Auschwitz, to the cultural cleansing of the British countryside enforced by the 1994 Criminal Justice Act (CJA). The CJA not only made trespass a criminal offence, it removed the duty of local authorities to provide stopping places for travellers. Our traditional lifestyle has effectively been outlawed.
Nowadays, in New Labour’s New Britain, official policy recommends ‘toleration’ of unauthorised encampments and the Romani, Irish and New Travellers that inhabit them. But traveller culture should be celebrated, not merely tolerated. Any culture that has survived a millennium of persecution should be celebrated by environmentalists for its tenacity, and welcomed as part of the antidote to the monoculture of industrial society. We too have something to offer a greener tomorrow. We are much more than the thieves, vagabonds and fly-tippers many perceive us to be. Even the Romani nation has a model of justice or sustainability at the heart of its tradition.
As hunter-gatherers in the concrete jungle, there isn’t much we don’t know about self-sufficiency, the reality of living close to nature or the importance of community. In times past, our ancestors’ knowledge of herbal medicine kept your ancestors alive, and our unrecognised sweat lubricated the agricultural economy for hundreds of years. It was our ingenuity that started modern recycling, through the scrap-metal business. As a people living at the margin of society, we were some of the first to be hit by globalisation. Handmade clothes pegs simply can’t compete with plastic pegs from Taiwan. But traditional Romani skills, such as herbalism, entertainment, horsemanship and craftsmanship, made redundant in an industrial age, will one day help us all to survive in a world without multinational pharmaceutical, media, car and manufacturing companies.
The Romani experience parallels that of many indigenous peoples; we’ve been assimilated, massacred, sterilised, enslaved and patronised. The one important exception is that we claim no homeland. As such we are true global citizens who claim the whole world as our home. People without anywhere to go have everywhere as their home.
But surely exotic indigenous peoples like Native Americans are a world away from ‘dirty roadside gyppos’ despoiling the quaintness of the British countryside. Not at all. Roadside encampments are a far better reflection of the modern Indian reservation than any recently founded ‘eco-community’. Official Gypsy sites are filled with exactly the same social problems, like substance abuse and criminality, that indigenous people all over the world experience. The parallels are there. The fact that they aren’t safely tucked away in the Amazon makes a lot of people distinctly uncomfortable.
Czech President Vaclav Havel has called Gypsies the ‘litmus test of a civil society’. Nowhere is this truer than in Britain where nomadic life brings travellers into daily conflict with mainstream society’s attitude to land ownership.
Most of the old ‘atchin tans’ (Romani for stopping place) have been stolen by farmers extending their fences or by developers pushing forward their relentless tide of concrete. Travelling in Britain is only possible today with an extremely intimate knowledge of the countryside and a willingness to trespass in defence of the right to live as our ancestors did. In doing so, we prove that free people are also a part of the natural world. Like the wolf or the deer, travellers’ actions are dictated by practical necessity rather than political idealism. But unlike other animals, our acts have political repercussions for which we feel the heat. Our active exclusion from Britain's Countryside and Rights of Way Bill is just the most recent example of this. As ever, no ‘right to roam’ is to be granted to the Romani people.
But we have inherent rights, which no government can grant or take away. Every fence I see needs crossing, and I’ll cross it when it suits me. All I ask is that I’m not condemned for doing so, for there is a green core at the heart of the Romani tradition. Like the miner’s canary, our demise is a sign of impending doom. If we go, the rest of you won’t be far behind.
Jake Bowers co-founded Earth First! UK in 1991.
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